Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  Cedros wondered if the weather lady could really make rain. Maybe she really was as dangerous as Choat believed. Wouldn’t that be something?

  Only abundance can ruin us.

  17

  Frankie’s uncle Ted drove the white long-bed pickup truck through the failing light of the breezeless, humid evening. The sky above Bonsall was soft and gray as the belly of a rabbit, and the fretful clouds in the northwest looked almost close enough to touch.

  Frankie sat beside Ted, and Stromsoe rode shotgun. Stromsoe looked back into the bed of the truck, at the eight five-gallon containers with vented lids that gave off the aroma of copper and chlorine. The containers were steel and rode on pallets that were roped to cleats on the bed sides. There were eight small gas canisters of the kind used to fuel camp stoves, and eight circular steel stands that looked roughly a foot in diameter. An aluminum extension ladder clattered against the pallets. There was an electric lantern and two large metal toolboxes, one red and one black. Three folding beach chairs were tied up snug to the bed and what looked like plastic rain ponchos were stuffed down between them. Ace and Sadie lay on blankets, panting contentedly as the truck bounced down the dirt road.

  Stromsoe couldn’t tell exactly where they were, just that they were south of Fallbrook, west of Interstate 15. They’d come here by a series of turns, gates, bridges, and other unmarked dirt roads. The Bonsall hills were dry now in the fall and Stromsoe smelled the clear, quiet sweetness of sage and chaparral coming through the open window at him.

  Ted drove fast, a cigarette in his mouth. He had given Stromsoe a firm handshake and a dubious once-over when Frankie had introduced him as Uncle Ted Reed—Frankie’s mother’s oldest brother.

  Frankie wore a brown fedora into which she had stuffed most of her hair. The pocket of her dress shirt held a folded handkerchief and three pens. The sleeves were rolled up. She held a jumping laptop to her thigh with one hand and tapped away with the other. Stromsoe spied a Southern California weather map with more contour lines, front indicators, and numbers on it than he could even focus on.

  She zoomed in on northern San Diego County, her face bouncing in unison with the computer. Then she turned, looked straight into his eyes, and smiled. Up this close, it was an unexpected and personal thing to Stromsoe.

  “It’s moisture acceleration, not rainmaking,” she said. “Great-great-grandpa Charley Hatfield made that distinction. You can’t make rain out of a sky with no moisture in it. It would be ridiculous to try.”

  “Acceleration,” said Stromsoe.

  “One hundred percent is what we’re after,” said Frankie. “We want to get double the rainfall per event.”

  Stromsoe thought. “How do you know what number to double?”

  “Because we’ve got four towers spaced three miles apart in the northwest-to-southeast storm line, that’s how,” said Ted. “We bait the two outside towers and compare the rainfall with the two inside towers. We’re plugged into the Santa Margarita Preserve, which is right over the hill. So we get data over their five thousand acres, and real-time video if we want it. And the city, county, state, and federal weather stations are all online now. That’s how we know what number to double.”

  Stromsoe thought.

  “With a storm of any size, you won’t get a one-hundred-percent fluctuation in that short a distance,” said Frankie. “If we get double the local yield over towers one and four, that’s our system at work. And it’s not really baiting, like Ted says. It’s not really seeding either.”

  “Tell him about the particles,” said Ted.

  Frankie shut down the computer, folded the screen, and looked at Stromsoe. In spite of the cool evening there were pinpricks of moisture just under her hairline.

  “Every raindrop contains a very small particle of solid matter,” she said. “Once an oxygen and two hydrogen atoms bond, you have water. But you don’t have a raindrop. It won’t form, and it won’t fall. We’re not sure why the inert grain is necessary. Maybe it’s the same principle as a grain of sand helping to form a pearl. Way back in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, soldiers noticed that big rainstorms often followed big battles in which cannon and black powder firearms were used. People also liked to say that rain ‘followed the plow,’ because the rainfall records distinctly showed a rise in precipitation over cultivated land. For years scientists thought these beliefs were just superstition about battle and the wishful thinking of land speculators. Now we know that the particulate matter caused by detonation and the dust rising from cultivation accelerated the rainfall.”

