The Stormchasers: A Novel (26 page)

Charles, however, is not lost. Charles is operating by his own set of markers, all having to do with what he sees in the sky. Ever since they got in the car he has been carrying on an enthusiastic monologue, talking and talking and talking and talking and talking. Pressured speech, Dr. H called it, a symptom of mania—in Charles’s case, a rant about this storm and that storm and his data and how Siri is always trying to stand in his way. Suddenly there’s a crack of thunder and a cold gust of wind buffets the Jeep, and Karena receives a nasty volt of fear: The sky, which has gotten more and more overcast the farther they’ve driven into Iowa, has congealed in horizontal layers. Some are gray and some are white and beneath them all is a wall of dark blue like a bruise. Periwinkle, Karena remembers from her box of Crayola 64s. That’s what that color is called. It also means they’re driving into a pretty nasty storm.

“How close is that?” she asks. She doesn’t like to risk invoking the wrath of the djinn by interrupting Charles, but that storm appears to be speeding at them faster than horses can run.

Charles cranes his head to peer beneath the windshield’s tinted strip.

“Not so far now,” he says cheerfully. “Yup, I’d say about five miles or so.”

He rubs his mouth where the dry white spit has gathered at the corners and starts in again.

“Really it’s tragic when you think about it,” he says, “though understandable, I guess. Yeah, yeah, sure it is, if you put yourself in her position. Think about it, K. Your life’s basically over. You’re all dried up. You’ve gotten married and you’ve had your kids and they’re flying the coop and your husband doesn’t notice whether you’re alive or not, like he ever did, so what are you going to do? Go to bake sales and play bridge and sit around bitching with the menopause club about how your kids ruined your life. It’s awful, yep, it’s heinous, but that’s the way it is, K. Our madre can’t stand for anyone, even her kids, to succeed. She’s so unhappy it’s subverting the natural order, her maternal instincts. She can’t accept her life is over and it’s our turn. I’m sorry to say it, K, but our madre is really a very sick woman.”

“Uh-huh,” says Karena. She doesn’t agree, of course—she thinks Siri is pretty content with her life, or would be, if not for Charles. Ironically. But that’s the thing about Charles’s disorder, it shackles Karena, makes her agree with all sorts of absurd statements because the consequences otherwise are so awful, and does any of this really matter right now? It does not. Karena scans the land around them, looking for shelter. She sees an abandoned chicken farm, its roof rusted out. That’s it. The grass, corn, and trees are bowing toward the storm, which now looks like a blue-black tidal wave about to break.

“But WE are getting out,” says Charles. “I’m so proud of us! Look at you, going to the U, even though it’s kind of basic and there’re a lot of idiots there, but I suppose that’s true anywhere, you’ll just have to be careful not to fall into cookie-cutter thinking. Maybe I can help you,” he says, talking and driving faster and faster, “maybe when I’m not collecting data I can come stay with you, yeah! During the off-season, won’t that be great? We can stay together, K, I can live in your dorm room, I can work on my project there, it’ll be awesome!”

“Sure,” says Karena, clinging to her seat as the speedometer creeps past sixty, then seventy. “Any time, Charles. But do you think you could slow down a little?”

Charles either doesn’t or can’t hear her. The red needle climbs past eighty and the Jeep slaloms along the rutted road. Lightning prongs in a double fork a mile away.

“And you can help me, K. OH MY GOD! Of course! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. You can be my assistant. I’ll even put your name on the abstract, though below mine because it’s my study. But I’m telling you, K, this study is going to be groundbreaking. Earth-shaking. It’s going to blow all the preconceived ideas right off the map, and all those poor little eggheads down in Norman with their radar and dinky little theories are going to be smacking themselves and saying, HOLY CRAP! Why didn’t we see this before? That Hallingdahl kid’s a fucking genius!”

“I’m sure they will, Charles,” says Karena. She’s staring up through the side window, and what she can see looks very bad. The clouds directly above them are molded into large, hanging lumps like the underside of an egg carton. About a mile away the road disappears into a curtain of white. “But Charles, I think we should turn around—”

“What? Why? Are you scared? No. Don’t be silly. Trust me, K. I know about storms. Look look look look look, you’re thinking about it the wrong way. You see storms as some big outside destructive force, separate from us, independent of us. But that’s so not right, K. Storms are organic. They ARE us. They eat warm air and they dump cold—they eat and excrete, get it? And they’re mostly water. What are we? Our bodies are eighty percent water! And lightning—what do you think our brains are run by, K? Electricity! And check this out, this is the very coolest thing of all. You ready? You ready for my hypothesis, K? Ready? Ready?”

