by Jenna Blum
But trying to make sense of what he’s saying now is like hearing a piece of music with one wrong note played over and over, and the hail plowing up divots on the road and shredding the corn around them reminds Karena even if Charles is a genius, she is also trapped in this Jeep with her manic brother and he’s intent on driving them into the storm.
“Charles,” she hollers over the hail. “Charles, we have to go back!”
“It’s all right, K,” Charles yells, cranking the wheel as the Jeep fishtails on the ice. “Trust me. I know what this storm’s going to do.”
Abruptly the hail stops. Karena’s ears feel stuffed in the sudden silence. The storm is rotating overhead, turning slowly, letting in only a strip of weak, dirty yellow on the horizon. Charles smiles at Karena.
“See?” he says.
Then there is a CHUNK, and another CHUNK, and CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK, and the windshield in front of Karena’s face cracks in a thick web. She screams. She can’t help it. Hailstones the size of softballs accumulate in the ditches.
“Excellent,” Charles shouts. “I forgot I heard a spotter say that once—when the small stuff stops and it gets really quiet, that’s when the big ones start. Okay, hold on, K! We’re gonna punch the core!”
“Charles, no—”
“We have to,” he yells. “Can’t go back now, nope, no way, no way out but through. Besides, if there’s a tornado, that’s where it’ll be! In the bear’s cage! It—”
But they are into that white curtain across the road, which turns out to be rain and more hail, and Karena can see Charles’s mouth moving—barely, the light is so scant—but she can’t hear him. She is yelling at the top of her lungs and can’t hear herself. The sound is deafening, a fusillade, like nothing she ever imagined. And she can’t see anything in front of them. The road has disappeared, the cracked windshield is a watery blank. It is like driving into a movie screen.
So Karena feels what they hit more than she hears it. It’s a frame-shaking shock, a thud that comes from Charles’s side of the Jeep and travels up through her feet to her stomach. The Jeep swerves right and Charles struggles to keep it on the road, a tough call anyway in dirt that’s turned to mud, is as slippery as lard. Karena yells as the Jeep tips. She catches a glimpse of her brother’s face in the weird, snowy half-light, blank with conversation as he spins the wheel in the direction of the skid. Then they slide to a stop, diagonally, but still on the road.
And just like that, the hail stops again. They must have passed through what Charles called the core. Karena’s ears pulse and ring. She looks around at the land, soaked and icy and dripping beneath the storm that still turns above it. But the gap on the horizon is bigger, letting in more lemon-colored light. Somewhere a bird is singing.
Karena and Charles stare at each other.
“What was that?” they say at the same time.
“That bump,” says Charles. “You felt it too?”
“I felt it.”
He scrapes back his hair, which is plastered in wet golden curls to his forehead. His chest is heaving, his eyes showing the whites all around the pupils. He is terrified, Karena knows, as she is. But she can also see, like water filling the pitcher, the sanity flowing back into his face.
“Maybe a deer,” he says. “Or a cow. Do you think . . . ?”
“Had to be,” says Karena.
She waves around at the fields, meaning, There’s nothing out here.
“Yeah,” says Charles. “Totally. That’s all it was.”
But they keep staring at each other, as if afraid to look anywhere else.
“Charles,” Karena says. “Charles, we have to go back.”
Charles’s face works as if he’s trying to swallow something.
“I don’t know if the Jeep will make it,” he says. “The road—”
Karena nods.
“We have to,” she says.
“I can’t,” says Charles.
Suddenly he throws the Jeep in reverse and, looking over his shoulder, rockets backward down the empty road. The tires whine a little; the strange, strained lemon-ice light glints off the lightning bolt at his throat.
“Be careful,” Karena says. “Slow down!”
But they don’t have to go far before they see the motorcycle. It is lying half on and half off the road. There’s something trapped beneath it. There’s only one thing it can be. It’s not as though the motorcycle just happened to be out here and fell sideways on a deer or a mattress. Still, until Karena cautiously gets out of the Jeep on legs that feel like gelatin and approaches the cycle, she can’t believe it’s a man. It’s as if her mind can’t make sense of what her eyes are seeing.
