Zebra Skin Shirt

by Gregory Hill

  Instead, with hope, I’m hustling toward the one spot in the world where something other than me may be happening. As to the why of the lightning and how it happened, I’m trying to keep the same attitude I’ve had about why-ness and how-ness that I’ve had since zero-hour-zero. As in, don’t ask questions you can’t possibly answer.

  Groundless speculation: Maybe the cloud was too full of potential energy to be held back by the invisible fist that brought the world into intermission.

  Mindless speculation: Or it’s a message from a god. Or I am as a god and I created the lightning with my mind.

  Stop with all that. It doesn’t matter what caused the thing, the point is that things can be caused, which means I’m not the only moving thing in the universe.

  That hellfire thunderstorm is my distant sail bobbing on the horizon. Let’s let us not dally, Robinson Crusoe.

  24

  I am underneath the Henry Fonda cloud of the hellfire storm. When I commenced my now-aborted trip to Denver, if you recall, I passed under the storm with my eyes closed, careful to avoid the looming doom. What a scaredy-cat I was. Come on in, kiddos, the bottom of a thunderstorm is no more frightening than one of those church youth group Halloween parties where you’re blindfolded and forced to stick your hand into bowls full of marshmallow fruit salad and cold olives. Unlike a church youth group Halloween party, you’re allowed to run around naked in a thunderstorm. I have shed myself of my sweats and the NASCAR shirt. They’re poised, human like, at the edge of the rain.

  It is raining under this particular cloud. The drops are perfectly round, the size of a rat’s eye, spaced remarkably far apart. I would have expected the drops to be, I don’t know, much closer together. Instead, they’re about a yard apart, on average. Sometimes, though, they’re clumped together, some of them literally bouncing into each other, distorting their spheres into miniature, glassy lava lamps.

  I collide with the raindrops. I poke one with my finger. As with other liquids I’ve encountered, the drop liquefies once it contacts my skin.

  Have you ever used a soldering iron? When the pointy tip of the hot iron touches a glob of solder, the solid solder turns to liquid metal, flattening and creeping upward along the metal of the iron. That’s what the raindrop does when my finger touches it. At the point of contact, it loses its jelly consistency and adheres to my skin. The raindrop is pulled toward me where it flattens out over the ripples of my fingerprints. As long as it’s touching me, it behaves like real water. If I shake my hand violently enough, the water is flung off and it re-jellifies to hover in mid-air as a spray of teeny little misty droplets.

  I run naked. The shoes remain on, of course. There are cacti here.

  As I collide with the drops, and as they turn wet against my skin, I enjoy my first shower in weeks. My face and belly and hair become wet. I rub my armpits and fling my funk to float in my wake.

  I grow tired and clean, so I stop running. The ground is dotted with dark wet spots. The rain must have just started. Puffs of dust have been pounded into the air by the individual drops. The smell is unbelievable. It smells like rain. Look up, vectors and vectors of raindrops, poised and paused, all parallel lines converging on nothing, hypnotic and backdropped by the grey-black mass from whence they’ve condensed.

  Deeper beneath the cloud, where the drops are more numerous, I resume running, now with my arms wide. I create Narwhal-shaped tunnels in the shower.

  Lookee! There’s a hailstone. Is that pea-sized or bee-sized? Investigate. ’Tis Cheerio-sized. Lookee! There’s more, no two the same.

  The sky slaves are dumping wheelbarrows of hail. Pluck one from the air and chew. Yummy. Gimme some sugar, Sugar. Gimme a Ferris wheel and a Sno-Kone. Vero, why are you sitting on a non-chair in that dopey diner in Holliday when you should be here, running naked with me?

  Let’s gather hailstones into a solid block the size of a basketball, right at head-height. Shape them into a face. Dig out the eyes. Give her hair, long and atomizing.

  In spite of myself, Vero, this looks something like you. Let’s gaze upon you from a distance, my beautiful floating ice head. Squint. A lopsided lump d’eau glacée. Hardly arty, but it is hovering in mid-air. You belong in a museum on that basis alone.

