The Stormchasers: A Novel (6 page)

B
y four o’clock, when they stop at the Sapp Bros travel plaza in Ogallala, some of the novelty has worn off. Karena is tired, rumpled, and cranky. Her face is oily from hours in the Jeep. Stumbling through the convenience store toward the ladies’ room, she feels as though she hasn’t blinked in hours. And this is only the first day. Karena wants to groan. Maybe it is the onset of the Dreads, but this whole trip suddenly feels ridiculous.

After washing her face and blotting it with a paper towel Karena feels a little better, and she walks back through the store to show Charles’s mullet photo to the clerks. As usual, nobody has seen him, and Karena starts to wonder if this is a case of the hair wearing the person. Maybe the mullet is just too distracting. She strolls through the aisles, past the atlases and cans of refried beans, the snack food and automotive parts and Huskers memorabilia, comparing the photo with the men she sees. She’ll start in here and work her way out. She rules out any guy under six feet, since Charles won’t have shrunk, and the overweight, because Dr. Brewster said Charles is in good shape. Other than that, any male about Karena’s age is fair game, and she stands by the ATM, the lottery ticket machine, even the men’s room, subtracting a baseball cap and glasses from this guy, a beard and mustache from that. She has the strong sense that Charles is nearby—what Charles used to call their twindar. She just can’t see him.

Once she’s covered the convenience store, Karena buys a pair of awful white sunglasses from the spinning stand and wanders back outside. There she stops. The travel plaza has become a stormchasers’ tailgate party. The parking lot is a maze of vehicles with radio and radar antennas, Skywarn stickers, orange bubble lights on their roofs. Chasers wander among them, drinking Big Gulps and eating microwave pizza. Karena often hears single women ask where all the men are. Now she knows the answer. She thinks she might propose a second article, this one for the
Ledger
’s “Lifestyle” section. Every unattached woman in Minneapolis will be taking stormchase tours.

Karena stands on tiptoe, scanning the lot for a slender six-footer with golden-blond hair. Charles is nowhere in sight, so Karena looks for her guides, figuring it’s best to start close to home. But the Whirlwind team is busy. Dan is in the driver’s seat of the White Whale, as Karena has nicknamed the van, watching the radar. Dennis is lecturing some of the tourists, gesturing animatedly to the sky. And Kevin is pacing the periphery, talking on a cell phone. Karena sighs, then plunges into the chasers, systematically working the lot from left to right. She doesn’t bother with the photo this time, just asks if anyone knows a chaser named Charles Hallingdahl. Many say they do—they refer to him as Chuck—and look at her curiously or impassively from beneath baseball caps and behind sunglasses. But nobody has seen Chuck Hallingdahl, not this season, sorry. Good luck, though. The Stormtrack party line.

Eventually Karena retreats to the median, disheartened and sweaty, and sits in the shade beneath the giant red-and-white coffee can billboard. She fans herself with her steno pad. Are the chasers closing rank, or have they really not seen her brother? Charles, the lone wolf. Maybe he’s really not here. Maybe he’s in another state altogether. But Dan said the only real chance for severe weather today is right where they are. Karena slits her eyes and inspects the crowd. Come on, Charles, she thinks. Show yourself. I know you’re here somewhere.

“Hiya,” says Fern, the British girl. She ambles over, tapping a pack of cigarettes against her wrist. “D’you want company?”

“Please,” says Karena. She might as well make a friend and get some material for her story.

“How you doing back there on your own?” asks Fern.

Karena smiles. “Fine,” she says. “Though I do miss out a little on getting to know you guys. But I like driving.”

“I’d go mad,” says Fern. “You Yanks drive like nutters. No offense. Don’t you get sleepy?”

“Sometimes,” Karena admits.

“D’you smoke?” Fern says, offering her pack.

“Not anymore,” Karena says.

“Shame,” comments Fern, lighting a Marlboro. “That’d keep you awake. You could try sunflower seeds, though. That’s how Dennis manages, since he can’t smoke in the van.”

She considerately exhales off to the side, the smoke forming a twisting parabola in the sunlight. You could die, you know, Karena wants to tell her. You’re not immune. Cancer doesn’t happen just to somebody else. She wants to tell Fern about her mom Siri, how at the end, after they took one of Siri’s lungs and put her through chemo and radiation and steroids, there was nothing recognizable left of Siri except her voice. But Karena kept smoking three years after her mom died, stopping only when she began getting migraines from it. The habit is that hard to break. So she says nothing, and the two of them sit quietly for a minute like old farmers, Karena watching the chasers, Fern the sky.

