Wichita (9781609458904) (21 page)

“Core-punch!” Bishop says, reaching back to give Drew a high-five. “And to make things even
more
interesting, the shortest route is twenty miles of dirt road.” Bishop giggles and rubs his hands together, glancing over at Abby. “There's really no other option if we want to get to the rear edge. Shall we vote? All in favor of core-punching say ‘Ay!'”

With the exception of Seth, everyone says, “Ay!”

“Core-punch, it is!” Bishop says. “Buckle up!” He looks at his map of the state and says, “The turn should be right up ahead, Abby!” She's leaning forward to see through the rain, which a moment later doubles in intensity and sounds like the crackling of bacon grease amplified.

“Can she see through that?” Drew asks Lewis nervously.

“I hope so,” Lewis says.

The rain turns to hail, which sounds like gravel rattling angrily down on the car with a kind of sentient hostility. Out ahead of them on the dirt road it looks like salt scattered on sidewalks in a snowstorm. The air is pearlescent. Hail pings wildly off the windshield. A robotic voice comes over the laptop: “The National Weather Service has issued a Tornado Watch number 358 effective until ten
P.M.
”

“Whoo-hoo!” Bishop shouts. “Consider yourselves
warned
!”

They're now following in the tracks of a slow-moving car whose tail lights are faintly visible. The hail sounds like it's denting the chassis.

“It's plum-sized!” Abby calls out a bit anxiously. “My poor car!”

“Wow,” Bishop says, leaning forward to see better. He rolls down his window and thrusts his arm out into the air and pulls it back immediately.

“Ouch!” he says, laughing and shaking his arm. Chunky hail rains into the front seat through the open window on Bishop's side.

He holds up a jagged hunk. “Look at that! She's right!” It goes on pouring through the open window like anti-aircraft fire.

“Close the window! Jesus, Bishop!” Abby tells him.

“Shit!” Bishop says, rolling it up and tapping the keyboard of the laptop. “It broke the screen!” Lewis leans forward to see: the screen is dark and riven by a fine crack. “I've lost the satellite link.”

“What's
that
mean?” Abby asks, peering over the steering wheel to see the road ahead.

“It means we won't be able to track the storm,” Bishop says grimly, tapping at keys. Then, recovering, he adds, “But that's fine.”

“It's fine?” Abby says dubiously. “How is it fine?”

“We're
right on course
,” Bishop says, making a chopping motion with his arm. “We just continue on to the end of this road and we'll be at the rear.”

“Once we get around this, we'll have a really excellent view of it, Drew!” Abby calls.

The hail turns to rain then the rain shuts off all at once and the dirt road ends in a paved one running perpendicular to it. Abby brings the car to a stop.

“And here we
are
!” Bishop announces victoriously, twisting around to give a double thumbs-up to the back seats. The sky is clear to their left and behind them, tinged the pale color of a sunset. Directly ahead and to their right is a massive gray head of cloud shaped in a swoop or twist.

“Oh, you gorgeous mesocyclone, you!” Bishop says. “
Look
at that mother!” It makes Lewis think of the Satanic image on the cover of
Storm Chase: A Photographer's Journey
. They seem foolishly close to it.

Coming toward them around a gradual curve in the paved road is a caravan of ten or so vans and SUVs. The lead van has a white radar dish bolted to the roof.

“Keep ahead of them!” Bishop cries, pounding the dash with his fist. “Go, go, go!” Abby pulls out into the road in front of the van with the Doppler dish, which honks at them merrily.

“Good job, babe!” Bishop says, looking back. “We do
not
want to get stuck behind
them
. That's the Doppler brigade.”

He rolls his window down and leans out, pointing at the storm bank. “Do you guys see what I see, at about ten o'clock? That lowering? That's a
funnel cloud
!”

Abby slows the car down and leans toward Bishop to see out. The car behind them honks.

“If that touches down, it's a tornado!” Bishop cries, bouncing in his seat like a child. “We're looking at a tornado-to-be right there! Hot
damn
!”

“This is awesome!” Drew says, leaning across Lewis to see out. He turns on his camcorder and holds it out the window. Seth seems to be asleep, his head nestled into a windbreaker wadded up against the window.

