Snapper Read Free

I lay facedown in the mud between two roots of a huge tulip poplar. I did my best to cover my hands with my sleeves and I covered my head with my hands.
    Some people describe the sound of a tornado as akin to a freight train, which is like comparing a wolf to a beagle. I have sat, with Lola and a brace of beer, directly beneath rolling trains on the Dogtown trestle bridge over the Ohio River: they’re rhythmic, clattering, dependable, and their sound, though loud, suggests a sort of restrained power. As I clutched my head between those poplar roots what I heard was purely chaotic, an unhinged and unpredictable malevolence, demon song; lightning struck twice nearby and I could not hear the thunderclaps because the whole chorus of hell overwhelmed them. God, perhaps suffering a midlife crisis by now, was off seeking deliverance on all the coasts of dark destruction where every wave sounds the rush and crumble of ruin. I found it hard to sympathize.
    Abruptly the sound diminished and I was in a predictable, chummy sort of thunderstorm. The leaves settled and the rain poured and the call-and-response of lightning and thunder drifted slowly away from me toward the west. I becameaware of some aches in my arms and back and legs. These developed later into bruises. I don’t know what hit me but to look at me a week later you’d guess that I was a spectacularly inept toreador. All around me were lethal-looking branches freshly shorn from their trees.
    That tornado left a six-mile swath of houses in splinters and twenty-nine dead after touching down four miles away from where I cowered in the mud. As if God had driven his Camaro through there with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a rented blonde in the other, AC/DC loud on the stereo. I don’t know how you can look at an occurrence like that without concluding that God
is
white trash, but you don’t say that kind of thing in Indiana.
    I didn’t know about the damage yet, of course. I knew only that I appeared to be okay, so I ran to the truck. It was scratched and dented and probably needed a creative paint job, but nothing was smashed, so I got in and headed for Lola’s house.
    I was astonished to see Gerald on his front lawn inspecting a branch there, wondering what neighbor’s tree had donated it. Everyone was doing this, of course—by this time, twenty minutes later, the sun was out, and the sidewalks steaming. Across the street a pin oak had dispatched one wall of a garage attached to a family home, but this far from the funnel cloud damage was minimal. Still, I had thought that Gerald must have been in the forest, too, with some tornado-evasion technique that he had used dozens of times before. He was perfectly dry, in clean clothes, outside his house. I was one big shade of mud, like something extracted from the shallows of a stagnant pond.
    He was alarmed. “You were out in that?” he said.
    “We work in all weather,” I said.
    “Did I say that?”
    “My interview,” I said.
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “I’m fine. I’m glad you’re fine. I came to check on Lola.”
    “Oh.”
    “Have you seen her?”
    He didn’t reply. I looked at her house; a large branch lay on the roof and had dislodged several shingles. I repeated myself.
    “She hasn’t been home for two days,” he said.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes.”
    I couldn’t tell you whether either of my neighbors had been home for a month. But then I didn’t live next to Lola. In ordinary circumstances, I would have drawn the correct conclusion: that she had made a new friend who had invited her back to his nest. In the aftermath of the storm I was too worried to think straight, and I approached her door in a panic. If she was inside, she was undoubtedly safe but probably freaked out. Moreover, she knew that I had been in the forest and was probably quivering with worry for me.
    She didn’t answer.
    I went around the corner to the window of her kitchenette. I had made a hasty exit from that window once