The Stormchasers: A Novel (21 page)

“Anxiety,” says Kevin, “something you haven’t coped with usually.”

Karena sighs. “Yes,” she says again. “I’m sure you’re right.” This is something her former therapist, Dr. B, used to say quite often.

“So, Laredo,” says Kevin, “what do you think these Dreads of yours are about?”

“The tour, partly,” Karena says. “I miss everyone. But Charles mostly. I failed, Kevin. I came out here to find him, and I failed.”

“You haven’t failed,” Kevin says. “You just haven’t achieved your objective yet. But I don’t think you need to worry about it right at this moment.”

“Oh, I don’t? Why not?”

“Because you’re exhausted and you’ve been through serious trauma and you probably have scurvy. You need to go home and take a long hot shower and get a good night’s sleep and eat as many green vegetables as possible. Recharge. Then we’ll find Chuck.”

Karena raises her eyebrows. “We will?” she says.

“Yes, we will,” says Kevin, perhaps not hearing Karena’s slight emphasis on the pronoun. “I’ll start making inquiries in the chasing community, send up some flares. No offense, Laredo, you’re a superlative reporter, but nobody knows you. And the media has done so many slam pieces on chasers that make them look like screaming yahoos—of which, regrettably, there are many—that the good ones are often wary of talking to the press. You’ve probably found you haven’t gotten very far asking about Chuck, right? But I will. At least, I’ll try.”

“Thank you, Kevin,” Karena says. “That’s a lot of trouble to go through.”

Kevin reaches for her hand.

“(A) it’s no trouble,” he says, “and (B) it’s a bribe. I’d like to keep seeing you, Laredo. When we get back to the Cities. Under less—adrenal circumstances.”

He is blushing wildly. Karena bites her lips to hide a smile.

“You would?” she says.

“Yes. I would.”

“Good,” says Karena. “Because I’d like that too.”

“You would?”

“Yes. I would.”

“Fantastic,” says Kevin. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

He kisses her hand and pats it back into her lap.

“Meanwhile, if you could keep your paws off me for a while, I’d appreciate it. You’ll have to wait ’til the next rest stop to satisfy your rapacious animal desires. I’m trying to drive here.”

Karena folds her hands.

“I’ll do my best,” she says primly.

She is smiling out the side window, feeling dozy, when Kevin says suddenly, “Pukwana Wiebke.”

“Goodness,” Karena says. “Bless you.”

“Ha, very funny, Laredo. No, it’s this game I play sometimes to keep myself awake on the road. I always thought, wouldn’t it be great to name a kid after the place it was conceived? And out here that’d make for some unique names. Hence: Pukwana Wiebke.”

“Oh,” says Karena. “I get it.”

She finds Kevin’s atlas in the backseat.

“Liiiike—Pedro,” she says. “Pedro Wiebke.”

Kevin nods. “Good for a girl.”

“Or Blunt,” Karena says. “Blunt Wiebke? Somehow that seems redundant.”

“Hey,” says Kevin.

“Eureka!” says Karena. “Eureka Wiebke, don’t be lookin’ at me like that! I’ll slap you upside the head!”

“Very nice,” says Kevin. “I can tell you have a gentle touch with the wee ones, Laredo. Speaking of which,” he adds, “something I should perhaps have—ahem!—ascertained before, but are we protected against an influx of little Wiebkes?”

“Yes,” says Karena, “at the moment.”

“Good. I mean, I’m not
opposed
to offspring or anything,” says Kevin, and when Karena glances over she sees he is flushing again. “I actually intend to procreate quite profusely. It’s just, you know, all in good time, my little pretty.”

“Good to know,” says Karena, smiling down at the map. “Mmkay, how abouuuutttt . . . Badger Wiebke?”

“Meh. A little too school-mascot.”

“Ideal Wiebke? Oh, here, Winner Wiebke.”

“Better,” Kevin agrees. “Alliterative.”

“Winnebago Wiebke. Wilder Wiebke.”

“Uh-huh,” says Kevin. “Sounds like we’ll be doing a lot of traveling.”

“Athol Wiebke,” says Karena and snickers. “Poor kid.”

“Okay, Laredo, I think it’s time to put the map away.”

But Karena can’t stop now. She starts to chuckle, then snort, and then she is laughing so hard she’s crying. “Tennis Wiebke,” she chokes. It’s not even that funny, which makes it all the funnier.

“Wakonda Wiebke,” she howls, “Okobojo Wiebke, Spink Wiebke, Holabird!”

