Storm Chasers

Calvin Hennick

My father is the second person ever to be treated for frostbite in the state of Hawaii. I learn this bit of trivia from the back of the B section of the Honolulu Star, under the heading of “Odds & Ends,” which I read sitting up in my king bed at the Waikiki Hilton. I’m here on my honeymoon, and my dad lives in Iowa, and when my grandmother—his mom—called to tell me he was in the hospital not five miles away, I thought at first he must be stalking me. 

“You should go see him,” Liz says, picking at her room service mahi-mahi. “It’s fate or something.” 

Liz looks like an advertisement for a better life, lounging on the balcony in her plush white hotel robe with her auburn hair pulled back and the ocean behind her, close enough to touch. At the wedding, near her parents’ home in the Berkshires, our friends all told us how lucky we are, how jealous they are of us. But I find it strange that we never fight.

“I haven’t spoken to him in fifteen years,” I say. “I’m not going to go see him now, just because we’re both in the same state.” 

But of course I go. I wait three days, until it’s raining and there’s nothing to do on the island, and on my way out I talk the bartender in the lounge into selling me a bottle of Crown Royal as a get-well present for my father. The bottle sits on the passenger seat of the rental car, regal in its purple velvet bag, the top of it poking out and teasing me. I’m not a big drinker, and whiskey has always made me choke, but at a red light I tear off the cap and take a sip to calm my nerves. I drink some more at the next light, and the whiskey burns less this time, and I take one last, large gulp in the hospital parking lot before I go inside. 

My father is in bed, watching a show about insects on the Discovery Channel. When I was a kid, he would take me to quarries to look for fossils, or we would spend an entire day hunting for Indian arrowheads and old coins in his uncle’s cornfield. The only things he’s ever been interested in are the most boring things in the world. 

His hair is thinner than I remember, and longer in the back. The sheets bulge over his potbelly and are pulled up around his knees to allow his feet—just two big, white balls of bandages—to poke up freely into the air. 

When he sees me, he sits up straighter in the bed. “Hey, there he is!” he says, beaming, as though we visit each other in the hospital in Hawaii every other Tuesday. “Ray Ray, my boy.” 

“Dad,” I say. 

He lets out a little grunt when I set the Crown Royal on his stomach. “My favorite,” he says, fingering the golden strings of the bag. “You remembered.” 

“Hard to forget.” 

He takes the bottle out of the bag and shakes it at me. “Dipped in already, eh?” He smiles strangely, covering his teeth with his lips, trying to hide the fact that four or five of them have gone missing since I saw him last. “Get those cups from the food tray.” 

“I don’t think you’re supposed to drink in here.” 

“Jesus, did your mother raise you to always follow the rules?”

I wheel the tray over to the bed and pour two fingers of whiskey in each glass. He lifts his toward me, and I clink mine against it. 

“Bet you never thought this was how you’d be having your first drink with your old man.”  

“I didn’t think we’d be having a drink at all.” 

“What’s it been?” he says. “Ten years? Twelve?” 

“What’s with the frostbite?” I ask. 

“I was chasing a blizzard back home. You know how I am. Get all tingly when the skies go dark.” 

He’s chased storms since I can remember, jumping into his car at the first hint of purple in the sky, following tornadoes around the countryside. He used to stay out for hours after the air cleared, and I would ask my mother if he had died, and she never answered. But he always came home, usually late at night, with whiskey on his breath and wild stories about how he’d nearly been taken away by a funnel cloud. 

“A blizzard?” I say. “What’s there to see in a blizzard?” 

“I like to watch the wind whip the snow into circles, the way the powder piles up on the fence posts. It’s something to see. Anyways, I’m out in the country, on this gravel road in the middle of nowhere, and my car gets stuck. Now, I’m the last son of a bitch alive who doesn’t have a cell phone, and I’m stuck in my car, and this is one day before I’m supposed to get on the plane for the factory trip. Plant flies us somewhere warm every winter for a vacation, sort of like a Christmas bonus.” 

“I didn’t know you were working again.”

