The Stormchasers

by Jenna Blum

  Instinctively Karena’s hand flies up to cover her mouth. The djinn, she reminds herself, the fucking djinn, although she would dearly love to say to Charles, That’s enough! What is wrong with you? They should lock you up and throw away the key. But this is one of the worst things about her brother’s illness. He can say anything he wants to Karena or Siri or anyone, and in fact not just awful things but the worst possible things he can think of, the things everyone else thinks but nobody would ever say. And they are not allowed to respond, to defend themselves, because they wouldn’t be fighting him, they’d be fighting an illness. It is such an unfair, slippery thing.

  But now it’s Siri who says, “Stop right there, mister. Don’t talk to her like that.”

  “Why not?” Charles asks, eyes glittering. “Don’t you want to hear the truth? That K and that fat friend of hers are sucking off everyone in Foss County? Why don’t you ask her? Go ahead, ask! Everyone knows they’re the town sluts, trying so hard to be popular, what a joke. Don’t you know they all laugh at you, K? Don’t you know what they say? That you should get monogrammed kneepads for Christmas!”

  Karena shakes her head. “That—is—not—true,” she says, her voice wobbling.

  Charles laughs. “Sure it is, and you want to know what else—”

  “Charles,” says Siri.

  “What!”

  “Did you take your medication today?”

  Karena sucks in her breath as the room goes still. It is the one question Siri has every right to ask and the one that will most surely bring disaster.

  Charles shakes his head as if he has water in his ear. “What?” he says.

  “I said, did you—”

  “I heard you,” says Charles. “I just can’t believe the idiocy of the question. For your information, the answer is no. I didn’t. Why? Do you really think they make a difference? Because I’ll tell you something, they don’t. They’re just tranqs, Madre, they don’t do any fucking thing except make me sick. They’re that bearded quack’s way of thinking he can control me. That’s all.”

  “Okay then,” says Siri. She sounds calm, but as she lights another cigarette the flame trembles. “You know the deal. No medication, no car.”

  Charles smacks his forehead and throws out his hands.

  “Oh. My. Goodness,” he says. “That is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I mean, I’ve come to expect that from you, Madre, but this just takes the cake. First of all, there’s no deal. The word deal implies consent between two parties, and have I consented to anything like this? Would I ever? Of course not. This is some weird rule you’ve made up and expect me to abide by. But okay, let’s try—try, Madre—to look at it logically. Here’s your equation: medication equals car. But even you must be able to see how ridiculous that is. Why would I need lithium to drive the car? Do you take lithium? Does Dad take lithium?”

  “Don’t bully me,” says Siri. “No car. Case closed.”

  “Sure, of course, disengage,” Charles says. “I knew you’d do that. You can’t deal with logic, so you pull back in like a little kid going lalalalalalala I can’t hear you because I don’t want to hear you, but I know you can hear me, Madre, so let’s keep going. Do all drivers in the state of Minnesota have to take lithium? Is it a requirement that responsible drivers take lithium before they get their licenses? She doesn’t have to take lithium,” he says, whirling and pointing at Karena, “blowjob queen over there.”

  “Hey!” says Karena.

  “Oh, right right right right riiiight,” says Charles, holding up his hands. “When you’re in a car you’re in the backseat, not driving, so it’s a moot point.”

  He walks closer to Siri and stands over her, arms crossed.

  “For the last time,” he says, “give me the keys.”

  Siri stares grimly ahead as if Charles weren’t there.

  “No,” she says.

  “All right,” says Charles. “You’ve forced me into it. I didn’t want to have to do this, but I’ll have to take them from you.”

  Siri scoffs.

  “Just try it,” she says. “I’m not afraid of you—” and then Charles reaches past her for her purse. Siri smacks his hand aside and jumps up, and for a few seconds they stare at each other. Then Siri slaps Charles neatly across the face and he pushes her shoulder, and the next thing Karena knows they’re tussling as Charles tries to get past Siri and she stands her ground.