She laughs and laughs, clutching her stomach, wiping tears from her eyes. “Oh, oh,” she gasps. “Holabird!” Kevin twitches the atlas off her thighs and throws it in the backseat, which makes her laugh even harder. Finally she tapers off to hitches and giggles.

“You okay, Laredo?” Kevin asks. He hands her a napkin. “You done?”

“I think so,” Karena says. She wipes her eyes.

“Holabird,” she repeats softly, and snorts.

Kevin shakes his head. “Holabird,” he repeats. “You’re a holabird.” But he takes her hand again, and he is smiling.

T
hey stop in Austin, MN, for the night, which on the one hand is silly because they are only a few hours from home and on the other is necessary because they are both so punchy. Besides, Kevin points out, Austin is home to the Spam Museum, which, wonder of wonders, both Karena and Kevin have managed to live their whole lives without managing to see. It would be a crime of nature, Kevin insists, to pass that up. They check into a Best Western, which seems like an incredible luxury, and walk—walk!—to an adjoining Applebee’s. Sitting across from Kevin in a booth, Karena can’t get over all the people, the faux memorabilia on the walls, the number of TVs all tuned to cable sports channels. In her grubby sneakers and limp, days-old clothes, Karena feels as though she has flies around her head.

“I can’t figure out why I’m so unsettled,” she tells Kevin. “It’s good we’re getting back to civilization, right? I can’t wait to have strong coffee. And shower with non-generic soap. But I feel like my friends who’ve been war correspondents—they’re so thrilled to get home, after being in these remote places, and then they see fresh fruit and they freak out.”

“Well, that’s an apt analogy, Laredo,” says Kevin. “We have been through a pretty hair-raising situation. Far above and beyond the norm. And it’s always a little jolting coming back from chasing anyway. Have you ever been diving?”

Karena tilts her head at the non sequitur. “Once, on my honeymoon in Mexico. Why?”

“Because then you know about the bends,” says Kevin. “When you’ve been down sixty, seventy feet, you need to come up in stages. That’s really why I wanted to stay here tonight. The reentry can be rough otherwise.”

He orders Karena prime rib to go with her salad because of the chasers’ custom of getting steak when they’ve seen a tornado. “And we missed our chance in Pierre,” Kevin says. “Ideally, though, we should be at the Big Texan in Amarillo, where they have the infamous seventy-two-ounce sirloin. A fitting counterpoint to that horrific wedge—”

He breaks off and takes Karena’s hand across the table, and they are both quiet for a while.

The next morning they wake early and turn to each other. “Austin Wiebke,” Kevin murmurs as he moves inside Karena, and “Faith Wiebke,” she whispers back. They have morning skin, sweet and musky and slightly sticky. Outside the window the day dawns fine and fair.

Afterward they go down to the lobby for breakfast. It’s only seven thirty on a Sunday, but there are a fair amount of people in the dining area, still in sweats or combed and washed and smelling of aftershave, moving among the food stations in a sleepy travel ballet. Again Karena is struck by fear and wonder at how populated it is here, the babble of world news from the big flat screen—goodness, she has a lot to catch up on—and the sheer volume of traffic flowing past the window, beyond the Best Western’s manicured grounds. The TV shows a thirty-second segment on the cleanup efforts in Oweeo, and Karena stops, arrested by the sight of so much remaining debris, those whittled trees in bright sunshine.

She gets coffee—better, but still the first thing she’s going to do when they near the Twin Cities is hit Caribou—and carries it to the table where Kevin is checking e-mail on his laptop.

“Dan says hi,” he says as she sits.

“Oh,” Karena exclaims, “how is he? How is everybody?”

Kevin turns the laptop toward her, and Karena swivels it a few more inches still to move the screen out of the sun. Dan has written two lines:

Karena smiles. “Bless,” she says in a British accent, imitating Fern. “When you write back, will you please say hi from me?”

“Will do,” Kevin says.

Karena starts to ask if he thinks Dennis will be receptive to her writing to make amends when her cell phone starts buzzing madly in her pocket. Apparently it has just discovered it can get a signal and is downloading all her messages. Karena scrolls them: several from the
Ledger
, though nothing urgent, since Karena’s Oweeo story has earned her a few days’ rest. Reader comments, mostly. There’s also a photo from Lisa in the newsroom of a squashed-looking infant—she’s had a boy! And a text from Tiff:
Where the F ARE YOU? That tornado article was CRAZY. Get the F HOME!!!!!!
Karena smirks and saves this. She has stories to tell Tiff, all right.