“Four years. Four years.” He brings his whiskey to his mouth with both hands. “So I’m stuck in this blizzard, and I get out of the car and walk up and down the road. Only four houses in two miles, and no one answers. Lights on in three of them, though. By the time I get back to the car, I’ve got icicles hanging out of my ears. I start the engine and turn on the heat full blast and just try to wait the thing out. Six hours later, I’m running on fumes, and I see a snowplow coming, and I honk to all bejesus because I’m afraid he’ll think my car’s a snow bank and plow right into me. But he stops and calls into town for a tow. Now, I’ve only got three hours before the plane leaves, so I haul ass, and right when I’m sitting down for the rubber chicken, that’s when I realize I still can’t feel my feet.” 

I refill the glasses with whiskey. “Lose any toes?” 

“Nah, but the smallest three on the left foot were close. The right foot they got wrapped up just for show.”  

My cheeks burn, and at first I think it’s the whiskey, but then I realize I’m angry. I haven’t felt anything about him one way or another for years, but now I’m angry that he expects me to sit here and make small talk with him after his own stupidity got him into this mess. 

“I hear you got hitched?” he says. 

I nod. “I’m here with my wife.” 

“Your grandma showed me the picture you sent. Real pretty. Liz something-or-other, right? You probably don’t want to hear this, but she reminds me of your mother, back before she was riding around on a broom.” 

I stare into my glass, empty again. 

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.” He pours us more whiskey. “I was sad to hear when she passed.” 

I can’t talk. I’m twelve years old again, afraid that I’ll say the wrong thing. I want to tell him to go fuck himself, but my lips are numb from the whiskey, frozen in place. 

“You could have sent me an invitation to the wedding,” he says. “Blood is thicker than water.” 

“Blood is thicker than water?” My voice is uneven, and a notch too loud. “You never called once after you left. Not once.” 

“Relax, relax,” he says. “Let’s not talk about the past. Tell me about your life. How do you like living in New York?”

“You wouldn’t like it,” I say. 

“That’s not what I asked. I said did you like it.” 

“I like it fine.” 

“I don’t see how, with the queers running around every corner. And the crime, with all the blacks.”

“I think I’m going to leave,” I say. “I shouldn’t have come.” 

“What? No, stay. I don’t have any company.” 

“I’m going to go.” I gulp the rest of my whiskey and stand up, but I wobble toward the door. I’m drunk, drunker than I’ve been since my sophomore year of college. Embarrassed, I sit back down. 

“You know I’m proud of you,” my dad says. 

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t do that.” 

“I mean it. Your mom and I never made it to college. And you, a lawyer. Never thought we’d have one of those in the family. You’ve done good.”

“You can’t do that. You can’t walk away and then come back when Mom is gone and try to take the credit.” 

“I’m not taking credit for anything. I’m just saying. I’m just saying, is all.” He looks away from me, out his window at three palm trees in a small courtyard. He puts his hand to his brow, and I think he might be crying. But then he turns back to me, his eyes dry, and says, “Hey, do you think maybe I can get fifty bucks?” 

“Jesus Christ.” I peel a ten and two twenties from my wallet, drop them onto his bed, and stagger toward the cafeteria to drink some coffee and sober up. 

 

“I think it’s a good thing,” Liz says when I get back to the room. “You and him talking again. Family is important.” 

“You don’t know him.” 

“You haven’t let me get to know him.” 

Liz’s chief complaint about her own father is that he once threatened to withhold her tuition money at Barnard if she majored in art history instead of business, and for a fleeting, irrational moment I regret marrying her. I proposed after only six months of dating, when everything was still new and exciting and it seemed like every one of my friends was getting married, and we spent the next six months planning the wedding. Now, still slightly drunk, I feel like I don’t know her at all. 

During the week we have left in Hawaii, Liz occasionally mentions that maybe I should go back to the hospital to see my father, and I say no, and she says family is important, and then neither of us says anything for a while. My dad has managed to ruin the trip. 

