Summer Storms

The storm arrived quietly, a black wall of westerly clouds sleepwalking in as he chopped vegetables for dinner. The dog signaled it an hour earlier; he found her hiding in the bathtub, legs rattling against the porcelain. As they ate his eyes couldn’t help returning to the kitchen window past his wife’s shoulder, back to the morbid sky and the row of quaking trees beneath it. Just a summer thunderstorm, he told her, nothing to worry about. Growing up he’d seen it a million times: the sickly green sky before the encompassing dark, and the whooshing of the tall pines swinging together around their house. But he was a kid then, waiting it out with his mother in the basement. He left that out. His familiarity gave her some small relief.

In the end, all that came their way were simple showers and echoes of thunder overnight, and by the early morning only the smell of rain remained. He was fast asleep in bed, wife and dog in a tangle next to him, when the phone rang.

The storm had touched down farther north, the editor said.

“Go take some pictures, talk to a few of the folks.”

“How bad?” he asked.

The editor didn’t reply. It didn’t matter. He’d learned by now that in this part of the state, any weather at all was news. Who else in the newsroom had already received the same call? All unavailable for one reason or another, and now he was the last resort.

“Take enough photos for our sister papers. Keep the good ones for us. We’ll run your story and art tomorrow. If it’s bad enough, it might make it on the cover.”

After the call ended he remained in bed, listening to the soft breathing of his companions. Junk stories during the day, callouts at two in the morning. Who cared to see what a storm wrought on a podunk town a couple hours away? He wasted several minutes staring at the ceiling before he kissed his wife goodbye and packed his things. A notebook and a pen, the DSLR camera that still felt like some alien technology in his hands, and some reheated coffee. Even his old Toyota refused to groan awake until the second attempt. The dog watched from the upstairs window as he reversed out of their driveway and onto the road.

⁂

A nearly full moon hung behind him as he drove. Whatever had passed in the night had cleared by the time he reached the highway. Cornfields, painted blue by the darkness, rolled along either side of the road, the infrequent bat darting overhead. The tornado had hit near Portage, two hours from his home, in some small town he didn’t know. It took him several false starts before he found it on the map. A thin line of blue–the Fox River–connected it to its neighbors, a mere capillary reaching out to the Wisconsin River nearby. But he couldn’t see much in the way of a storm, and the further he drove the more he felt as if he was part of some elaborate joke.

It had been like that. Every mile he covered for the job seemed to push him farther from where things actually happened. Where he came from, the news existed on a scale grander than the decisions of the local school board. To think she urged them there. Acted as if this job would be a good step for his career. Months earlier he’d written about a swan that, each year without fail, stranded itself in its pond as the creeping ice encircled it, always requiring an undignified rescue. The woman he interviewed–he’d described her as “the swan’s savior”–thought herself a hero. But he pictured with a sort of shame that strange woman cutting away at the ice with an oar, plucking the swan into her rowboat and dumping it onto the messy bank. The story had done well online. People liked that kind of thing, but that didn’t make it any less embarrassing. In the newsroom they’d started taking bets on the swan, still months ahead of winter’s arrival. He’d refused to partake.

Now he imagined turning in photos of garbage cans blown over, reporting on how many ears of corn had been shredded by the high winds. But even as he neared the town, the trees and corn stalks stood upright, unbothered. In the pale light he waited to see anything at all. Bulbous backlit clouds cast long shadows across the fields. Finally the road bent and he slowed as he approached the small town. Then he saw it.

The pavement itself continued undisturbed into a neighborhood, white lines only visible to his headlights, but the rest of the street remained in shadow. The scene grew clearer as he drove. There were no streetlights illuminating the neighborhood. Nor could he find the poles themselves that would hoist the missing lights. Instead, only destruction.

On either side of the street, broken trees lay folded and grotesque, snapped like toothpicks into giant splinters next to messes of boards and dirt and dust. Homes, reduced to their fundamentals. Both sides of the street were ruinous in the same way. The carnage extended one block, then two, then a third, as far as he could see. At the end of the road a mass of people had gathered. Red and white lights flashed somewhere off in the endless dark behind them. He parked his vehicle on the side of the road and stepped out. A quiet, apologetic murmur of conversation leaked from the crowd. He sighed.

Despite his profession, he hated approaching strangers. Especially devastated strangers. Especially at four in the morning. He held his notebook in one hand, camera in the other, its worn strap irritating the back of his neck. In certain situations he hoped just looking like a reporter was enough to open people up to the idea of answering questions.

A woman approached him before he could start speaking.

“You with the paper?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Before he could think of his next words, the woman pointed a finger toward the end of the block behind him. He turned, stepped past her to look. Nothing distinguished one pile of rubble from another, save for the unique ways the thick branches dangled off broken trunks of trees. In his mind he tried to draw the square plots that supposedly lay beneath each collection of debris.

He asked for her name (Cheryl), what time the storm started, when the power went out.

“I’m so sorry. How long have you lived here?” he said.

“Thirty-two years now,” Cheryl said. “Never seen anything like this. There’s been storms before, certainly. Even a few that had me worried. But this?”

“What did you do when the storm hit?”

The woman wiped the edges of her eyes.

“I was already in the basement,” she said. “Heard it all. I couldn’t help crying when I finally came upstairs. I couldn’t believe it.”

Another neighbor broke off from the crowd and joined them. “You think that’s crazy, ask for Dale and Barb when you’re speaking with the other folks,” he said.