But there is nothing from Charles or anyone who might have seen him.

“Kevin, do you mind if I check Stormtrack when you’re done?” Karena asks.

“Not at all. But as of ten minutes ago there was nothing new from Chuck.”

Karena nods, then picks up Kevin’s hand and presses it over her heart. Kevin blinks at her, surprised. He looks this morning much as he did the first few times Karena saw him, hair wet from the shower now, clean Whirlwind T-shirt. His eyes are very bright.

“Thank you, Laredo,” he says, kissing her hand. “Okay, if you want breakfast you’d better hustle. I want to hit the Spam Museum before the lines get too long.”

“Yeah, because that’ll happen,” says Karena, standing.

Kevin smacks her on the behind. “Get movin’, mouthy,” he says.

Karena floats over to the breakfast stations and browses them, plate in hand. She can’t handle anything too heavy after the steak last night, her stomach is already groaning, but she takes a few wilted slices of microwave bacon because they’re there. And two pieces of whole wheat toast, but what she really wants is an egg. She is starved for protein after all those banana-and-pretzel breakfasts on the road. And they do have eggs here, or at least they have a single hard-boiled one left, rolled into the corner of its steam tray. Karena transfers her plate to the other hand to reach for it, smiling as she remembers her mom saying Karena and Charles were the easiest kids in the world to cook for, because all Siri had to do was boil an egg and Karena would eat the white, Charles the yolk.

But somebody else reaches for the egg at the same time. Karena knows as soon as she sees his hand, large and square and brown, even before she sees the ring. The silver-and-turquoise Lakota ring with its stern and ornate face.

She looks up.

“Hi, Charles,” Karena says.

Her brother grins.

“Hi, sistah,” he says.

T
he Hallingdahl house is a little ranch, sitting in a modest yard near the intersection of Lincoln and Main. Across from the B&M gas station, two doors down from Ellingson’s Used Cars. Pretty small house for a lawyer, people say. They wonder why Hallingdahl didn’t buy one of the Sprague houses, the stone edifices the banker erected for his daughters at the turn of the century. Or the old Alma mansion on St. Paul Street, set high on the crest of its sloping lawn. They don’t know that when Frank Hallingdahl was a boy on the farm he watched his mother get worn down by the caretaking of just such a big three-story house, rubbed away bit by bit, and he vowed that his own family would have a modern home, as lightweight and easy to care for as possible.

Inside, the Hallingdahl house is carpeted throughout in beige and smells like the interior of a lady’s handbag, dusty, sweet, a little mysterious. If people tend to decorate at a time in their lives when they’re full of energy and optimism and let it slide thereafter, then the lawyer’s wife, Siri Hallingdahl, hit her peak era in the late nineteen-sixties, early seventies. There is a sunburst clock on the wall in the kitchen. The table is Formica, the chairs aluminum and red vinyl. The bathroom wallpaper is a psychedelic field of green, orange, and pink poppies. Everywhere there are afghans, ashtrays, newspapers, glasses, and plates, because Siri is an indifferent housekeeper at best. She likes to visit with her friends, to play bridge, to sit in the sunken sunporch off the kitchen and smoke and watch television. Her prize possession is the desk she bought in La Crosse as a young bride, a heavy piece of walnut furniture with a glass top under which photos can be slid. The family is preserved there in snapshots. Newlyweds Siri and Frank honeymooning in the Wisconsin Dells; Frank squinting in front of his newly opened practice; the twins as infants; the twins in a wading pool, their bowl-cut white hair and plaid sunsuits identical although they themselves, of course, are not—there was some talk about dressing a boy and girl alike, but Siri has always been considered progressive. There’s Siri’s brother Carroll, who lives up in the Twin Cities, mustached and paranoid behind huge sunglasses. There are plump pink-faced cousins, gray-haired elders, children whose shy school smiles bristle with braces. In spots liquid has gotten under the glass and stuck the photos to it, erasing the faces to milky blurs.

W
hen Karena lets herself into the house, creeping in from the garage, she hopes her mom will be asleep, but no such luck. Karena smells smoke, hears the laugh track from the TV. She tiptoes past the sunroom, whose louvered pocket door is closed. Smoke curls out from beneath it as from a genie’s lamp. Karena tries to make it across the kitchen linoleum without hitting the creaky spot, but it doesn’t work: The sunroom door accordions open with a smash and Siri, revealed there, says, “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”