Sentimental Journey (15 page)

His pride made him suddenly want to make the whole place just disappear.

“No one could possibly fly in that mess of weather out there.” She still didn’t look at him, so he didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself.

Most people hereabouts believed that only the very old or the very crazy talked to themselves. He was nineteen, yet he’d been talking to himself for years.

The wind whistled down the walls, through the old window frames, and rattled the glass, then over the roof and through the eaves, making them shudder slightly. It was a loud, howling wind.

She straightened suddenly and turned around, leaned back against the windowsill and stared up at the ceiling as if she expected it to fall in.

“Your plane should be safe enough inside the garage. It might look like the roof could cave in, but it won’t.”

“I’ve never seen hail like this. It’s huge.”

“Then you haven’t been in
Texas
long.”

She pushed away from the window looking as out of place in the shabby, small room as a silver dollar in a handful of plug nickels. She was so tall she could look him in the eye. He’d never seen a woman that tall before . . . well, at least not a pretty woman.

“I was in
Lubbock
last night and had planned to be in
Wichita Falls
by this afternoon. Instead I’m in . . . ” She paused, then looked at him, frowning. “Just where am I?”

“Acme,
Texas
.”

“Oh.”

“A hundred miles west of
Wichita Falls
.”

For a second the only sound in the place was the hammering of the hailstones from outside. He went to hitch his hip on the corner of the kitchen table and sat down instead on the distributor. He felt his face flush hot and red, so he turned and tried to push the parts aside.

He sort of wished she would keep talking. The silence made him feel naked. He said all the wrong things to this fly-gal. He’d just never expected a female pilot to land in his gas station. Who would? But she made him feel like he was dumber than toast.

It was strange, the way she jumped to the conclusion that he thought she couldn’t make a living at being a pilot because she was a woman. All he’d been surprised at was that anyone could be paid for something as fantastic as flying an airplane.

He might have set her straight, but somehow he figured there was a big argument in that, at least when she was still mad as hens at him for something he didn’t really say.

He was a little rusty at talking to women, except for Nettie, his sister, and Ruth Wendell, Pastor Wendell’s wife, who invited him for beef dinner the first Sunday of every month. He talked to female customers once in a while, but most of them were older than Eve. They had known his granddaddy as well as his daddy, had white hair, and remembered the day Red got his first tooth and his first haircut.

She wasn’t looking at him, but around the room.

He wondered what she thought when she looked at the place. All he ever saw was the emptiness of it. It wasn’t much different from how it had looked when his mama left, except for the three-year-old Kadette radio on the kitchen counter, and the barren windows with only five-and-dime store roller shades wedged into the top of the window frames.

On the day his daddy died he’d finally taken down those old, rotting lace curtains his mama made. Nettie wanted to take them down before, when they’d gotten the postcard from
Dallas
. But their daddy had always said no. Perhaps they reminded him of another time, when Red’s mama hadn’t wanted to run away, when she had been a woman who sewed for her man and her children, and made the place a home.

“What’s this you’re working on?” She had crossed to the table and was staring down at the engine parts.

His mama had always gone on and on about greasy auto parts on the kitchen table. She and his daddy had fought about it.

Charley Morrison picked up a piston and turned it this way and that, completely ignoring the grease all over it. She set it down and casually wiped her hand on her jumpsuit as she studied everything on the table. “Pistons, barrels, carburetor . . . ”

She knew what they were.

He almost said something stupid like,
Well, I’ll be damned.
Hell, with that chip on her shoulder a comment like that might get him slapped.

“I’d say by the look on your face that you think women don’t know about engines.” She sounded exasperated with him.

What was it about his face that told this woman something he was surely not thinking?

“Is that what you think?”

Finally he just laughed and raised his hands in the air. “Not me. I’m no fool. I’m not thinking anything except what you want me to think.”

“You’re a fast learner, Red Walker.”

They stood there, neither of them saying anything.

“Your turn,” she finally said.

“My turn for what?”

“To ask me a question. I ask you a question, then you ask me a question. It’s called conversation.”

“Well, okay . . . Right now I’m trying to figure out if I should ask you where you learned what a piston looked like.”

“Afraid I’m going to bite your head off?”

“Something like that.”