I’ve kept my Blackberry off during the honeymoon, a promise to Liz, but during the layover in Los Angeles I power it up and check my email. There’s surprisingly little from work, but I see four short messages from my father, who is already back in Iowa. 

 

Hey, hey, Ray Ray! Good to be in touch. Your grandma gave me your email address. I told her you wouldn’t mind. 

 

Ray, you going to be in Iowa anytime soon? I owe you a bottle of whiskey!

 

Maybe I’ll make it out to New York one of these days. I’d like to meet the missus. By the way, I meant it when I said I’m proud of you. No bullshit. 

 

Hey, I was just thinking about that old show we used to watch when you were a kid. The guy had a moustache, and you said I should grow a moustache so I would look like him. You remember? Let me know if you think about it. 

 

This onslaught is both confusing and bizarrely gratifying. Since I was a teenager, my father has never expressed a desire to communicate with me. And now, after a few drinks in a hospital room in Hawaii, he wants to be pen pals. He wants to come see me in New York. He wants to be my best friend. Maybe Liz is right. Maybe this is fate. Or maybe it’s just an alcoholic getting a taste of something he’s left on the shelf for years. 

 

Months pass. Each week, I receive three or four emails from my father. He sends mostly chain letters and joke forwards, but once in a while I open an email and find documentation of his amateur storm chasing. The photographs are uniformly terrible, just grainy scanned snapshots of cloudy skies, and I begin to doubt whether he’s ever really seen a tornado up close. There’s never much text in these messages, only captions for the photos, lines like “Hailstorm outside of Polk City.” 

It feels as though Liz and I are still moving into our new apartment, a sunny two-bedroom on the Upper West Side with a private patio that gives me vertigo when I stand too close to the edge. The apartment is maybe half the size of the house where I grew up, but it’s all granite and marble and stainless steel, on one of the top floors of a luxury complex, and for what we paid we could have built a palace in Iowa. 

Liz works for a charity that promotes adult literacy, and she gets home an hour or two before me most nights, time she uses to paint and repaint the same wall in our living room. One week, it’s avocado green, and the next it’s stonemason gray, and after that it’s a color called sunrose that might be pink or might be purple. I’m still getting used to the idea that we both live here, that I need to pick up after myself, and go into the bathroom to fart, but mostly married life isn’t bad. It’s nice to have her in bed with me, to feel the weight and the warmth of her body next to me. It feels permanent and safe and some other things I can’t name. 

Once or twice a month, Liz heads to the Berkshires to visit her parents for the weekend. I’m always invited along, but I rarely go. In the city, my business suits camouflage me, but her family golfs and rides horses and plays tennis, activities all seemingly invented for the sole purpose of exposing me as an imposter in the world of money and society. I’ve made efforts. Once, I bought a pair of tennis shorts, but I felt like a dog dressed up in a sweater, and even though he’s in his early sixties, Liz’s father beat me playing left-handed. 

On these weekends alone in the city, I mean to make plans with friends, but often I put it off and end up with nothing to do but go into the office. Sometimes at night I buy a bottle of Crown Royal and sip it on my patio, watching the sun go down behind the New Jersey skyline I pay so much to see. I sit with my computer on my lap, searching real estate listings in Iowa. I find scores of bright new four-bedroom homes on two-acre lots, priced so low I could practically pay for them in cash. I think of how hard I work to live so high up in the sky, how many billable hours have gone into my sixteen-foot ceilings and hardwood floors, and I know I’ll never have what I could afford in Iowa on a mail carrier’s salary. 

 

It’s early October when Liz tells me. The leaves have begun to change, turning the trees in Riverside Park into dots of yellow and orange and pink below us. The air is slightly chilly, but we know the patio will be useless to us once it snows, and so we put on sweaters and eat outside. Liz makes baby back ribs, baby carrots, baby potatoes, baby corn. She looks at me expectantly, but I still don’t get it. 

She smiles, stands, takes my hand, and puts it on her stomach. “We’re pregnant.” 

Instinctively, I recoil, taking my hand away. I know immediately that I’ve made a mistake. 

