The Year of the Storm

by John Mantooth

  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.

  The wind shifted suddenly, and my body twisted. My hand slipped, and instead of flying away, I was driven down into the hatch.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  To this day I don’t know what happened. I think I hit my head on either the ladder or the oxygen tank, maybe even the ground, or maybe I just passed out. Either way, the next part is indistinct in my memory, like the fragments of long-remembered dreams, images shaken out of a tree, hundreds of leaves falling at once. Only a few stand out.

  Mom. Her face, filled with the sweetest light, sitting in the backyard, peeling a pear, her knuckles wet with the sticky juice. Me bounding across to her, so full of enthusiasm it hurts to remember it because the hard fact hits me: I won’t ever be that enthusiastic again.

  I buried my head in her lap, and she tousled my hair. Her hands in my hair. Jesus, I go back to that even now, even when I can no longer determine if the image was a real memory or just a dream. In the end it does not matter.

  There’s not an honest man anywhere who would deny the sweetness of a memory like that. Even now, the emotion of that moment is a real thing. And it occurs to me that if all of life had to be reduced into one moment, one gesture, this is the one I’d put forward.

  The second image is of Seth. He came to me in the darkness, the boy from the photograph, his face lit with a glow that illuminated his whole body. He knelt beside me, whispered in my ear. Told me things about the slip. I listened so close, but when I came to, I could barely remember any of it, just his presence, his soothing voice in my ear, a phrase that he kept repeating—Sometimes you find your way when you stop looking so hard.

  The third was even more dreamlike, but somehow, it is the one that I go back to the most now, as if it really happened, as if I can place real meaning in the contours of its mysteries. It was Pike, standing over me, his white hair dangling around his neck and hanging down in my face. I could smell the scent of Wild Turkey and cigarettes on him (two smells I’ve continued to love even through adulthood). He shook me awake, pulling me up with both hands. “You’ve done too much believing to quit now,” he said. “Besides, if you don’t believe for yourself, nobody is going to do it for you. Seth and me got lucky and found something important. It wasn’t a new world or a swamp or a little cabin in a picture at dusk. It was more. It was a piece of God. The piece that resides in us, that lets us be more than just dirt. It was a door and we opened it. Now you’ve just got to do the same.”

  I tried to tell him I couldn’t open it without him, that I was still in the storm shelter, and that he was dead, and I didn’t buy this shit about a piece of God. But every time I tried to stand up, he pushed me back down, telling me to wait, to rest. “You’ll need your energy.”

  Overhead, rain continued to pelt the hatch, and I could hear it leaking through the cracks, splattering on the soil.

  “Aren’t you dead?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  “What do the dead know?” I asked him.

  “Nothing. We know nothing. But we see everything. You’ve got to see, Danny.”

  Then he was gone, and I was too.

  The last thing that happened before I returned to full consciousness (though my therapist, Dwight, would suggest that I didn’t ever really return to full consciousness until days later) was the falling.

  Even while it happened, I remembered how Pike had described it and found myself amazed by how it was exactly like I’d imagined it. The wheel first. The world shifting, turning over like a great stone behemoth, and then the eerie dusk, the bottomless blue sky, the full moon, and—something I don’t remember—the lightest touch of rain on my skin. The cabin flashed by, the water below, the giant oak trees, again and again until I slapped the water and sank to the bottom of a new world. Either that or an old dream.

  When I woke some time later, it was to the sound of silence, and I knew the storm was over.

  —

  Dim light filtered through the opened hatch. I sat up, groggy. Hungry too. When had I last eaten? I tried to remember, but images got in the way—me pulling Pike through the mud, Sheriff Martin and his deputy running to get in their police car only to see it picked up like a plaything and tossed God knows where, the sound of Pike’s labored breathing, that awful broken-glass sound.

  “Pike.” I scrambled across the storm shelter, feeling for him in the darkness,
sure that when I touched his body I’d find it cold and lifeless.

  But how could I imagine that I wouldn’t touch it at all?

  I walked the shelter over twice, and then twice more, before I allowed myself to believe it. He was gone.

  But where? Better question: But why? He wouldn’t leave me. Unless he’d been crazy all along. I dismissed that. There was no point in even considering such a thing.

  He couldn’t be gone. I searched again, this time on my hands and knees, but the shelter was empty.

  The adult me finds this hard to believe now. It’s one of those easy places where a skeptic will say, “You were groggy. It was dark. He was there, you just didn’t find him. Hell, maybe you were still dreaming.”

  And maybe I was. Maybe, a part of me still is.

  It doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that I searched five times, and Walter Pike was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I’ve always thought the shadows were deepest at dusk when they lengthened and twisted themselves into ominous distortions. If you are caught walking at the moment when the sun dies and the woods go silent from birdsong, it can be disconcerting. The trees take on new, sometimes vulgar shapes, their vines casting out a more expansive web, the birds disappearing with sudden hushed eeriness, the very ground before you shifting and offering new contours, and sometimes a strange figure is glimpsed, flitting among the trees like a washed-out image from an old motion picture before disappearing in the periphery of your vision, blanketed by the oncoming night.

  All of this might make a person disoriented, sure of themselves in the light of the day, but now—in the sudden dusk—leaving them groping for something familiar.

  Sometimes I wonder if this is what happened to me when I came out of the shelter that day and saw the landscape changed, the very trees grown denser and more full of vines, the water on the ground, murky and knee-deep. Sometimes I wonder if stumbling out onto the flooded ground, I fell into a long, perilous delusion—a dream state brought on by the stress of the storm and Pike’s disappearance.