  Deeper into the storm. The ground rises and then slopes downward into a bowl-shaped valley. The rain is odd here, the vectors swerving, twisting. I walk down the valley’s slope and then I stop and I freeze as tight as every other human I’ve encountered in the past two weeks. On account of the fact that, right at the bottom of this valley is a—

  25

  tornado.

  Here, friends, is where everything comes to a grinding start. We’ve all seen cyclones in photos and on film, the mile-wide ones that regularly destroy and regenerate Midwestern cultures. The whipping tails on local news captured by handheld videocams, accompanied by the Missus telling the Mister to get the hell away from that window and get hisself on down to the basement.

  No one has ever seen a tornado like I’m seeing this one. A column of black, as wide as Jack’s magic beanstalk, rising straight to the devilish sky. The tornado has whipped the storm into a vast corkscrew, the wind stretching the raindrops into sperms, each with a mote of dust in its mouth. How many dust motes does it take to make a rainstorm? Who cares about dust when you have a tornado, especially when the thing is moving?

  You’ve been on a bus before, right? Maybe you sat in front of me and I called you by a racial epithet. Please accept my most sincere apology for that incident. You’ve been on a westbound bus in rush hour on Colfax when traffic was clogged to a complete stop. You’ve looked out the mud-splattered window to see an eastbound bus to your immediate left, also clogged in traffic.

  And then this thing happens where you feel your bus pull forward. You see it happen and so you believe it. But in reality you’re just seeing the other bus move ahead and you’re still stuck in your lane. Your eyes are liars.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes when they told me the tornado was moving. The battle between perception and reality rendered me dizzy, and so I fell down to the ground, where I found myself slapping my own face while shouting, “Get ahold of yourself, man!”

  I have since gotten ahold of myself, dusted the dirt off my ass, and am once again poised bipedally, staring at the tornado, ready to admit that my eyes are not full of shit.

  Reader, you’ve never gone two weeks without seeing anything move. Even the poor assholes in solitary confinement get to see a food tray three times a day. They can flush their shits.

  This tornado is moving, moving, moving, moving, moving, moving. I want to write those words a million times. You can’t begin to appreciate how much I’m moved by this movement. I’ve composed a haiku in its honor:

  A massive vertical column

  of aggregated stuff

  is twirling.

  The tornado is spinning so fast I can see it move. You and I have different definitions of “fast,” obviously. In fact, you would probably say that the tornado is barely moving at all. But you’re wrong. To risk a tautology, it’s spinning, therefore it’s spinning.

  My heart is beating too quickly to be any judge of seconds or minutes, but I’ll try. In ten heartbeats a clod of dirt suspended in that vortex has traveled at least half a foot in the same counterclockwise direction that water flows as it swirls down a northern hemispherical shower drain.

  That’s just a dirt clod. The whole tornado, full of dirt and dust and spermy raindrops, is moving before my scary eyes. Imagine an inverted version of the Eiffel Tower, spinning spinning spinning fast enough that a turtle would have to walk briskly in order to maintain a conversation with the tourists who hang desperately from the girders.

  I’m going to circumnavigate this thing.

  The tornado is big-ish, probably twenty yards in diameter. There’s no distinct line to define just where the tornado starts and non-tornado-ness begins. I keep to the outside of the area where the raindrops begin to atomize.


  The twister is creeping downhill, toward the very bottom of this valley. In the dim light below the clouds, the bottom of the valley is filled with big, old barkless trees. The twister has reached the first of them and it’s starting to tear off branches. Stand for a hundred heartbeats and watch a twig bend just a little. Here, a branch the breadth of a human arm is being dismembered from its trunk.

  Godchrist, it’s altogether too quiet here. Silent as a lamb and dark as the bottom deck of the ark. Not that dark. Pretty dark, though. There’s a profile of light coming from the diffused sun, just enough so I can tell what’s happening.

  On the ground, I see a branch the size of a jousting lance. I lift it and poke it into the tornado. If you thought it was a thrill to watch a tornado, imagine what it’s like to feel one tug a stick from your hand. I release the stick and watch as the tornado slowly, slowly consumes it.