  Stromsoe nodded and looked out the window to the clouds advancing from the northwest.

  “We’re doing something similar,” said Frankie. “But we’ve got something a lot better than heavy carbon molecules or plow dust, and we’ve got a way to put it right where it belongs. The basic formula comes down from Great-Great-Grandfather Hatfield. It’s based on an easily made silver iodide isotope—everybody suspected that’s what it was—but that’s all I can tell you about it. His other ingredients were a secret and people thought they died with him until I found his old lab out in Bonsall. That’s his stuff out there you saw—most of it was his, anyway. He was a genius. Then Ted and I went to work. It’s taken us eleven years but we came up with a lighter, more versatile particle and a much more effective way of dispersing it. Our formula is secret too, so don’t even ask. Charley would have absolutely dug it. We built the towers out of wood just like he did, but that’s because I’m nostalgic and because they look inspiring. If you ever went large scale with this, you’d use cast aluminum if you needed them lighter.”

  When she looked over at Stromsoe again he saw the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the tiny droplets of moisture above her lips.

  As if seeing what Stromsoe saw, she wiped her face with the hankie. “Man oh man, this might time out just right, Ted.”

  “I think it’s going to, Frankie,” said Ted. “Soon as that jet stream started coming south again we were looking good.”

  “And you, Matt,” she said. “Maybe you’ll see some history made.”

  “We won’t know until after it stops raining,” said Ted. “When we compare the rainfall numbers.”

  “But if it pours cats and dogs over towers one and two, I’m going to be one happy girl.”

  IN THE NEW darkness they parked by tower one and Frankie climbed back, turned on the lantern, then pushed two canisters to the edge of the lowered tailgate.

  Stromsoe carried one from the truck to the ladder, handing it up to Ted, who muscled it with a grunt onto the tower platform. The containers were heavy and hard to handle with his modified left hand. The smells of copper and chlorine hung in the dense air.

  Before handing up the second canister, Stromsoe tried to peer inside but the vent holes were tiny and the lantern cast only a faint light.

  “Don’t,” said Ted. “It’s not yours to know.”

  “It’s mine to smell,” said Stromsoe.

  “We’ve done this fine a long time without you.”

  “Come on, kids,” said Frankie.

  Stromsoe heaved the heavy container up to Ted, who jerked it onto the tower platform then shoved it into the corner opposite the first. Frankie handed up two of the gas canisters and two of the circular steel stands.

  Stromsoe saw the cluster of meteorological instruments affixed to one corner of the platform. The cups of the anemometer scarcely shifted in the still night.

  “That’s going to change,” said Frankie, again seeming to see through Stromsoe’s eyes.

  Frankie reached into the truck again and slid out the red toolbox. By the dip of her right shoulder Stromsoe could see how heavy it was.

  “Matt, I’m going to ask you to face due south right now and give me some privacy.”

  Stromsoe glanced up to find the North Star but the clouds were too low to locate anything at all. He faced what he thought was south and listened to Frankie’s boot steps across the earth, then on the ladder, then the hu
ff of her breath as she hoisted the toolbox to the platform, then the clank of the heavy thing on the redwood.

  He heard the lid open, and the sounds of objects being laid out on the platform. The fumes found their way down to him, not a foul smell really, but one that seemed potent.

  Ted came over and stood in front of him and offered Stromsoe a smoke, which he accepted. The old man lit it for him and stepped back where he could keep an eye on Stromsoe and still see Frankie up on the tower. “I’m really not doing an antler dance up here,” Frankie called down from the platform. “This is science. Mostly.”

  “Mostly science,” said Ted.