“Can we find somewhere to pull off?” Abby asks Bishop.

“Right here!” he says, banging the side of the Escalade with his fist.

“Oh, this is perfect,” she says, pulling onto the soft shoulder. The sunlight from the west strikes the rear wall of the storm with strong clear light. “You are
good
, Bishop!”

Everyone piles out and moves into the field, Seth too now.

“If this thing produces,” Bishop says, pointing at a vague area near the bottom of the storm, “it'll be an absolutely
elegant
twister.”

The supercell is mountainous but close and clear at the same time—too close for Lewis's taste, like an amphitheater. The farthest trailing edge of the storm, a ragged soot-gray wasp's leg, is almost directly overhead. The air has turned a seasick gray-green. The caravan of other chasers has driven past them and pulled over further down the road, hazard lights flashing. Spidery silhouetted figures set up tripods, bend over viewfinders.

They all stand staring across the field except for Seth, who's sitting on the hood of the Escalade with his arms folded. Maybe a mile away behind them, visible through a stand of trees, is another tiny town, a silver water tower. From that direction a tornado siren begins to wail, floating up over the trees.

“Tornado siren!” Bishop shouts happily, cupping a hand to an ear.

The air goes suddenly still then just as suddenly a stiff breeze begins to blow. His wispy white hair raised by it, Bishop holds up the palms of his hands. “That's gen-u-ine rear-flank downdraft!” he announces, his T-shirt fluttering.

A cruiser with the roof light going but no siren swoops along the narrow dark road, slowing by the Doppler radar caravan then again by the Escalade. Lewis finds himself watching narrowly, braced against the
whisk-whisk
of the squad car transmission, Tasers, handcuffs, furry forearms.

“You guys are on your own!” the cop calls out the window.

“Right-o!” Bishop calls back delightedly, giving a double thumbs-up out of a crouch. He turns back to the storm as to a huge drive-in movie screen. “That's the actionary, the updraft, we're seeing,” Bishop says, pointing.

They stand waiting, watching the evil lower clouds turn slowly, mutate, configure and reconfigure in a lazy ominous motion. “There's
no place I'd rather be
right now!” Bishop says.

Then nothing except for this slow swirling, which gradually halts, fades away like a mist. Minutes pass. Arms crossed, Seth has lain back on the hood of the Escalade. A flock of crows sweeps past like leaves caught in a strong gust.

Lewis contemplates a distant farmhouse and wonders what that life is like. “What now?” he asks finally.

“Now we just wait a little longer,” Bishop says, a hint of disappointment entering his voice.

Drew takes a knee in the grass. He's been speaking to someone on a cellphone and when he gets off, Bishop asks him, “Did you hear what Bush said when he flew into Greenburg?”

“Is this a joke?” Drew asks with good-humored wariness, not to be fooled twice.

“If only,” Abby says.

“You know about Greenburg, right?” Bishop asks. “Little town about hundred miles southeast of Wichita? An F-5 just destroyed it.”

“I saw the pictures,” Drew says, nodding solemnly. “Just terrible.”

“It's like an atomic
bomb
went off down there,” Abby says.

“Quite a few folks are moving away,” Bishop says, nodding. “Lost everything; can't imagine rebuilding after that. So anyway, Bush flies in—” Bishop starts laughing in advance, bent at the waist. “So Bush flies in,” he says, beginning again, “and Bush says—through a bullhorn or something, you know how he does. ‘My mission—” Bishop seizes his white-bearded jaw to keep from laughing—“'my mission is to
touch somebody's soul
. . .
by representing our country
!”

They all burst out laughing, Drew following suit after a beat but uncertainly, peering from face to face as if to grasp the real gist.

“Touch somebody's soul!” Bishop cries. Then, as if the intimacy of it just struck him, he adds, “Don't
touch my soul
! Keep your hands
off
my soul!”

“Don't represent our
country
,” Lewis says.

“Too late,” Abby says.

They turn back to the storm, which has acquired a static quality—no movement at all now.

“Well, come on!” Bishop calls. “Come
on
, you mother!”

