“Here it is,” said Carrie. “Molly’s using it for a footrest. Molly, pick up your feet and let me look in the snack sack.”
“What’s that smell?” asked Ruth. “All of a sudden the car smells like old bananas.”
“It’s old bananas,” said Carrie. “I was gonna bake us some banana bread when we got to the woods. They always say the riper the banana the better the bread.”
“Well, they’re stinking up the whole car,” concluded Ruth. “Lyle, how can see anything through that windshield?”
“It ain’t easy,” admitted Lyle. Lyle turned on the radio and skittered around the dial to find a weather report.
“Oh stop it right there — please, please, please,” said Molly. “I love that song. It’s from Ghost—it’s what they played when Patrick Swayze was trying to help Demi Moore turn her pot.”
“Not turn her pot—throw her pot,” corrected Ruth from the backseat. Ruth turned to Maggie and said, “But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt since she’s on industrial-strength tranquilizers.”
Molly didn’t hear this. “And — and — and — all the clay got all over the place because she was hungering for his touch.”
“Lonely river flow to the sea, to the sea,” sang Carrie pensively.
“Like us,” said Ruth. “All this rain is gonna take us right out to sea. Are you sure we shouldn’t pull over for a few minutes?”
“Sure,” said Lyle. “Let me just find a place.”
“Lonely rivers say ‘wait for me, yes for me,’” paraphrased Carrie tunefully.
“I cannot believe LeAnn Rimes was only four when she sang this,” marveled Molly.
Ruth muttered, “Fourteen. Not four.”
Molly went on, “Only four years old and singing this very adult song about rivers and love and shit.”
“She was fourteen,” muttered Ruth.
“Indulge her,” whispered Maggie. “It’s just nice to see her finally calmed down.”
“I could use a Valium right now,” said Jane, looking apprehensively out the window. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit.” Jane, who was sitting directly behind her brother, leaned forward. “Lyle, really now, honey, find a place to pull over.”
“I’m trying to. It’s just farms and fields — I mean, from what I can see, and I can’t see much.”
LeAnn Rimes was gone. She had been replaced by a man giving a dire weather report. “The National Weather Bureau has issued a tornado warning for the following counties in northern Mississippi—”
“Well, we can’t just pull off to the side of the road,” said Ruth. “Not if there are tornadoes all around.”
Lyle groaned. “Well, what do ya’ll want me to do — pull over or not pull over?”
Several opinions went up at once, while Molly said, “Do you think Patrick Swayze has soft and supple girl hands? Some say this, but I never noticed.”
Jane raised her voice above everyone else’s: “Everybody shut up and help Lyle find some safe place to pull off. The wind’s picking up. This isn’t normal wind. It’s blowing sideways.”
Jane was correct in her observation. The car was being slammed in the side by forty- and fifty-mile-an-hour wind gusts. Lyle was having a difficult time keeping the Duster on the road.
“On second thought, Carrie,” said Jane, nervously, “why don’t you keep on singing?”
“And help take our minds off the fact that we’re all about to die,” commented Ruth in an equally nervous voice.
“I’ve never been in a tornado,” admitted Molly, peering calmly through the passenger window. “I’ve never even seen one except in the movies. Like — like Twister, with all the cows and tractors and stuff flying around. But maybe there are also tornadoes like the one in The Wizard of Oz that picked up Dorothy’s house and set it down all nice and easy in that place where all the midgets lived.”
The wind was wailing now. The wind had begun to sound angry and human.
Ruth groaned. “I don’t think real tornadoes ever do that, Molly. I believe they’re much more violent than that.”
“Holy shit, this looks bad, Lyle!” cried Jane from the backseat. She was bent all the way forward now, her fingers curled around Lyle’s headrest. “Just pull off anywhere.”
“I think that’s a farm up there. Doesn’t that look like a barn?”
“Whatever it is, it’s got to be a lot better than this death-trap-on-wheels we’re sitting in right now.”
“I think one of the tornadoes in Twister was tossing around tanker trucks like they were Tinkertoys,” said Molly.
“That was an F-5,” said Ruth. “F-5s are very rare, as I understand it.” Then to Maggie: “Molly needs to shut the fuck up, okay?”
“What number tornado is this one?” asked Carrie nervously.
“What makes you think we’re in the middle of a tornado?” asked Maggie.
“Because my ears just popped and I can hardly hear myself think.”
“Do you hear a freight train?” asked Jane. “They say approaching tornadoes make a sound just like a freight train.”
Carrie shook her head. “No. It just sounds like wind.”
“Then we’re probably all right for the moment,” offered Maggie.
Lyle squinted through the windshield. “That gate looks locked.”
“Well, we weren’t gonna stay in the car anyway,” said Jane. “Let’s just get out and climb that fence and go inside that barn.”
“In the rain?” asked Molly.
Ruth snorted. “Molly, you need to get out of the car. Everybody out of the car. Anybody who objects is gonna get knocked unconscious and thrown over that fence like a hay bale.”
Molly said in her poutiest voice, “Would you please stop being such a meanie?”
“It’s tough love, baby. Back me up, Jane.”
“One hundred percent. Everybody move your asses,” said Jane. “Carrie, baby-honey, that umbrella isn’t gonna do you much good. It’ll just carry you away like Mary Poppins.”
“I’m scared,” said Carrie.
“I’m right here,” said Lyle, squeezing her hand.
We Six spilled out of the Duster-Twister and onto the shoulder of the state highway and then trudged, heads down, into the driving wind and the driving rain toward the old barn, which sat at some distance from a small darkened farm shack whose electricity had already gone out.
Molly tried to remember what happened to Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton when they fled into a barn at the end of the tornado movie. She couldn’t quite recall, and then in an instant she did recall and a great chill went down her spine, even though she had thoroughly tranquilized herself.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Tutti
Ruth and Carrie were going to America. It had been decided that each would create new lives for themselves on the other side of the Atlantic pond. This made perfect sense, given their present situations. Ruth knew not a soul upon the earth to whom she was connected by blood, and with the exception of her absent and itinerate father, Carrie could make the same claim for herself. And who was to say that Ruth and Carrie’s long friendship didn’t create a bond which surpassed in steadfastness and affinity that of familial attachment? For has it not been stated time and again (in this story most markedly) that the link which joins female friends may be most sisterly in its strength and complexion?
The plan was made. And then the plan was altered in the best way possible when Lyle Higgins confessed upon the heels of its disclosure that he must be with the woman who had captured his heart, whither she might wish to go.