by Ninie Hammon
“It’s all over, sugar,” he whispered. “It’s gone. You’re safe now.” And his heart swelled up with the joy of it. “I’ll take care of you.”
* * * * *
Princess cleared her throat once, twice before she spoke.
“You’d think I’d a-thought of something important to say as my last words, studyin’ on it like I have for fourteen years,” she said. “But now it’s come down to it, all my thoughts is running around on the top of my mind like water spiders and I can’t grab hold of nary a one long enough to think it.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Besides, I ain’t got no spit. Can’t talk without spit.”
Princess was quiet, in that profound way she had that made silence more than the absence of noise, made it a positive force, an aura wrapped tight around her. Oran had the crazy notion that if he reached out his hand, he could touch it, and the silence would feel like … warm smoke.
But he didn’t reach his hand out. For a few moments he didn’t move at all. No one did. They all seemed as frozen in place as he was. Time paused, then let out its breath in a slow, sad sigh and reluctantly moved on.
As one struggling through deep water, Oran lifted the paper in his sweating hand and prepared to read it aloud. It was Princess’s death warrant, signed by the governor of Oklahoma in the presence of four witnesses, as was required by law. It had been issued for May 10, 1963, and was valid for another seven hours, until midnight.
“Whereas, Emily Gail Prentiss has—” he began, but that husky, disconcerting voice of hers interrupted him. It wasn’t firm like it usually was. Though the people sitting out front wouldn’t likely catch the tremor in it, Oran did. Because he was hearing it live instead of through a microphone. And because he was close, near her physically. But on a much deeper level he couldn’t tack words onto, he was somehow close to her in a more profound sense as well.
“I ain’t got nothin’ to say sorry for, and nobody to ask forgiveness from. I done made my peace with Almighty God, and anybody else got somethin’ against me, don’t matter.” She paused for a moment. “My slate’s wiped clean. That’s how I’m leaving this life. Guess that ain’t a bad way to step into the next.”
Oran cleared his throat and continued.
“… has been convicted of the crime of murder …”
* * * * *
Mr. Wilson’s front bumper clipped the side of the porch as Mac skidded to a stop in front of the house. Leaping out of the car, he raced up the steps for the woman who stood staring vacantly into space.
“Twister!” he cried.
Without another word, he grabbed Wanda Ingram by the wrist, dragged her down the steps, pushed the front seat forward, and literally threw her into the back seat. He jumped behind the wheel again and sped away, banging the door closed as he drove.
A glance in the rear-view mirror revealed that the bubbling black wall had made it to the far side of Boundary Oak Lake.
The world seemed to crank down into slow motion. Mac had his foot jammed to the floorboard and Mr. Wilson lumbered along the best it could, bouncing over the bumpy road, its steering wheel vibrating madly in Mac’s white-knuckled grip, the radio blipping on and off so fast the music was unrecognizable.
With that same odd calm and clarity of thought, Mac analyzed the situation and weighed his options. The twister was so huge he couldn’t even tell what direction it was headed. It might not even cross the lake at all, just rumble along the far side of it and away.
He tore his eyes from the road ahead and stole a quick look in the rear-view mirror. His mind almost refused to process what he saw. The lake was swirling upward in a gray wall of frothing water.
Is this what Moses saw when he crossed the bottom of the Red Sea?
But the wall of water behind Mac wasn’t standing still. It was moving, racing toward him. Wanda sat up in the back seat, followed his gaze and saw the gigantic waterspout. She began to scream in terror, her wail mingling with the low rumble Mac could now hear, the sound of a stampede.
Calm reasoning again. All right, now he knew the trajectory of the storm—northeast—the same direction they were going on Harrod’s Creek Road. And the twister that was gobbling up the world in a mountainous avalanche of water was gaining on them. Mr. Wilson couldn’t possibly outrun it. Now what?
Go south! Princess said to go south.
Turning south would set them at right angles to the tornado. If they could go far enough, fast enough, it would pass them by. Unless it changed direction, of course. Or was so huge they couldn’t get beyond it in time.