Her smile fades. “You’re not happy.” 

I stare at her stomach in front of me, trying to detect some change. I want to ask if she’s been lying about taking the pill, if she’s done this on purpose. I want to remind her that we’ve never technically agreed that we both want children. I want to ask her why she said that “we” are pregnant. But I know any of this will only make things worse, and so I stay silent. 

“Say something,” she says. “Don’t make me remember it this way for the rest of our lives. Please.” 

“We didn’t plan this,” I say. 

Liz picks up the dishes and takes them inside, even though we haven’t finished eating, and I follow her. She scrapes the food down the garbage disposal. I can feel the seconds ticking down until she’s going to cry, and so I come up behind her and turn off the faucet and kiss her neck. 

“I was just shocked, that’s all. Of course I’m happy.” I cradle her still-flat stomach in my hands and whisper into her ear, “We’re going to have a baby.”

“A baby,” she says back to me. 

“I really am happy, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We’re ready for this. You’ll be an amazing mom.” 

Liz turns to face me, gives me a kiss. “And you’ll be an amazing father.” 

She doesn’t sound entirely convinced. 

 

Later in the month, I wake up to my phone buzzing on the nightstand. It’s an Iowa area code. 

“Hey, Ray Ray!” my father’s voice shouts through the line. “Your old man got a cell phone! I’m with the times.” 

“It’s past one a.m. here,” I say, still groggy. 

“I know what time it is. I’m here. In the Big Apple!”

“What?”

“Hey, you sound tired. You in bed?”

“No,” I say, not even sure why I’m lying. “What do you mean, you’re here?”

“This woman I met on the Internet, she lives in the Bronx, up by Pelham Parkway. I flew out for a few days to meet her. Sorry I didn’t call before. It was a last-minute deal.”

I consider for a moment that I might be dreaming, but I look over at Liz, sleeping with her back turned to me, and I see my work shirt for the next morning hanging on the door, and everything is quiet and normal.

“Anyways,” my dad says. “You want to meet your old man for a drink?”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now. What, you got somewhere else to be in the middle of the night?” 

I tell him to meet me at a bar on 76th and Broadway, three blocks from my apartment. I’ve never been inside the place, and I don’t even know its name, but it has a big neon sign in the window that just says “BAR,” and I figure it’ll be easy for him to find. 

I leave a note for Liz on my pillow, throw on a pair of jeans and my NYU hoodie and walk to the bar. The place is more of a dive than I’d imagined. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of bras stapled to the walls, and two waitresses are standing on top of the bar, dancing and singing along to Hank Williams Jr. on the jukebox. 

When the song ends, I order a Crown Royal, but they don’t carry it, and so I settle for a Jack Daniel’s instead. I finish the drink more quickly than I’d intended, and I order another. Each time the door opens I look up to see if it’s my dad, but I know the train will take more than an hour at this time of night. 

By the time he walks in, I’m on my fourth drink. 

“Hey, hey!” he says, slapping me on the back. His shoulders shudder as he takes the stool next to me. “Getting kind of chilly out there.” 

“All you ever talk about is the weather,” I say. “I want to talk about something important.” 

“What are you talking about?” he says. 

“I’m talking about why you left. I want to know.” 

“Are you drunk already?”

“No,” I say. “Maybe a little. Not much.” I finish my whiskey and wave for two more.

“Shit, I figured we were past this stuff,” he says. “Thought we’d turned a new leaf and all.” 

“How did you figure that?” 

“Meeting up like this, having drinks. Picking up where we left off.” The whiskeys arrive, and we both take them down like shots. “There isn’t much to say about me leaving. It isn’t any great mystery. Your mom didn’t like my drinking or my girlfriends, and I didn’t like her nagging me all the time, and that was it. But hell, I knew when she was walking down the aisle on our wedding day that it probably wouldn’t last.” 

“Are you serious?” 

“Hell, it’s not that big a deal. Most things don’t last.” 

“But you had a kid,” I say. “You didn’t even try to see me.” 