  Stromsoe heard the sounds of various lids being pried off, then liquid being poured into liquid. The cigarette smoke tickled his memory as he listened to the scrape of something on the inside of one of the big canisters, the sound of Reina Tavarez stirring the pot of chile verde she made on Sundays while the boys watched sports on TV or shot pool on the ancient balding blue-felt table in the Tavarez garage or hung with the other adolescents down at the corner of Flora across from Delhi Park but never actually in the park because Mike’s father, Rolando, threatened to punish his son if he ever set foot in Delhi Park or ran with the bangers in Delhi F Troop, which was why Mr. and Mrs. Tavarez had had Mike transferred across town to Santa Ana High School, because they didn’t want Mike in with the bad boys at Valley High, which was F Troop’s corner. Stromsoe imagined Mike then unimagined him and wished that he could edit that face from his memory forever but knew he never would.

  An enemy can live in your heart forever.

  “Good job bagging the stalker,” said Ted.

  “Thanks.”

  “Think he’ll come back?”

  “Maybe,” said Stromsoe.

  “John Cedros, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you make for a day’s work?”

  “Three-fifty.”

  Ted was quiet a moment. Then, “I thought of police work when I was young. Turned out I was better suited for meteorology. I could do the math but I couldn’t toss people around.”

  “I liked tossing around some people,” said Stromsoe. “I never thought of anything but law enforcement. My father told me I lacked imagination.”

  “Imagination, well, fine,” said Ted.

  “I liked the work okay,” said Stromsoe. “It paid the bills.”

  “She’s a sweet girl,” said Ted.

  “I know.”

  Stromsoe heard Frankie climbing down the ladder. The copper-chlorine smell had changed to a lighter, more ethereal aroma that came and went quickly.

  He peeked up at the tower, where the tops of the containers glowed a pleasant shade of light blue, and pale vapors rose into the air. Each container sat atop one of the circular stands, and each had a propane canister attached to its bottom.

  When they were finished at tower one, they drove off to tower two, a mile to the southeast. Here, Ted again climbed the ladder and checked the cables and contacts on the meteorological instruments bristling atop the platform.

  “The bugs get up in the housings,” said Frankie. “One time we had a bat in the rain collector and another time a bunch of wasps got into the module case.”

  “Looking right,” Ted called out from the platform. “Load ’em up here, PI.”

  Stromsoe slid the first canister from the truck bed and lugged it over to the ladder.

  AN HOUR AFTER Frankie climbed down from tower four it started raining.

  18

  The three of them sat in the beach chairs in the bed of the pickup truck, the plastic ponchos efficiently shedding the raindrops. The dogs were outfitted in the same gear, with the hoods bunched behind their necks and the tails of the ponchos trimmed for their shorter bodies. They squinted into the rain with the air of veterans. Ted came up with a pint of Scoresby that slowly made the rounds.

  Stromsoe looked up at the tower in doubtful wonder. Frankie’s secret brew had been percolating for an hour now. The tops of the five-gallon canisters were still glowing a light blue color as the last of the gases sputtered and hissed and climbed into the air, then wriggled into the sky like smoky embers. Before the rain had started, he’d been able to watch the vapors rise up a hundred feet into the air, but now Stromsoe could follow them only a few yards before they vanished into the wet dark.

  A few minutes later the containers rocked and shuddered and the blue light dwindled out. They sat smokeless and silent, no more interesting than empty paint cans.

  “What’s your forecast?” Ted asked. “Unaccelerated.”

  Frankie was already nodding. “I came up with half an inch. NOAA says half an inch. UCSD says half an inch too.”

  “I’m liking this,” said Ted.

  “I want double at towers one and four,” said Frankie. “Maybe even triple.”

  “Don’t get your hopes too far up.”

  “What are hopes for?”

  Stromsoe sat with Sadie’s gray muzzle on his leg, feeling the rain hit his poncho. His shoes and socks were soaked. For the first few minutes the rain was light, then it almost imperceptibly gathered force until the drops were springing off the bed and roof. Stromsoe listened to the growing volume of it against the metal and the ground.

  Frankie sat next to him with her feet up on the bed side and the rain streaming off the brim of her fedora. Her work boots were heavily oiled and shed the rain.