Problem: They were on the only road for miles. Nothing intersected it going south between here and Route 79. They’d never make it that far.
Well, road or no road, Mac intended to go south. That’s what Princess had said to do, and right now he trusted that more than common sense, a good plan, or his own instincts.
Princess. She’s going to die. Might already be dead.
He sucked in a strangled sob, then shook off the thought so he could concentrate. Easing the pressure on the accelerator, he jerked the steering wheel to the left, sending the lumbering white car into a sideways slide down the middle of the narrow asphalt road. He let the car skid for a couple of seconds, smelled the scent of burning rubber, then gave it the gas again. The old Buick fishtailed as the tires tried to grab, then leapt forward off the roadside into the ditch.
It was a shallow ditch, but the jolt sent Mac upward and his head banged painfully into the roof of the car. Joy bounced off the seat, hit the dashboard and landed with her legs in the floorboard and her torso on the front seat. Wanda flew upward, too, maybe hit the ceiling, Mac couldn’t tell. But her screaming never missed a beat, it remained a continuous, wailing shriek. The radio turned on, blared out a single note from a trumpet, and turned back off again.
Mac held tight to the steering wheel as the old car bounced up out of the ditch on the other side, tossing everyone around again before it ripped into the barbed wire fence surrounding the vast expanse of pastureland. The wire didn’t break and the car yanked out two old fence posts before the wire finally came loose from them. One strand of it remained tangled in the grill, flapping against the side of the car as they tore out across the open plains.
The prairie appeared deceptively smooth. Melanie used to say it was as flat as a Barbie Doll’s belly. But in reality, it was as bumpy as trying to drive over a washboard. Mr. Wilson lurched up over yucca plants and banged down into prairie dog holes, filling the car with ancient dust expelled in wheezing gasps from the old seats.
A sandhill crane appeared in front of them in an explosion of gray wings as it tried to leap into the sky. But the car center-punched it, feathers flew, and the body bounced off the grill and collided with the windshield with a thunk that dented the glass and sent cracks racing out in all directions from the bloody smear.
Jackrabbits darted out of their path, bounding like midget kangaroos; they even scared up a coyote that dodged away and was gone.
Mac paid the animals no heed as he jammed his foot down so hard on the accelerator he feared he might shove it right through the rusted old floorboard. He could see the approaching monster to their left, could now see the cloud of dust that marked the edge of it. If they could just get beyond that point before it got to them … so far away! The tornado was huge. The Big Ugly.
Time flew by, propelled by rocket fuel—and it also crept by like slogging through knee-deep mud in a swamp. Both at the same time. The world was a wild yell. Wanda was screaming. Mac realized he was shouting, too, an inarticulate yell of effort and determination, yearning and terror.
The monster drew closer every second. His ears began to pop and the car was filled with the scent of a freshly plowed field. The roar grew louder and louder; the dust cloud of its edge was just beyond them, achingly out of reach.
Chapter 29
Durango County Deputy Sheriff Stan Oliver pulled to a stop and flipped on his blue lights. A downed tree was blocking Seminole Road. It
was barely sprinkling now, so he got out of his vehicle to investigate, stepped over the tree trunk and froze. There was no road on the other side of the tree. The highway—asphalt, shoulder, everything—had been ripped right out of the ground. The officer stood stupefied for a moment, staring down the swath of devastation that extended as far as he could see in both directions. Judging from the direction the tree carcasses were leaning, the beast that killed them was traveling northeast. Toward Graham!
The deputy ran back to his cruiser, put the hand-held mic to his lips and pushed the transmit button with his thumb.
“Dispatch, this is Oliver, do you copy?”
When he released the button there was only static.
* * * * *
For almost an hour now, Andy Cook had watched in growing horror as the massive storm swept across the Oklahoma plains, its image a green blob on the WSR-57 radar screen.