“When you walk away, you walk away. That’s my philosophy. Besides, all this is ancient history. What do you want, an apology?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I want an apology.” 

“It wouldn’t make any difference. It wouldn’t change anything.” 

“It might. It might if you meant it.” 

“Well, I’m not saying it. You’re going to think whatever you want about me anyway. Two words aren’t going to change anything.” 

I study his face for a moment, a little stunned that this man is actually my father. Then I stand up and walk out, leaving him to pay my tab. I stumble slightly on my way home, but I’m not yet as drunk as I want to be. The liquor stores are all closed, but I stop at a bodega and buy a forty of Budweiser. Opening the door at home I’m careful to be quiet. I drink the beer alone in the darkened kitchen, and when it’s gone I wish I had some more. 

 

During the winter, I become a regular at the bar with the bras on the walls. I never do learn the name of the place, and in my mind I just call it “BAR,” after the sign in the window. At home, Liz wants to talk about bassinets and cribs and breast pumps, and so I go to BAR and tell her I’m working late. I have bottles hidden at home, too. Crown Royal, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam. All in the top cupboard in the kitchen, because Liz won’t use the step stool now that she’s pregnant. She’s too smart not to know that I’m drinking, but she hasn’t said anything to me yet, and I think she’s hoping it’s just a phase. That’s what I’m hoping, too. 

I haven’t missed a day of work, but I sometimes go in hung over. I’ve begun putting off basic tasks like paying bills, taking my suits to the cleaner, even calling back clients. But everything seems to get done eventually, and even when it doesn’t, the world doesn’t end. It feels good not to try to control everything. 

I don’t hear from my dad again until March, when his mother has a stroke that puts her in intensive care. “Are you going to come see your grandmother in the hospital?” he writes in an email three days after it happens. “Or should I just let you know when she’s dead?”

“Go fuck yourself,” I write back. 

But I book a ticket to Iowa for the next week. It’s too late. She dies the day before my flight.

I go anyway, and my dad and I spend two days sorting through her things and looking at photographs and drinking whiskey. Spring in Iowa is schizophrenic. One morning it’s unseasonably warm, and we open up the house, airing it out. But by afternoon the skies turn violent. Battered tree branches thwap against the roof, and we rush to close the windows before the raindrops come down like machinegun fire. A man on TV says conditions are ripe for a tornado, but my dad tells me the weathermen have been saying the same thing for two weeks and nothing has come of it. 

We both wear sunglasses to the funeral. My head is aching from the previous night’s drinking and fuzzy from this morning’s, and I don’t hear a word the minister says. The sun is shining as my dad drives us to the cemetery, but the sky grays while the casket is being lowered into the ground. We take turns dropping shovels of dirt into the hole, and rain begins to fall, lightly at first. Then thunder crashes, letting loose a flood from the clouds, and everyone runs to their cars except for the minister and a groundskeeper and my father and me. We get the hole filled in, muddying our suits, and then my dad and I get into his Buick and turn on the radio.  

A series of small tornadoes have been spotted in Story County, a newsreader says, and residents are urged to take shelter. My dad drives us toward the interstate. It’s the wrong way. We’re supposed to be going back into town for a reception at his sister’s house. 

“Where are you going?” I say. 

“It’s your lucky day. You’re about to see your first twister.” 

“Oh, no. Not this bullshit. This is how you lost your goddamn toes.” 

“Didn’t lose any toes, remember? Besides, no snow today.” 

By the time we reach I-35, we can barely see out the windshield, the rain is so heavy. And then, without warning, it lets up completely, giving way to the type of calm that can only be followed by disaster. 

“Shit,” I say. I pull out the pint of Jim Beam I’ve stored under the passenger seat and take a drink. 

“Look at you, you big baby,” my father says. “I remember when you were a little kid. Any time there was a tornado watch, you were down in the basement, hiding under a card table.” 

“And you were never there,” I say. “Mom would beg you to stay inside with us, but you always had to go out and chase the storm.” 

