The Virgin of Small Plains

  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.

  That way took her back to the top of the hill where the Virgin lay.

  The air had gone a greenish-yellow; even in the darkness, she could detect the change in color, the coming vacuum, the impending stillness in the center. Under the darkest part of the storm, there was enough light to be able to watch the cloud formations. They curled, they stabbed the air beneath them, they began to rotate, and then she saw the tornado a few hundred yards away.

  She put her van in park at the top of the hill.

  Without thinking, hardly knowing what she was doing, and even less why she was doing it, the girl flung open her door against the rain. It was hailing now, small, hard, rough balls that pelted her weakened body, and would have hurt if she had been capable of feeling anything at that moment except the overwhelming desire to run to the top of the hill to meet the storm. She stumbled, and fell to her hands and knees on the dirt road that was turning to mud. With the rain and hail pelting her back, and the wind pushing at her like abusive hands, she crawled toward the Virgin’s grave.

  When she reached it, she turned over and lay spread-eagle, her face to the clouds.

  All around her, the branches of the trees danced and the trees themselves leaned one way and then the other. There was a howling all around her, and then there was a roaring like a train coming closer to her. She felt like a damsel tied to the tracks, but that’s how she had felt for months in the path of the cancer that was killing her. This was no different: No one could rescue her.

  No strong, handsome man would come along to pick her up this time.

  This was her third go-round with chemotherapy for her brain tumors. Each of the first two times, she had “known” she would lick it. When the third diagnosis came in, she lost the will to fight. She would endure one more round of chemo, she told her doctors, but that would be it. In the other two rounds, she had fought to control the nausea, using acupuncture and medicine, using whatever worked, and for a while, it had seemed to work.

  It wasn’t working anymore, nothing was working anymore.

  She was in pain a lot of the time, and so very ill.

  Now, from under the black, black oily layer of clouds, she watched the funnel form high in the air, watched it dip down once, watched it rise back up again, always moving in her direction.

  When it traveled directly over her, it was one hundred feet wide at the tip.

  She gazed up directly into the mouth of it, where she could see the revolution of the air and things—objects—whirling around inside of it. The roar was deafening and terrifying. She felt her whole body being picked up as if she were levitating, and then being laid back down. And then some of the things inside of the funnel began to fall on her. She closed her eyes, expecting to be killed by them. But they fell lightly atop her and all around her.

  When she opened her eyes, she discovered she was covered with flowers.

  The three teenage boys following the twister parked across the road from the cemetery. One of them hopped out of their pickup truck and ran around to the front of it while his friends stayed inside where it was dry.

  “Are you crazy?” was the last thing he heard them say before he slammed the door.

  As the twister roared safely above him, Jeff Newquist realized he could get the video of a lifetime: actual footage up inside a tornado. Although he was getting pelted by rain and hail, pushed and pulled by wind, he took an educated guess that he’d live through it. The ’nado was just high enough not to kill him, just low enough to reveal its black heart to him.

  People always claimed a tornado sounded like a freight train.

  He felt as if he were chasing it down the tracks.

  Jeff propped himself against the grille of his friend’s truck and started filming. First, he panned the sky for context, then he focused on the eye of the storm and hit “zoom.” Feeling an illusion of safety behind the lens, he began to follow the twister—across the highway, over to the opposite shoulder. H
e stopped beside the fence, propping himself against it to steady himself, still filming as the tornado moved on.

  While he was looking in the viewfinder he couldn’t tell what the hell he was seeing; it was all black and wet to him. There was a moment, though, when an odd bright greenish light filled the sky, illuminating the scene as if a director had shone spotlights on it. Even so, it was only when he hopped back in his truck, and took a look at what he had filmed, that he and his friends saw that his zoom had caught a shower of stuff falling from the funnel. Excited to find out what it was—litter from somebody’s house? fence posts? arms and legs? dogs and cats?—he hopped out of the truck again, and then climbed over the cemetery fence toward where his camera had been pointed.

