Fully Loaded (23 page)

He walked back to the motel a little drunk and a lot tired. Friday night,
9:30 p.m.
, and Hoxie as dead as advertised—no sound but the hum of streetlamps and crickets. He climbed into the RV and sat for awhile in the dark on the foldout sofa. Staring through the window into the prairie, half-expecting to see some suggestion of residential glow out there, but not even a
porchlight
disrupted the gaping darkness. Around
midnight
, he got up and stepped into the closet-size john. Brushed the wine stain off his teeth and tried to avoid meeting the eyes in the tiny mirror. Windows to an empty house. Lobotomy eyes. He cracked a window and crawled into bed. The sound of the wind blowing across the prairie moved him like nothing had in days.

In the morning, he brought yesterday’s coffee to a fast boil in a saucepan and powered up the laptop. The forecast discussion on the National Weather Service’s
Goodland
,
Kansas
Website thrilled him—extreme thunderstorm activity expected along the
Nebraska
border.

Peter headed north up Highway 23 and reached the town of
Cedar Bluffs
at
noon
, the sky still clear, the heat intense and wet. He pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut, nuked a frozen dinner in the microwave, ate lunch, slept off the remnants of a three-wine headache.

He woke sweating, the sun blazing into the RV. Grabbed a bottled water from the Fridge, drained it in one long gulp.

That familiar pang of disappointment blossomed in his stomach as he read the updated forecast discussion. The
NWS
had, as usual, missed the boat. A line of storms were setting up, but over the eastern plains of
Colorado
, a hundred and seventy miles west of his position. With convection already underway and a
supercell
forming south of
Greeley
, the party would be over long before he got there.

He convinced himself on the five-block stroll from his RV to the Prairie View Café that he was going in hopes they’d reprised the chicken-fried steak and because he’d spent the entire day in his home on wheels. It had nothing to do with the waitress who probably had the night off anyway.

She stood at a booth scribbling an order onto a pad when he walked into the restaurant. The chimes that jangled over the opening door caught her attention, and she looked at Peter and raised her finger, might even have winked, though he couldn’t say that for certain in the poor light. The thought of it put knots in his stomach. She wore a blue and white dress that seemed such the epitome of her profession it reminded him more of a movie costume. With her hair down tonight and her lips a paler pink than before, perhaps their natural color, he went short of breath as she walked toward him.

“Hi, Peter.”

“Melanie.”

“You want the window booth again or a brand new experience?”

He thought about it. “I like the booth.”

She walked him over.

He slid in.

“How was your day in scenic Hoxie?” she asked, setting a menu on the table, and he almost responded as he would have to any other human being who tried to engage him, but he didn’t want to just say, “Fine,” because then she’d probably smile and leave and he wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want her to walk away yet.

“Disappointing,” he confessed.

“What happened?”

“It was supposed to storm up near the
Nebraska
border, but the forecast didn’t pan. Kind of a wasted day.”

She looked at him askance. “It was a beautiful day, Peter.”

“Not if you wanted a storm.”

“No, I guess not. Well, I’ll be back in a bit to tell you about the special. You want something to—”

“I’m an idiot,” he said, heat flooding his face, wondering if she noticed the color. “I should explain.”

“No, it’s—”

“I’m a storm chaser. That’s why I wanted it to—”

“You mean one of those people who photograph tornadoes?”

“Sort of.”

Her face lit up. The awkwardness retreating. “Oh my God, that is so interesting. So you’re one of those guys.”

“Yeah.”
   

She smiled. Strangely, genuinely impressed. “That’s the coolest thing I’ve heard of in awhile. How’d you pick Hoxie?”

“You guys got hammered a couple years back with a tornado outbreak.”

“I was here when those storms swept through. It was awful.”

“Well, I’ve been all over
Oklahoma
, the
Texas
panhandle, eastern
Kansas
.”

“Searching for that elusive storm?”

“Something like that. This western part of
Kansas
is the last region I haven’t spent a ton of time in. Long range models were predicting an active couple of weeks, so I thought why not give it a shot.”

Melanie glanced over her shoulder at the two other occupied tables, then sat in the booth across from Peter.

“You ever seen a tornado?”

“I’ve seen nine of them.”

“Like in real life?”

“Yep.”

“What’s the closest you ever got?”

“A mile away.”

“What was it like?”

Like standing next to God, but he didn’t say that.

“Amazing.”

She looked at her tables. “I better get back to it.” She got up.

“Melanie?”

“Yes?”

His heart thumped in his chest.

“I’m going out again tomorrow. Now, there’s no guarantee the weather will cooperate, but—”

“I’d love to, Peter.”

“You would?”

“You must’ve read my mind. I was hoping you’d ask.”

It was like nothing he’d done in years, and he felt both joy and debilitating regret that in a moment of weakness (or strength) he’d exposed himself.

The waitress said, “Glass of red?”

His throat constricting. “Be great.”

She headed back toward the kitchen, and he stared through the
windowglass
, watching the prairie darken. Kept telling himself that it was still Saturday night and he was only in
Kansas
and his RV just five blocks away. As if that piece of news might tether him to the world he knew.

