Jimmy and the Skeletons

 

The last night Jimmy had walked Laura home, it was just a few days before Halloween. The neighborhood was very well decorated and thousands or orange leaves were falling all over the decorations and in the street, making noise when they walked. It was impossible not to walk on orange leaves everywhere, as even the people who raked assiduously could not keep up with the number that had fallen.

But it was the decorations that she remembered the best. Skeletons with blood on them, a bride-scarecrow with blood on her wedding gown, a Santa with his head cut off. People were going all out. There were a lot of the balloons - balloon ghosts, balloon dragons, balloon vampires, that kind of thing. But the scarecrows, handmade people, were a lot more realistic. And whatever they were using for fake blood, or the red blood-appearing subtance on all the clothes, it worked. These exhibits were getting more sophisticated every year.

Jimmy was depressed; she already knew that. It wasn't just that she'd just broken up with him about a week ago. They'd gone over that, her reasons, her need for some space, her need to not be taking care of him just at this point of her life; she was trying to graduate from high school. He was depressed because his parents had apparently failed him. They told him that since he was nineteen, he had to either go to college or get a job, and as he'd made it clear he was pretty much unable to do either one. He couldn't take college, couldn't study, couldn't sit in another single class. As for jobs, yes there were plenty around, but those terrified him. He couldn't bring himself to even apply. Just thinking about it gave him terrible panic attacks.

So his life had become quite uncomfortable, and he didn't quite know what to do about it. He had moments of happiness. He would smile at Laura and tell her she made him laugh. He would say that the days they went together as boyfriend and girlfriend were the best days, the ones he'd always remember. He said that the best thing about high school was the classes they'd been in together though there were only a few of them. As they walked he kicked a few branches in the street and sometimes she'd see in him that boy side of him that she'd known just about forever, and she wondered, what happened, did life take most of his spirit away? What does he mean he can't get a job? Of course he could! He was just terrified of the next step, growing up.

As they walked up the brick street, through the leaves, a car came along facing them and stopped. They recognized Vern, a friend of theirs from high school. Vern was joining the army and leaving in about a week, he said; he'd stopped noisily and rolled down his window to talk to them. He'd decided that his girlfriend, Gwen, would just have to wait back here for him to finish; he'd be in the Army a couple of years. Maybe he'd be able to marry her and bring her along with him, but that was a long shot, he said, and he felt like he was too young to marry. He asked Laura about her plans, but her plans hadn't changed: she wanted to finish high school and go on to be a nurse. He asked Jimmy about his plans, though, and Jimmy was stuck in his tracks. He had absolutely nothing to say. He had no plans. Vern tried asking him if he wanted to join the Army; they could go off to boot camp together. No, the Army held no appeal to him.

To Laura, what she remembered best was not Jimmy's absolute refusal to have a plan, or see any hope, or see anything in his future, but rather the dancing lights on the skeletons in the yard nearby. This particular house had set up a moving light display so that all the tombstones, and the skeletons with their blood and their poses, would be bathed in moving light, and the moving lights danced around them all evening apparently, making a kind of light show for passersby like Laura and Jimmy. Even Vern for a minute seemed to appreciate the amount of work they had done to fix up their yard; it seemed much more elaborate than the Christmas displays of yore or the other kinds of displays that had been a running feature of the neighborhood. Laura wondered if they were trying to get more trick-or-treaters on Hallowe'en night or something, as if the light show might somehow draw them in.

On Hallowe'en night Vern's little brother Adam came around trick-or-treating and told Laura that Jimmy had killed himself, jumped off the Commander Avenue bridge over the interstate, just as Vern was driving by, and Vern himself had hit him. Vern was pretty shook up about it, said Adam, but everyone knew there was nothing he could have done and besides, it was unlikely that Jimmy had even known that it was him coming, as he'd jumped off the bridge. It was a cruel thing to do, the night before Hallowe'en, but Jimmy had done it and Laura hadn't even heard about it until Adam had come around trick-or-treating. She quickly made some calls and found out that it was true. Somehow she'd been left off the "inform immediately" list and the family was still dealing with the shock of the tragedy.

Vern eventually got over it and went off to the Army in three or four days as was his original plan. The problem was, he'd had Gwen with him in the car, and what they'd seen was a horror that they would remember forever. It did some damage to his car, but not much; his car would be alright in the end, and fortunately, traffic on the interstate had not accordioned up and killed anyone else, but it was still a frightening image that Gwen would never be able to live down. Gwen really didn't know Jimmy at all; he was just a guy who fell out of the sky while she was driving with her boyfriend at night.

