Chapter 30
Iadjust my rearview mirror to check myself out. My face looks like a wet tomato. I wipe my eyes and nose down with my sleeve until I look presentable enough to reenter Roland's bedroom. He's back at his computer and watches me step to the side of his bed and sit.
“I read your essay. I have what you're looking for. I have video of the tornado. Raw footage.”
He looks me in the eyes for the first time, but still doesn't say anything.
“Because I'm the boy they found in the tree. I'm from Vernendal. So are you still going to ignore me?”
He blinks nervously. The pencil in his hand goes still.
“Guess so. See you later.”
“That's why you have that scar?” he says at the last second.
I yank out my phone and enter that dark corner in the cloud that's held the video all these years. A video I was too afraid to acknowledge, even just to delete it.
“The part about the tornado looking like ghosts dancing is true,” I say as he watches, enraptured. “My house, gone. My family. Vernendal wasn't reduced to a war zone; it was erased.”
“How did you survive?” he asks.
“I ask myself that every day. We didn't even get a tornado watch, never mind a warning. Nobody had a clue anything was coming.”
“I know,” Roland says.
“Your dream is not dead. You could still become a meteorologist and help people. There's nothing stopping you from doing that.”
He hangs his head. Without thinking, I blurt out a suggestion.
“What if I took you there? To ground zero. If that would help your project, that is. It's a three-hour drive, east of San Antonio,” I say.
Why did I do that? I haven't been back there since that night. I can't believe I'm saying this.
“I wouldn't want you to relive that,” he says.
I point to my face. “You think I don't relive it every day?
I die inside every time I hear a crack of thunder.
I have to look at my aunt, who hates me, and remember why I'm a burden on her in the first place. If I could take you there and give you firsthand experience looking at the damage, that would make your project more meaningful. You can also use my video.” I pause before adding, “And it would make me happy to see you happy.”
“I'm sure everything is rebuilt now anyway.”
“Developers buy the land but never do anything with it, so it's been untouched. Nobody wants to live on top of a graveyard. Especially if history repeats itself,” I say. “Anyway, do you have plans for tomorrow?”
___________
The countryside in Texas is an assortment of rolling hills decorated with little farm equipment shops, churches made of corrugated sheet metal, gas stations with food stops, and adult video stores.
Seeing a Cracker Barrel or a Buc-ee's is as certain as seeing cattle.
The entire freeway is flanked by telephone poles and wires.
The grass is green with a tinge of November yellow.
This is all capped by the delicious odor of methane, which is a slight improvement over the smell in Oyster Pit.
I stop at an Exxon to fill up my tank. It's nice and dry outside, but still too warm for my taste. Christmas music is already playing on the speakers, and it's not even Thanksgiving yet. Roland is asleep in his wheelchair, but he wakes when I shut the door.
“Sorry,” he says. “Making up for lost sleep. At night I get stomach spasms. That's why I take the gabapentin.”
Thirty miles later, I make a turn onto an unkempt road that makes my hands shake as I grip the wheel.
From afar, you can see the speckles of empty slabs over the land and concrete steps leading to nowhere.
The Shadow Oaks monument is still a pile of rubble.
The queasiness in my stomach is compounded by the van bumping over large patches of missing asphalt that was stripped away by the tornado.
“This must be what it feels like to visit the Titanic,” Roland says, taking a series of photos through the window with his phone.
I park on the side of the road and help him out of the van.
He wheels across the torn gravel and grass beside me without slowing down—the kind of upper body strength that won him all those trophies on his wall.
I guide him to my old house among the graveyard of concrete foundations that were cracked and even pulled up from the earth.
Grass and weeds have grown in between the gaps.
Shredded underground plumbing, sucked up from the intensity of the winds, peeks out of the ground.
The foundation bolts on every side were sheared clean.
Trees have regrown their bark and leaves. There are reminders of the storm, like a license plate embedded in a trunk like a tattoo.
The sky is a brilliant light blue, with rows of peaceful-looking clouds stretched out in a line, moving patiently. It's hard to believe this is the same sky that unleashed something so viciously evil on the land.
“All this open space out here, and it had to hit the fucking town,” I say.
“The pictures of the damage are bad enough,” Roland says. “Being out here gives me a whole different idea of the scale of it. I guess we don't think about this stuff when we're watching people chase tornadoes in their cars.”
Not many people thought about it, period. The president wanted more good news about the country and less bad news, so most of the media attention that week went to a sighting of Jesus in a golden retriever's fur.
“I woke up in the hospital two days later with a concussion, a punctured lung, broken ribs, and a cracked sternum.
Gashes all over my body and face. Soil and grass in my ears, eyes, nose, and throat.
A big chunk of my back sandblasted. It felt like I was being sprayed with a giant pressure washer hose.
I still have glass and other shit falling out of my skin to this day. ''
I tug my shirt up and roll my pants up to show him the scars all over my back and legs.
“A group of first responders pulled me out of an ash tree, naked, covered in dirt and blood, and tangled in my dad's Christmas decorations. There wasn't a single leaf left. All the bark had been sucked off. I probably wouldn't be here if it weren't for Santa and his reindeer guarding me.”
“Where did they find your parents?” Roland asks.
“They didn't,” I say. His unblinking gaze locks with mine. The breeze fills his silence and teases his hair. “Or my friend Tramel and his family. They didn't even find my dad's truck or my mom's SUV. The wind made everything… gone.
“My grandma and aunt would never talk about what they knew, but I saw the local news…
about how the winds and debris were unsurvivable.
About the search and recovery team. What they saw.