“Nice Cu,” Fern says.

“Sure is,” says Karena absently. Then, “Wait, what’s Cu?”

Fern laughs. “I keep forgetting you’re a virgin,” she says. She points with her cigarette to the white puffy clouds cruising over the truck stop.

“Cu,” she says. “Short for cumulus, cumulus congestus. We’ve got a bit of a Cu field, actually, and they’re agitated. See how they’re blowing themselves up? Means we could get some action soon.”

Karena laughs and takes out her little recorder.

“Agitated Cu,” she says into it. “Cu field. That’s great, Fern. The guides should give you a cut.”

Fern looks aghast, as if Karena has committed some blasphemy.

“I’m shite compared to them,” she says. “They’re bloody geniuses.”

“How many times have you been on tour, anyway? Do you mind if I record this for my piece?”

“No, that’s all right,” says Fern. “Six.”

“Six!” says Karena.

Fern blows smoke into the sky. “Whirlwind’s brilliant,” she says.

“Apparently,” says Karena. “How’d you hear about them? How’d you decide to do this in the first place?”

“I saw a documentary on Discovery Channel about chasing,” says Fern, “and I knew I had to come. I’ve always been obsessed with tornadoes. I’ve loved them ever since I was a little girl.”

“That’s interesting,” says Karena. “How come? It’s not as though England has a lot of severe weather.”

“Well, that’s the point,” says Fern. “English weather’s shite. The most you ever get’s some pathetic little thunderstorm, and everyone goes mad. It’s bollocks. So I knew I had to come to the States. And that first tour changed my life.”

“Interesting,” Karena repeats, a little more alert now. There’s a story here. “How so?”

Fern stubs her cigarette out on the sole of her boot, her grape-colored hair swinging forward.

“Fell in love, didn’t I,” she says.

“With the storms?” Karena asks.

“With a man,” says Fern. “The best, smartest, sexiest man in the world—bloody bastard.”

Karena makes a sympathetic face. “Ah,” she says. “Should have known.”

She waits while Fern lights another cigarette. Karena was right: This is turning out to be a much richer story than the one she had planned, as so often happens when the people get involved.

“So who is the sexy bastard?” she asks. “If you don’t mind talking about it.”

But before Fern can answer, somebody from the lot shouts:

“There it goes!”

Fern looks up and grins. She nudges Karena with an elbow.

“Look,” she says, pointing.

Karena does. Her mouth opens, just a little. One of the big Cu has exploded like a Jiffy Pop container, and it is still growing, punching up and outward so fast that Karena can actually see it happening as if in fast-forward film. Its top is blinding white against the blue sky, and hard and knuckly, but its underside is dark gray, and as it expands its shadow eclipses the truck stop.

“Right,” says Fern, “showtime.”

She stamps out her cigarette, bends to pocket the extinguished stubs, then jogs toward the White Whale. Halfway there she turns.

“See you out there,” she calls.

“Let’s go, people,” shouts Dan Mitchell.

The parking lot is a madhouse. The chasers are jumping into their vehicles and speeding toward the exit, which results in a nasty bottleneck. Horns blare, and some of the vehicles start plowing across the median rather than wait. One of them, a bizarre hybrid of tank and armadillo, gets mired in the grass, blocking the rest. Karena watches in awe.

“Hey, Laredo,” yells Kevin, and it takes Karena a second to realize he’s shouting at her, referring to her by the model of her Jeep. Of course: She hasn’t introduced herself to him yet, so although she has been listening to him all day, he doesn’t know her name.

“Saddle up, Laredo,” he shouts and cranks his arm. “We’ve gotta move!” and then Karena is running too, sprinting like everyone else toward the vans.

T
hey turn right out of the Sapp Bros and drive through Ogallala to pick up 61 North, Karena talking to herself in her Laredo. Come on, she tells herself. You can do this. It is not like last time. These guys are not Charles. They’re professionals. They have radar. But Karena is shaking all over, so badly she can hardly hold on to the wheel. She can’t help it. Every instinct in her screams to drive back to the Sapp Bros, where there is, if not a basement, at least a bathroom she can hide in, a windowless room in a cage of pipes. Instead she keeps following these total strangers into life-threatening danger.