Laura and Gwen became fast friends, but after a few weeks they stopped talking about it altogether and talked about other things. They each held their last memories of Jimmy close and they had that in common, but the rest of the world seemed to go on as if nothing had happened. Finally snow came, and the leaves blew away or were raked out of the way, so that the town had a peaceful wintery feeling. But the Christmas displays didn't hold a candle to what Laura had seen at Halloween. It was like people just didn't have all the decorating inspiration for the displays, or maybe they were worn out from having gone totally overboard at Hallowe'en. By Christmas and Hannukah, it seemed more like they were ready to hide in their houses until spring, and just keep the light shows to a minimum.

The fall is at its peak right now; the colors of the leaves on the trees are stunning, thought it's nighttime. It's night, and I'm out on my front porch as a storm blows in and brings drizzle, leaves, pollen, you name it, whatever is blowing around in the countryside, that storm is bringing it right in to my porch. But it's not too cold. Halloween is in about a week, but it's a mild storm; if it's bringing in one of those bitterly cold fronts, that is a little further out in the countryside.

The raging winds actually make a kind of rhythm, with all the falling leaves and flags and such flapping around. Someone has a wind chime somewhere - not us - but it goes off in the background as the wind is so intense it's knocking everything around. In my mind I hear these drummers outside a Sox game. They had this gig, and it was a good gig - they set up a bunch of drums on the sidewalk from the parking lots to the stadium, where hundreds of people had to walk right past them, and they got going. There were about four of them, but they knew their drumming. They'd done it before. They were quite good at it. They were fast, and you had to appreciate that.

A good drum exhibition is something to remember. Nowadays my hearing's not great, but I remember more than one drum exhibition. You get these people who are really good at it, and some might just be like those four black kids outside of Comiskey Park. Maybe they get paid for their efforts, maybe not, or maybe not nearly enough. But if they're filling the air with intense rhythms and getting people all stirred up - I for one remember this even forty years down the road.

There was one when I clear the cobwebs from my head, one that stands out from all the rest. This was at a Rainbow Gathering in Enterprise Reservoir, southwestern Utah, summer of maybe 1974. I'd been hitchhiking around the southwest and had found that the heat was overwhelming as it was late June early July. I got to this gathering right around sunset on July 3rd. or maybe it was the 4th, but I was close to heat stroke so someone guided me to some caves where I could get back in the caves, roll out my sleeping bag, and sleep, and that's what I did. There were lots of hippies around but none seemed to mind me and in fact I think they kind of kept their eye on me just to be sure I wasn't tripping out or something. I was just exhausted from traveling, no drugs in the picture. They made sure I had water. I slept for like ten hours.

When I woke up there was this drum circle going on. I'm not sure what time it was. All the hippies were gathered around this big circle out in the center of the caves where there was plenty of room, and they had every imaginable drum out there, and they were all remarkably enough pretty good at it. The drums were intense, and ongoing. It was how I woke up.

Sometimes a drum exhibition can tell you that you've arrived, you're here, you're where you're supposed to be. That's how I felt on that day. Or maybe it was night. I was a little disoriented. But I do know, I was in the right place.

The world is a hostile place. I learned that from hitchhiking in intemperate places like the deserts of southern Nevada and black-slush on-ramps of the northern industrial states. When you get a little companionship, refuge from the hard life, a place off the street, out of the sun, with plenty of water and a bite to eat once in a while, that's all you need to keep going. But you need inspiration too. That's what comes from the drums. The drums reach back into your heartbeat and connect with other living things, so that lots of heartbeats are going at once, and the drums tell you that all life is connected and all heartbeats are really part of the great heart beat. When you feel connected, you have your inspiration, and then you're truly ready to get back in the game.

On this porch I hear the distant train, now. We're in a small town that has trains going in every direction, but they're actually not all that far from my house. The wind has been ongoing; the leaves stirred up by it but, getting wet, they're getting that feeling like they might just be pressing into the grass for the next week or two. When they're really wet, they're less likely to be flying around.

The next-door neighbor's wind chime is odd, though. I'd never even heard it before tonight, but it has a kind of sing-song voice, a little off, not at all in harmony with the wind, kind of like a baby who keeps asking as nice as she can to be picked up by her momma who is way too busy doing some kind of flirtation or something. The wind is a serious pressing urgent business. The wind chime is a kind of irrelevant tangent.

