Mitch opened all the windows and propped open the front and back doors.
Had kids broken in and used it as a party house?
If that was true, they had known where to find the keys, because no door locks or windows showed signs of a break-in.
He located a roll of plastic trash bags and started picking up beer cans.
It didn’t take him long to discover there were many more things he had forgotten about living in the country than he remembered. Well water, for one thing. He’d forgotten that his parents’ small ranch house wasn’t on a city water line, and so his first glass of water surprised him with its mineral flavor.
He used many gallons of it to mop, wash, scrub.
It made him feel better to work hard, sweat, get results.
After two hours of nonstop cleaning that left nine full trash bags propped outside against the house, he closed the windows and doors again, turned on the air conditioner, put one last load of towels in the washing machine, and then-feeling suddenly starved-went through all the cupboards to see if there was any food. The refrigerator was empty except for one lone beer can and a container of rotten salsa. On the cupboard shelves he found cans of gourmet stuff: little cans of sardines that might be a decade old, mustards in brands that local grocery stores would never sell, cocktail onions, and several different versions of liver pǎté.
There had been cocktail parties here, he recalled, with the Old Friends.
The Shellenbergers, the Newquists, the Reynoldses.
While the six adults had drunk themselves silly, with a lot of laughter and card playing, he, Rex, Abby, and Patrick had chased one another around in the grass. The memory of that made him think again of the grown-up Abby and Patrick he had seen that morning, which made his stomach clench and drove him restlessly outside again.
Mitch stepped onto the front porch and then into the middle of the front yard, where he stopped and turned in every direction, looking around. That’s when he saw another thing he couldn’t believe he had ever forgotten-the drama of an approaching thunderstorm.
“Wow,” he breathed, unable to keep from saying it out loud.
He was facing southwest, looking straight into the leading edge of the blackest, biggest, baddest storm he had seen since he left his hometown. My God, he thought, did I ever take these for granted? Did I used to think this was no big deal? The line of black was huge, rolling for miles horizontally, and also up, up, up until he had to bend his neck back to see the top of it. He’d seen dramatic clouds in the city sky, but nothing had the overwhelming drama of this panorama in which he could view the whole front edge, and watch it marching toward him.
It was close, he realized with an inner start.
The wind was kicking up in front of it.
He could see the lightning now, hear the rumble of the thunder.
It was spectacular. He didn’t know how he had lived without seeing this for so many years. He felt as if it was made of sheer energy-which, he supposed, it was-and that all of it was starting to infuse him with something that felt exciting. Ions of excitement. He glanced to the south and saw that part of the countryside had gone stark black, hiding everything that stood there. Then there was a ferocious crack of thunder followed by a lightning bolt that flew from sky to ground, lighting up the southern scene with false daylight. In that incredible instant, he saw cattle standing in the pastures. Then, just as quickly, they were gone, disappeared into the blackness of the storm again.
Once, but only once, he had seen a tornado when he was a boy.
He and Rex would have chased it if they’d been old enough to drive.
Ever after that, they had eagerly scanned the bottoms of every storm cloud, hoping for that characteristic roiling action, that spooky special color that looked like car oil, praying for the storm to work itself up into the full boiling fury of a funnel. They’d never lucked out. Friends of theirs claimed to have seen plenty of twisters, but Rex and Mitch had never witnessed another one.
Mitch almost didn’t believe it when he saw one start to form to the southwest of him.
A bit of black cloud dipped down, went back up, dipped farther down.
He saw the unmistakable shape of it.
Jesus! he thought, and wondered what to do. Call 911? Call the weather bureau? Get himself the hell out of the middle of the yard and down into the storm cellar at the back of the house?
He knew he wasn’t going to do that.
He remembered the storm cellar more vividly than he wanted to. His mother had been a bit claustrophobic. She’d made his father get it dug bigger than average. She had insisted on cement-lined walls, instead of just dirt, and a ceiling high enough to make it feel like a room, instead of a grave. She had even put in plumbing for a toilet and sink, and electricity. It had seemed silly, until you had to race into it when storms like this one roared across the prairie.
All of the kids he knew had hated storm cellars; there was something so creepy about the lightbulb-lit underground refuges with their old splintery wooden doors. Everybody had always been afraid of getting imprisoned in one of them. And now, even as an adult, everything in him rebelled at the idea of closing himself into such a dank, dark, anonymous space where it might be that nobody would ever come to look for him. Which they never would, since nobody even knew he was there.
While he stood there, awed, indecisive, the cloud with the funnel moved away from him, and around to the southeast. When he saw he was out of its path, he kept staring at it. It was amazing to see it veer off suddenly yet again, this time to the northeast, in a straight, fast, and deadly path.
It dawned on him that its path led straight toward Abby’s place.
With his mind screaming at him not to be a fool, his body ran to his car, hopped in, started up the engine, and tore off toward the way the storm was heading.
The deputy didn’t mean to leave anybody locked inside the cemetery before the storm hit. The girl with the wheelchair in her van didn’t intend to get left behind. On this, her second visit of the day, she had stayed in her car without trying to reach the grave. When the deputy drove through the graveyard, stopping every time he saw people and pointing to the clouds and ordering everybody out, they all had to drive in single-file down and around, winding through the cemetery in order to get to the gate again. When Catie Washington got near the point in the road where there was a large equipment shed, she began to feel nauseated. She knew she had only a few seconds before she’d be too sick to drive. And so she jerked her van out of line, drove up a short gravel byway toward the shed, and scooted back around it, not wanting anybody to see her getting sick.
She was behind the shed, helpless and miserable, for a long time.
When she finally felt well enough to steer the van again, her hands were trembling, her body was soaked with perspiration, her mouth was sour with vomit, but she felt the gratitude that came when the worst was over.
It was starting to rain very hard now.
Catie turned her windshield wipers on, and then her headlights.
It grew darker by the instant, it seemed, but not so dark that she couldn’t detect the oily green-black roiling of the bottom edge of the clouds directly above her. The deputy had rousted them because of tornado warnings, and now she saw the accuracy of them. There wasn’t a funnel, not yet, but she looked up into the clouds, and knew the signs of what might come. Disoriented by her sickness and the worsening weather, she got back out to the one-lane road and made the mistake of turning left instead of right.