  “No!” says Karena and suddenly she’s in the sunroom. She doesn’t remember how she got there, doesn’t feel her feet touch the floor. All she knows is that she’s jumping on Charles from behind, throwing her arms around him. It’s like trying to hold a bag of snakes. Charles’s muscles flex and clench, incredibly strong. But Karena is banking on the fact that he won’t hurt her, of all people, and she’s right. He doesn’t. He just shakes her off, and she falls and lands on her tailbone.

  “Ow,” she says, more in anger than in pain.

  “Oh, honey, did he hurt you?” Siri says. She pushes past Charles to make sure Karena’s all right, then turns on him.

  “You listen to me, you little bastard,” she says. She pokes her cigarette at Charles with every word, and Karena can’t help flinching each time the lit ember nears her twin’s skin. “You ever touch her again and I’m calling the sheriff. I’ll have you locked up, don’t think I won’t. I’ll have you taken away. In fact,” she says, “I think I’ll call him anyway. You are out . . . of . . . control.”

  “Okay,” says Charles, pushing Siri aside and grabbing her purse from the davenport. “Wow, that’s a good idea, Madre. Did you think of that all by yourself? Go for it. Call him. Tell ol’ Deputy Dawg I borrowed your Jeep for a little while to conduct some perfectly legit scientific research on my perfectly legal license and I’ll bring it back whenever I’m done, maybe tomorrow, maybe by tonight even. I’m sure he’ll love that, I’m sure he’ll thank you for wasting his time, not to mention the taxpayers’ money, but if you really feel you must, Madre, you gotta do what you gotta do. Meanwhile”—and he jingles Siri’s keys triumphantly in the air—“thanks a lot for the ride, catch you on the flip side, see you in the funny pages, bye!”

  Then the door to the garage slams behind him and he’s gone.

  The air quivers in his wake. Both Siri and Karena are stunned. Siri goes to the phone in the kitchen but stands staring at the dial. “Oh God,” she says. “What am I going to do? What can I do?”

  Karena is still sitting with her legs splayed out before her like her old Raggedy Ann doll. She’s ashamed to look at Siri after what Charles said. Instead she stares at her mom’s belongings scattered in the rug. Hair combs. A pack of Marlboros. Several lighters. A nicotine-flecked hand mirror and some lip gloss. Was it just this morning Karena was serving breakfast at the Chat ’n’ Chew? Was it just earlier this afternoon she and Siri were in La Crosse, buying things for Karena’s dorm room?

  Then the garage door rumbles up and Karena springs to her feet.

  “Be right back,” she says.

  “What?” says Siri. Now she is on the phone, calling the sheriff or maybe Frank. She’s on hold. “No, sweetie,” she says, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece. “Don’t go out there. He’s dangerous.”

  “Which is exactly why he shouldn’t be driving,” Karena says as she jogs up into the kitchen and snatches her bag from the back of a chair. She doesn’t have time to stand around arguing about this. Of course she has to go. Isn’t Karena the only one who can control Charles?

  Hasn’t she proved it time and time again? Did she not talk him down when he climbed the water tower last year? Did she not stop him at the Starlite? True, Karena wasn’t able to save him from the dislocated shoulder, but that wasn’t her fault, and if Charles had succeeded in taking Frank’s car then, things could have been so much worse. It’s common knowledge that Karena is the only one Charles listens to, the only one who can calm him down. She might not like it, but she doesn’t have to. She just has to do her job. “Don’t worry
,” Karena calls to Siri, “I’ll go get him and bring him back,” and feeling weary but resolute, she marches toward the door.

  32

  They drive southwest on Highway 44, which carries them through towns whose order Karena knows as well as a childhood prayer: Norwegian Ridge, Luverne, Clinton, Accord, Creston. Norwegian Ridge is where her great-grandparents met, courted, and married. Luverne is Charles’s favorite because a tornado tore up the golf course in 1967, three years before the twins were born. Right after Clinton there’s a t-junction marked by the abandoned State Line Motel, in whose weedy parking lot the Amish sell quilts and pies. Karena considers asking Charles to stop and let her look at the wares, anything that’ll get him out of the Jeep and onto solid ground. But Charles calls the Amish wagon the Ptomaine Stand, and he’s in a hurry anyway. He swings south onto Highway 52, and within a minute the sign flashes past: WELCOME TO IOWA.

