Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  Friends try to help. One night a teammate and I are both going to take Puzzle for her evening walk. Ellen has witnessed this spectacle in the past, and tonight we decide that we'll use the long SAR lead, which has a sense of weight and gravitas, and that we'll wear the puppy out with backyard games, wind down for an hour or so, and then take her out when she is mellow. Mellow. As if, Puzzle's expression seems to say when we bring her in from forty minutes of fetch and chase in the backyard.

  "Maybe," Ellen says, "we should just up and go in the middle of a TV show. You know ... sit and watch the show and then, all of a sudden, just get up and go." It is a good plan, meant to teach the puppy spontaneity and adaptability, but the truth is we hope to sneak the walk up on Puzzle and to teach her there's no need to make a fuss about something she does twice every day, anyway. No need to dismantle the dining room. The Poms do not have to be woofed, nor the cats flushed upstairs in happy anticipation.

  Our plan fails on several levels. Puzzle is lying on the floor, tenderly beheading a stuffed octopus when I get up. She immediately drops the toy and rolls onto her chest to watch what I'll do next. I head for her long lead, and she's at my ankles, happy and wiggling as I snap it on. She's delighted with it. Gathering a knot of black webbing in her teeth, she trots toward the door with her head up and her fuzzy tail waving. As I move for my house keys and Ellen bends to re-tie her shoe, Maddy flashes through the room and right under Puzzle's nose, then skitters away. It is a direct provocation and one that Puzzle cannot resist. She scrambles after the cat, her long lead trailing, and before I can grab it, the end of the lead catches under the leg of the china cabinet. The cabinet shudders but does not fall. Before we can shriek "Puzzle, stop!" the lead snaps taut. Puzzle scrambles after Maddy, the uneasy cabinet makes a little hop, then pivots somehow on two feet that are free, turning ninety degrees clockwise on squat legs like a glass sumo wrestler, before its weight stops the puppy. Through some miracle of physics, the cabinet rests upright and perpendicular to the wall after the dance step, its curved glass intact. The china and crystal inside have shifted but have not shattered. Ellen and I gawp, wordless. I'm reminded of those magicians who can pull a tablecloth out from under a laden table and leave dinner, wine, and candles intact. Puzzle has felt the check on her lead and sits like a good dog, her expression a little wistful as Maddy rounds a corner out of sight.

  Ellen finds her voice before I do. "Did you see that?" she shouts, waving her arms at the china cabinet. "Did you—DID YOU SEE THAT?" Her pitch rises to dog whistle altitudes and Puzzle gives a little woof. High octaves out of humans are very exciting. I extract the dog's lead and tell Puzzle to hold her sit, which she does, but I can feel the happy vibration of her down the long length of webbing. The puppy flashes me a loopy, tongue-sideways smile. A cat, a scramble, a spin, and a shriek: this is the way all walks ought to begin.

  10. SOMEONE ELSE'S STORM

  A SPONGY EVENING on the verge of spring, and I am driving up I-35 in a caravan of eight other cars. A teammate sits beside me. Frances has her knees propped on the glove box and her peanut butter sandwich on the dashboard. She's clearing waypoints from her GPS and humming along to Santana. I've got a Thermos of coffee wedged next to me in the seat. We've got a long drive ahead. The team has been preemptively deployed against bad weather in another state, and we're packed for several days of possible searches, heading out to serve as field assistants to the handlers with certified dogs.

  We've driven north out of city lights and into the enveloping black of rural night sky, but we lose stars, too, by the minute as we head into the storm system moving toward central Oklahoma. On radar, the system's greatest violence and repeating hook echoes suggest that tornadoes are likely again in an area barely recovered from multiple disasters across the past decade. So we've been deployed to a staging area just outside the storm's projected path, the local police and fire departments now aware how long it can take specialty search-and-rescue teams to get to a disaster site after the fact. We'll move three hours closer to coming trouble, but not too close to become victims ourselves. With any luck there will be no trouble at all.

