The Stormchasers: A Novel (16 page)

“Who’s Howie?” Karena asks.

“Howie’s this guy right here,” the woman says and taps her finger on the display case, indicating a ring with a stern sterling-and-turquoise face, along with a headdress and feather earrings of inlaid onyx. “Never thought we’d see anyone else with a ring like Howie, did we, Bob?”

“Nope,” says the old rancher. “But this fella had one, all right.”

He flaps the photo, pinching it in an old man’s long yellowing nails.

“He still got this poofy hair?” he asks, squinting one eye at Karena.

“I hope not,” says Karena.

“ ’Cause if you’re talkin’ a guy with much shorter hair than this, and a little darker and about twenty years older, I think you got your man.”

“Excellent,” says Karena, beaming, “thank you so much! When was he here?”

The woman turns to Bob for confirmation. “I’m going to say . . . yesterday? For dinner?”

“Yep,” says Bob. “Alls he had was the soup. He coulda used more, I remember thinking. High wind’d blow him away.” He hands the photo back to Karena. “He got some Lakota in him?”

“Not that I know of,” says Karena. “Why?”

“Just had that look,” says the rancher. “And we figured why else would he have that big ring? Welp, don’t let the tornada boogeyman getcha.”

“I’ll try not to,” Karena says as she leaves.

The Whale is already idling at the entrance to the lot, the Jeep behind it with Kevin in the driver’s seat. Karena has missed briefing.

“Sorry,” she says breathlessly as she swings in. “But we had a Charles sighting.”

“Hold on,” says Kevin, and into the handset he says, “We got her. Proceed.”

“Copy that, SLM,” says Dennis. “KE5 UIY, mobile,” and the Whale turns left out of the lot.

“So guess what,” Karena says as Kevin follows suit. “Charles was here yesterday.”

Kevin nods. “Good,” he says. “Not surprised. He’s probably chasing the same setup we are—along with everyone else. It’s going to be a zoo out there.”

His tone is matter-of-fact, his face impassive as a cop’s behind his aviators. Clouds play across the lenses as they drive across the overpass. Karena looks at him, startled and a little hurt. Why is he still being all business when they’re alone? Did she do something wrong? Is Kevin going to pretend last night, yesterday, didn’t happen? But then he reaches over and curls his hand around the nape of her neck.

“How did you sleep?” he asks.

“Like a baby,” says Karena, and is amazed to realize this is true. For the first time in ages, she didn’t wake at four thirty A.M. “You?” she asks.

“Terrible,” says Kevin. “I was up all night in agony, thanks to you, Laredo.”

Karena laughs.

“Now you mock my pain,” says Kevin. “Nice. Very nice.”

They merge onto I-90 East behind the Whale. Karena toes off her sneakers and props her feet on the dashboard, watching the land fly past. Silver roll clouds float across the highway like submarines, the sun shining through them. Standing sentinel atop a ridge is a lonely water tower, blue and lollipop-shaped in the dissolving mist.

“This could be a very big day,” Kevin says. “I think today’s the day, Laredo.”

“I know,” Karena says. The water tower is just like the one in New Heidelburg, the one Charles loved to climb. She turns to watch until it is out of sight.

Kevin laughs. “Somehow I suspect we’re talking about different things.”

“I know,” Karena says again. She pats his knee and looks out the window, smiling.

A
ll morning they travel east on I-90, the mist burning off as they go but a thick cloud blanket developing. “Stratus deck,” says Kevin, squinting up through the windshield. “That’s not good.” He and Dan and Dennis discuss strategy on the ham while Karena listens and watches the land blur past outside the window. She has never seen anything like it, territory so untouched it looks prehistoric. Just grasslands rolling to the end of the world. Karena knows there are people here, that although the towns grow sparser and the distances between them greater, there are rich and complex and damaging lives being played out just beyond her vision. Still, she is entranced. She half expects to come upon a brontosaurus lifting its head from one of the small ponds that nestle among the swells, vegetation dripping in its jaws as it watches the Whirlwind convoy pass.

“I love it here,” Karena says suddenly. “I’d love to live here someday.”

“You would?” says Kevin, hooking the handset back in its cradle. “Now that surprises me, Laredo. Here I’d pegged you for an urban girl, never without her latte. You are a woman of great complexity.”