  Karena doesn’t know the towns here as well, but she recognizes them a little, because many’s the afternoon Siri dragged her along on antiquing expeditions with her friend Sandy, the two women poking endlessly through bins of junk in cold limestone buildings and holding up a lefse pan or carpet beater and saying, Remember these? My mom had one just like it! A lot of these towns have dried up now, their store-fronts closed and streets deserted, their hopes having dead-ended when the railroad passed them by. The next big town is Decorah, where Karena plans to request a pit stop so she can call Dr. H from a pay phone. Because it has occurred to her—why didn’t she or Siri think of this before?—that the Mayo is where Charles should be, and maybe Dr. H or his nurses can give Karena pointers how to best lure Charles in.

  Then Charles swings off Highway 52 onto a smaller road, and everything starts to look unfamiliar. The land here is different from around New Heidelburg, more hilly and wooded. The road whips left, then right, then sharply left again. Karena sees a sign for Stillville and breathes a sigh of relief. But to her horror, when the two-lane curves right, Charles sails straight off onto an unpaved road. Gravel ticks and pops and punks under the Jeep. The land grows stranger and stranger. A farm with rotted outbuildings. A creek bed with dense undergrowth, dead twisted trees mixed in with live ones. Karena feels like Gretel without the bread crumbs. She tries desperately to memorize their route while Charles drives and turns and turns and talks. But most of the roads aren’t marked, and when they are the names all sound the same: Amity and Valley and County, 290th Street, 190th Street. The light fades, and everything around them becomes dark and gray, and before Karena knows it, she is lost.

  Charles, however, is not lost. Charles is operating by his own set of markers, all having to do with what he sees in the sky. Ever since they got in the car he has been carrying on an enthusiastic monologue, talking and talking and talking and talking and talking. Pressured speech, Dr. H called it, a symptom of mania—in Charles’s case, a rant about this storm and that storm and his data and how Siri is always trying to stand in his way. Suddenly there’s a crack of thunder and a cold gust of wind buffets the Jeep, and Karena receives a nasty volt of fear: The sky, which has gotten more and more overcast the farther they’ve driven into Iowa, has congealed in horizontal layers. Some are gray and some are white and beneath them all is a wall of dark blue like a bruise. Periwinkle, Karena remembers from her box of Crayola 64s. That’s what that color is called. It also means they’re driving into a pretty nasty storm.

  “How close is that?” she asks. She doesn’t like to risk invoking the wrath of the djinn by interrupting Charles, but that storm appears to be speeding at them faster than horses can run.

  Charles cranes his head to peer beneath the windshield’s tinted strip.

  “Not so far now,” he says cheerfully. “Yup, I’d say about five miles or so.”

  He rubs his mouth where the dry white spit has gathered at the corners and starts in again.

  “Really it’s tragic when you think about it,” he says, “though understandable, I guess. Yeah, yeah, sure it is, if you put yourself in her position. Think about it, K. Your life’s basically over. You’re all dried up. You’ve gotten married and you’ve had your kids and they’re flying the coop and your husband doesn’t notice whether you’re alive or not, like he ever did, so what are you going to do? Go to bake sales and play bridge and sit around bitching with the menopause club about how your kids ruined your life. It’s awful, yep, it’s heinous, but that’s the way it is, K. Our madre can’t stand for anyone, even her kids, to succeed. She’s so unhappy it’s subverting the natural order, her maternal instincts. She can’t accept her life is over and it’s our turn. I’m sorry to say it, K, but our madre is really a very sick woman.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Karena. She doesn’t agree, of course—she thinks Siri is pretty content with her life, or would be, if not for Charles. Ironically. But that’s the thing about Charles’s disorder, it shackles Karena, makes her agree with all sorts of absurd statements because the consequences otherwise are so awful, and does any of this really matter right now? It does not. Karena scans the land around them, looking for shelter. She sees an abandoned chicken farm, its roof rusted out. That’s it. The grass, corn, and trees are bowing toward the storm, which now looks like a blue-black tidal wave about to break.