“We all got to find a way to feel alive.” My dad fiddles with the radio, looking for updates, trying to pinpoint the location of the funnel cloud. He pulls off on an exit ramp, and soon we’re on a gravel road. 

We pass the whiskey back and forth. 

“I need to know,” I say. “When you left us, how were you able to do it?”

“This again? I told you, I’m not saying I’m sorry.” 

“I don’t want an apology,” I say. “I want your advice. I don’t think I can have this baby with Liz. I need to find a way out.” 

“Well, hell,” my father says. “There ain’t no trick to leaving. You just pack your bags and go.” 

And that’s it. I’ve been building up the decision to leave, but all it takes is the courage to act like a coward. I envy my father for it. I want to shed my responsibilities like snakeskin. I want to disappoint everyone I’m supposed to love and never have to say I’m sorry. 

“Dad,” I say. “I forgive you.” 

He steps down on the accelerator, hard. We’re going sixty miles an hour, then seventy, then eighty. Gravel pings off the bottom of the car, and we’re fishtailing so badly that I’m sure we’ll end up in the ditch. My dad turns up the volume on the radio. 

The country blocks are half a mile long, and my dad drives east for a block, then north for a block, and then east again, zigzagging toward the spot where the radio says we’ll find the tornado.

Eventually he pulls over at the top of a small hill. The land is flat for miles around on all sides, with only an occasional grain silo or farmhouse breaking the horizon. At first I don’t even see the tornado. It’s way off in the distance, and it looks motionless, just a skinny brown tube connecting the earth to the sky. 

My dad gets out of the car and opens the trunk. He takes out an ancient camcorder for himself and hands me a disposable camera with a dozen exposures remaining. 

“See if you can get some good pictures,” he says. 

I snap a couple of photos while my dad sits on the hood of the car filming. In the viewfinder, the tornado looks as thin as a needle. 

“This isn’t so scary,” I say. 

“Not if you know what you’re doing,” he says.

After a few minutes, the funnel cloud begins moving slowly toward us, until it’s winding its way through the barren cornfield below the hill. The tornado is less than a half-mile from us now, and I see that it isn’t tiny at all. It’s a tower of wind and dirt and debris, maybe a hundred feet tall and twenty feet wide. But still, somehow I’m not scared. The funnel cloud advances a little, and then scoots back again shyly, flirting with us. 

“All right,” my dad says, shutting off the video camera. “Time to pack up. We don’t want to be standing here when that cloud comes through.”  

But instead of getting in the car, I run through the ditch and into the field, toward the cloud, snapping photos and rewinding the film like a madman, taking pictures over the already-used exposures. My dad yells at me to come back, but I just turn around and run backwards and snap his picture, and then I turn again and keep jogging, drunken and unsteady, toward the tornado. 

The wind rips through me, peppering my face and arms and chest with dirt and tiny rocks, but I keep running. My father’s voice has disappeared into the howl of the storm. The tornado is a hundred yards away from me now, and I chase after it, but it curves away from me in a wide, lazy arc. Then it comes to a surreal standstill. I stand with my hands on my knees, panting, trying to catch my breath. The tornado doesn’t move. It seems to be waiting for me, daring me to come closer. 

I take a step forward and pick up a rock. I throw it as hard as I can, but it doesn’t even make it halfway to the cloud. I take another step. The wind, already fierce, becomes even more intense for an instant, and I fear I’ll be lifted off my feet. 

If I don’t leave now, something bad will happen. I know this. I can see it in my mind, a brick hitting me in the head, my knees buckling, my face landing in the dirt. But then I see what happens next. I’ll wake up in the hospital, bandaged and medicated. Liz will be there, holding my hand. My father will bring me whiskey, and my name will be in the newspaper. No one will care how reckless I’ve been, as long as I’m all right. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to ruin my life. There will always be somebody there to pick up the pieces. 

I walk a little more toward the funnel cloud, straining against the wind, shielding my eyes from the dust. I get within eighty yards, seventy, sixty. I pick up another rock to throw, and when I let go, it lifts from my hand like a balloon.

.