“Well, of course I’d have an espresso machine,” Karena says. “Still.”

She resumes her contemplation of the land flowing by, the horizontal layers of blue sky, green grass, clouds. How to explain why it makes her heart leap, her throat hurt with wistfulness and longing, just looking at it?

“I guess it’s hereditary,” she says. “Our great-greats had a homestead out here, we don’t know where exactly. Somewhere near Martin, we think. They had a soddie at first, then an actual house. But they must have suffered some kind of loss, locusts or blizzard or something, because they had to retreat to Minnesota where there was already family set up. My great-great grandmother, Libby—Lisbet—she never got over it. She pined for the empty space.”

“Wow,” says Kevin. “That’s fascinating, Laredo. You know this how?”

“Letters,” says Karena. “Letters Libby wrote to her cousins in New Heidelburg, where she ended up. My dad has them. Or maybe the Foss County Historical Society.”

“I’m jealous, Laredo,” says Kevin. “My family’s just a bunch of little Polish sausage makers from Chicago.”

“Well, that’s nice too,” Karena says diplomatically. Then she sighs. “I do romanticize it,” she says. “I know it was a harder life than I can possibly imagine. Just to get water you had to walk miles sometimes, or you could die from something we wouldn’t think twice about now, like childbirth or appendicitis. . . . But sometimes I wish I could be transported back there, just to see what it was like. No TV, no phone, no Internet, just people sitting around and talking in the evenings. Listening to the wind.”

“You don’t think you’d get bored?”

“Maybe,” Karena says. “But I think I’d find it . . . peaceful.”

Kevin nods.

“That’s nice, Laredo,” he says. “I think peace is underrated.”

A few miles later they exit onto 83 North at Murdo and stop at the travel plaza off the highway to hurry up and wait. The tourists pinball lazily around the area. Alistair wanders the railroad tracks behind it, taking pictures of the rails. Melody stands to one side to watch him while chatting with Pete. The other women form the usual line at the ladies’ room, so Karena stays outside to eavesdrop on the guides. They have gathered by the driver’s door of the Whale, conferring. The cloud cover is a problem, suppressing the heat necessary for the storms to form, and the debate is whether to drive out from beneath it or wait for it to erode. “I keep thinking we should be farther north and west,” says Dennis, leaning in to tap Dan’s laptop. “There’s already clearing there, and we could catch the cells as they go up.”

But Dan shakes his head. “Then you’re getting into the Cheyenne River Reservation, and there’s no road network,” he says. “We could get spanked. Here we’ll have our choice of escape options, and given how fast this stuff’s going to move if and when it gets going . . .”

Dennis massages his beard. “True,” he says. “Still. I just have a feeling—”

They bring up screen after screen of data, and Karena wanders off. She uses the now-unoccupied ladies’ room, shows the mullet photo to the convenience store clerks, canvasses the chasers. There are a good amount of them, including a vanload of meteorology undergrads eating Bomb Pops and playing Frisbee. But it’s nothing like the tailgate party at the Ogallala Sapp Bros, and as more and more chasers depart, Karena starts to fret. What if Charles is playing a different area too? Karena makes herself a root beer float, Charles’s favorite drink, and carries it outside to where Fern and Alicia and Marla and Scout are sitting on the wall of ice-melt bags piled against the convenience store.

The women fan themselves and eat candy Marla passes out, Mallo Cups and Nut Goodies and Cherry Mash. They stare at the tall grasses across the highway. Fern smokes and gazes gloomily at Dan. Everyone seems listless and scratchy. The air is sullen beneath the thick gray clouds, so humid that they’re all dripping with sweat.

“I sure hope we see something today,” Scout says.

Marla examines the sky from beneath the brim of her flame hat. “Doesn’t look promising, does it?” She leans past Karena to Alicia. “Maybe you could pray us up some, Allie,” she suggests.

“Oh, I have been trying,” says Alicia, “believe me.”

She smiles at Karena.

“I’ve been praying we find your brother too,” she says.

Karena’s mouth drops open. She turns to Fern, sitting beside her, with a glare of hurt and reproach:
Thanks a lot.

“Bloody hell, Alicia,” Fern says, grimacing and chuffing out smoke, and Alicia looks mortified.