  “But WE are getting out,” says Charles. “I’m so proud of us! Look at you, going to the U, even though it’s kind of basic and there’re a lot of idiots there, but I suppose that’s true anywhere, you’ll just have to be careful not to fall into cookie-cutter thinking. Maybe I can help you,” he says, talking and driving faster and faster, “maybe when I’m not collecting data I can come stay with you, yeah! During the off-season, won’t that be great? We can stay together, K, I can live in your dorm room, I can work on my project there, it’ll be awesome!”

  “Sure,” says Karena, clinging to her seat as the speedometer creeps past sixty, then seventy. “Any time, Charles. But do you think you could slow down a little?”

  Charles either doesn’t or can’t hear her. The red needle climbs past eighty and the Jeep slaloms along the rutted road. Lightning prongs in a double fork a mile away.

  “And you can help me, K. OH MY GOD! Of course! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. You can be my assistant. I’ll even put your name on the abstract, though below mine because it’s my study. But I’m telling you, K, this study is going to be groundbreaking. Earth-shaking. It’s going to blow all the preconceived ideas right off the map, and all those poor little eggheads down in Norman with their radar and dinky little theories are going to be smacking themselves and saying, HOLY CRAP! Why didn’t we see this before? That Hallingdahl kid’s a fucking genius!”

  “I’m sure they will, Charles,” says Karena. She’s staring up through the side window, and what she can see looks very bad. The clouds directly above them are molded into large, hanging lumps like the underside of an egg carton. About a mile away the road disappears into a curtain of white. “But Charles, I think we should turn around—”

  “What? Why? Are you scared? No. Don’t be silly. Trust me, K. I know about storms. Look look look look look, you’re thinking about it the wrong way. You see storms as some big outside destructive force, separate from us, independent of us. But that’s so not right, K. Storms are organic. They ARE us. They eat warm air and they dump cold—they eat and excrete, get it? And they’re mostly water. What are we? Our bodies are eighty percent water! And lightning—what do you think our brains are run by, K? Electricity! And check this out, this is the very coolest thing of all. You ready? You ready for my hypothesis, K? Ready? Ready?”

  “I’m ready, Charles,” says Karena. She clings to the side of her seat as the Jeep hurtles along. It is like being on a game show in a nightmare. If she says everything right, they might get out of this. If she answers wrong—

  “Okay!” says Charles. “What do storms have to do in order to produce tornadoes? They cycle, right? HELLO! Sound familiar? Not like I have a disorder or anything, that’s just what that bearded idio
t Hazan says. BUT I’m going to prove there’s a link between storms that rapid-cycle and ones that produce tornadoes because I’m a rapid cycler myself. In fact I’m the closest thing a human being can be to a storm, and in case you think it’s far-fetched consider the overall pattern, the grand design, the webbing that holds the universe together: Everything is like everything else. Look look look. I’ll help you see it. The veins in a leaf are like capillaries, which are like lightning. See? Or the cochlea of your ear is like a shell is like a spiral staircase is like a corkscrew is like a whirlpool is like a tornado. Get it? Once you see it you can’t stop seeing it, I can’t turn it off, and I’m so grateful for that, because it’s so beautiful, K, it’s so fucking beautiful I swear it’s almost enough to make you believe in God.”

  Something large and white smacks off the hood of Siri’s Jeep, and Karena jumps. She has been pinned against her door by the police-hose force of Charles’s rant—the saddest thing about which is, it almost makes sense. Between cyclothymia, Charles’s type of bipolar disorder, and cyclone, which is what their grandmother Hallingdahl called tornadoes—Run to the cyclone cellar!—there does seem to be a logical link, and Karena feels if she just tipped her head the right way, she might figure it out. Charles is, after all, a genius, and Karena knows from the psych texts she’s borrowed from the La Crosse public library that many manic-depressive people are. Schumann, Melville, Woolf, Van Gogh, Edgar Allan Poe—all brilliant. All bipolar. Maybe Charles too could give something amazing to the world.

  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.