The Year of the Storm (17 page)

At some point, Pike said, “Stop,” and I opened my eyes. I was standing in just about the same place I had been standing the day I saw Anna. The shelter was close now. I let go of Pike's hands and went to find it.

I
n the dark of the shelter, there were three sounds that nagged at me—the booms of thunder outside; Pike's labored breathing, which was so bad that I tensed before each intake, cringing at the sawing sound that came back up; and the baying of the dogs. They'd obviously tracked us to the shelter. It was only a matter of time before the police discovered the hatch.

Despite this, I felt it was imperative for Pike to rest. I'd never heard someone die before, but if I had to guess, Pike was coming pretty damn close to what it might sound like.

But he refused to rest. “It's now or never, Danny-boy,” he gasped.

“What do we do?” I asked him in the dark.

“Just be still. Wait. Hold my hand.”

I found his hand in the darkness. It felt cold.

“Now, just close your eyes, Danny-boy. Just close your eyes and wait.”

—

W
e waited. For a long time nothing happened. Pike talked in between labored breaths. He talked about cigarettes. He told me how if he had his oxygen, he'd put about four in his mouth right now and smoke them all. He told me that addiction is one of the ways we curse ourselves, and he had a double dose of it, what with the cigarettes and the whiskey, but he reckoned if he could have only one, it would be cigarettes. He felt the need for them in his bones, he said. “A deep need, the kind that kills you.” He laughed then, obviously amused by the irony of his situation.

“Listen,” he said suddenly. “Hear that?”

“What?” All I heard were the concussive blasts of thunder, so frequent they blended into each other, creating one long drumroll of booms.

“The dogs. They've gone quiet.”

He was right. I realized it had been several minutes since I'd heard them.

“Good and bad,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they're gone. That's the good news.”

“And the bad?”

“Think about why they left, Danny.”

I shrugged. “I don't know. They gave up.”

“Dogs don't give up, not when they had us dead to rights. The storm. They must have gotten word it's going to be a hell of a thing. Either that or the dogs just got spooked. I'm betting the latter. Dogs know before people.”

I said nothing. At least we were in the safest place for a storm.

Another long silence passed. His hand, once cold, was sweaty in mine. I kept trying to imagine the swamp, trying to make it happen, but nothing did.

Pike groaned loudly.

“What?”

He tried to speak, but all that came out was another hacking cough. His grip loosened on mine.

“Mr. Pike?” I said.

“Shit,” he groaned.

“You're dying,” I said.

“Not yet.”

“But soon. Real soon if you don't get your oxygen.”

“Too many cigarettes,” he said weakly. He started to laugh, but it got stuck in his throat.

“That's it. I'm going back for your tank.”

His hand gripped mine again. “Don't go nowhere. I'll be fine. We . . . we gotta stay right here.”

I shook my head. “No. You're dying. I'm going to get help. Or at least your tank.”

He gripped my hand again, this time softer, with less urgency, and I knew it was because he couldn't get air.

“No. Look, damn you. You made it here. You beat them damn dogs, the police, the doubts. You beat them all. Now, you just got to stay put. And when it happens, you go in and bring them back.”

I pulled away from him. “No. You've got to get help.” I stood up, backing away, stumbling over my feet and landing in a heap next to the ladder.

“Your family or me?” he rasped. “Think, you damned idiot. You go out there into that storm, there ain't no guarantee you'll come back.”

I did think. Right there in the pitch dark, the only thing that was in my mind was having them both. My family and Pike. I could get the tank and still go to the swamp for my mother and sister.

“I'll be back,” I said. “With the oxygen. Just hang on, okay? Hang on.”

He muttered something else, but I couldn't hear it. Once I was to the top of the ladder, I flung open the hatch and was hit hard by a blast of wind and rain. My head was forced back, and I couldn't see for all the rain and debris flying at me. It was morning. It didn't seem possible that so much time had passed, but the sun was up—at least dimly—and when the wind wasn't making me squint, I could see the devastation from a night's worth of storming. The storm showed no signs of abating with the morning. Trees creaked and threatened to splinter, straining themselves all the way down to their roots, as straight-line winds attacked the woods with such force I could only imagine what they'd do to me. Still, I ducked my head and pulled myself up and out of the shelter.

