Gateways

The big question: Stay in the boat or get out? In the boat seemed worse than being in a trailer. They were too exposed; if that fu

Jack was looking around too.

“Let’s dump the boat!” he shouted over the growing roar.

“And go where?”

He pointed to the right. “I saw something over there.”

Tom squinted through the rain and darkness. A flash revealed the dark splotch of a willow thicket sitting like an island in the saw grass sea. The willows tended to be small in these thickets, little more than a dozen feet tall. They’d provide some shelter, something to hold on to without worrying it would crush them if it toppled over.

A glance in the opposite direction showed the tornado even closer.

“Let’s do it!” Tom shouted.

“What about gators?”

“If they’re smart they’re on the bottom of the deepest cha

He didn’t mention snakes. He had no idea what snakes did in weather like this. He hoped they didn’t head for higher ground…like hummocks and thickets…

Jack jumped out of the canoe, Tom followed. The water was thigh high in the cha

Lightning lit their way as they sloshed toward the thicket, Jack in the lead, while the roar of the twister grew behind them…no, not behind them…to the left…

A flash revealed the swaying, writhing fu

Then again, after all he’d seen today…

“Crawl in here!” Jack shouted as they reached the thicket. His voice was barely audible over the roar of the onrushing fu

Tom dropped to his hands and knees as he ducked into the leafy mesh, feeling ahead of him in the dark until he found a sturdy-feeling trunk maybe six inches across.

“You take this one!” he shouted to Jack who was close behind. “I’ll take the next.”

He heard a garbled protest from Jack but kept moving. Half a dozen feet farther on he found another, more slender trunk, maybe half the size of the first. He dropped prone and wrapped his arms around it. His lungs struggled for air. God, it was good to lie still. He felt his heart ramming at his chest wall as he lay in the mud.

“You okay, Jack?” he shouted. He could barely hear himself above the tornado’s roar. “Jack?”

That roar…it had to be at least an F2…any higher, they were goners.

Frantic, he looked around for Jack and saw nothing but darkness. And then the tree began to shake and the ground to tremble; he ducked his head against the wind and the saw grass blades whistling through the underbrush like knives.

Thank God they weren’t trying to weather this back at the lagoon. The flying debris from the boats and the huts would be lethal. Here it was only grass and mud and water. Not that any of that would matter if the fu

The wind scythed at him from all angles as he clung to the trunk. He could hear the twister grinding through the saw grass on the far edge of the thicket, roaring like a freight train—he’d always heard tornado survivors describe the sound that way, and now he knew it was true…like a train…in a tu

Tom felt the underbrush around him being twisted and yanked from the mud. And then his tree started to tilt, first to the left, then the right, then—

Dear God, it was coming out of the ground, ripping free of the mud, rising into the air!

Tom had to let go or rise with it. As he released his grip the willow ripped free with an agonizedcrunch and sailed off. He tried to cling to the rootlets left in the hole but the deluge of water made them slick and they slipped through his fingers. Then he felt his legs lift as he was pulled backward. He clutched for grass or weeds or ferns—anything!—but they came free in his grasp. His body angled off the ground and he clawed at mud that had no more consistency than beef stew. He was losing his last contact with the ground when he felt a hand grab his right ankle and yank him down.

Jack!

Another set of fingers wound around his left ankle and started hauling him backward. He heard Jack’s enraged voice shouting above the storm.

“You got away with this once, but not again. No fucking way!”

Who was he talking to? The twister? But he’d said “again.” Tom doubted Jack had ever even seen a twister, let alone dealt with one. Who, then?

He’d worry about that later. Right now he wanted to know how Jack was hanging on. If both hands were holding Tom, who was holding Jack?

He felt one of Jack’s hands grab his belt and haul him farther back. Tom craned his neck to look over his shoulder and saw that Jack had locked his legs around a willow trunk. He kept dragging Tom back until he could wrap his arms around the larger tree.

And with that…the roaring began to fade. After brushing the thicket, the twister was moving on, probably carving a new cha

Jack rolled away from the tree and lay on his back.

“Thought I was going to lose you there, Dad.”

As his heart regained a normal rhythm, Tom watched Jack lie there with closed eyes as rain pounded his face.

“I thought I was a goner too. Thanks.”

“De nada.”

Nothing? No, it wasn’t nothing. It was something…something very special. He owed his life to Jack.

He couldn’t think of anyone he’d more like to be indebted to.

Tom swallowed the lump in his throat. “Come on. Let’s see if we can find that canoe and get to someplace dry.”

Tuesday

1

“I’ve decided to move back north,” Dad said as Jack packed his duffel bag for the trip home.

Jack studied his face, still bruised from the accident, and weathered from the storm. “You’re sure about that?”

Dad nodded. “Very. I’ll never be able to look at Anya’s house without remembering what…what we saw there…what happened to her. And I can’t see me ever looking out my front door at the Everglades without thinking of the other night…all that blood spilled, especially Carl’s…and that sinkhole and the things that came out of it. And the storm, that tornado…” He shook his head. “We damn near died out there.”

“But we didn’t,” Jack told him. “That’s all that counts.”

It hadn’t been easy getting back. The canoe had been far enough from the twister to come through in one piece, but the subsequent battle through the storm had been an ordeal. With the smaller cha

Monday had been spent recuperating. Muscles Jack didn’t even know he had protested every time he moved. The groundsmen—sans Carl—were out in force cleaning up the mess left by the storm. They must have seen Anya’s shredded screen door but probably attributed it to the storm.

Late in the afternoon, after the crews had finished for the day and no one was about, Jack and his father buried Anya’s remains in her garden, among the plants she’d loved. Since she kept pretty much to herself, no one had discovered yet that she was missing.

Jack dug a two-foot hole in the wet soil—deeper than any dog or coon would go—and then Dad reverently placed the quarter-folded skin within. He’d chosen not to wrap it in anything. Better to let it decompose quickly and recycle its nutrients back to her plants.