He hadn’t ever observed the progress of a storm on radar, so he had nothing to use for comparison, but the other meteorologists had, and they said they’d never seen one move that fast. Andy had plotted coordinates, then used his slide rule to do the math, and if his calculations were correct, the storm was roaring northeast at a speed of sixty miles per hour. Most tornadoes tracked southwest to northeast.
The section supervisor had been on the phone almost non-stop for the past half hour, trying to get spotter confirmation of a twister on the ground. But the back-path of the storm was eerily quiet. Phone calls produced a busy signal; radio transmissions granted nothing but static. Out in front of the storm, no one he spoke to reported even a hint of a funnel cloud.
But the distinctive hook shape on the storm’s radar image was unmistakable, and it had remained constant, without a sign of dissipating, for the past sixty-three minutes.
“Nobody’s spotted a twister,” the supervisor bleated in frustration. “And without a sighting, we can’t—”
“What if they can’t see it?” Every eye in the room turned to stare at the new guy.
“You’re saying it’s invisible?”
In theory, that was possible. A visible tornado was a combination of a condensation funnel—a rotating cloud on the ground—and a debris and dust swirl. A weak tornado traveling over wet soil it couldn’t suck up, or over open countryside with no leaves or branches, could appear transparent.
But Andy Cook didn’t believe for a second the huge hook on the radar screen was a weak tornado.
“No, not invisible. What if it just doesn’t look like a tornado?” Andy spoke the thoughts as they suddenly formed in his head. “What if it’s so big you can’t see the funnel shape?”
The supervisor rolled his eyes. “If a big twister’s right on top of you, maybe. But on those flat, empty plains, you can see a storm coming from miles away. Last guy I talked to said the base of the clouds was low to the ground. You could spot a funnel shape snaking down out on a low-ceiling storm like that—if there was one to see.”
Not if it was huge, Andy thought. Monstrous. Not if it was ... a mile wide, if the cloud base the guy saw wasn’t just low but on the ground. What if that was the tornado?
Andy turned back to the radar, watched the hooked menace bear down on Graham. And he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t ignore his gut any longer. He turned and walked quickly back to his desk, picked up the phone, dialed O and asked the operator to connect him to the courthouse in Graham, Oklahoma.
This is gonna get me fired.
“Durango County Courthouse,” a cheery female voice said. “Betty Porter speaking. How can I help you?”
“This is the National Weather Bureau in Oklahoma City. A tornado—”
A clicking sound cracked in his ear and the phone went dead. Andy slowly lowered the receiver back into the cradle. He was too late.
* * * * *
There was a great roaring in Princess’s head, like a mighty, rushing wind was blowing inside it, the Big Ugly itself, a gale that swept through vast caverns between her ears, howling in hollow, empty halls. Those halls had been full once, jammed with people and impressions, sights, smells, laughter. And memories, gems of memory that glowed from the inside.
Now there was nothing there at all. She had consumed the memories, used them up, squeezed every sparkle of light out of them. And all the rest of the contents of her mind had been blown away by the wind, whisked up into the air like autumn leaves hurrying down a country lane.
Terror of the unknown had been gobbling up huge bites of her soul ever since the warden stepped into her cell, but she was beyond fear now. She had raced out ahead of it into the wind, felt the rushing air whip her hair back out of her face.
She couldn’t think; had nothing to think about and no mind to think with. All she could do was feel. So she let go of thinking, let go of the reality of what was about to happen and filled her lungs with the sweet scent of a small child’s breath, and the warmth of her chubby little hand.
Bradley and Talbot stepped forward then to strap her into the chair.
“I got to take these now,” Talbot said, and tried to remove the pictures Princess clutched in her hand. She tried to speak, to tell the guard that she didn’t want the pictures taken away, that she wanted to hold onto them until the very end. But she discovered she had no voice. All she could do was look at Talbot with mute pleading in her purple eyes.
* * * * *
Mac gritted his teeth, leaned his body forward in the seat willing the car to go faster. The prairie in front of them was suddenly filled with jackrabbits. Dozens of them crossed in front of him, running from the monster. Mac mowed them down, their bodies stacking up like cordwood on the big grill on the front of the car.
