Nothing Better To Do - a novel in stories - Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

Spring rain is sweet, like spoiled milk, but autumn rain is acrid, tainted with the tannic acid of dry leaves, angry red over the season of their demise. In early fall, cold dry fronts slide down from Canada, bumping up against the blistering humid heat of the heartland. The conflict takes place over the middle states. The people of Serena, Ohio consider themselves lucky at such a time, if all that results is thunder and rain. But sometimes they are not so lucky and the outcome is a tornado, or two, or three. In the spring of 1975, three twisters crossed paths and linked up, forming one large unusual tornado with winds that behaved with more than the ordinary fury. It leveled much of Serena. Twenty-five years later, a single funnel, which at times measured force four on a scale of five, followed almost the same path as its ancestor, reminding the folks of Serena, once again, of their mortality. This one was of the autumn variety.

The past night, and again in the morning, there was long rolling thunder, the bowling alley kind, in true stereophonic sound. Thunder had never particularly bothered Harry Kresge before. He figured his chances of getting struck by lightning were about the same as his chances of winning the lottery. But ever since the tornado which touched down about a quarter mile from his house, then tore a straight line path, diagonally from Southwest to Northeast Serena, taking out a Walmart, a Chinese restaurant, four churches, about a hundred houses, an IGA supermarket and dozens of barns and silos, any thunder which moved from point A to point B was potentially that freight train of which he had been warned. Kresge was nervous, not that the experience had touched him in a personal way, much more than if he and Jenny and the kids had still been living in New York.

It had been early in the evening on a Wednesday, two weeks before. They had just returned from shopping. The weather reports had warned of thunder showers, but that was nothing unusual for Southwestern Ohio. A cold front was moving in, but it hadn't been particularly hot. Harry remembered thinking that this didn't seem like tornado conditions, not that anyone had brought up the idea of tornados. It was something that had occurred to him on his own. But there was something weird about the sky. The clouds were grayer than usual.

On the drive home, there had been distant thunder and an occasional flash in the far-off clouds. Drops started to appear on the windshield just before they got to their driveway. "Get the perishables into the house first," Harry told Jenny and the kids. We can leave the other stuff until it stops raining."

They had brought home fresh salmon for their dinner. Jenny immediately started it in the electric oven, hoping to finish it before they lost power. Outages during thunder storms had been a common occurrence in three months since they had moved to Serena.

The thunder and lightening moved closer. The lights flickered briefly. A few minutes later they flickered again, only this time it felt like they almost lost them. Harry went for the computer. He was trying to power down when nature finished the job for him. "Shit!" he muttered. "I hope the computer wasn't damaged."

It was the start of dusk, but with the heavy cloud cover it was getting dark early. Harry found some candles and lit them.

"How long will the power be off?" asked Amy, Jenny's teenage daughter.

"How would I know?" Harry was annoyed. All this kid could think about was television and signing on to AOL to chat with her friends from New York. "It could be a few minutes or it could be a few days."

"Oh, that's just great. And what am I supposed to do without electricity?" As usual, she acted as if it were Harry's fault.

"In the past these power failures have lasted for a couple hours. One of the transformers was probably struck by lightening. That's what usually happens. Beyond that, I can't tell you anything."

Jenny's little boy looked out into the back yard. He was looking up at the utility pole by the back fence. "Why don't you call them to come and fix it?"

"No, Bill, it's not that one. It's probably another one, somewhere in the neighborhood." Harry looked out the front window to see if there were any lights in other houses on the street. There weren't.

The salmon had only been in the oven for about five minutes before the power went off. Harry ventured out into the rain and moved the charcoal grill under the eaves. He removed the cover and squirted lighter fluid on the dead coals that were left-over from the last time they grilled. He lit them with a wooden match and covered them again. He came back into the house. "It'll take about twenty minutes for them to heat up enough. Then we can move the salmon onto the grill and I'll put the cover on it. That should do it."

"Oh Harry, don't even bother! It will come out lousy." Jenny was skeptical any time Harry fired up the barbecue.

"I'm not going to waste fifteen dollars worth of salmon."

"Don't be so cheap."

Harry thought about that for a minute. He had never been a cheapskate. No one would ever have accused him of that, back in New York. That was partly what got him in trouble. But when he bolted with only a moderate grub-stake, he had made up his mind to mend his spending ways - to watch his money. In the short time he had lived alone in a cheap one-room apartment in the north end of town, he had cultivated the habit of conserving, especially food. Then Jenny tracked him down and insisted on joining him. By then, she had figured out that he didn't have much money. Now that she was supporting him, he felt a responsibility to conserve her assets as well. He was ever mindful that she had the two kids to look out for.

The salmon seemed to take forever. Using the old coals wasn't such a hot idea, but Harry wasn't about to admit it. By the time he adjudged the fish to be done, they were all hungry. They ate by candle light. Even Jenny had to admit it was good, but only grudgingly. "When you're hungry, anything tastes good."

"What are we going to do now, Harry?" the girl demanded. "This sucks!"

"I don't know. I think it's kind of fun. Hey, at least Snake can't bother us with his stereo."
Harry took a flashlight into the bedroom and located a small transistor radio. He turned it on and set it on the coffee table in the living room.

"Put on Z-93!" the girl demanded.

Harry was having trouble settling on any station with the tiny dial, much less locating a particular station.

"Let me try!" She grabbed the radio and played with the dial.

Finally she located a strong signal. They were running a commercial so it was hard to tell which station it was. Then the announcer came on. "We are taking you back to our reporter in Serena, where one person has been killed and another one hundred have been hospitalized in a scene reminiscent of the big one of 1975.

That was the first they had heard that they had just been missed by a tornado. It had been about two hours since the lights had gone out. They had consumed a candle-lit meal of salmon stuffed with crab meat, washed down with white wine, while ambulances and rescue workers were working frantically to save lives. The reports from scenes around town were being phoned in from cells phones. Each horror the callers reported was worse than the last.
"This is boring," the girl complained. "Put on Z-93!"

***

The thunder stopped about the time Harry got out of bed and started the coffee. What was it Hank Pitts had told him..? He tried to remember. It had something to do with Indian folklore - something about the weather.