The Breathtaker Page 12

  “Are we going to be okay?” she asked her husband for the hundredth time. It was past midnight on a cold May 10, and the storm had come up suddenly and unexpectedly. They’d only had ten minutes of warning from the town siren before the power had gone out.

  Sailor Rideout pinched the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. He was irritated with her, his features fixed like granite in an effort to project some kind of churlish male courage. They were huddled together inside the hallway closet, seated on the narrow padded bench that lined the wall, and she was holding the flashlight. Sailor’s face, when lit from below, reminded her of a Halloween pumpkin, theatrically spooky. “It’s gonna be okay, old girl,” he said.

  “We’re gonna get hit. I just know it.”

  “God’s protected us so far, hasn’t He?” His hand felt cool against her skin. Sailor hadn’t seen his belt buckle in many years, but her heart still quickened whenever she caught sight of him in an unguarded moment, smoothing his gray hair or surveying his chickens, his potbelly rising doughlike over the waistband of his jeans.

  Now something hammered on the roof like it wanted to get in, and for a spine-tingling moment, she imagined the two of them blowing away like dandelion seeds.

  Thunk, thwunk… crash!

  She hugged Sailor tight. Forty minutes ago, she’d been curled up safe on the living room couch, watching old movies on their ancient Zenith set. Her husband could sleep like the dead, but not Birdie. She needed to be eased into that dark place with mugs of warm milk, extra pillows on the couch and plenty of late night TV. Now here they were, cowering inside their hallway closet like two scared kids, waiting for the tornado to chew them up and spit them out over the plains.

  She could hear the living room windows jumping in their jambs, whump-whump-whump, like unruly guests. Noises exploded throughout the house, and she felt each impact in her skeleton. The tornado was a jet plane bearing down on them. Beyond the crack of light, Sailor’s body arched with fatigue, and when she rested her palm on his arm, she discovered that he was shaking uncontrollably.

  “Sailor?” She dropped the flashlight and took his hand, then felt the next thunk in her pelvic bones. The bench they were sitting on was vibrating. The roof beams screeched far above them. She didn’t want to die. There was still so much left to do.

  “Look at that!” she said, irresistibly drawn to a pale oval of light strobing underneath the crack in the door.

  Sailor wiped his shiny forehead on his sleeve. “It’s just lightning.”

  “No, it isn’t!” Before he could stop her, she got up and opened the door, her long gray hair whipping back in her face. She thought she saw a figure moving around inside the dark, chaotic house and chased the phantom with her eyes, but there was nobody there.

  She felt a shiver of memory… party dresses… Christmas barbecues… her first lipstick, her first bra… the excitement of boys… the births of their sons. Birdie had lived in Dogtooth, Texas, all her life; her two older sisters had fled to Houston. One married a doctor, the other a lawyer, whereas she had married her high school sweetheart.

  She shuddered and pushed the door shut against the wind, then went to him. “I love you,” she shouted above the howling wind. “You know that?”

  “Don’t be silly,” he hollered back. “We’re gonna be just fine.”

  2

  DOWN IN the bowels of the Wind Function Facility, the missile launcher chamber was thick with the silence of concentration. Wouldn’t you know it, Willa Bellman’s stomach kept rumbling. She’d only had a few bites of toast that morning and too much coffee. Couldn’t eat. It was this weather. It had her all stirred up. Be still, my stomach.

  Rick was screwing a plastic sabot into the end of the fifteen-pound wooden stud. He was all business today, all frowning exactitude. Come on, Rick, be spontaneous for once. The two of them worked well together and knew how to anticipate one another’s moves like clockwork. Like an intricate dance.

  “Ready,” he said, and together they muzzle-loaded the six-foot-long wooden stud into the barrel of the air cannon, a number two southern pine with a fourteen-inch radius at the impact end.

  “How many more tests have we got left?” Willa asked with a mental wringing of the hands.

  “Impact and cyclic-fatigue.”

  “Oh my God. We’re gonna be here all day.”