  I’d be an idiot not to touch a tornado.

  I creep forward, knees bent, bracing to be whirled off my feet and into Oz. I outstretch my left arm, closer, closer. As I near the event horizon, particles of particulate begin to pelt me at a dreamish pace. I’m a magnet and this dust and that pulverized silicate and this terrified fly and so forth strike and cling to my rain-wet arm.

  I reach in further. I feel the tornado dust strike my back, my butt cheeks, my ear. I wish I’d left my clothes on. I feel the drag of the wind on my fingers. Another step and my hand is definitely inside the tornado. I grope about, enjoying the wind. It’s like being breathed on by a sleeping dog. The sensation is brand new. I’m not making this happen. It’s happening to me. I take a full step closer. I feel indecent and vulnerable so I cover my crotch with my free hand.

  There’s a football-sized mass passing in front of me. I reach for it and touch fur. It’s a rabbit! Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll save you. I grasp a hind leg, crawl my hand to the scruff of the bunny’s neck. You would think it’d be easy to extract a rabbit from a tornado, but this is not the case. I have to grasp with both hands. When I try to yank the cuddly bunny out of the tornado, I have to lean on my heels, and even then the patient wind won’t let go of the bunny.

  Oh, boy. The patient wind won’t let go of me, either. The tornado hoists me closer and soon my feet are no longer on the ground and things are very, very serious. I let loose of the rabbit and start clawing at the specks of dirt that have engulfed me. I scream until my eardrums rattle.

  The storm is swinging me towards one of the dead trees. I’m three feet off the ground, my feet are being pulled in. I’m flapping my arms, desperately trying to swim away from the vortex. It’s a ridiculous image, this flailing naked man in black referee shoes.

  I’m swung ever so slowly, but oh so firmly, into a dead branch big enough that it would support a tire swing. I grab hold and hug my limbs against the limb. The wind is at my back and it presses me painfully against the knobby branch. On the bright side, I’m stable for now. On the other side, I’m still fucked because in just a few minutes, the tornado is going to creep forward and crush my ribs against the tree and then eat me.

  I opt for a third option: desperation born of terror. Imagine a scene in a sci-fi movie where the spaceship’s hull has been breached and all the air is pouring out of the ship and our hero has to climb up a flapping electrical cable in order to reach the button that turns on the emergency force field.

  Let’s dispense with the drama. I made it. I clawed along the branch to the trunk and made my way around and escaped the tornado. Once my feet were back on the ground, I ran the hell away from that thing, bunny be damned, and straight back to my sweat pants. Before I dressed, I scrubbed myself clean, again, in the raindrops.

  And now I sit with my back to the sun. My hands, sternum, thighs, et cetera, are scratched up. Blood oozes from a non-fatal gash on my left arm.

  I can’t believe that just happened.

  26

  I hiked south of the tornado, in the general direction of the House of Pronghorn, where I’d stayed several nights prior, the one with the decapitated pronghorn head and the pot roast, and the guns—the latter of which, if you recall, I’d taken outside and pulled the triggers.

  Within the hellfire storm within my Nar-centric universe there spins a mighty tornado. A reasonable person might interpret this as a clue. This reasonable person might suggest, in that helpful manner of reasonable people, that If only you could figure out why a tornado can move and why lightning can flash, you could figure out how you got trapped here and then you could figure out how to get the world started up again.

  Perfectly reasonable. Where do you recommend I start?

  When I’d marched toward the Henry Fonda cloud, I did not know what to expect, but I definitely did not expect to see a tornado, much less see it move. Much, much less did I expect it to nearly kill me.

  But what did the fucking thing tell me?

  It told me that there’s a slow-motion tornado in a pasture a couple miles north of the House of Pronghorn. It told me that the world is not completely frozen. It told me there’s a scrap of hope, because if a tornado can move, then maybe other things can move. This is all excellent news, probably. In honor of that probably-excellent news, I shall endeavor to pay attention to my surroundings, to look for more evidence of motion, and to figure all this shit out.

  After I deal with The Blad, that is.