  But the longer we drive, the more the angry sky defines itself. We watch the roil of cloud to cloud lightning and see, from one splendid chain reaction across the horizon, a dozen flashes and three separate cumulonimbus anvils backlit in perfect formation, firing on one another like ships of the line in the age of fighting sail.

  To stay alert on the road, Frances and I trade storm stories. Frances grew up in New York and had never witnessed a tornado before she got here, but the first year she was in Texas as the young bride of an ex-military man, a storm out of nowhere hit when she was alone at the farm. The sky of that storm, she says, was unlike anything she'd ever seen: purple, silver, and green, pimpled with mammatus clouds—beautiful and surreal.

  When the storm released, she heard all the windows of the house pop, as though the pressure in the house had suddenly changed. Hail the size of softballs killed some cattle, spooked horses in their stalls, and took out all the baby trees in the front yard. Hail fell so loud and so long, it was enough to make you crazy, she says. When her in-laws called afterward to make sure she was all right, Frances shouted into the receiver, unable to hear the caller and hardly able to hear herself.

  This was her introduction to extreme Texas weather. It was enough to make her wish she'd married a guy from Rhode Island.

  Frances says worse than the storm was her husband coming home to find out she'd forgotten to put his candy apple red '67 Mustang GT in the garage. She was too young to have gotten married, and things had gone south just afterward. They had been in all kinds of standoffs for months after the wedding. Thinking back, she says she might have forgotten the Mustang on purpose to shake things up, bring the storm inside a little, at least to know where she was with him, which it turned out was nowhere, but at least she knew.

  Donny screamed at her for days after the storm, every time he caught sight of the GT's smashed windshield, the cratered hood peeling paint. When he threw a skillet and threatened to kill her dog, she packed while he was at work. She loaded his old army duffle full of clothes and that was it. Frances was eighteen at the time. She took her poodle and left, stepping over split baby trees, walking past the smoldering livestock that had died in the storm, piled into a mound to be written off as a loss, doused with gasoline, and torched.

  "What about you?" Frances asks. "Do Texas kids just get used to this?"

  I tell her that of all the things I could have been afraid of as a child, it was storms that scared me most. Which came first, storm phobia or The Wizard of Oz, already showing on television when I was small? While some of my playmates feared the flying monkeys or the talking trees, and others were spooked by the Wicked Witch of the West, for weeks after a rerun of The Wizard of Oz, I dreamed only of storms—nightmares I still remember—all lowering sky and wind rising, a whirl of flightless chickens, a tornado on the horizon, and the storm cellar bolted shut.

  I had tangled reasons to be afraid, living with my parents near an air force base in an era of nuclear tension, housed on the leading edge of the Midwest's Tornado Alley. If The Bomb didn't get you there, said the sixth-graders (who knew it all), the tornadoes would. I was pretty much terrified of both. A few of the big boys talked about missiles in Cuba ("just a hundred miles away!"), little missiles with lasers and big ones with The Bomb, all of them most definitely aimed at us. But tornadoes were the stuff of better stories. Some of the sixth-graders had seen the Wichita Falls tornado of '64. Others pretended to have seen it. Those big kids fascinated and frightened us with their catalogue of bizarre outcomes: a toothpick stuck in the side of a car; a Cocker Spaniel found—still alive!—thirty miles from home with its ears pulled right off its head; a picture of a solemn, suit-wearing farmer holding a bald chicken, its exploded feathers plucked clean by the passing storm. Sometimes two boys would fight over whose uncle had the chicken and whose daddy had the earless dog. I had given up
on Santa Claus by this time, but for some reason I believed every story from the sixth-graders about the tornado of '64.

  Their tales were indirectly validated by our teachers. We were thoroughly prepared for disaster. On first-grade field trips, we memorized which buildings had the yellow and black FALLOUT SHELTER sign (post office, hospital, big school) and which did not (movie theater, grocery store, church). We learned which buildings were the safe places in storm or nuclear attack. The rules were simple: hear the siren, run for the sign.