  What he found there, at the top of the hill, scared the hell out of him.

  At first, he thought it was a body dropped out of the center of the storm.

  Then he thought maybe it was a corpse tossed out of a new grave, because if it wasn’t, then what in God’s name were all those flowers doing on top of her, and all around her?

  He raised his camera and started shooting again.

  When the “body” moved, he yelped in fright, but never put the camera down.

  Jeff watched the “corpse” rise to her feet, shedding petals as she got up.

  When he realized she was definitely alive, he ran toward her, yelling, “What happened?”

  Smiling in a dazed way, the young woman looked at him, and then pointed up.

  Toward the sky.

  It finally registered with him that she was bald. And very thin. She would have looked mortally ill except for the expression of wonder and bliss on her face.

  “Where’d you come from?” Jeff called to her.

  “Wichita,” she called back, and laughed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Catie!” She threw her arms wide in a gesture of pure joy. “My name is Catie Washington and I’m alive!”

  She walked away from him, moving like a zombie in a trance, albeit an ecstatic zombie. Jeff filmed her getting into her van and then driving away.

  When he raced back to the truck to show his friends, they watched with amazement at video proof of a “miracle”: flowers falling from a deadly storm, a young woman rising from a grave, and walking away with a look of bliss on her gaunt face.

  “You going to sell this to the local news?” one of his pals asked him.

  “Local news, hell,” Jeff Newquist scoffed. He could already feel the cash in his hands. “What do those big tabloids pay?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Mitch was pretty sure he was acting crazy. This was not a good precedent, he thought wryly, as he barreled toward the entrance to the highway on the north edge of town. With the rain coming down on his car, and the worst of the storm ahead of him, he felt like a storm chaser trying to catch up to a twister. This is nuts, he told himself, but how could he just stand by and watch a tornado fly toward her home, and not do anything about it? Was he supposed to just stand in his yard and hope for the best for her? What if she was there alone, what if she got hurt, what if she needed help, and he was the only one who could get there in time? He had to make sure, it was the only decent thing to do. If he got there and saw that everything was okay, he could just quietly drive away, with nobody the wiser.

  Nuts. This place is already driving you crazy.

  He was on his way to see if Abby had survived the tornado, and he hadn’t even tried to see his father yet. Or, his brother, Jeff, whom he had not laid eyes on since his college graduation, when the boy was only four. I have a brother…

  It was how he used to think of Rex, like a brother.

  Rex. Mitch tried to think out ahead of time what he would do if he encountered the principals in what he thought of as his own little melodrama, now that he had decided to stick around for a while. What would…could…he say, not only to Abby, but also to Rex, or any of the other people who’d known him years ago? What was his attitude going to be if—more likely, when—he ran into Quentin Reynolds and Nathan Shellenberger? What about Verna, for that matter? And now he had Patrick to consider in his scenarios, as well. What was he going to say to people about why he had left, much less so suddenly, and why he had never returned until now?

  He tried imagining it with Rex, albeit a fantasy Rex who had a grown man’s body with a familiar teenager’s face. He tried saying, “Hey, I’m sorry I left like that,” but that wasn’t going to work. If he said he was sorry for anything, he was going to have to explain why. “I’m sorry I left like that, but the thing is, I had just seen your father carry a dead girl into Abby’s house, and then I saw her father…”

  Yeah, right. He tried imagining what it might be like to run into the older men.

  Immediately, rage welled up inside of him, so that all he could see himself saying was something like, “You goddamned sonsabitches…”

  He couldn’t apologize. He couldn’t explain. He couldn’t defend.

  He was damned if he was going to employ the defense his mother had used on his behalf. “When people ask why you left like that,” she had written him, “I tell them things were becoming too intense between you and Abby. I tell them we didn’t want you to feel pressured to get married so young, or, God forbid, start a family at your age. I say, we thought it best for you to go away where there are greater opportunities, and different girls to date.”