The hot summer days of Enterprise Reservoir are distant history now. The Rainbow people couldn't even remember where they'd held that third of all Rainbow gatherings and placed it somewhere more toward the center of Utah's canyonlands, but that was probably because either they'd had two gatherings that year, and forgot about the one at Enterprise, or more likely, just forgot about its exact location and didn't write down where that gathering was until many years later. I remembered it, very clearly, though, as I've never really been to any other gatherings, and it really was quite unique. This I'll say for those hippies though: they were welcoming, and generous, and gave me what I needed to sustain myself.

Devour That Spaghetti

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He Barked

Mary knew Ingrid from work, but didn't know her well. The time she figured out what had happened to Ingrid was a time she had gone over to Ingrid's house to pick up some documents for work. She had been to Ingrid's house three or four times doing the same thing, but this was the time she knew Ingrid was in trouble. It was a clear day in April. Ingrid answered the door and let her in. Her husband, Mark, stood behind her in the living room, and Max, their dog, was right there to make sure Mary was ok.

Mark was very controlling. It was hard for Mary to figure out how controlling he was, but there were definitely signs that he was too controlling. For one thing, he stayed near Mary and Ingrid at the door and never let Mary get out of his sight. He got Ingrid to bring her the documents without Ingrid and Mary being alone together. Mary had a bad feeling about this. She sensed Ingrid was being held prisoner in some way; the room was very tense. But she was here for a reason, and it wasn't her business.

Mary did not see any bruises on Ingrid, or any signs she was being physically abused. But there was that strange sense that Ingrid would not tell her the whole story, was not free to be honest, and that they would be unable to talk in private. So, at one point Mary looked into Ingrid's eyes questioning whether everything was ok; Ingrid, however, met her gaze without emotion, and didn't say a word. Of course they were being watched.

Mary thought about consent. If this Mark was controlling her, and that was ok with her, and she didn't give any indication that it was a problem, what business was it of Mary's? She had a bad feeling about Mark, and about this situation, but that was just her feeling. Maybe she was superimposing some kind of "problem" onto something that wasn't a problem for Ingrid.

Ingrid spoke German to her dog, Max. Usually it was simple things like "come here" (Kommen Sie) or "get down" (runterkommen) but occasionally she would say other things. One thing Mary had heard her say in previous visits was "He is an evil man," (Er ist ein bosser mensch), but even this was not surprising to her. In previous visits, Ingrid would say that as if she was just expressing herself. Mary was used to this, as she had come by the house several times, and this running conversation with her dog was part of knowing her.

The reason this was important was that Ingrid didn't know that Mary knew German. Ingrid kept up this running conversation with her dog, easily assuming that things she said were for Max's ears only. Even Mark, her husband, probably assumed that she was calling him a boss, and not calling him evil. But Mary, who had actually spent a semester in Germany when she was in high school, had just enough German to know that she was saying "evil," not "boss." She had never told Ingrid that she understood, but she did. And she was generally amused by the conversation, since she liked Ingrid and liked the dog too, and thought this kind of conversation was interesting. She wondered how much of the German the dog actually understood.

As Ingrid spoke to her dog, Mary could see that Ingrid was very isolated. The dog, Mary, Mark, that was her whole world. If she wanted to express herself to anyone, what choice did she have? She went on work-from-home duty at work about six months ago, probably at the urging of Mark, and as far as Mary knew she did not go out much. But since then, the tension in the household had gotten much worse, in Mary's opinion. Things were not good at all, she could tell.

The breaking point on this day was when she said to Max, "Er ist ein bosser mensch! and Max actually made a shrill, quick, loud bark as if to answer "Yes!" Max's response was what actually surprised Mary. Mary knew dogs and knew that dogs had some sense of what you were saying, but were especially sensitive to tone. So in the end it wasn't so important whether Max knew the translation of bosser, but Max did know that this was his opportunity to say something, to make a move, to get Ingrid out of this situation. It worked. Mary noticed. Mary knew when the dog was upset and she knew she had to do something.

Mark, for his part, knew something had gone bad too. Mary figured that probably Mark was beating that poor dog too. Violence is the refuge of the weak, she thought, of those who have the physical or emotional power to commit it, but don't have any other way of asserting control in their life or getting what they wanted. Mary decided right then and there to do something about it.

She told her boss, and her boss decided to call Ingrid in and talk about it. Under pressure, alone and away from home, Ingrid admitted that she was being beaten and needed a way out of the situation, and it was arranged. A women's shelter and a midnight ride to another town were involved. Mary knew very little about it.