  We watched a lot of Duck and Cover! in those days. I still remember animated Bert the Turtle retracting into his shell at the first sign of trouble, the goofy kid in the jacket with the fur collar dropping his bicycle and flinging himself headfirst against a curb, the smiling teacher pointing out two types of nuclear attack on the chalkboard, the neat rows of schoolchildren hiding beneath their desks when something bright flashed white outside. When we ducked beneath our desks during drills, the rows were not so perfect, and our teacher didn't smile. Some kids giggled while the sirens wailed. A five-year-old first-grader, I always cried.

  Tornado warnings caused sirens spring, summer, and autumn; civil defense drills brought sirens at least monthly year-round. The sound of that horn, just blocks from my house, the way it wound up and down its wail, went right through me. A latchkey kid after school while my parents searched in vain for childcare, on stormy afternoons I would hide in the closet beneath the stairs when the sky went black and the sirens went off, turtling like Burt, apart from my family like Dorothy Gale, ducking and covering and waiting for the house to fly.

  I spent a lot of time in that closet. I can laugh a little about it now. "Duck!" I sing to Frances, "...and cover!"

  She says, "You were one spooky kid."

  ***

  The southbound side of the highway is ablaze with headlights, people running from the storm; northbound traffic is sparse. "Looks like we're heading the right direction," says Frances. She has eaten her sandwich and pulled on her boots. We've finished the coffee.

  The storm stretches wide, west to east in front of us. Lightning, now cloud to cloud, now cloud to ground, reveals five intact super-cells. One cell northwest of us surges powerfully upward, and its churning base has begun to droop toward the horizon.

  We drive north in still air past all-night fast-food restaurants. It's business as usual for them, with lines of cars wrapped around the drive-through. (Not a safe place, I mutter.) Burger by burger, they seem impervious to storm. But we are twitchy with expectation. We've turned off the music and turned up our team radios, the squelch crackling with storm discharge. I take off the cruise control so I can feel the car beneath my feet. I expect a blast of wind at any time.

  A couple of years in Tornado Alley had its effects. When I was diagnosed with an ulcer at six years old, my parents made arrangements for me to stay awhile with my grandmother. She was my favorite relative, living in a small town with calmer weather—on the surface, this was a very good plan.

  None of us remembered that my grandmother lived only a few blocks from the firehouse. One day just after our arrival, I was outside playing barefoot in the grass when the fire siren went off—an all-purpose, small-town horn used to alert volunteer firefighters or warn of a coming storm. It was a higher-pitched, long-winded cousin of the civil defense sirens of Tornado Alley. When it wailed on that sunny afternoon, I didn't have a lot of logic going. Hear the siren, run for the sign. The closest one was the post office three blocks away. I ran across the yard for the house, to save my family, but ran straight into a patch of stickers, fell, ran again, fell again, and lay screaming with my arms over my head, curled into duck and cover.

  The siren had to stop before my parents found me, doubled up, being sick in the grass. I remember my mother's stricken face and the single look she exchanged with my father. "There's not a storm," she said, bewildered. "There's not a storm." I wasn't able to tell her the sirens were terrifying enough. I feel compassion now for my parents, out of money and possibility, whose sick child had fears she couldn't explain. They had no other options. When they left a few days later, I knew why I stayed behind.

  We watched them go, and my grandmother had her own ideas about storms and Susannah. She was in no mood for a summer of wailing. The next time the firehouse horn sounded, she held up a hand. "Ehh," she said, with a shushing motion. "Not every siren has to do with us. Not every storm is ours." She said what we needed was a little "equanimity." I had no idea what the word meant, but I used it every chance I could.

  Now three state troopers and two trucks full of storm chasers pass us. Plastered with logos, their vehicles are whiskered with equipment, and they are driving fast.

  "Would you do that?" Frances points to the storm chasers. "I'd do that."

  I nod. Me too. Somewhere along the way, fear of storms had turned to fascination.

  "DPS says stop at the Holiday Inn," crackles Johnny over the radio. We have come far enough.