But she walks a little closer, stopping near the driver’s headlight of the Jeep. The man is wedged beneath the motorcycle—Karena doesn’t know anything about choppers, but she thinks it’s a Harley. It’s a big one, anyway. Lots of chrome. The man is in his forties or fifties maybe—grizzled, thickset, long yellow-white hair. Gathered in a ponytail that’s askew on the road. He wears no helmet—at least none Karena can see. Maybe the hail knocked it off.
What is he doing out here? What was he thinking, riding into this storm? Maybe Karena’s own mind is playing tricks on her. Maybe he doesn’t really even exist.
A shower of raindrops patters down from somewhere. The air smells like April, fresh ice and wet dirt. Close by, the bird sings.
Karena approaches the man. He is lying awfully still. His face is in profile, the one blue eye she can see is open. He’s pink-skinned with white lashes and mustache, like an albino, like one of her own cousins. He looks surprised.
“Hey,” Karena says.
Holding her breath, she edges closer and nudges the man’s boot with the toe of her sneaker. It’s solid. It scrapes on the road. He exists, all right.
“Hey, mister! Are you conscious? Can you hear me?”
Nothing. Just the Jeep’s engine idling. The bird trills again: whitwhitwhitwhit—whit-too!
“Hey, mister,” Karena says, more loudly this time. “Can you hear me? Say something if you can hear me!”
She circles a few feet to the right. The shaking has traveled up her legs to her arms now. She puts a hand over her mouth and it’s ice cold.
When she’s directly in front of the man she can see that half of his scalp has been ripped off. The bike must have dragged him a little after it fell, because the side of his face against the road looks like ground beef. A puddle of blood is spreading from the top of his head, shockingly fast. That is what amazes Karena: how fast it is. There is also something that looks like instant oatmeal.
“Oh my God,” she moans. “Oh my God.”
And her brain, maybe unable to sustain what she’s looking at, makes a sudden, weird cross-connection: a bird embryo she once found that had fallen out of a nest. In their backyard. From the big pine bush. She had picked up the blue egg, delighted and wanting to take it inside with her, and the embryo slipped out. Covered in mucus. She had gagged then as she is gagging now, unable to stop, staring at it in pity and revulsion.
She backs away from the motorcycle man. About two feet away, the Jeep’s wing mirror. What hit him.
“What did you do, Charles?” Karena screams. Her brother is standing by the Jeep, staring in horror, rubbing his mouth. “You happy now? Huh? What did you do here? What did you do?”
33
When they get back in the Jeep Karena is driving, because Charles is useless. He is screaming and sobbing, rocking back and forth with his hands over his face. Karena has never heard a man scream before. She hasn’t known until now that whereas women scream from their throats and chests, men scream from their stomachs. This is not a lesson she has ever wanted to learn, and now that she has she can’t unlearn it. Charles’s screaming is a raw sound, ragged and wretched, as if it’s being pulled from his gut inch by inch over something rough.
“Nooooo,” he is screaming. “Oh God, oh fuck, oh my God, oh fuck fuck fuck fuck FUUUUCK—”
&nb
sp; “Shut up!” Karena says, because she has to concentrate to get them out of there. The road is slurry with mud and melting hail, and her shaking is so bad it’s as though an electric current is being passed through her body. She clenches her jaw to keep her teeth from clacking, presses down on her leg with one hand to force her foot steady on the accelerator.
Once she’s made a three-point turn, though, and aimed them back in the direction they came from, she says, “Okay. Okay. It’s all right, Charles. It’s okay.” Because now although Charles isn’t screaming anymore, he’s clawing his cheeks. He doesn’t mean to, Karena thinks. He probably has no idea what he’s doing. But he’s digging his nails in and drawing blood and pulling down his lower lids to expose the vein-threaded bulge of eyeball. Like the Halloween scare faces they used to make at each other as kids.
“Charles,” Karena says. “Charles, stop. Take your hands off your face. Put your hands down. It’s going to be okay, Charles. You hear me? It’s going to be all right.”