She has snapped into hyper-alert mode again, her eyes ticking rapidly right and left in case some detail might be necessary later for survival. The warehouses and steakhouses of Ogallala. The bungalows on its outskirts. The Platte River again. The land becoming hilly as they head north, long, gentle swells beneath the grasses. A beautiful blue-green lake. A picnic table and pine trees like a 1950s postcard. The light is intense and jaundiced, choked off by the storm, as if Karena is wearing yellow-tinted sunglasses.

She starts thinking about what she could tell them: Her check engine light came on. She had a sudden attack of E. coli from her fast-food burger the night before. She got an emergency call from home. But then Karena would have to call her editor and confess she’s aborting the assignment. Tell Tim Tarrant, the Whirlwind owner, the same thing— after she assured him she could handle this. She imagines the tourists saying,
What happened to that reporter?
and Fern saying,
She did mention she was getting sleepy back there.
Dan would say nothing and probably be relieved. But what really bothers Karena, for some reason, is the you-all-right? look that guide Kevin gave her during orientation. She doesn’t want to repay that small kindness by disappearing.

And there’s Charles. She has come out here to find Charles. Karena straightens her arms, bracing them against the wheel, and keeps driving.

After a while, Karena starts to relax, hypnotized by following the van along the swooping highway—and here is a curious thing: The sun is out again, shining strong between the agitated Cu Fern pointed out, which sail like galleons over the Jeep. In the rearview the storm that exploded over the Sapp Bros is barely visible, looking like a scoop of melting vanilla ice cream. Karena hasn’t seen any other chasers since leaving Ogallala, either. “What the hell?” Karena says. Why are the Whirlwind guys going in the wrong direction? There’s a white line above the hills ahead, bulging upward in the middle like a contact lens, but that’s not a storm. That’s a front.

Suddenly her cell phone starts burring and moving itself around on the passenger’s seat, startling Karena—she’s forgotten about it. She grabs it. “Hello!” she says. “Karena Jorge.”

“. . . scanner,” one of the guides says. She thinks it’s Kevin. The phone beeps three times and goes dead.

“Damn it,” Karena says and shakes it, as if this will help. The phone buzzes in her hand.

“. . . scanner, Laredo,” Kevin says faintly. “146.520.”

“Oh!” says Karena as the phone dies again. She waves to the van, annoyed with herself. How could she have forgotten to put on the scanner? 146.520, she repeats, 146.520. This is the channel the scanner has to be on for her to hear them. She steers with her elbows while she programs the frequency in.

“. . . with us, Laredo?” says Kevin on the scanner. “Flash your high beams twice if you can hear.”

Karena does.

“Okay, copy. You doing okay back there?”

Flash. Flash.

“Copy that. Good. Just wanted to let you know there’s a Wheel of Fortune on our storm now. We’re looking to intercept in about twenty minutes.”

“Wheel of Fortune,” Karena repeats, bemused. She flicks her high beams rapidly, a blizzard of brights, and holds up her hand questioningly.

“Oh, sorry, Laredo,” Kevin says. “A Wheel of Fortune’s a little spinny thing, spinning icon, that pops up on our Threat Net when a storm starts to rotate. That’s what we’re looking for.”

Karena flashes twice to show she has understood, and in response all the tourists stick their arms out the windows, then wave them up and down in unison so it looks as though the van is flying. Karena laughs and turns on her recorder. “Wheel of Fortune,” she says. “Threat Net.” Is this how Charles talks now too? Probably. Karena remembers him saying things like
punch the core
and
in the bear’s cage
. He always did love the lingo.

Then she thinks, Wait, did Kevin say
our
storm?

She leans forward again and shakes her head. “Where?” she says. “I just don’t see—” And then the van comes up out of the valley they’ve been traveling in and a moment behind it, Karena’s Jeep, and she realizes that what she thought was a front is a storm, after all. It’s just so big she didn’t recognize it as such. She never would have imagined a storm could be this huge, a mothership filling the sky, taking up the whole horizon. It hangs there, the telltale anvil shape Karena recognizes from Stormtrack, the bottom flat and the top also, sheared off by upper-level winds. Any tornado, even as tall as a skyscraper, will look like a toothpick coming from that thing.