Deborah E. Kennedy - Tornado Weather

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To Joyce and David Kennedy

One dog yelping at nothing will set ten thousand straining at their collars.

JAPANESE PROVERB

But fish do not build cathedrals.

JACQUES COUSTEAU

(May)

Fikus pulled up to the corner of Hate Henry Road and Rocky Way and flipped on the ambers. The crossing bar swung out and nearly hit a feral dog scooting its way through gravel to the other side. Damned cur, he thought. Damned nuisance. Better not bite her.

Daisy! You ready back there?

He found her in the rearview, giving him a thumbs-up. My God she was cute. So cute it hurt Fikuss gut a little to look at her. Those dimples. Those crooked front teeth.

Prepare for flight! he said, and grabbed the remote that worked the wheelchair lift.

In the Bottoms, the cottonwood seeds were flying, pushed by a hard wind from the east. Dry snow. Christmas in May. It wouldnt be dry for long. There were thunderheads gathering into knobby purple towers over the county dump. Lightning flickered between the clouds like childrens flashlight beams. Secret signals, Fikus thought. The day had turned eerie. Tornado watch. Strange green sky. Lilacs, gust-bent and fragrant, growing over the old Udall places garage, focused on him with the strange concentration of a periscope. When Fikus was a kid, Willa Udall slaughtered pigs there and made homemade sausage in her bathtub. Now the house was haunted, or so some said, with the ghosts of the pigs and the poor deceased Udalls. Hard to tell them apart, said the believers. The people and the pigs. The Udalls always did have squat noses.

Fikus hopped out of the bus and watched as Daisy rode the platform down to the street. The white swirled around him. A cottonwood seed landed on his tongue and he stuck it out at her. Then he swallowed the thing and patted his stomach. Mmm-mmm good.

Ewwww, Daisy said, scrunching up her nose. Youre gonna grow a tree inside you.

Mayhaps a whole forest. And then Ill spit it out, oh, I dont know, just here He poked her tummy. Something hard hung there. Metallic, felt like. Bejeweled. He spied a chain around her neck. She cupped the necklace or whatever it was and laughed. He tickled her chin and she laughed again. See? She wasnt scared of him. He was forbidden from touching the children but did it anyway because it was an idiotic rule and he wasnt hurting anyone. Leave that to the priests and the perverts, he thought. And then youll have a woods for your belly button. What about that?

No thank you.

You know your neighborhood used to be all trees? That was the Bottoms, back in the day. Prettiest, wildest place in all of Colliersville, Indiana. Trees and Indians. Indians and trees. As far as the eye could see. Now look at it. Three streets toppling into the river. Sad.

Indians? Daisy asked.

The wind whipped up more cottonwood seeds, drove candy wrappers down the street. The little dog sat down under an oak ten feet away. He licked a sore spot on his leg, then raised his nose in the air and howled.

Native Americans, he hollered at Daisy, who had clapped her hands over her ears. Feathers, not dots.

The dog stopped howling and lay down in a pile of white fluff.

What happened? Daisy asked.

To the trees or the Indians? Fikus said, although it amounted to the same thing.

The Indians, she said.

Oh, well

Tell me. Please.

Fikus took a deep breath. It wasnt a pretty story and the bus was idling. But he couldnt tell her no. That face. That voice. He should have had a child when there was still a chance.

So, this young chief, he started, braids down to his ankles, decides to steal this Englishmans daughter, right? There was a fort on the river, you know, where that barge sank a few summers back.

Fikus! It was Tiara, Fikuss eleven-year-old neighbor. She was halfway out the bus window, a scowl on her sharp face. Whats taking so bleeping long? Im worried about Murphy.

Whos Murphy? Fikus asked. Had a kid from someone elses route snuck on the bus when he wasnt watching? It wouldnt surprise him. His bus was a madhouse.

The fish I won today in the spelling bee duh, Tiara said. I want to get him home and in the tank before he dies. Or before we all die in a goddamned tornado.

Gimme a minute, Tiara.

Fine, she said. She showed him her skinny right wrist clad in an oversize plastic watch. One minute. Im counting.

Fine, Fikus said back.

So Daisy prompted.

So, Fikus said. Where was I?

There was an Englishmans daughter and a fork.

A fort. Doesnt matter. Anyway, the Englishman goes crazy. Just insane, thinking his beautiful daughters going to be deflowered by this savage longhair, and he gathers up a militia. The Englishman and his cohorts are kind of a ragtag bunch. Theyve got arrows, some rusty muskets, and only one cannon, but theyre determined. They think Gods on their side, so they hump it over to the Indian camp and they let loose. They go crazy. They turn those teepees to tatters, into toilet paper. They burn. They rape. They pillage. They hang men, women, and children from the nearest tree. They take moccasins and put them on their own smelly feet. Its a slaughter, and when its all over, they chuck the bodies into the Ranasack. He took a deep breath. The end.

Daisy wasnt looking at him. She seemed to be thinking. Rain began to fall in big, cold drops and her wheelchair got a sheen to it. Whats deflowered mean?

Oh, well, Fikus said, its just a saying.

But what does it mean?

Forget it. My point is, the Bottoms is where they killed all the Indians. The grounds soaked with their blood. Anything you grow here, grass, rhododendrons, dandelions, cucumbers, is seething with sin.

Fikus was trying very hard to be a more spiritual person. Hed been raised a Lutheran, but his mother and fathers starched faith and the stiff services they took him to as a child did nothing to expand his world or his understanding of it. Now, in late middle age, he hoped to discover new sides to the story, to find out that everythingfrom human action to the prevailing wind currents to the soil and the life that sprang from itwas connected. Maybe even in a cosmic way. There were books on Buddhism, Sufism, the New Age movement, and Hinduism waiting for him back home. Not that hed been able to get very far in them yet. His nightly routine usually left only enough time for a quick dinner, followed by whiskey, a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and bed, which wasnt really bed, since he slept in his recliner, but he hoped to do better. He had goals.

Are daisies seething with sin? Daisy asked.

Oh, I dont know about that. Fikus had gone too far. He was always going too far.

But my homes haunted. Daisys eyes were fixed on his face now. Thats what you meant.

This land is full of ghosts, just full of them.

Where you live, did they kill the Indians there, too?

Fikus considered the question. Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park was up the hill and around the corner from the Bottoms. It was not, as far as he knew, the scene of an Indian slaughter, but it might as well be. The misery that went on there. It warranted its own monument. We killed the Indians everywhere, sweetie. Especially in Indiana. Ironic, isnt it?