“Howwwwww,” Charles moans. “How can it be? I killed him, K! I killed him!”
“No,” says Karena. “It’s all right. Don’t say that.” She’s driving as fast as she dares, which is only about ten miles an hour as the road is pocked with water-filled potholes two feet deep and she doesn’t want to catch up with the hail core of the storm. “Don’t think about it, okay? We’ll get help. We’ll go right now and get help.”
“I want to die,” Charles cries.
“No!” says Karena. “Shut up! Don’t you ever ever say that!”
She grits her teeth and braces her arms and gives the Jeep a little more gas and slaloms through the potholes. Finally they reach the end of the cursed road. At the t-junction Karena looks in the rearview but can no longer see the motorcycle. I’m sorry, she thinks. Oh God, mister, I’m so sorry. She signals—ridiculously, on the empty road—and, making a guess, turns left. North.
“He might still be alive,” she says, and her stomach lurches with the lie. The blood, all that blood spreading from the man’s head. So much and so fast it was actually pumping, making a little rill over the washboard dirt like a stream over a rock. But still. The important thing is Charles.
“We’ll go find somebody,” Karena says. “Okay? We’ll go to the first town we see and get help, okay, Charles? Just hold on. Do you hear me? Are you listening?”
“Okay,” moans Charles. “Oh God, oh my Gooooood . . .”
“Okay,” says Karena. “Okay.” Please God, she thinks. Please help me find a town. Please just let me get us out of this.
About three miles farther they come to pavement, and then there is a farm, and Karena swings the Jeep into its driveway and jumps out, though something about the place doesn’t look right. It’s not very well kept; it’s what Grandmother Hallingdahl would have called a dirty farm, with blue industrial plastic over the windows and the roof of the barn caved in. Still, this is no time to be picky. They need a phone. Karena is running toward the house when a striped dog with a head like a snake’s rounds the corner, barking and growling, showing its teeth. Karena screams and races back to the car, slamming the door just as the dog thuds against it. It leaps up on the window, its nose leaving a smeary mark. Karena accelerates backward into the road. Charles is still crying.
The next farm they come to has a rusted trailer in the dooryard and huge coveralls flapping on the line next to it—a man’s clothes only. Karena suddenly remembers a story about one of Frank’s cases down here, involving a road nicknamed Dead Man’s Curve not because it whipped back and forth at 120-degree angles but because the mummified body of a man was found in a shed at one of the hairpin turns. Apparently Iowa is an extremely dangerous place. Anyone could be out here, doing anything. Absolutely anything at all.
Karena is about to turn in anyway when she looks left and sees something so strange and frightening it numbs her instantly. The storm is still above them, a ragged purple-brown ceiling slowly turning. From the lowest part of its base a green funnel is emerging, crooking down like a finger. Haloed by a burst of brighter, phosphorescent green, it bends at a forty-five degree angle to point at the ground, perhaps at the spot where they just were. Karena sucks in a terrified breath and looks over at Charles. He’s rubbing his eyes and hasn’t noticed. Karena speeds up, passing the farm. She mashes her foot on the accelerator. But the tornado travels with the Jeep. No matter how fast Karena goes, it rides alongside them, bending, stretching, changing shape in a leisurely fashion. Karena can’t stop cutting her eyes over at it. Every time she looks the green tornado is still there. Keeping them company. It’s not until Karena reaches another t-junction and turns east that they leave it behind.
34
Half an hour later, by some miracle, they come to Highway 52. From there it’s just a matter of running north to Decorah. Charles is quieter now, groaning like a tired kid. Karena doubts he knows he’s doing it. He stares out his window, his head wobbling a little with the joins in the road. The storm has sped northeast ahead of them toward Minnesota and Wisconsin, and behind it the setting sun gleams on fresh-washed fields, the air clear and cool. It feels more like fall than July. If not for the puddles on the road and the droplets sparkling like diamonds on the irrigation rigs, Karena might not have known there had been a storm at all.