They didn't know if something was human or animal.
Two men from the Red Cross fainted. I can't think of the word ‘meat' now without gagging.”
A geyser of memories starts to hit me. The moment Dinah had her arms around me at the hospital, whispering, “You sweet boy. You poor, poor sweet boy,” through her bawling. That, and when she went straight-up guard dog on a news reporter who tried to sneak into the room.
That didn't last very long, of course. At the funeral, Dinah went on a tirade about how the government seeded a violent tornado that went in the opposite direction a tornado usually goes and hit a populated area so they could distract the public from whatever scandal they had currently been trying to cover up.
She also went on about dark forces at work in the world before my grandma, shaking her head and in tears, had to pull her away from the podium with my help.
The heartbreak my grandma endured, in addition to having to take care of me, was overwhelming.
When she didn't wake up one morning six months later, I couldn't blame her.
“You're so brave,” Roland says. “You survived an EF5 tornado at peak strength. It's like surviving a nuclear blast or a plane crash. There's nothing comparable. You're a special kind of person, Wade. I'm sorry I never realized that.”
My heart flutters. I'm glad I've gotten us to a point where we can communicate openly, and his words flatter me. Still, I feel like an imposter who doesn't deserve this praise.
“Survival feels more like punishment,” I say, and notice the sun starting to set. “Get whatever pictures you need now because it's getting dark.” I'm also going to be super late to Felix's birthday party, but he'll understand. I hope.
By the time we're back in the van, the ignition doesn't start. This shitty old thing.
“No,” Roland says. “Don't tell me we're stranded out here in the middle of nowhere at night.”
Dinah and Clint are not answering their phones. I have no choice but to ask Felix, who picks up right away. I never call him without texting him, so that's how he knows it's an emergency.
“I'm kind of in a situation. The van needs a jump,” I say.
“My party is about to start. Where are you?”
“Not close. Vernendal,” I say, bracing myself for his reaction in the silence that follows.
“You went back there?” he asks.
“I know, I know. I can explain later. I'm sorry. Can you please come?”
Over two hours later, it's pitch black on the country road. A slasher could be hiding outside the van, and I wouldn't know it.
“Wade,” Roland says, with some apprehension in his voice. “I tried to kill myself. After the accident. My parents threw me into a hospital and had them deal with it.”
I nod at him.
“I'm glad you're here,” I say. “You deserve to be alive and happy.”
“I don't deserve anything,” he says.
“Stop acting like you're the worst person on earth. You want to meet the worst people on earth, I'll invite you over for dinner sometime.”
“I was obsessed with canceling your musical. All that time, I was flirting with some guy I met through a DM. He invited me over to his house and told me to go through his window. That's when…”
I can't listen anymore, especially since I know more than he does about that night. “You don't have to tell me anything if you don't want to.”
“I do.”
“Then let me tell you something. Felix and I are… also, you know. We are well aware of what it's like to be scared to talk about it.”
“Honestly? Everybody thinks you're a couple anyway.”
I'm too tired to be shocked or intrigued by that response. Hell, I wish Felix thought that way.
“No,” I say.
“I've tried so hard to make it go away,” Roland says. “Now I know I'm stuck like this forever, like I'm stuck in this wheelchair forever.”
“I'm stuck in my own broken body forever. So we're stuck together, okay?”
___________
Felix eventually pulls up and brings a long cable out of his trunk.
“Hi, Felix,” Roland says.
“Oh, he speaks now,” Felix says to me. “Happy birthday to me,” he sings to himself in a forlorn voice as he attaches the cables to my engine. Working his Felix magic, he gets my van started in less than five minutes.
“See you at Buc-ee's?” I tell him.
The face of a smiling beaver in a cap greets us as we park at Buc-ee's to fill up my tank and my stomach, which has been eating itself for the past two hours.
The parking lot is full of hustle and bustle, with people charging their electric cars or walking their dogs in the grassy area beyond the curb.
I push Roland to the entrance, zigzagging around crumbles of horse manure scattered all over the lot.
Inside is a madhouse of people. Felix goes to join the long bathroom line while I snag some Beaver Nuggets made out of corn puffs. Roland peruses the beef jerky aisle.
At the checkout counter, a smiling old lady greets me and runs my food over the scanner.
“Have a good night, sugar.”
When you watch movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you get the idea that people in the countryside are terrifying. Really, they're the nicest people—nicer than anybody in Oyster Pit. I almost forgot about that.
At the entrance, Felix waits.
“Are you in love with him or something?” Felix asks, turning down my offer of snacks.
“Give me a break,” I say. “These Beaver Nuggets are good. You sure you don't want one?”
He ignores me. “You said you would never come back here. You won't even talk to me about what happened, but you let Roland into our lives and suddenly you're an open book.”
“Roland is working on a paper about the tornado. I brought him to my old house to take pictures of the damage and use me for an interview. I'm giving him unprecedented access. I owe him that.”
“You got him talking again. I'll give you that.”
“Look,” I whisper. “He trusts me enough now to tell me he's gay. I'm making good headway with him.”
“Because he's alienated everybody else by being a hypocrite who says horrible things about other people.”
“That's not fair, Felix. After everything that's happened—the accident and the movie—the least I can do is help him in any way I can,” I say.
“Until what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Until you feel better about yourself? He's in that wheelchair forever. Anyway, gonna head straight home now and hit the sack since my party ended before it began.”
“We're still filming next weekend, right?” I ask. He nods and disappears beyond the crowd outside.
I ruined his birthday. There's no easy save here. Instead of setting myself up to be open with Felix, I'm pushing him away.