Tornado Siren: A love story

Copyright © 2005 by Patrick Gabridge

Cover image and design: Dan Pecci

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THIRD EDITION

ISBN: 978-0-9986982-0-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9986982-1-2

Published by Pen and Pepper Press

Medford, MA

www.gabridge.com

For Tracy, Kira, and Noah

About the Author

Patrick Gabridge is the author of three novels, Steering to Freedom, Tornado Siren and Moving (a life in boxes). He is also a prolific playwright and his full-length plays include Lab Rats, Blood on the Snow, Distant Neighbors, Fire on Earth, Constant State of Panic, Blinders, and Reading the Mind of God, and have been staged by theatres across the country. He’s been a Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company and with New Rep in Boston. Recent commissions include plays and musicals for In Good Company, The Bostonian Society, Central Square Theatre, and Tumblehome Learning. His short plays are published by Playscripts, Brooklyn Publishers, Heuer, Smith & Kraus, and YouthPlays, and have received more than 1,000 productions from theatres and schools around the world, in 14 different countries.

His work for radio has been broadcast and produced by NPR, Shoestring Radio Theatre, Playing on Air, and Icebox Radio Theatre.

Patrick has a habit of starting things: he helped start Boston’s Rhombus Playwrights writers’ group, the Chameleon Stage theatre company in Denver, the Bare Bones Theatre company in New York, the publication Market InSight… for Playwrights, and the on-line Playwrights’ Submission Binge. He’s also a member of the Dramatists Guild, StageSource, and a board member of the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund. He is the co-founder and current coordinator of the New England New Play Alliance.

You can read more about Patrick’s work on his website, www.gabridge.com, or on his blog, The Writing Life x3.

Patrick has a passion for history and a lifelong love of science and scientists. In his spare time, he likes to farm and fix up old houses.

Other books by Patrick Gabridge

Moving [a life in boxes]

Jed and Lila are compulsive movers. For them, moving boxes, packing tape, and open houses are the ultimate aphrodisiacs. They meet on a moving day, Jed proposes on a moving day, and they end up moving 18 times in 18 years. Moving defines their lives, their identities. They move for fun, to recover from tragedy, and for new opportunities—until Lila decides she wants them to put down roots, in Boston. Moving tells the story of a marriage challenged by wanderlust, obsession, infertility and adoption, and race.

Steering to Freedom

A troubled country, a courageous heart, and the struggle for freedom. In May 1862, Robert Smalls, a slave and ship’s pilot in Charleston, South Carolina, crafts a daring plan to steal the steamship Planter and deliver it along with the crew and their families to the Union blockade. After risking his life to escape slavery, Robert faces an even more difficult challenge: convincing Abraham Lincoln to enlist black troops. Based on a true story, Steering to Freedom tells the powerful and inspirational story of a young man who becomes the first black captain of a US military ship, while struggling to navigate a path to freedom for himself, his family, and his people.

Praise for Tornado Siren

This is a story that will take you on a journey into the strange and unknown and leave you wondering about what we really know about nature and how it works. I really enjoyed this story and recommend it to everyone who enjoys a story that combines the paranormal with a whirlwind romance.  RomanceJunkies.com

Natural disaster buffs will enjoy Gabridge's paranormal take on nature's destructive powers.  Publishers Weekly.com

Deftly written and one hopes it will garner much deserved attention. 

Curled Up With a Good Book

Gabridge's novel is engaging and touching, and this love story flows along at a pleasant pace, dispensing a few odds and ends about how tornadoes form, dissipate, and kill.  Ink19.com

Chapter 1

When I traced the muddy depressions of a man’s work boots and the footprints of a very large dog, the earth was still unnaturally warm. That heat, and the fact that the tracks made no sense whatsoever, made my fingertips tingle.

