Heavy Weather

"What?"

"I was three, she was eight. I'd been coughing a lot, at the time. I think it got on her nerves."

Carol stared at him a long time, then rubbed her reddened eyes with her thumbs. "Well, you're just going to have to forgive her that."

"I forgive her, Carol. Sure. For your sake." Alex climbed up onto the workbench and lay down flat on his back. He pulled a narrow translucent hose from his jeans pocket and a flat packet of anesthetic paste. "Here, take this and screw it on that threading on the end of the jug."

"Wow, this jug is hot."

"Yeah, I kept it out in direct sun today, it's pretty damn close to blood heat."

"I can't believe we're actually doing this."

"My whole life is just like this." Alex tilted his head back and practiced relaxing his throat. "Do you have any idea how deep Jerry is into her? I mean, financially?"

"I think he's pretty much wiped her out, Alex. Not that he wants to do that, but he just doesn't care about anything except hacking storms."

"Well, don't tell anybody. But I've made Juanita my sole heir. I think that'll probably help the Troupe some. A lot, really."

Carol hesitated. "That was a pretty dumb thing to tell me. I'm a Trouper, too, y'know."

"It's all right. I want you to know."

"You really do trust me, don't you?"

"Carol, I think you're the only actually good person here. One of the few truly good people I've ever met. Thank you for helping me. Thank you for looking after me. You deserve to know what's going on, so I told you, that's all. I'm probably go

He opened the packet of anesthetic paste, smeared it with his smart-gloved fingers over the nozzle of the tubing, and then, with a single gesture that took all the courage he had, deliberately shoved it down his own throat. He successfully avoided the back of his tongue, felt it fficker down his sore and swollen larynx, down through the beating center of his chest. He'd nerved himself to do this, maybe even to talk, but as the anesthetic kicked in. all the strength flew out of him like an exploding covey of quail, and left him empty and cold and sick.

Then the fluid came. Are you a good swimmer, Alex? It was cold. It was too cold, it was cold as death, cold as the red Laredo clay. A great rippling belch burst out of his lungs. He heaved for air, eyes bulging in panic, and felt a great interior tide of the stuff slide through his tubercles, a deadly, crazy, cold amoeba. His teeth clamped on the hose, he panicked, he sat upright. Liquid shifted inside him like a strong kick to a half-empty beer keg, and he began coughing convulsively.

Carol stood there with the jug still clutched in her arms, the picture of disgust and terror. Alex pulled the hose, pulled the hose, pulled the hose, like a hateful battle with some deadly tapeworm, and finally it came free, in a frothy spew. Carol jumped back as the jug kept siphoning, the hose trailing and spewing, and Alex kept coughing. His lungs felt like bloody foam rubber.

He stood up. He was extremely weak. But he was still conscious. He was half-full of lung-enema fluid, and he was still conscious. He was carrying the weight of it around inside him like some kind of obscene gestation.

He tried to talk, then. He faced Carol and moved his mouth and a sound came out of him like a drowning raccoon and his mouth filled with great crackling sour bubbles.

Something inside him broke, then, and it really started to hurt. He fell to his knees, doubled over, and started venting the stuff across the bubblepak floor. Great deadly vomitous gouts of it, a huge insupportable fizzing bolus. His ears rang. I-Iis hands were spattered with it. It was all over his clothes. And he still wouldn't, couldn't pass out.

It was starting to feel good.

Carol stared at him in disbelief. All the fluid was draining from the jug, trickling relentlessly from the hose. Shut it off, shut it off, he gestured, making a drowned gobbling noise, and then another fit of the coughing seized him, and he made another long, blackening, agonized swoop toward collapse.

Some moments later he felt Carol's arms locked around him. She sat him up, propping him against the leg of the table. She looked into his face, checked his eyelid with her thumb, her broad-cheeked face pale and grim. "Alex, can you hear me?"

He nodded.

"Alex, that's arterial blood. I've seen it before. You're hemorrhaging."

He shook his head.

"Alex, listen to me. I'm go

Alex swallowed hard. "No," he whispered. "I won't go, you can't make me. Don't tell. Don't tell. I'm getting better."

CHAPTER 9

By June 15 it was obvious to the veriest wa

Everyone with the least trace of common sense had battened down, packed up, and/or evacuated. But the sensible evacuees did not begin to match the raw demographic numbers of people without any common sense, who had come swarming in an endless procession of trailers, chartered buses, and motorized bicycles. Oklahoma had become an instant mecca for heavy-weather freaks. And there were far more of these people than Jane had ever imagined.

After some hesitation, many of the people with sense had shamefacedly returned to ground zero, to make sure that the freaks were not stealing everything. Which, in fact, the freaks were doing, in their jolly, distracted sort of way. Anadarko, Chickashaw, Weatherford and Elk City, their cheaper hotels packed and their city parks full of squatters' tents, had turned into slobbering, good-natured beer busts, punctuated with occasional nocturnal shootings and smash-and-grab raids. The National Guard had been called out to maintain order, but in Oklahoma the National Guard was pretty much always out. The National Guard was one of the largest employers in the state, right up there with crops, livestock, timber, and Portland cement. The paramilitary Guard sold the marauders souvenir T-shirts and Sno-Kones by day, then put on their uniforms and beat the shit out of them by night.

To judge by the frantically enthusiastic local TV coverage, most everybody involved was perversely and frankly enjoying the hysterical, unbearable edge of weather tension. The sky was canary yellow and full of dust, and great fearsome sheets of dry heat lightning crackled all evening, and everything smelled of filth and sweat and ozone, and the people were actively savoring this situation. The drought had simply gone on too long. The people of Tornado Alley had suffered far too much already. They had gone far past fear. They had even gone past grim resignation. By now, the poor bastards were deep into convulsively ironical black humor.

The people trickling in from all over America-including, of course, Mexico and Canada-were a far different crowd of wa

But the current heavy-weather crowd was a different scene entirely, not the weather people Jane was used to, not the ones she had expected. Even though they were in the heart of the continent and long kilometers from any shore, they were much more like your basic modern hurricane crowd.