It’s getting dark when they reach Decorah, which surprises Karena. She doesn’t have a watch, and she forgot to check the dashboard clock. Now she sees it’s almost eight thirty. Siri will be worried. How long have they been away? What time did they leave this afternoon? It’s as though the events behind them, the purple-brown storm and green tornado and the dead man on the road, have all occurred out of time, have taken place outside the regular universe.
Karena follows College Road into Decorah, passing Luther College on the right, up on its hill—and that’s another weird thing about Iowa, she thinks, how big the hills are here, just over the state line. College Road is quiet, since only summer school is in session, but in a month it will be packed with cars ejecting good Lutheran students and their families into the quads and dorms. Karena is grateful she won’t be among them. Siri went to Luther in the days when students could be expelled for playing cards or dancing, and although it’s no longer quite so strict, when Frank lobbied for Karena to go there, both Karena and Siri said no way. And then Karena won her scholarship to the U, which helped—but what is she thinking about? How can she be thinking about college when there’s a dead man on the road back there? Forget the U. She’s probably not going there at all, or anywhere else for that matter, except possibly prison. The juvenile detention facility in La Crosse—and then Karena remembers, and it’s like cold water in her stomach. No. Not juvenile. She and Charles are eighteen today.
They cross the Upper Iowa River into town. The houses are pretty and neat on their squares of lawn, under the dark canopy of trees, most flying flags. Norwegian, American, flags with flowers, flags with trolls. Norwegian flags also hang from the streetlights, which are starting to come on. Karena pulls into the first gas station she sees, a Casey’s, and even its canopy is decorated with rosemaling, the Norwegian style of flower painting. This is one town that’s serious about its heritage.
Karena drives into the far corner of the lot, away from lights. Charles’s face looks pretty bad, its gouges and scratches. He is staring out his window, his lips moving, and his head knocks against the glass when Karena parks. He’d better stay here, Karena thinks. She turns off the engine and starts to get out.
But Charles bolts upright.
“No!” he says. “Don’t leave me, K. Please.”
Then he opens his door and leans out. Karena can hear him retching and retching. A station wagon full of kids passes, and they honk. “Gross,” a girl says, and a guy yells, “Dude, waste of beer!” More laughter as they pull away.
When Charles is done Karena hands him some wet-naps from the glove box.
“Here, Charles,” she says. “You might want to clean yourself up a little,” and she
touches her face.
Charles pulls down the sun visor and winces when he sees himself in the mirror on the back. He starts applying the tissues, gingerly.
“Where’re you going?” he asks.
“Bathroom.”
“ ’K. I mean, okay. But come back soon, okay?”
Karena says she will. She crosses the service plaza past the pumps, which are bathed in shocking white lights. A country-western song issues from the canopy speakers, magnified and somehow terrifying. Inside the store too, it’s too bright. It’s not crowded, but the people in here—a couple of girls Karena’s age, a large soft lady considering the Hostess cupcakes, a man in a trucker cap—they are all moving too fast, like film sped up and spliced badly together, their gestures sudden and threatening in the fluorescent light. Or is it Karena, is she moving strangely, dopey and slow? Her muscles ache from having been tensed for so long, especially the big ones in her thighs. Tonight she bets she won’t be able to move them at all. Which reminds her: She probably won’t be home tonight, either. Karena turns toward the counter to ask directions to the sheriff’s office—but she really does have to use the ladies’ room. She waits in the little hallway with the crates of soda pop, staring at the bulletin board with its flyers for puppies and outboard motors and houses, then uses the facilities. On the way to the counter she grabs a Diet Pepsi—she’s parched—and a root beer for Charles too.
She stands in line behind the girls her age. They’ve obviously been swimming in the Iowa, their wet blond hair slicked back, towels around their necks. They’re pooling their change to buy a pack of Virginia Slims—so they’re over eighteen too, college girls maybe—and Karena realizes something: The counter lady probably can’t tell them apart. These girls and Karena. In this town full of students, nobody would give Karena and Charles a second glance. Even his throwing up apparently isn’t unusual. Their hecklers in the wagon likely assumed he was a freshman who couldn’t handle his beer.