I was in a fallow, stumpy field, somewhere near Memphis. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen things that appeared impossible—all damage surveys offer some freak twist. Maybe the tornado plucks all the feathers from a dozen chickens but leaves them alive and without a scratch. Once, I saw an entire house destroyed, the pieces scattered over the prairie, with the exception of the dining room table and a single glass of water, unbroken, half full.

But this… I found the trail where I had expected, based on the farmer’s description. The tracks were nearly obliterated by the wind and debris. As I followed, I expected to see them suddenly grow farther apart, as the man began to run—even a clueless drunkard wouldn’t miss a tornado bearing down on him. Then I would see smeared handprints as he tried to dig into the earth, a last desperate grasp for life. Finally, there might be a few random skids as he and the dog were pushed and pulled by the growing intensity. Then, after they were carried aloft, the tracks would end.

Someone would find their twisted shapes hanging in the barren trees down by the river, like ordinary trash, or the remains of a lynching.

All of that would have made perfect sense. Gruesome, but logical. But the man and dog did not take flight. Instead, as far as I could surmise, they stood still, feet planted in the mud, and waited. The twister wasn’t incredibly strong when it hit the house and the barn, but as it reached this point, it intensified. Ancient stumps were wrenched from the ground and saplings were uprooted, like a giant pulling carrots from his garden. The ground was cut and scored, a pincushion of splinters and nails and scraps of aluminum siding from the hog barn. It appeared that the tornado slowed down, almost stood still over this very spot. Possible, but unlikely, even for a tornado.

So our madman, surely that’s what it takes to stare down a twister, stood and waited. The tornado came lumbering down its chosen path—end of story, end of man.

Except the trail continued, only now the tracks were clean. There was no windblown grass or grain in the mud. Just an evenly spaced set of boot prints, continuing across the field, stepping over a few fallen trees, finally climbing up a clover-lined embankment onto the road, where they disappeared.

#

I approached the farmer cautiously, making lots of noise as I picked my way through the twisted siding and splintered lumber that used to be a hog barn. I’d been doing this long enough to know that you don’t want to surprise people in the aftermath of a tornado—they’ll be lost in a shocked reverie, overwhelmed by nature’s raw power, and the next thing you know they turn with a snarl and a shotgun—because they know there is no protection from violence and devastation. No government, no police or sheriff has the power to prevent catastrophe. They are minuscule specks on a planet without mercy, liable to be tossed in the wind like a dried blade of grass. Their home is now open to the sky. There is no private life, no barrier between them and the world, no secret hiding spot.

He wore blood-spattered overalls, his arms and back sinewy with age and from decades of work on the land. His ebony skin was coated with dust and streaked with sweat. I was relieved he was black—I never know what to expect from a white old-timer when he sees me, a young black woman, trespassing in the midst of a disaster. In one hand, the farmer carried a wood-splitter’s maul—a cross between a sledgehammer and an ax. At the sound of frantic scratching beneath an arched section of aluminum, he picked up the siding to reveal a wounded hog, his hind quarters nearly sliced through by a jagged piece of metal. The farmer raised the maul overhead and smashed the blunt end against the flat plate of the hog’s skull. The sound was dull and finite, leaving only silence in its wake, spreading like a ripple across the farmyard.

I reluctantly cleared my throat, and the farmer turned to face me.

Alicia? he said, squinting.

I was tempted to play along, to offer some comfort in disguise. But if I began the game, I couldn’t see how I’d ever stop. No, sir. I’m Victoria Thomas, a tornado researcher from the National Severe Storm Lab.

Sorry, young lady. You look so much like my granddaughter. You’re like a vision. Nothin’ seems quite right today, he drawled in a voice low and earthy. The good Lord is testing me and my mind’s none too clear.

I tried to reassure him that this is common after big storms. I wanted to offer to help, to spend the rest of the afternoon restoring order to lives tinged with chaos. To be honest, they got off easy—their house was still standing, though all the shingles were stripped from the roof. One or two outbuildings were still intact. But I had my own work, my post-mortem of the storm and its vortex. It was never easy to suppress the urge to offer concrete assistance, but I believed the research improved our ability to predict tornadoes. The data I gathered here would be chewed and digested by computers housed in dry, solid offices.