The wind made it difficult to do anything, even to keep my body aimed in the right direction, but I stayed low to the ground and set off in a straight line for Pike's cabin. A fox shot past me toward the pond and clearer land, and it occurred to me that all sensible creatures would be doing the same. As if to underline this thought, a blast of wind cut through the trees to my left and lifted me off the ground, tossing me up like a paper airplane. I must have flown six or seven yards before a big elm stopped me. The impact into the tree wasn't so bad, but when I tumbled to the ground, I twisted my ankle. I wiggled it, testing the range of movement, and decided it hurt, but it wasn't going to stop me.

I waited, pinned against the elm, while tree limbs all around me snapped like dry matchsticks. Pieces of them flew in my direction, and I made myself into a tiny ball at the base of the elm and closed my eyes.

For a while, I just sat there, shivering, thankful to be braced against the one tree that would not snap. A lull ensued and I opened my eyes to view a wasteland of lumber and vegetation and something else, dark and exploded all over the ground. I tested my ankle and got my bearings again and started toward Pike's place. That's when I saw what the dark stuff on the ground was. The wind had ripped the roof of the cabin off savagely, twisting it and grinding it into the tiny pieces that lay all over the forest floor.

Down the dirt road, no more than twenty or thirty yards, a sheriff's cruiser was stopped, a huge pine laid across the hood. The driver was out, trying to roll it off without much success. Another officer—Sheriff Martin, from the looks of his pear-shaped profile—climbed out of the passenger side and looked directly at me. For a second, we both froze—me all locked up with indecision about whether to go on for the oxygen tank or try to enlist their help for Pike; Martin, I'm sure, just shocked to see me.

I think he hollered at me. His mouth moved, I'm sure of that, but with all the commotion, I couldn't hear anything. I wonder how long they'd been stuck like that, how they'd managed to survive aboveground.

I shook my head in frustration. It didn't matter. Time was wasting. I slipped inside the now roofless cabin.

Somehow, being inside felt even more dangerous, especially with the roof gone. The place was destroyed. Water stood on the floor at least three inches deep. The furniture was missing—some of it tangled in the tree branches above me. I paused long enough to sort out my bearings—a difficult task in the midst of such disarray. We'd sat in this room, but there was no couch now, no bookshelf. Pike's ashtray lay against the far wall, on top of a pile of dishes and splintered boards. Digging through the debris, I spotted what I'd come for. I picked it up, making sure the tubes were still connected.

I was just heading out the back, hoping to avoid Martin and his deputy, when I heard his voice.

“Daniel, slow down there, pardner.”

I stopped and turned. Martin stood in the doorway with the deputy—a slim, clean-shaven man that I knew from the D.A.R.E. rallies at our school. Neither held a weapon. Both wore long black rain slickers but still appeared to be soaked to the bone. A gust of wind blasted them, and Martin had to hold on to the deputy in order to keep from falling over.

There was a moment—albeit brief—when I believed it was over. Pike had been right. I was a fool to leave. They would take me back to the squad car, finish moving the fallen limb, and take me to the police station, where I would wait for Mr. Banks to come pick me up and Mom and Anna would still be trapped inside a damned swamp that might or might not exist. And Pike, Pike would die alone inside the very storm shelter that had wrecked his life. That was the kicker, thinking of him lying there, not being able to breathe.

I rushed them.

Sheriff Martin had just managed to squeeze his beer gut through the door frame and shake his head slowly.

“You know, we almost died last night trying to help you. What I don't understand is your fascination with the old coot. He's plainly—”

But I never heard the rest. I hit him running full speed. He was big, over six feet, and probably approaching three hundred pounds, but I led with the oxygen tank to his midsection, and he stumbled backward with a surprised
whoof
. I kept my momentum moving forward. The deputy reached out for me, but I twisted sideways, out of his grasp and through the door.