Down the road, the Doppler brigade is packing up their cameras and tripods with military efficiency. Their silhouettes then slip into the vehicles, which are soon driving past, the headlights on in the dying light.

“What's happening?” Abby asks, watching them go. Bishop watches them too, hands on his hips, squinting. He shakes his head. “I don't know,” he says in his neutral, admirably honest fashion.

“You would if your laptop worked,” Abby points out.

“True,” Bishop admits with an embarrassed chortle.

She sighs, shakes her head. “You and your record-sized hail. One for the local newspapers!”

Bishop squints up at the storm as if willing it to send down a face-saving twister then announces, “I guess this may not happen after all, people!”

The tornado siren has fallen silent. Lewis watches the taillights of the last minivan in the Doppler brigade disappear around a descending curve in the road. To the northeast, thin slanting curtains of rain move across a golden band of horizon at the far perimeter of the storm.

“It's still
incredibly
beautiful,” Abby says, waving her arm at the massive, sterile cloud creature. The twilight falls across her suddenly weary features as if to veil them from view.

Now, in the quadrant where the caravan was headed, there's a tremendous lightning strike and everyone flinches.

“I mean look at that!” Abby cries, startled out of her melancholy.

“It's the Goddess, all right,” Bishop says wistfully. “If there were
any
community, they would've stopped to give us a heads-up,” he adds, staring bitterly down the road after the Doppler caravan. “Every man for himself, I guess!”

“We could follow them,” Lewis suggests.

“Nah, it's too late,” Bishop says. “Every fucking man for himself!”

“We don't guarantee a tornado,” Abby tells Drew, “but we
absolutely
guarantee
beauty
.” She makes a theatrical sweep with her arm. “This is a real glimpse of Gaia.”

“It's pretty incredible, all right,” Drew says but clicks off his camcorder and lets it hang limp from his neck.

“Well,” Bishop says with a concluding note. As they're turning to go back to the car, there's a movement in the far corner of the field.

“What's that?” Lewis asks, catching Bishop by the wrist. Bishop pauses and looks back, squinting hard, straining his neck forward tortoise-like.

“Is it
burning
?” Lewis asks.

Wisps of smoke or is it earth are rising snakily into the air, two, three of them. Lewis thinks it must be from a lightning strike, fire in the field. Then the tendrils or snakes of smoke rise in sheets and grow larger, forming a rough circle like enormous ghosts in a ring dance, Sioux warriors risen on the prairie. Now they reach up to join tatters of clouds from the bottom of the storm, helically intertwining.

Then it's simply there, out of nowhere, this long stout elephant trunk or length of intestine.

“Oh!” Abby and Bishop shout in unison, as if orgasming. “Oh my God!”

“Wild!” Lewis yells, a funny sort of happiness flooding him.

“Seth!” Abby cries, pointing at it and jumping up and down. “Look! Look!”

Lewis turns back to see Seth is snapped out of his numb detachment, grinning and shaking his head in amazement. His teeth glow in the gloaming. He eases himself down from the hood of the Escalade and takes a few steps forward into the field. Abby goes back to meet him and circles an arm around his shoulder. Lewis joins them. He leans near Seth's ear and says, “You made a tornado happen after all—it was just a bit delayed!” Seth nods. Lewis chucks him on the shoulder and they stand together watching it. Lewis is filled with a sense of great optimism and hope, as if it's borne on the air and he's inhaling it like laughing gas.

Quickly filling itself in, the tornado is more like a water tower now, thick, bluish-white, cocked to one side, phallic. Lewis walks forward to stand next to Drew, who has set up a tripod for his camcorder and is filming away meanwhile speaking into his cell phone. “It's a dream come true!” he tells whoever's on the other end. “Literally!”

Bishop is doing a little goat dance. “A tornado on our
first chase
!” he says, holding a camcorder toward it. “What a blessing, what an amazing blessing!”

“Just
look
at that thing!” Abby tells Seth. “It's truly
a god
!” As if she never truly believed all the talk about Gaia and Goddesses. “It's neither earth nor sky, it's some
new union
!”

“It's making me hot!” Bishop says, speeding up his little goat dance.