  My current plan: go to the House of Pronghorn, dine on some more pot roast and carrots and then, fully recomposed, resume my journey to Denver, find The Blad, extract him from his office, transport him a hundred and twenty miles east, and toss him into the tornado. Let the All-Powerful Wizard decide what to do with the cuckolding prick.

  *

  As I hiked underneath the non-tornadic portion of the storm, I crossed a gully lined with trees. Further south, I encountered an abandoned homestead. It consisted of a sandblasted wood-frame house with teeth of glass in the windowpanes, a caved-in barn, and a picturesque windmill missing several of its blades.

  The lighting situation, with the darkness overhead and the red sun to the west, cast everything simultaneously grey and orange. When you think of The Romantic West, this is the sort of mystical setting that comes to mind, or at least the sort that shows up in paintings above hotel room beds. I walked thru the homestead soaking in the composition, touching nothing but the dirt under my shoes. This place was not romantic. It was full of dread. No. It was full of reverberations of dread.

  I strode south and east now, and exited the storm, on the lee side, the dark side, the Vero side. I quickly found the House of Pronghorn, redbrick, asquat on the plains, surrounded by its evergreen windbreak.

  Remember the guns? The twenty guns I’d brought outside and aimed at the sky, and whose triggers I had pulled? They were now lying on the ground, like a pile of lethal Pick-Up-Stix.

  I crept toward them, examining the dirt for footprints and finding only the ones I’d deposited when I’d first been here. The old footprints had noticeably deeper tread. Either I was losing weight or all this walking was wearing down the soles of my shoes. Where am I gonna find a new pair of size fifteen officially-sanctioned official’s shoes in this commerce-free community?

  Looking carefully in all directions, I leaned over the guns and sniffed. The air smelled like combustion, as in, these guns had been fired. It was at this juncture that I switched from the bemused side of the ledger to the worrisome side of the ledger.

  With great care, I examined the guns one by one, sniffing around the barrels, rubbing my finger inside. Every one of them had sent forth its payload of lead. Apparently, the folks at the House of Pronghorn were of the opinion that the safest gun is a loaded gun. The kick of combustion had thrown the weapons violently into the ground, leaving butt-shaped indentations.

  I followed my nose. Just to the south and east, a white, dispersing puff of a twenty-one-gun salute floated several yards above the ground. No sign of the bullets or shotgun pellets or whatever comes out of these things. I’m woefully stupid when it co
mes to firearms. The most dangerous weapon I’d ever owned was a blowgun I’d made out of four-foot length of conduit. The projectiles were Play-Doh. The blowgun got confiscated by my second-grade teacher after I brought it to school and tried to show a buck-toothed girl how to ping the merry-go-round.

  Lightning, tornado, guns that fire. Contrary to my original conclusion, things are happening. This raises many questions, none of which I am in a position to concern myself with, for I’m currently preoccupied with the fact that I may have shot my almost-fiancée.

  I left Vero in a diner with a pistol prepared to discharge into her face from fifteen feet away, remember?

  Currently, I am sprinting toward Cookie’s Palace Diner in Holliday, Colorado.

  27

  With long-distance running, you can either enter The Zone and concentrate exclusively on foot placement, angle of elbows, deep breaths, hip twists, and optimum spinal flex; or you can let all that shit happen on autopilot and focus instead on various forms of guilt, regret, fear, and shame that one encounters when one realizes one has accidentally-on-purpose abandoned one’s almost-fiancée with the barrel of a forty-five caliber pistol staring at her face.

  Before I had placed the pistol in Sandy-the-waitress’s hand and aimed it at Vero, I’d pointed the thing at my own head and pulled the trigger. If something bad has happened, I would argue that the original intent was self-infliction of death, not murder.

  No, I would not. Whatever I come across when I reach Cookie’s is my responsibility.

  I just passed the turn-off for Keaton. Seventeen more miles.

  I’d wrapped Sandy’s fingers around the gun very loosely. Does anybody out there know what happens when a gun goes off in a loose grip? Me, neither, but I sure hope the thing will jerk backwards and in so doing send the bullet way off target, like at least a foot higher than the human head at which it was initially aimed.