I'd made it maybe five yards, back toward the shelter, when I realized something was wrong. I stopped, putting on the brakes so abruptly I almost lost my balance.

Tornado survivors typically talk about an eerie calm just before the storm hits. They describe the sky as turning a putrid shade of green. The wind dies down and the animals fall so silent they might as well be dead. That's why I stopped. It was suddenly silent, calmer than any day had a right to be, but there was something on my skin, in the air, a smell I could almost recognize. I knew it well enough to realize it spelled doom.

“Holy shit,” I heard Martin say. “Will you look at that?”

I saw it too, a stack of darkness, churning and undulating in the sky to our west. It was probably somewhere over the cotton fields, but there was little doubt it would soon be here.

Then the silence was gobbled up, eradicated so thoroughly, I was never able to remember it properly because my mind always wanted to jump from hitting Martin with the oxygen tank to the sound of it coming. Oh, the sound. There are certain things in life that do not make good stories because they are so unbelievable. I think the volume of this tornado is one of those. In the years after it happened, I'd catch myself trying to describe it at a party or on a date and realize how futile it was. In the end, I stopped trying because most people just looked at me blankly as if I were making it up, or at the very least, being overly dramatic.

I'd also always heard that tornadoes sounded like freight trains, and the thought of this was enough to give me bad dreams as a kid about running away from funnel clouds bearing down on me with the ferocity of runaway locomotives, but in reality, this one was more like an earthquake. It sounded like a deep, guttural moan from the atmosphere bolstered by the breaking of trees and a thousand tiny explosions, that I later realized had to be the snapping of power lines out by the highway. It was like God himself had decided to expel a bad meal all over this particular corner of northern Alabama.

I tried to make my feet move again, but that's when I saw it, and the raw power of the thing held me in place.

This was the tornado, breaking free of the stack of clouds over the cotton fields, defining itself, charging straight for us, the god of all other tornadoes that kept growing bigger by the second until I lost the sky somewhere behind it, and the whole world was twisting and shaking and about to shred apart.

Trees lifted off the ground, roots and all, and vanished into the swirling folds of the twister. Somehow, one particularly large tree escaped the pull of the twister and shot past me, traveling on a trajectory so straight it might have been a missile. It collided with the front wall of Pike's cabin, leveling it and sending Martin and his deputy running.

With this my paralysis broke and I started trying to find the storm shelter—no easy task considering the way the storm had already changed the whole area.

Years later, the change would be the thing I would remember most. It was as if the tornado were slowly ripping apart the woods, razing them, only to put something else in their place. At the time, I didn't completely understand, but now, I think I might. Or maybe I don't. My thoughts on this—as well as everything else these days—vacillate.

Meanwhile, the twister continued to eat its way east. There was a great boom, like a stack of dynamite going off, and little pieces of painted wood and siding began to fall out of the sky. I knew that meant the storm had gotten a house, maybe mine, maybe one of the half dozen others scattered around these woods between the cotton fields and County Road Seven.

I kept looking for the shelter hatch.

I heard Martin and the deputy yelling at me. They'd made it back to their car and were now shouting at me to join them. I could only guess they were hoping the winds would lift the branch off and then they'd be able to make their escape, though I had no idea where they'd go.

I couldn't imagine them making it out alive, so I yelled back, trying to tell them about the storm shelter, but they waved me off and got inside the car.

The tornado was on me now. I watched helplessly as it lifted not only the branch from the squad car, but the car as well. My foot hit concrete and I knew I'd found the shelter. But before leaning down to open the door, I watched, mesmerized, as the police car shot upward, like it had been caught in some sort of supersonic tractor beam, and disappeared into the ever-growing swath of whirling darkness.

I dropped the oxygen tank inside and managed to get one foot on the ladder, when I felt it. The brute force of it picked me up, launching me out of the shelter like a rocket. I managed to hold on to the top rung of the ladder with one hand. My legs flew into the air and I was turned upside down. I stayed like that for what seemed like an eternity, my arm stretching and my hand aching with the pain of the abrasive steel step as it dug into my palm.