Only another hundred feet or so and they’d be beyond the edge of the rumbling terror.
Please … for Joy!
Mr. Wilson was suddenly engulfed in swirling dirt, a choking cloud of unbreathable air, and Mac knew his run for it was over. The car scooted sideways instead of forward, and he let go of the steering wheel—he wasn’t driving anymore anyway—and threw his body over Joy to protect her. Then the real wind hit, knocked the car aside as carelessly as a child might kick a ball out of the way.
* * * * *
At 4:55 p.m. the tornado warning siren began to wail from the bell tower of the old courthouse building in the center of the town square. Betty Porter had only heard “National Weather Bureau” and “tornado” but that was all she needed to hear. It took a few seconds for the siren to rev up to full blast, where it produced a warbling, high-pitched shriek like an air-raid warning. No one who heard it could mistake it for any other sound.
At that moment, normal life all over town stopped. From that moment forward, Graham, Oklahoma would never be the same again.
Mothers grabbed their children and shoved them into the basement if they had one, or into a bathtub under a mattress if they didn’t. Plenty of people had bomb shelters in their back yards and they hunkered down in them, as frightened as they’d have been of a nuclear attack. The manager of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store herded all his customers into his big, walk-in freezer; Main Street shoppers huddled in back rooms, away from the plate-glass windows out front.
Still, some people wasted precious time wondering if this was the real thing or just a drill. Others didn’t hear the warning at all, had their windows down, the fans whirring inside, and the mixer on making mashed potatoes for supper so they could eat in time to watch 77 Sunset Strip at 7:30.
But most had a pretty good sense about such things, living as they did in Tornado Alley. They could usually spot the really bad storms and all afternoon they’d been eying the monstrous, eggplant-purple storm rumbling toward them across the prairie.
* * * * *
“I’ll just set the pictures right here in your lap,” Talbot said, and pried Princess fingers off the photographs. She placed them carefully on Princess’s damp dress where she could see every one of them. Bradley unfastened her handcuffs and removed them, then took her arms and strapped them to the arm
s of the chair with worn leather straps that looked like the ends of a belt.
“Not so tight!” Talbot snapped, in a whisper only Bradley and Princess could hear. “She ain’t going nowhere.”
Bradley removed the leg irons and buckled down her right leg and then her left, fastening the straps affixed to the wooden legs of the chair around her skinny limbs. Then he picked up a wet sponge out of a bucket under the seat. A wire ran from it into an opening in the raised platform the chair rested on. Princess felt the cold of the sponge on her leg and jumped involuntarily, but she was trussed up so snug her body didn’t move. She glanced down and saw him tape the wired sponge to her right calf.
Talbot then reached into the same bucket under the chair and withdrew a bigger sponge and placed it inside a leather helmet with an inner layer of copper mesh that she set like a crown on top of Princess’s shaved head. The sponge was so wet it dripped, and rivulets of water streamed from it down her neck and into her face, but she gritted her teeth and didn’t jerk away, just sat still while Talbot fastened the strap on the helmet under her chin.
But when the guard lifted a black hood and started to put it over her head, Princess found she still had a voice, after all.
“Don’t you put that thing on me!” she cried. “I don’t want no hood over my face.” She gestured with her head toward the crowd of people in the viewing room. “I wonder they have any stomach for watching a woman fry, but if they can’t take seeing my face when I die, they shouldn’t a-come.”
She turned to the warden then, standing several steps away from the chair by the window that looked out on the Indian Bluffs.
“Ain’t no reason I got to wear that thing, is there?” she asked. “I don’t want my last sight to be the inside of a black sack.” She nodded toward the pictures in her lap. “That’s what I want to see—them faces right there.”
The warden paused for a beat, considering, then told Talbot to forget about the black hood. Talbot dropped it to the floor, then she and Bradley stepped back from the chair.