Melanie lived two miles out of town at the end of a dirt road, spruce trees forming a windbreak along the north and west boundaries of the homestead. It had seemed an idyllic farmhouse from the highway, austere on the morning prairie. Proximity destroyed the illusion. The white paint had chipped almost completely away, and the weathered boards and the rusting tin roof and smiling porch presented more of a ghost house than a livable dwelling.

Melanie emerged and spent a minute locking the door after her. Came down the bowing steps and through the weeds onto the drive as Peter leaned across the seat to open her door, the pair of coffees he’d bought at the gas station steaming into his face.

“I could barely sleep I was so excited,” she said as they rolled along the dirt road toward the highway.

“Could turn out to be a bust,” Peter warned. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“Well, it’s all about the journey, right?”

They drove west on the interstate, the sun a blood blister in the side mirrors, its light so watery and diffused you could stare it down. Adult contemporary droned through the speakers at a reasonable volume, the small talk coming just often enough to keep the stretches of silence from passing the point of no return.

They crossed the border into
Colorado
at a quarter past eleven and Peter pointed through the windshield. “You see that?”

“You mean those clouds?”

“The one that looks like an anvil is going to be a thunderstorm when it grows up.”

“This is good?”

“Very good. Major convection underway.”

Melanie squealed and clapped her hands, something free and childlike in her excitement.

He took the next exit and pulled over so they could track the gathering storm cells on the laptop—irregular blobs of green with nuclei of hot pinks and fuchsia.

“They’re still maturing,” he said, running his finger along the screen, tracking the loop of their northwesterly movement on the radar. “We’ll take 385. Should intercept them in about forty minutes. If we’re lucky, they’ll be booming.”

They went north. The summer sky turned dark. Peter lowered his window, let the musty air rush in. Straining to hear thunder over the engine.

They pulled onto the shoulder on the outskirts of
Wray
,
Colorado
. Peter killed the engine and glanced over at the computer, now in Melanie’s lap.

“We’re in position,” he said.

The first fat drops of rain splattered on the windshield as Peter squinted at the screen.

He opened his door, got out, crossed the road.

Melanie joined him.

Strings of lightning bent down and rain sagged from the clouds in ragged black tendrils.
 

“It’s so beautiful,” she said, and he wondered if she really meant it, if it touched her with even a fraction of the intensity it touched him, or if she was saying what she thought he wanted to hear. He looked up at the clouds streaming over them.

Lightning touched the plain a mile away, the blast of thunder vibrating the ground beneath their feet.

Melanie clutched his arm.

“Should we go back to the car?” she asked, and he couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. You embraced a storm by standing in the middle of the goddamn thing, feeling the rain beat down on your face, letting the wind bully you, trying not to flinch when the thunder dropped right on top of your head.

“Sure,” he said. “We can go back.”

They experienced the storm from inside the RV, everything reduced to gray through the rain-streaked glass and nothing to see beyond fifty yards as thunder detonated all around them, the Winnebago creaking and listing against the stronger gusts.

Melanie reached over and pried Peter’s right hand off the steering wheel and laced her fingers through his. Her hand was small and warm, and he was afraid if he looked at her she would kiss him.

When the storms had passed, they went on, taking
backroads
into
Kansas
, the late afternoon sky going bright and clear, Peter feeling with every passing breath like the RV was shrinking, the air being compressed from his lungs.

Thirty miles north of Hoxie, he pulled off onto the side of the road.

“Why are you stopping?” Melanie asked.

“I just need some air.”

He walked around the front of the Winnebago, the overworked engine pumping eddies of heat through the radiator. Twenty yards from the road, he stopped. The only disruption in all that prairie a grain mill several miles to the east. Peter took deep breaths until the mayhem in his head had gone quiet and he could hear the grasses scraping at his jeans.

Melanie said, “You all right, Peter?”

The sun had dipped below the western horizon.

“Yeah. You?”

“Uh huh.”

They traveled in silence for another mile.

“I mean, did I do something? Because I thought we were having a pretty good time this morning, but now—”

“No, of course not.”

“We weren’t having a good time?”

“No, I mean you didn’t do anything.”

She stared out her window.

They cruised south on Highway 23, and the quiet had grown cancerous by the time the headlights of the RV swept across the porch of Melanie’s farmhouse. He shifted into park and turned back the ignition. Melanie unbuckled her seatbelt.

“Hold on,” Peter said.

“What?”

He wanted her out of the RV. Wanted nothing more than to drive back to the motel, crawl into bed.

“This is my fault,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“It was my idea. I invited you.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I thought…”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”
 

Melanie put her hand on the door.

“It’s not your fault,” he said, reaching across the open space between the seats, almost touching her, letting his hand rest instead on the edge of her seat. “I just thought I was capable of doing this.”

“Of doing what?
Being
with me? Is it so difficult?”

“Being with anyone is, but when I saw you in the café last night…I don’t know…something shifted. I’ve said more to you in the last couple days than I have to anyone in twenty years.”