  “That’s the plan, babe.”

  “Three or four more hours, at least.” She glanced at her watch. It was ten o’clock on an overcast Monday morning in the middle of prime tornado season, and she could feel the sweat beginning to collect under her arms, her expensive comfrey deodorant having failed her once again. She was such a mess today. Hastily dressed in painter’s pants and big hoop earrings, her greasy, coconut-smelling hair falling like a wet mop down her back. She snatched a rubber band and made a quick ponytail to get it off her face, then gazed longingly at the Apple laptop on the cluttered machine table. The downloaded surface data were showing a powerful dynamic system ripping through Texas and parts of Oklahoma today, a lovely swirling pattern of red. Oh God. Radar images so breathtaking she was practically drooling. She’d been out storm-chasing all weekend long and was yearning for more. More, more, more. Couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Heroin for the heartland.

  “The SPC has issued a tornado watch for East Texas, north-central and northwest Oklahoma,” she told Rick. The SPC was the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. “Gordo just called about another tower popping north of Texola…”

  “Welcome to my worst nightmare,” he said. “Getting stuck inside on a day like today.”

  “KXDI radio just reported another warning for the Panhandle, but the Weather Channel radar loops don’t even show an echo there.”

  “That’s the problem. Their information’s old.”

  “Will you look at that rotation?” She let out a low whistle. The bird’s-eye satellite view showed a gorgeous rotating cloud pattern, a big red cell moving southwest to northeast. “Let’s go after it, huh? Huh, Rick?” She gave him her patented cutesy-pie look, batting her eyelashes.

  “What,” he said with a touch of irritation, “now?”

  “Yes, now. Why not now? You wanna miss all the fun?”

  He smiled, a bundle of contradictory emotions. But then, pain in the ass that he was, stickler for details that he was, he shook his head. “Shut up, temptress. Jacobs wanted these missile stats yesterday. He’ll have our frigging heads.”

  “Yeah, well… as the Queen of Soul would say, I ain’t too proud to beg.”

  Her partner in crime wore that serious, calculating expression she loved poking fun at, shirttails tucked neatly into his waistband like a little boy. Pint-sized science geek, bet the kids used to make fun of you, put tacks on your chair and slap notes on your back, because they’d sure done it to her. Oh boy… when you’re poor, it’s pitiful. Secondhand clothes, ill fitting and out of fashion. Two older sisters, and she got all the hand-me-downs. Not enough water in the well, so she couldn’t wash her hair more than once a week, and when puberty hit, she got acne and dandruff… dandruff on her shoulders, and the other girls were nasty because she was so poor and smart, a double curse… too smart for her own britches.… They made fun of her mercilessly the way girls do sometimes, picking on the weakest one… her curly dark hair growing oilier toward the end of the week…

  Willa’s father had introduced her to a whole new world, the storm-chaser community. He’d rescued her from her girlish misery, and she’d gotten to know good people, smart people, people with great senses of humor. When you chased the wind, the ground fell away from under your feet and you were transported someplace else… someplace special. Her dad was so smart and funny, always quoting William Shakespeare: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” He used to swear at the other storm-chasers in made-up Shakespearean sonnets: “Thou art a douche
bag, surely thou art! Hath thou no blinkers, fool?” He was funny, but he could also be stern, and he expected her to get straight As, even though girls weren’t supposed to be smart where Willa grew up.

  “You don’t think I’d beg Jacobs to let us go chasing this afternoon?” she said. “You don’t think I’d get down on my hands and knees?” She pointed at the computer screen. “Look! Mucho activity!”

  “I am raising a doubtful eyebrow here.”

  “It’s twister weather, baby. A sure thing.”

  “Can we focus? Can we please stay focused on the task at hand?”

  “Fine. Your funeral, buddy.”