  Upon reading that letter, he had scorched the telephone lines with a call to her, telling her to stop it, telling her not to do that to Abby, who was completely innocent in all this. “How could you?” he had yelled at his mother. “How can you say things that make people think of her like that?”

  To which she had cooly replied, “Well, I have to tell them some- thing, Mitch.”

  There had been a time, nearly nineteen years of time, when he would never have talked to his mother like that. Out of respect, and because he wouldn’t have dared; he would never have dreamed of raising his voice to her, much less speaking to her in such a harsh tone, with such peremptory, accusatory words. In his family, politeness had reigned. By the time of this phone call, he had lost the respect, if not entirely the fear.

  “Not that!” he had yelled at her. “You don’t have to tell them anything. It’s none of their business. But don’t tell them that.”

  He had no idea if she paid any attention to him.

  Now he was going into a situation where he didn’t know what people thought, what lies had been spread, what stories had been made up to compensate for the truths that had never been told. He decided to take his cues from others, at least while he was still testing the waters, timing his moves. If they were friendly to him, that’s how he would be to them, up to a point that stopped short of reactivating friendships. That wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t happen. If they were cool, he would be, too. He decided his best bet was to be courteous but distant pleasant but unapproachable. That way, nobody could get hurt, or at least not as badly as the truth could hurt them.

  He preferred not to think about how his other plans might hurt some of them.

  As Mitch turned north on the highway, he had a feeling he had already lost his grip on all that rational planning. Where was it that morning when he had impulsively followed little green arrows to Abby’s place? And where was it now when he was following a tornado, for God’s sake, straight back to her?

  “Courteous, aloof, neutrally pleasant,” he reminded himself, out loud. “I’ll be so goddamned pleasant my own ex-wife wouldn’t recognize me.”

  He was more than halfway there when he saw something that made him pull over to the side of the road and park. Just ahead of him, there was a Muncie County sheriff’s car that was parked crooked on the shoulder, as if its driver had pulled over in a hurry and left it there. And off in the nearby culvert, a tall man in a uniform was getting to his feet and appearing to dust himself off, a sheriff’s deputy, maybe.

  The storm had gone through here in a big way.

&n
bsp; Mitch got out of his car, to make sure the deputy was all right.

  Rex endured small hailstones pounding on his back, and drenching rain. Wind howled around him, picking up gravel and hurling it at him. He thought he even heard the metal in his car rattle. He wanted to raise his head and look, but didn’t want to take the chance of being blinded by debris.

  It seemed to last forever, but when the worst of it was over, he realized he had only been a victim of the more ordinary part of the storm, and not the twister itself. When he did look up and scan the sky for it, he couldn’t even see it, but only spotted the dire black clouds from which it had emerged, receding toward the northeast. Where twisters were supposed to go. Rex looked due north, checking for damage and people and not seeing any. Then he turned to look south and spied one car, a black late-model Saab, parked on the same shoulder where he was.

  He watched a tall man get out of the car, and walk toward him.

  There was something about the way the man moved that struck a vaguely familiar chord in Rex. It was the aggressive tilt of the broad shoulders, the straightforward carriage of the head that made him think it might be somebody he knew. It brought back memories, for some reason, of playing in football games when he played left tackle, running ahead, making big blocks for their talented tight end…

  I’ll be damned…

  When the big man got close enough, Rex found himself looking into Mitch’s eyes.

  Mitch saw it in Rex’s face, the exact same immediate impulse he felt in the first second when they recognized each other: a natural, almost irresistible impulse to grin. In that instant, the years between them didn’t exist. There was only the same old close friendship, the same chemistry and rapport. There was a flash of amnesia, a wiping out of old sins, a memory only of affection and great times. In that moment, there was only the day before yesterday; yesterday, itself, disappeared. In that moment, they could have slapped each other’s shoulders, they could have shouted, “Goddamn!” and laughed out loud. They could have said, “Where you been?” and laughed about it. They could have taken up right where they had left off.