Much later, Mark would end up in jail, for some other kind of offense. Ingrid, back in town for another reason, called Mary up, met her for coffee, and thanked her for helping her get out of a terrible marriage. Mark had been like most abusers, she said, nice at first but then increasingly controlling and fixed on violence as a method. She would also admit that the dog had saved her life. Poor Max, she said, had died a short while later, as dogs don't last as long as we do, but if there was one good thing that dog had done, that was it. It was unclear to Mary whether Max had had to be left behind in the midnight escape, or if Max had come along, lived in Ingrid's new home, and had some trouble adjusting. Ingrid had loved Max, though, who was very loyal, and at least seemed to understand every word she said.

Downpour

It was 1999, in a remote Amazonian village where Werner was making a movie. The movie was the story of Juliana, the only survivor of a plane accident on Christmas Eve of 1971, 28 years earlier. Juliana had had a horrific experience, dropping two miles from the sky, but somehow miraculously surviving, and Werner was making a movie about it. Now, after their longest day of filming, he was taking her to dinner.

Dinner, however, was a rustic affair, with the rain pouring down on the tin roofs of the small restaurant in a small Amazonian town. The food was good, and they were both used to Amazonian fare; Juliana in fact lived not too far away and was comfortable in the environment. He had chosen tonight to tell her his secret.

Making the movie had been hard for Juliana, and the rainstorm, or the downpour, was hard on her too. As it happened, it was a combination of being strapped in her airplane seat, coming down through the canopy, and landing right-side-up that had allowed her to live. She had woken up in the rainstorm with numerous broken bones and was entirely alone in the forest for over a week. The hardest part, the part they had filmed today, was the day when she came upon the body of her mother, who had been sitting next to her on the plane. All the other passengers, who also had fallen from two miles strapped to their chairs, had met a much crueler fate than Juliana. It had taken her a while to figure out that she was the only survivor.

Werner knew that, as a filmmaker, he had to handle the situation very delicately. She was in fact very emotional about the whole experience. He had promised to pay her well, and did, as she gave a very useful account of how she felt at each point of the journey, a journey which took her from the forest where she landed, to a small clearing, and from there to a stream, and then to a river landing where some fishermen were able to save her. His movie would show every step, every painful move she'd made.

The rain pounded on the roof of the restaurant and the servers seemed to know that they had something important to discuss, so they backed off a while, having ensured that they were well fed and had plenty of Amazonian coffee. Juliana was actually tough; she had come back to the rain forest to finish her parents' work as a biologist, and had made their base into a kind of reserve. She had been dealing with the psychological trauma of the accident for twenty-eight years, and told Werner that making the film actually helped her deal with the trauma and process it.

There was no real romantic attachment between Werner and Juliana; they were just very good friends, having worked together now for several weeks. Both had families and lives that were somewhat incompatible with each other; Werner, for example, traveled the world making films, while Juliana rarely left her base in the jungle and didn't even really want to. Werner thought, as he looked out the window at the pouring rain, that this might be the most memorable moment of his entire time in the Amazon. Juliana, as he looked at her, was beautiful, strong, and steady; she was the Amazon. She was entirely at home.

His secret was this: on the day of the crash, back on Christmas Eve of 1971, he was due to be on that plane, but he had canceled his flight, by chance, and wasn't on the plane. Of course he'd been riveted to the news when it came out that the plane had been struck by lightning, had blown up two miles up in the air, and had, in the end, only one survivor. He'd been somewhat fixated on the story for much of his adult llfe and now, being successful as a filmmaker, had a chance to explore the whole terrible mess that he had somehow, purely by chance, avoided. He told Juliana this story right as they were eating dinner. He told her how he'd imagined the crash for years and only now had a chance to really find out what had happened.

Juliana looked at him somewhat quizzically; it had never occurred to her, at least in the last twenty-five years or so, that there could be anyone else who could consider themselves a survivor of that accident. But Werner, in a sense, had survived the accident also. True, he had not suffered the way she did, crawling through the mud, getting extremely hungry, following the stream to the river. He had only experienced that much vicariously, by making the movie and by asking her numerous questions about what had happened. But now she had insight into why he was so interested, and it seemed kind of dark to her; like making the movie was laying out the elements of his subconscious fear of what could have been.