  The missile launcher chamber consisted of an air-actuated cannon capable of propelling timber at speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour into a test panel, thereby testing its resistance to flying debris. The chamber was forty feet long by fifteen feet high, and they were used to hearing their own voices echo back at them. These drab four walls had been painted tangerine in an attempt to brighten up the place, but the false cheer only made it feel more oppressive. After a few hours down here, you went a little stir-crazy. They’d been at it since 7:00 A.M.

  Now Willa initiated the electronic timer, a calibrated timing device that measured the missile’s speed before impact. Next she moved down to the breech end of the air cannon and selected the operational air pressure. The barrel was twenty feet long, a PVC pipe painted orange and held in place by two metal supports at either end. The cannon was braced against recoil by three angle struts that ran along the floor at the back of the chamber, where several sandbags anchored the barrel supports. Today, they were testing a batch of “foamcrete” door panels for their resistance to flying debris, but the material wasn’t performing up to standards. The company, KeepSafe, specialized in aboveground tornado shelters, also called safe rooms. KeepSafe was hoping to get its new foamcrete material certified by the WFF, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not if Willa Bellman had anything to say about it.

  “How come we can’t put ‘this sucks’ on the form?” she asked, and Rick lost his constipated look and smiled. “Ah-ha! A crack in the facade! Two smiles in one hour!”

  “You’re hopeless.”

  “Will you look at that?” She pointed at the radar loop. “Colliding air masses! Big bad storms likely!”

  He loped methodically along, checking everything twice and getting his data straight, but she could tell that his resolve was weakening.

  “You want it,” she cooed in his ear. “You want it bad.”

  “Enough.”

  “Come on, admit it.”

  From the radio came the beautiful low voice of Lou Reed in his Velvet Underground period.

  “Let’s try it at a lower speed this time,” he said.

  “Lower? How much lower? Why don’t we hurl turtles at it? It’s obvious this crap isn’t going to meet FEMA standards. Those last two panels definitely do not qualify, muchacho.”

  “Humor me.”

  She sighed, ready to die of frustration. She wanted the cloudy day on her face, the wind in her hair. Her father would grab his camera and her, and they’d take off in his beat-up Rambler, just the two of them heading into the wild blue yonder. He could make his ears wiggle. He could smell lightning. She’d roll down her window and hold her face to the sky, fat raindrops kissing her lips and eyelashes. A clap of thunder meant another stop to set up the tripod. “Kiss of death,” he told her. “Setting up a camera for a lightning photo is the kiss of death. The second you open your shutter… fizz. No more lightning.”

  At the far end of the chamber, beneath the ceiling’s soggy acoustical tiles, was a test panel marked “KeepSafe,” clamped to a reaction frame by eight yellow C-clamps. The reaction frame had two functions: first, to support the test panel, and second, to stop the missile from penetrating the back wall. Willa waited impatiently for air pressure to build inside the sixty-gallon water tank in the room next door. The water tank room was no bigger than a closet, separated from the missile launcher chamber by a long, narrow plate-glass window. The water tank was linked to the air cannon through a solid-core ball valve, which could be operated remotely.

  “There’s high risk in our forecast area,” she said. “Isolated supercells are expected to become tornadic by this afternoon.”

  “Stop.” He carefully aimed the PVC barrel at the center of the test panel. “You’re killing me.”

  “C’mon, you coward.”

  “You are in the strangest mood.”

  “Thunderboomers.”

  “Get ahold of yourself, woman.”

  “Do you really want me to drop it?”

  He looked at her for a troubled moment. “Truth?”

  “Truth.”

  “No.”

  “Oh wow, that’s great! Hurry, hurry. The weather gods are smiling on us.”

  “Let’s finish this test first, okay?”

  “Okay.” She blew several long wild strands of hair out of her eyes. “Waiting for pressure to build,” she said, checking her watch, then glancing over at the laptop again. As the convection brewed, she could imagine all sorts of watches and warnings popping up across two states. Good news for a few, bad news for many. The loss of all one’s possessions in the blink of an eye was not a pretty thing. Put twenty tons of pressure on a small house, and it reached its limit of resistance pretty quickly. She had witnessed again and again the awesome power of these beasts. Yet the statistics were clear: Tornadoes took only eighty American lives a year; swimming pools took four thousand; automobiles took forty thousand.