“I’m ready, Charles,” says Karena. She clings to the side of her seat as the Jeep hurtles along. It is like being on a game show in a nightmare. If she says everything right, they might get out of this. If she answers wrong—

“Okay!” says Charles. “What do storms have to do in order to produce tornadoes? They cycle, right? HELLO! Sound familiar? Not like I have a
disorder
or anything, that’s just what that bearded idiot Hazan says. BUT I’m going to prove there’s a link between storms that rapid-cycle and ones that produce tornadoes
because I’m a rapid cycler myself
. In fact I’m the closest thing a human being can be
to
a storm, and in case you think it’s far-fetched consider the overall pattern, the grand design, the webbing that holds the universe together: Everything is like everything else. Look look look. I’ll help you see it. The veins in a leaf are like capillaries, which are like lightning. See? Or the cochlea of your ear is like a shell is like a spiral staircase is like a corkscrew is like a whirlpool is like a tornado. Get it? Once you see it you can’t stop seeing it, I can’t turn it off, and I’m so grateful for that, because it’s so beautiful, K, it’s so fucking beautiful I swear it’s almost enough to make you believe in God.”

Something large and white smacks off the hood of Siri’s Jeep, and Karena jumps. She has been pinned against her door by the police-hose force of Charles’s rant—the saddest thing about which is, it almost makes sense. Between cyclothymia, Charles’s type of bipolar disorder, and cyclone, which is what their grandmother Hallingdahl called tornadoes—
Run to the cyclone cellar!
—there does seem to be a logical link, and Karena feels if she just tipped her head the right way, she might figure it out. Charles is, after all, a genius, and Karena knows from the psych texts she’s borrowed from the La Crosse public library that many manic-depressive people are. Schumann, Melville, Woolf, Van Gogh, Edgar Allan Poe—all brilliant. All bipolar. Maybe Charles too could give something amazing to the world.

But trying to make sense of what he’s saying now is like hearing a piece of music with one wrong note played over and over, and the hail plowing up divots on the road and shredding the corn around them reminds Karena even if Charles is a genius, she is also trapped in this Jeep with her manic brother and he’s intent on driving them into the storm.

“Charles,” she hollers over the hail. “Charles, we have to go back!”

“It’s all right, K,” Charles yells, cranking the wheel as the Jeep fishtails on the ice. “Trust me. I know what this storm’s going to do.”

Abruptly the hail stops. Karena’s ears feel stuffed in the sudden silence. The storm is rotating overhead, turning slowly, letting in only a strip of weak, dirty yellow on the horizon. Charles smiles at Karena.

“See?” he says.

Then there is a
CHUNK
, and another
CHUNK
, and
CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK
, and the windshield in front of Karena’s face cracks in a thick web. She screams. She can’t help it. Hailstones the size of softballs accumulate in the ditches.

“Excellent,” Charles shouts. “I forgot I heard a spotter say that once—when the small stuff stops and it gets really quiet, that’s when the big ones start. Okay, hold on, K! We’re gonna punch the core!”

“Charles, no—”

“We have to,” he yells. “Can’t go back now, nope, no way, no way out but through. Besides, if there’s a tornado, that’s where it’ll be! In the bear’s cage! It—”

But they are into that white curtain across the road, which turns out to be rain and more hail, and Karena can see Charles’s mouth moving—barely, the light is so scant—but she can’t hear him. She is yelling at the top of her lungs and can’t hear herself. The sound is deafening, a fusillade, like nothing she ever imagined. And she can’t see anything in front of them. The road has disappeared, the cracked windshield is a watery blank. It is like driving into a movie screen.

So Karena feels what they hit more than she hears it. It’s a frame-shaking shock, a
thud
that comes from Charles’s side of the Jeep and travels up through her feet to her stomach. The Jeep swerves right and Charles struggles to keep it on the road, a tough call anyway in dirt that’s turned to mud, is as slippery as lard. Karena yells as the Jeep tips. She catches a glimpse of her brother’s face in the weird, snowy half-light, blank with conversation as he spins the wheel in the direction of the skid. Then they slide to a stop, diagonally, but still on the road.