There was no question, her week-long ordeal was the worst thing that could have happened to anyone, not to mention a young girl, still attached to her mother, who woke up next to her mother's empty seat in the rainforest and in the rain; then had come upon dead bodies in that rain forest when, starving and depleted, she was trying to walk to safety. People had been staring at her and whispering in her presence, for years, as she was famous for what she'd gone through. Yet she'd come to live with that, and now most of the people in her circle of friends and other biologists, knew not only what she'd been through but also what it had done to her. It was just part of her life and of who she was.

As she talked to Werner, she realized that, for him, it was more of a secret - that he'd barely talked about it at all for twenty-eight years - so that msking the movie was hard for him a completely different way. She complimented him on his ability to bring difficult emotions out in filming. She also told him that he was very good at portraying the Amazon as it really was, without making it worse or better than it was anyway. It was remarkable, he said, watching as the rain died down a little, that she could get so used to its extremes.

Yes, she said, but the hard rain would always make her remember that day, waking up in the chair with all those broken bones. And nobody would ever appreciate a tin roof, or the ability to sit under it, as much as she did. Werner paid their check and they prepared to leave, both, in their own way, thinking of the scenes they had filmed earlier in the day.

(8-22)

I used to take real news stories and turn them into esl exercises. This is the same, but I'm not sure what I'll do with it. It is based on real life, though I have no idea if Werner actually met Juliana in a cafe; the particulars are fiction.

Wheelies

I was moving and had a van full of random furniture - an old table, a couple of chairs, whole sacks of clothes, that kind of thing. This particular move was across our new town, but I wasn't thoroughly versed in the layout of the town, so I got stuck by a train that was going right through the center of it. This train was quite long, but I didn't mind; I looked absentmindedly at the graffiti on the boxcars, trying to read it when I could, and checked my phone. The trains made a very loud noise of metal on tracks such that you couldn't hear anything else. It was like three in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and it was July; it was plenty hot.

A couple of kids were also caught by the train; they were on bicycles, and they were doing wheelies somewhat recklessly in front of.me, using that little flat part of the tracks that isn't technically road but is part of the railroad itself. I felt the arrogance of youth with every one as invariably the wheelie would be right in front of my car; mine was the front car. I felt like telling them it was dangerous, and it would be easy for them to get hurt, and hurt badly. A wheelie is when you go up on the back wheel of your bike and just ride on that wheel alone for a while. I wouldn't want to have a bike go the wrong way right into an oncoming train any time; I did a lot of reckless things in my youth, but that wasn't one of them.

Much as the boys were reckless, and purposely taunting me, I felt, practically daring me to yell out the window something about being careful, as I was in fact the adult on the scene, they were also taunting each other. One was slightly older, maybe fourteen, showed signs of a rough home life, and was especially vicious to his younger partner. He called the younger kid some name like "weasel face" although they were clearly friends riding together. He clearly felt he was better at wheelies since he was doing so many of them, so close to the train, and he was egging the friend on to do more in spite of the obvious risks.

The friend, about twelve with red hair and freckles, seemed like he had a slightly better disposition, but was clearly irritated by the older kid's ruthless taunting. He'd scrunch his face and try to do wheelies that were each slightly more risky than the previous one, although pleasing the older boy was clearly impossible. Somewhere, I thought, these kids have parents who wouldn't approve of this. Somewhere out in the neighborhoods behind me, they would be worrying about their boys out here doing wheelies by the train.

It was an unusually long train, coming from the east, and somewhere in the middle of it were four more engines and another train, all attached, so it was really two long trains, whether those engines were running or not. I watched as car after car, with colorful graffiti displaying urban art and free expression, passed by with deafening noise. The boys continued doing wheelies, mostly parallel to the train going either east or west, as cars piled up behind mine; those other drivers were witnesses, albeit indirect ones, of the wheelie show. On the east side of the road was a sign that said simply "Look," with an arrow pointing both ways beneath it; its message was clearly intended for the drivers.

The older boy, doing a wheelie going east, got to the sign, and leaned in to the far post of the sign, grabbing the sign with his right hand, and bringing his bike back around to go west again. It was really quite a trick, since you can't really steer a wheelie except with your own weight, but he did it, and then shouted, "Try that, weasel face!" at the younger kid. The younger kid, to my right, scrunched his face again, getting ready to try something daring.

But just then, the train ended; the last car crossed and headed off into the west, and it seemed like the loud noise would subside. The younger boy, now right in front of me and on both wheels, pivoted to cross the tracks as fast as he could, and started across. But just then, an eastbound train was arriving at the intersection, also going about thirty miles an hour, and hit him head on. We could hear the metal brakes on the eastbound train as the conductor tried to stop, but it would take him half a mile or more, and the damage was done; he'd killed the boy. That conductor would never live it down; neither would the older boy, probably. It was a mess. Ambulances were called and traffic was bottled up for another several hours while we drivers had to find another way around.