  “I’ve set the impact speed at a hundred this time,” she said.

  “That’s low enough.” He switched on the video feed and picked up the remote control. “Brace for impact.”

  She slipped on her orange rescue headphones, which muffled all sound, then inhaled sharply as Rick pressed the remote. Almost instantaneously the ball valve released the compressed air from the water tank with a sick snap, and the test missile shot out of the air cannon with a thwunk.

  The cannon fired its fifteen-pound wooden stud at a blistering speed. Quicker than the eye could calculate, the stud impacted the test panel, and the shoddy KeepSafe material splintered all to pieces.

  Willa exhaled sharply.

  “Wouldja look at that,” Rick said as he scribbled something on his clipboard. “Total perforation of the test panel.”

  She swept off her headphones, smoothed her hair and crossed the room toward the ruined test panel, where wisps of smoke curled up from the debris on the floor. The wooden stud had sustained little damage. She removed the C-clamps and lowered the shattered panel. “It’s pierced the skin and penetrated the insulation,” she said. “Material is scabbed on the back side.”

  “Yeah, thought so. I clocked it at one hundred two point eight miles per hour. Another unsuccessful test.”

  “It’s back to the ol’ drawing board for these guys,” she said, slipping off her safety glasses and massaging the bridge of her nose. She picked up her clipboard and carefully jotted down her notes. In order for a client to qualify for certification, the walls, roof and doors of any given shelter had to be able to resist penetration by windborne missiles. If the material didn’t meet the Standard for Windborne Debris Impact Tests, SSDT 11-93, then it wouldn’t pass muster. No certification from the WFF meant no sales. “I, Willa Bellman,” she read aloud from the certification form, “an employee of yadda, yadda, being duly sworn, et cetera, depose and say that, to the best of my knowledge, the impact tests on these panels did not meet the requirements… Underline not.”

  “It’s a box kite. Tie a string to it.”

  “Stamp a big fat ‘F’ on this baby.” She glanced at her watch again. “I’m gonna go see Jacobs now. Would you mind signing off on the rest of these for me, Rick? I wanna leave by one or we’ll miss all the action.”

  He had a cynical laugh. “My, aren’t we confident.”

  “Relax. Herr Professor is putty in my hands.” She paused for a moment, han
ds on hips. “So what d’you think? Should I invite Charlie along?”

  He shot her a patronizing look. “Charlie?” He grinned at her through narrowed eyes. “You’ve got the hots for him, don’t you?”

  She could feel the tips of her ears going pink.

  “Don’tcha? C’mon, admit it. You’re among friends.”

  “I’ve got four words for you—shut the fuck up.”

  “My, aren’t we touchy.”

  “What? I offered to take him chasing. He said it would help with the investigation. What’s wrong with that? Today’s as good a day as any, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Absolutely.” He lowered his head and continued filling out his report.

  She stood watching him as if she needed his approval. She felt a bit giddy. Butterflies in her stomach. “Hm… lemme think about this a minute and procrastinate some more.”

  Rick glanced up. “You’re driving me nuts. What’re you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know. What am I waiting for?” She absently played with her ponytail, pulling out the rubber band and letting all that coarse black hair collapse around her shoulders. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look at you, you’re adorable.”

  She winced. “I have a big round face like a porridge bowl. And my ears stick out.”

  “Quit boasting. You’re making me sick.” He tossed her his cell phone. “Here. Go crazy.”

  She walked over to the laptop, where the downloaded radar image kept repeating its seductive loop—chase me, chase me. That roiling mass of clouds sweeping across two states. Rick pretended not to be listening as she dialed the number of the station house.

  “Hello?” she said, feeling the blood rush from her head. Whoosh. She had to sit down. “Charlie? It’s me, Willa Bellman… Listen, would you like to go chasing today?”