Lately, it seemed each survey got harder. Some of my colleagues, especially the chasers, seemed oblivious. They constructed an interior wall that allowed them to see past immediate suffering and confusion, or at least to make it blurry enough that they could concentrate on the task at hand. My own barrier was cracked and sagging, and I found myself pushing to gain distance from the destruction at the center of my work. How many steps back to be safe?

A fly lit on the thin line of blood trickling from the hog’s forehead. The farmer tapped the carcass with the toe of his boot, looked at me carefully, and mumbled, You lookin’ for that man?

I certainly hadn’t passed myself off as any kind of policeman, though I am a detective of sorts. Sometimes, back in the office, in Norman, we give a Sherlock Award to the researcher who comes up with the most entertaining explanation for a tornadic oddity. Maybe this would be my year. I suppose I should have repeated my introduction, to clear up the notion that I might be able to chase down a fugitive, but I was curious, so instead I only asked, What man?

The one taken by the tornado. I hope you find him, because tough as Matilda is, I don’t want her stumblin’ across some rottin’, stinkin’ pile of humanity next week.

I’d already met Matilda, the farmer’s wife. She was standing in the driveway when I arrived, hands on her hips, staring at a row of six young apple trees that had been plucked from the ground and stacked into a neat pile by the tornado. She couldn’t understand what a twister might have against such promising trees. Their swollen buds were only days from opening, from firmly announcing the presence of spring. I loaned her two graduate students who had accompanied me to help replant the trees. Matilda was just as weathered as the farmer, her skin faded over the years in the kitchen and in the fields—we were almost the same pale shade of brown. Her eyes were sensitive and moist, wounded by the loss of her beloved fruit trees. I didn’t want her tripping over a corpse either.

Did you know this man?

"Never seen him before in my life. I just looked up and there he was, comin’ across that stumpy old field I been meaning to clear. Had some wild lookin’ dog nippin’ at his heels. That’s when I saw the twister, right along the woods over there. I’d been havin’ a funny feeling ‘bout the weather all day. Somethin’ just didn’t feel quite right—I could feel it building, growing, like some sort of invisible fog. So I see the twister, snakin’ and swirlin’ all around, and I yell to the man to get in the cellar with us. But he didn’t seem to a heard me. Just kept walking.

"He was dressed in raggedy work clothes. Didn’t walk like a bum—he was strong and steady, like he had some sort of purpose to him, knew where he was goin’. His skin was brown, not black, not white. Maybe he was Indian or somethin’. He was a ways off, but even from where I was standing, I could see he wasn’t scairt.

I tried yellin’ again, but the wind, she was howlin’ something fierce. He just kept walking. I held the door open, long as I could, ‘till I felt the wind sucking at my feet. Matilda was down in the cellar, pleading with me to come down, but I didn’t want to… I tried to help him, Lord knows I did, but I had no choice. No choice.

He looked down and fidgeted with the maul, his head bent, as if seeking absolution from me, from Heaven. I hate to think what happened to that man.

#

I wandered down the road, looking for some sign, some clue, though I’m not sure what I expected to find. A trail of blood? Torn scraps of clothing? A collapsed heap, pierced with the tornado’s projectiles, perhaps a cinderblock lodged in the poor man’s skull? There was nothing.

I was drawn back to the spot where he stopped and waited. The ground was cool now, the muddy footprints greying in the air. There was no good explanation, though I came up with a handful of possibilities. I’m a scientist, so the notion of answers is important to me. I’m not comfortable with blind acceptance. If I were religious, perhaps I would attribute it to God. The unseen hand of the Creator cupped down over one of his minions and provided mercy from Nature. To me, this would only intensify the questioning—why this man? Why now? Why not protect the whole farm? And suddenly we’re off trying to read the mind of God.