  We exit the highway in tandem, right blinkers flashing. They are a shocking red against the storm's white and black. We meet in the parking lot and climb out of our cars to move around while we can, stiff from sitting and sore from straining forward to see the weather ahead. The wind is strong, the air electric. Released from their crates, the search dogs pee and race and quibble with one another, stretch in the bending grass of a neighboring field.

  "They feel it," says Deryl. We all do.

  A state trooper pulls up. His car is muddy and already dinged with hail pocks. He has a rain cover on his hat. "You folks good to go?" he asks. He looks tired already, and this storm is young. "Probably won't be long now." In the radio calls of his colleagues, we hear a distant siren wail.

  "We're ready," says Max.

  One hour. Two. Three.

  Hunter's head rests on his paws, but his eyes are open and his sensitive ears flick left and right as the pitch of the moving storm changes and one distant siren gives up as another begins to wail. Saber lies on his chest, his graceful head turned to the northeast. Though they lie almost immobile, I watch their nostrils twitch, and I imagine all that they must process between the local, familiar scent of teammates, the nearby restaurants, and the millions of shattered, disorganized town and country scents stirred by winds miles away.

  Saber looks thoughtful, a paw extended to the side of his crate and resting upward against it, the pads touching the wire frame lightly. It's an attentive posture, the way an adult would hold up a hand and say Hush! to catch the second sound of something. The movement of Saber's nose is slight but precise. A change of scent: I see his head lift almost imperceptibly and turn an inch or so to the left, his nostrils working more rapidly. I look in the direction of his change. Moments later a restaurant employee appears from behind a brick wall surrounding a kitchen door. He carries a white paper bag in his hand. It looks like take-out: late supper, perhaps, early breakfast. In the dim light, I have an impression of short dark hair, dark pants, a white T-shirt, and running shoes. What does Saber know of him? A baseline scent of individual young man, plus soap and fry-cook grease, and the onions he ate on liver earlier in the day, a hint of vanilla and jasmine on his jacket, left by the embrace of a girlfriend, plus the white bag contents: the hamburger, the cold, greasy fries, and the wedge of pickle with a half-inch smear of mustard along its edge? One thing is certain: the dogs get more of him than I do in the shadows. When the young man gets in his car to drive away, Saber releases him of interest, turning his head slightly back in the direction of the storm.

  We've parked close together; we talk car to car. Frances and I were not the only one trading storm stories, we learn as the team waits for word to deploy or stand down. Many among us have been caught out by violent Texas weather—survived flash floods, tornadoes, hurricanes. Several members of the team have worked Oklahoma tornadoes before, most notably the 1999 F5 tornado that began in Chickasha and tore through Bridge Creek and Moore before dissipating. We speak now of that past history and what thes
e storms can produce: mass casualties and injuries, entire neighborhoods leveled, landmarks obliterated. In Moore, Fleta says, even firefighters born there could no longer always be certain where they were amid the rubble. She describes established neighborhoods where nothing left was more than waist high, the dogs threading their search through twists of raw metal, jagged wood, and shattered glass. A hard search on the humans, tough on the dogs—in some cases, human scent from survivors, the injured, and the deceased torn to fragments and strewn wide.

  Moore had its oddities too. Max speaks of trees stripped of leaves and of bark, and of one tall tree blown completely bare, a desperate squirrel still alive and clinging to the slick of its topmost branches. The Toughest Squirrel in the World, Max calls that guy, a bright memory in Moore amid much darker ones. And just down the street from what might be the Toughest Dog too. On one neighborhood search, Max saw rubble shiver from a collapsed house across the street, and as he ran to assist whoever was moving beneath it, a battered Rottweiler emerged. Buried in rubble for two and a half days, injured and frightened, the dog had nonetheless dug his way out. Rescue responders led him to a local group that was there to provide veterinary care and help families recover their lost pets.

  Sometimes, Fleta says, the loss gets even closer than you'd expect. In one sector, as she and Saber searched for victims down a street of flattened houses, the firefighter working beside her gestured briefly to the rubble of the next house they approached.