“Oh no, I’m sorry,” she says. “I forgot I wasn’t supposed to know.”

Flushing miserably, Fern starts to apologize, but Marla grabs her arm and gives her a shake. “Don’t blame Fern,” she tells Karena. “It’s not her fault. We ganged up on her.”

“We did,” Scout agrees. “We bullied her mercilessly. After you ran out of the party the other night, Karena. We could tell something was going on.”

Karena shakes her head. “Never mind,” she says. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” says Fern. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I never betray a trust, as a rule.” She grinds out her cigarette viciously. “I just thought, we’ve so little time, and five sets of eyes are better than two—”

“We want to help,” says Scout.

“And we didn’t tell the guys,” says Marla. “Honest. We’re very discreet.”

Karena can’t help but laugh.

“I know,” she says. “It’s all right. Really. Thank you. Fern?” Fern hunches her shoulders. “It’s okay,” Karena says. She maintains eye contact and nods until Fern manages a smile.

Karena stands and slaps off the seat of her shorts, looking at the Whale. She’d better go over there right now and tell Dan what she’s been up to, since it’s only a matter of time until he finds out. What did Karena expect? This is what happens. Information leaks, people play telephone, situations mushroom out of control. Karena doesn’t blame Fern. It’s Karena’s own fault for having opened her mouth in the first place. And while it’s not necessarily bad the ladies know about Charles—in fact, Fern is right, from a logistical standpoint the more lookouts the better—what’s dangerous is the erosion. Karena just cannot afford her new habit of confession, of blabbing things that need to be kept private. Because what if this too spirals out of control? What if Karena blurts something out or starts talking in her sleep? Karena sighs and sets off toward the Whale, but before she can reach it Kevin and Dennis turn, reeling them all in, yelling that it’s time to go.

K
evin drives again, and despite the sugar from Karena’s float, or maybe because of the crash following it, she falls asleep, for when she wakes up they’re at yet another gas station. This one is in a city, though, a small two-pump operation instead of the travel plazas she’s gotten used to, and Karena is a little discombobulated by the busy intersection alongside it, the series of streetlights marching into the distance and the pickups and muscle cars zooming past. As Karena sits up two beaters cut across the corner of the lot and plunge back into traffic to make the light, rap thumping from their windows. Toto, I guess we’re not in Kadoka anymore, Karena thinks. She feels sticky all over, her mouth from her float, her hair tickling her face in spiderweb strands, attaching itself in the humidity. It must have just rained here, for steam is rising from the pavement.

And Karena realizes something else: The sun is out. Oil rainbows dance on the tar. But the sky ahead is that dark blue like a bruise, and everything around her glows that saturated Technicolor that happens when a storm is forcing light into one quadrant of the sky.

Uh-oh, Karena thinks.

She opens the door and gets out, planning to ask Kevin where they are. But she doesn’t see him. The gas pump is sticking in the tank, and Karena pulls it out, screws on the cap, collects the receipt. She has been covering all her own expenses because the
Ledger
will reimburse her; now she makes a note to repay Kevin. He comes out of the store toward her, chugging a canned espresso drink.

“Bruh,” he says and shudders. “I don’t know how you can drink this stuff.”

“Well, I don’t drink
that
,” Karena says, peering at the little can with its rattlesnake pattern. “Are we in Pierre?”

“We are,” says Kevin, “and we’re gassing up one last time before we head into it.”

He motions Karena into the Jeep and swivels his laptop toward her—back in Valentine he somehow mounted it onto a stand. Karena hooks her hair behind her ears and stares in at the radar. A huge green-and-red pinwheel is eclipsing most of the county just north and west of Pierre.

“Zoiks,” she says. “That looks like a huge one.”

“It’s healthy all right,” Kevin says. He pulls her back out of the Jeep and points toward the blackening sky. “That’s what we’re seeing over there. And check out the flags. What do you notice?”

Karena looks at the pennants on the adjoining car dealership, the American flag over a Subway. They are all standing out stiff, flying toward the storm.

“They’re pointing northwest, right?” Kevin says. “That means the wind is from the southeast, what we call a backed wind. That’s what we like to see, Laredo. That wind’s carrying moisture all the way up from the Gulf to feed our hungry storm. And this thing is ravenous,” he adds, checking the radar again. “In fact I’d guess it’s a beast.”