“Dale and Barb,” he repeated back to them, checking the spelling out loud. He snapped an apologetic portrait of Cheryl, the mangled street behind her fading away into a soft blur. Then he walked down to her lot at the end of the street with the wide-angle lens before returning to the group.

For the next hour he spoke with several others in the crowd, absorbing similar stories. Most hid in the basement too, but some had taken refuge in their studies or bathrooms, watching walls covered with family photos peel away from across the room. It all sounded the same. As he walked up and down the street he imagined the dull words he’d be writing later that day. There was nothing new here, unfortunately. There was nothing novel about destruction.

Then he found Dale and Barb. The older couple stood at the far end of the street, talking enthusiastically with neighbors. Dale was a stout man with a gray beard and thinning hairline and his wife, Barb, an even stouter woman with short, dark, curly hair. In her hand she held a leash with a panting golden retriever at its end. He thought of his own dog watching him leave, his wife still asleep in bed.

Patiently he waited for the pair to finish their ongoing conversation. Dale waved him over before he had the chance.

“I was told to come hear your story,” he said.

The two of them chuckled, laughs of either exasperation or total submission. Dale scratched his head, shrugged.

“I still don’t believe it,” he said. “We were fast asleep in our bedroom, second floor.”

“We’re heavy sleepers, I guess,” Barb chimed in, touching her husband’s arm as she spoke.

“Right, very heavy sleepers apparently. She snores, and the dog does too. As a result I wear earplugs.”

He held his recorder beneath his notepad, scribbling fragments while the microphone faced out towards the couple to capture everything he missed. A flattened town, and he’s speaking to the two people who nearly slept through it. They even spoke with small, excited laughs between their words, as if they’d just left an amusement park rather than watched their home be destroyed.

“Anyway, as I was saying–we’re fast asleep upstairs one second, and the next we’re jolted awake. Just like that.” Barb snapped her fingers. “I opened my eyes and all I saw was the sky.”

“What do you mean? The roof was gone?” he asked.

“Not just the roof. The whole damn house,” Barb said. He couldn’t help but smile as she covered her mouth after she cursed.

“We woke up square in the middle of the living room now. All three of us–” Dale motioned to the dog “–still sitting in bed, in the middle of the ground floor. Nothing else around, neither. Come with us, I’ll show you.”

By then he’d been at the town longer than he’d planned. The sky in the east had started to warm up, dawn approaching on one horizon while stars still filled the other side. In his mind he tried to guess what time he’d make it back to the office.

He followed them further up the street past the neighbors and towards a corner lot that glowed with the lights of a nearby ambulance. He wanted badly to see a sidewalk wrapping around the yard, a neat picket fence set back several feet. Instead there was chaos, and less of a house than he’d seen so far.

They walked up the cement path leading to an absent front door, debris sprinkled all around them. A stand mixer like they had back at home, pages from magazines poking out between boards, a lonely shoe. Like some big junk heap, as if someone had tossed the whole of the house in a blender and dumped the results. At the end of what used to be the first room–the foyer, he guessed–was the bed. Just as they’d described it, lost in the living room. The bed frame was solid wood, thick with ornate corners and patterns that stretched up to the top of the headboard. A thin layer of dust had settled on the disturbed sheets. A few feet away past the threshold, the dog bowl sat atop kitchen tile, still filled with water.

“Didn’t believe us, did you?” Dale said. “That’s alright. Most of them didn’t until they saw it too. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“It’s hard to believe,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

He talked with them until sunrise, probing the ordinary details of their life together for background. The story had already started to take shape in his mind. They were happy to talk. They told him about the big moments in life that had happened there, birth and loss and harder times than he’d had yet to face. But the mundane too–so many Christmases, Thanksgivings in that home. When he finally lined the pair up to take their portrait next to the bed, they placed the dog in a well-mannered sit atop the mattress at their side. Before leaving he photographed the rest of the property, the missing shape of the home, the torn-up grass, the intact mailbox at the end of the driveway.

⁂

The wreckage replayed in his mind on his way to the newsroom. In the dark he fumbled with the lock and groped the walls for the light switches. Tired, he gave up trying to figure out the coffee-maker before dumping his things at his desk. Still an hour or so until the others would show up. He wanted to rest his head for a moment, but his body hummed with excitement. The lede was obvious, and the rest of it would flow from there. He typed rapidly, so engrossed that he hadn’t even heard anyone else arrive until he finished.

When the editor did show, up he flashed a smile.

“How was it out there?” the editor said.

“A mess. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“I bet. Send me the story when you have it. I’m looking forward to reading it.”

“It’s already done,” he said. “I’ll send it now.”

The editor paused, then gave a curt nod and disappeared into his office.

He gave his story a quick once-over, checked for double-spacing, unneeded commas, and shifted a few paragraphs around until he was satisfied with the structure. Then he hit send and waited.

The editor came out of his office thirty minutes later, walked past him toward the kitchen, but returned shortly after with a full mug of coffee. The editor sat back on the edge of an adjacent desk, sipping the hot coffee.

“What was the dog’s name?”

“What?”

“The dog that was sleeping on the bed with the older couple. What was its name?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask,” he said. He flashed back to the scene, tried to picture a name on the dog bowl.

The editor sighed, blew on his coffee, then stood up to leave.

“It’s alright,” he said, eyes elsewhere. “You’ll get ’em next time.”