  Ted was on the other side of her, cupping a smoke in one hand and wobbling the Scotch bottle on his knee with the other.

  “That’s the most beautiful sound on earth,” said Frankie. “Don’t you think?”

  “Chet Atkins,” said Ted.

  “And you, Matt?”

  “I like how it roars on the truck.”

  “I like how much time it took to get here,” said Frankie. “It’s a closed system, you know—and it’s hundreds of millions of years old. We could get hit by a water molecule right now that evaporated up from the Atlantic a few million years ago, rained down in Egypt thousands of years later, ran with the Blue Nile south to Ethiopia, then perked down into the ground. Later it came up in a village well and somebody used it to water a barley plant, so it evaporated again and got swept up by a front that dumped on Bangkok, then it ran off into the South China Sea. Then it wobbled along the Tropic of Cancer over to the North Pacific, where it became part of the ocean for a few million years before the northeast trade winds led the currents all the way to this front off California. Where our little molecule rose up, found a particle, and became a raindrop that hit a dog lying in the back of a truck.”

  Silence then, except for the rain.

  “Which dog?” asked Ted.

  Frankie backhanded his leg.

  “Wow,” said Stromsoe. “That’s a mouthful, Frankie.”

  “Or not,” she said. “Every drop has a different story.”

  She pulled the bottle from Ted, took a small sip, and handed it off to Stromsoe.

  “God damn I’m happy right now,” she said.

  “You’re a cheap date, Frankie,” said Ted.

  “That’s me. Two sips of Scotch and I’m good to go. And I know I’m verbose. It’s bad. I just love this stuff. This.”

  She stood up and jumped off the side of the truck bed to the ground. Ace and Sadie took the smart way, off the tailgate.

  Stromsoe watched her walk out into the chaparral, raise her face and arms to the sky.

  “She got straight A’s at UCLA,” said Ted.

  Stromsoe dropped out of the truck, his landing padded by his rain-swollen shoes and socks. He walked over to Frankie and the dogs, stopping not right next to them but nearby.

  “What?” asked Frankie.

  Stromsoe couldn’t remember being at a simple loss for words in many years.

  “Looks like rain,” he said.

  BACK IN THE barn office Frankie and Ted pulled the rainfall data off the tower sensors while the dogs sprawled on the red braided rug in front of an electric heater. St
romsoe made instant coffee, took cups to the scientists, then pulled up a chair with the dogs.

  He listened to the rain hitting the tin barn roof overhead, an amplified clatter that sounded much wetter than the lessening slant of drops visible against the yard light outside the window.

  He thought of a trip he’d taken with Hallie and Billy down to Costa Rica one year to see a live volcano and collect seashells. They got caught in a thunderstorm on the Arenal volcano and Stromsoe had found an old sheet of corrugated tin that he held up as shelter. They sat for a while and watched the big boulders and molten lava heave forth from the cauldron in the distance while the rain thundered down on their roof. Stromsoe had felt particularly strong at that moment, captaining his little family on the journey of life, protecting them, showing them a good time.

  Now, a lifetime later, he shuddered.

  “It’s going to be a while,” said Frankie. “Don’t feel like you have to wait around in wet shoes. I’ll call you first thing in the morning if you want.”

  “I’ll just sit here if you don’t mind.”

  “There’s sandwich stuff in the fridge.”

  “That’d be good.”

  BY MIDNIGHT THE rain had stopped, though Frankie said there was probably another cell out there swirling in.

  “Come on in here, Matt,” she called to him from the office. “I’ll walk you through this part.”

  Stromsoe stood next to Ted and looked over Frankie’s shoulder as she went online and collected the NOAA rainfall data. Then she linked on to the Santa Margarita Ecological Preserve Web site for real-time downloads from their weather stations. She paused on a camera feed from the Santa Margarita river gorge. In the scant moonlight the runoff pounded over the smooth rocks of the old riverbed. Frankie quietly murmured. Then she clicked off, printed some pages, and highlighted certain numbers with a yellow marker. She said the state and county figures wouldn’t be available until morning.