She sat back and gave him a direct look, then crossed her arms and one leg over a knee. “My pop told me a long time ago that if you’re going to fly a plane, you’d better know how it works, especially when you’re running it thousands of feet in the air.”

“I suppose that makes sense.”

The hail had stopped. Now it sounded like regular rain pounding down on the roof.

She shifted her weight to one side, unzipped a pocket, and stuck her hand inside it, rummaging around for something. “Look. Can I get something to drink?” She set some change on the table. “I saw the soda pop advertisement on the building, so I figure you must sell them, right?”

“I’ll get you one.” He stood up so fast he hit a knee on the table and wanted to swear. “Stay put,” he said, walking for the door. “The cooler’s in the station.”

“Wait! Here’s some money.”

“I’ll get it.” He was already half outside. The screen rattled closed behind him. He went inside the station and got a couple of bottles of soda, stuffed some bags of peanuts into his pockets; then he stepped back outside.

The wind had stopped. Now it was quiet, that empty kind of quiet that preceded something just the opposite, the kind of silence that made you stop and pay attention.

He walked toward the open side of the station and stood there a minute, holding the cold Dr. Pepper bottles by their long, damp necks.

Off toward the south, the clouds were black as iron and rolling over and over, down and sideways, twisting and moving toward the ground. A narrow outline of thin black was spinning like thread from the bottom of those heavy clouds.

He turned and ran to the house.

She met him at the door, standing with the screen propped open against her back.

“Here’s your drink.” He shoved it at her, then kept walking past. After a second he called back, “Come on.”

“Come on where? Where are you going?”

“This way!” He made straight for the tower. “Out back!”

He heard her run down the steps. “What’s going on?”

He turned around, but continued trotting backwards. “That’s tornado weather off toward the south. Look! There’s a funnel cloud!”

Not only did she have a name like a man. She swore like one.

“LEANING ON THE OLD TOP
RAIL
”

Charley froze where she was, the word
shit
still hanging in the air. She turned to the south. High in the sky were clouds black as coal dust. Two long, dark, spiral clouds were joined together by a thin thread and were hanging down from the storm like some kind of uneven jump rope that moved constantly.

She ran after him, around the corner of the old wooden building that was the base of the water tower.

He had disappeared.

She looked around on the ground for the doors to a cellar or storm shelter of some kind.

There was nothing.

She scanned the area and saw nothing but a freshly combined wheat field and a dark sky.

“The view’s better from up here.”

She looked up.

Red Walker was leaning on a wooden railing, looking down at her from a narrow platform that ran around the tower.

“What are you doing up there?”

“Watching the tornado. You coming up?”

“Up? Don’t you think we should go someplace safer?”

“Like where?”

“In a cellar or storm shelter. Underground. Far away?”

He laughed. “Why?”

“So we don’t die.”

“We’re not going to die. It’s only a tornado.”

Charley looked off toward the clouds.

Only a tornado. That’s like saying only an airplane crash.

She could see a funnel beginning to form beneath the roiling storm clouds. She looked back at him. “Are you crazy?”

He shrugged. “If you’re scared, don’t come up, but that seems a little strange to me.”

“What seems strange? That I’m afraid of a tornado cloud? Pilots have to fly around them, Red. Planes can’t fly as high as that cloud.”

“Have you ever seen a tornado?”

“Not up close, thank you.”

“Well, that’s interesting.”

“Interesting? Why?”

“You claim we shouldn’t accept the ordinary, but here you have a chance to do something out of the ordinary and you won’t do it.”

She gave him what she hoped was a look as dark as those clouds, then she turned on her heel and climbed up the ladder. She crawled through the ladder hole and onto the platform.

He was sitting down with his back to the splintered wood of the tower, his long legs dangling freely over the edge.

He faced her and patted the platform. “Sit.”

She shifted into the same position he was and watched the clouds warily. She began to fidget. She wanted to be someplace below-ground, not high above it. It was humid and warm and sticky. She unsnapped the cuffs on her flight suit and shoved the sleeves back to her elbows.

He just sat there, calm as a toad in the sun.

She realized there was suddenly no sound outside. No birds. No wind. Nothing. Just strange, empty air. “How come there’s no siren blowing?”

“They have warning sirens in town. This is farm country. Out here we don’t have any sirens, and if we did, they wouldn’t do a lick of good. Most farms are a few hundred acres.”