And just like that, the hail stops again. They must have passed through what Charles called the core. Karena’s ears pulse and ring. She looks around at the land, soaked and icy and dripping beneath the storm that still turns above it. But the gap on the horizon is bigger, letting in more lemon-colored light. Somewhere a bird is singing.

Karena and Charles stare at each other.

“What was that?” they say at the same time.

“That bump,” says Charles. “You felt it too?”

“I felt it.”

He scrapes back his hair, which is plastered in wet golden curls to his forehead. His chest is heaving, his eyes showing the whites all around the pupils. He is terrified, Karena knows, as she is. But she can also see, like water filling the pitcher, the sanity flowing back into his face.

“Maybe a deer,” he says. “Or a cow. Do you think . . . ?”

“Had to be,” says Karena.

She waves around at the fields, meaning, There’s nothing out here.

“Yeah,” says Charles. “Totally. That’s all it was.”

But they keep staring at each other, as if afraid to look anywhere else.

“Charles,” Karena says. “Charles, we have to go back.”

Charles’s face works as if he’s trying to swallow something.

“I don’t know if the Jeep will make it,” he says. “The road—”

Karena nods.

“We have to,” she says.

“I can’t,” says Charles.

Suddenly he throws the Jeep in reverse and, looking over his shoulder, rockets backward down the empty road. The tires whine a little; the strange, strained lemon-ice light glints off the lightning bolt at his throat.

“Be careful,” Karena says. “Slow down!”

But they don’t have to go far before they see the motorcycle. It is lying half on and half off the road. There’s something trapped beneath it. There’s only one thing it can be. It’s not as though the motorcycle just happened to be out here and fell sideways on a deer or a mattress. Still, until Karena cautiously gets out of the Jeep on legs that feel like gelatin and approaches the cycle, she can’t believe it’s a man. It’s as if her mind can’t make sense of what her eyes are seeing.

But she walks a little closer, stopping near the driver’s headlight of the Jeep. The man is wedged beneath the motorcycle—Karena doesn’t know anything about choppers, but she thinks it’s a Harley. It’s a big one, anyway. Lots of chrome. The man is in his forties or fifties maybe—grizzled, thickset, long yellow-white hair. Gathered in a ponytail that’s askew on the road. He wears no helmet—at least none Karena can see. Maybe the hail knocked it off.

What is he doing out here? What was he thinking, riding into this storm? Maybe Karena’s own mind is playing tricks on her. Maybe he doesn’t really even exist.

A shower of raindrops patters down from somewhere. The air smells like April, fresh ice and wet dirt. Close by, the bird sings.

Karena approaches the man. He is lying awfully still. His face is in profile, the one blue eye she can see is open. He’s pink-skinned with white lashes and mustache, like an albino, like one of her own cousins. He looks surprised.

“Hey,” Karena says.

Holding her breath, she edges closer and nudges the man’s boot with the toe of her sneaker. It’s solid. It scrapes on the road. He exists, all right.

“Hey, mister! Are you conscious? Can you hear me?”

Nothing. Just the Jeep’s engine idling. The bird trills again:
whitwhitwhitwhit—whit-too!

“Hey, mister,” Karena says, more loudly this time. “Can you hear me? Say something if you can hear me!”

She circles a few feet to the right. The shaking has traveled up her legs to her arms now. She puts a hand over her mouth and it’s ice cold.

When she’s directly in front of the man she can see that half of his scalp has been ripped off. The bike must have dragged him a little after it fell, because the side of his face against the road looks like ground beef. A puddle of blood is spreading from the top of his head, shockingly fast. That is what amazes Karena: how fast it is. There is also something that looks like instant oatmeal.

“Oh my God,” she moans. “Oh my God.”

And her brain, maybe unable to sustain what she’s looking at, makes a sudden, weird cross-connection: a bird embryo she once found that had fallen out of a nest. In their backyard. From the big pine bush. She had picked up the blue egg, delighted and wanting to take it inside with her, and the embryo slipped out. Covered in mucus. She had gagged then as she is gagging now, unable to stop, staring at it in pity and revulsion.