I guess that’s what we keep trying to do, whether we believe in one or not. There must be a reason for everything. God. Science. Nature. Perhaps, due to a complex set of physical interactions, quirks of fluid dynamics, there was a calm empty space in the tornado and the man was in this space. Perhaps it had multiple vortexes, as some tornadoes do, and he slipped through its twisting, destructive fingers.

Maybe I was wrong about the tracks altogether. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t some sort of wilderness guide, a Davy Crockett in khaki pants. Maybe the farmer or a passing neighbor made the tracks after the storm. Whatever happened, if there even was a man, the twister passed by him, over him, around him.

I imagined what it would have been like in the field—deafened by the diesel locomotive roar, pelted with twigs, seeds, craning my neck upwards, the snake-like cloud dark and dirty, reaching thousands of feet into the sky. Its tendrils whip back and forth, prolonging my agony. I wait and wait and wait. In an instant, I am obliterated.

I couldn’t seem to move from the spot. If it happened—and I was only willing to proceed with a very big If—if it happened, he was touched by something elemental, baptized by the wind. What sort of scar would this leave on a soul? I had never even seen a tornado in the flesh, and this walker bathed in one. Did he know the why? Did he even ask, or did he just accept his fate, grateful for continued existence?

What I should have done was chalk it up to a fluke of nature and moved on. Such speculations are completely unproductive in my line of work, because the fuel for them is always there. Tornado researchers are the high priests of weather, exploring the occult—we claim to know and understand, even to predict. We are the oracles. Our weather maps and satellite data and dew point readings are steaming entrails, a pattern of bones. But we are scientists: thoughtful, educated, sincere, respectable. The world is knowable—we are certain of this. I was one of them, a believer.

#

It was almost dark before I returned. The twilight crept up on me while I was orbiting muddy footprints, neglecting my work. I’d bring the team back tomorrow and complete the survey. The class I was teaching was almost finished, and then I’d return to Oklahoma. This storm and its oddities would blend with all the others, lost in a steady stream of catastrophic input.

At the farmhouse, neighbors had arrived to help with the hog carcasses. My students, two young, well-meaning white boys, stood with Matilda, admiring their handiwork. The apple trees had been replanted, soon to be pink and green standard bearers for human resilience, the continued drive to restore order to an entropic world.

I stood just outside the bright light cast by portable generators, a shadow. My arms were caked with earth up to my forearms, from probing the ground for something, not knowing what. I was reluctant to enter the light, to shift back into the circle of human contact, to take part in the pain and laughter. My ideas, fantasies, theories, would sound foolish as soon as the words seeped into the air, and the spell would be broken. I was ashamed at its power over me, my reluctance to feel it dissolve. Slowly, I stepped forward into the glare.

#

That night, I dreamt of flying in thick, dirty air, wishing someone would pull me from the suffocating cloud. The strong hand of nature pinned my arms, pressed my lungs to emptiness, and filled my gaping mouth with dust. I stretched my feet downwards, downwards, desperate to touch the ground, certain if I made contact with the earth, gravity would hold me close.

In the morning, my body ached.

Chapter 2

Even from the air, I could tell the town of Lebo was grieving. Four black hearses were lined up beside a grey-roofed church. The parking lot and street were filled with cars. Tiny specks of humanity appeared and disappeared, like a cloud of uncertain electrons. In a town so small, the burial of native sons touches everyone, but in the Canary, my single-engine Cessna, I was insulated. After a while, though, the drone of the engine began to sound mournful, echoing the mothers, sisters, and girlfriends below.

I already knew too much. I never should have picked up the local paper—it held only inaccuracies and guesses about the tornado, though it reported plenty about the four boys in the van. They were on their way to a baseball game—home opener for the Royals. In print, they were, of course, beatified—stellar athletes, straight-A students, future leaders,