While I was unloading furniture I thought again of the parents of the red-headed boy, and whether they would ever hear the truth about how he came to be in such a hurry to cross the tracks. I felt guilty, of course, for not at least saying something to the kids to put them a little more on guard. Kids tend to think they'll live forever, and aren't any more likely to read a sign than to use it as part of their exhibition. I myself, though, will never see that sign the same way again.

Tornado

The weather was pleasant, so the large window in the classroom was open. But as the class progressed, we could sense trouble out there. Clouds were passing through quickly and there was a kind of electric current in the air. If you live in the midwest you know this is a sign of trouble; the sky becomes the color of a day-old bruise.

My ESL students were from around the world, but they too knew trouble, as if we have a built-in survival instinct; they cast worried glances at the sky and the increasing wind outside the window. Mohammed and Maya had brought some kind of quarrel in at the beginning of class; they were snapping at each other and seemed to be on the edge of a fight. Mohammed was an older guy, from Saudi Arabia, with a wife and two daughters over at the student housing across the woods; Maya was a young Israeli woman, not backing down from any argument. At all costs I wanted them to refrain from a political argument about Israel's right to exist, or anything related to that, as these things got so volatile so quickly and there was really no solution. Instead they were snapping about some story we had been reading about a mixed-race marriage. The question concerned what kind of preparation a couple would have to do to make a mixed-race marriage successful. Some class members had already maintained that they weren't in the market for marriage anyway, so it didn't concern them. I told them, you can still answer the question, if you want to practice your English. I glanced nervously at the sky out the window; things were getting worse.

A guy named Nawaf arrived breathlessly, late for class. He was a young guy from Yemen; he'd been delayed in arriving due to some war activity at his airport, and then been placed in the wrong reading class, so he was just now arriving in our class where we would study intermediate reading. I knew he was fairly good at speakng and I guessed that he'd been held up by talking to much to some young woman in the hallway or somewhere as he loved people and was pretty good at just striking up conversations. He had curly hair and powerful, intense eyes, and I think Maya noticed him right away, as she was sitting near the door. He noticed her, too. I could tell it was the beginning of some kind of something, as from that moment on, they were very aware of each other's presence.

Soon after he arrived, though, some guy came by to tell us to move our entire class down to the auditorium on the first floor, because it was a tornado warning. A warning meant that one had been seen in the area, and I knew that we didn't mess around; if someone told us to find a safe place, we'd find a safe place. I told everyone this. There's a tornado in the area. Class is dismissed. Stay with me and we'll go to that auditorium down on the first floor. During a tornado you want to be downstairs, away from windows, with good solid walls around you.

Maya had again locked eyes with Nawaf, and they were now talking as we walked down to the first floor. There was another man, Diego, in the class; he was trying to catch up to them and be included in their conversation. I tried to keep track of everyone, but couldn't; some were already out of my sight. When we got to the auditorium there were other classes there, maybe about thirty or forty people altogether, and somebody had put on the overhead projector, which was playing a news reel but silently. Maya and Nawaf sat together in a back corner so they could keep on talking, and Diego joined them; I could tell this wasn't their choice but something they had to allow. Mohammed was explaining to me that he had to go home to his wife and children, as she was not permitted to talk to anyone outside the family, and she would not know what to do. He planned to walk straight across the woods, about half a mile, to get to his home.

Absolutely not, I told him. A tornado was spotted in the area, allegedly coming toward us, and the last thing you want to be walking out in the woods with huge trees out there, not to mention panicking animals. We just don't do it, and I'm sure your wife will figure out the best sthing to do with her kids and herself, to find safe shelter. He was not pleased with my answer. She is not allowed to ask for help, he said, or just go to a shelter where there are others, if he, her husband, is not around, he said. To him it was a matter of life and death for them, regardless of the danger of the woods.

The other problem concerned Erina, whose elderly parents were visiting from Japan for her older brother Taru's graduation. I was amused at the mention of Taru, who had been my student maybe six years ago, hadn't learned much English, but somehywheow got through and even graduated, or was about to graduate, by some kind of miracle or perhaps cheating which was always a possibility. In any case this elderly Japanese couple were visiting the U.S. for the first time and what should happen but a tornado come through.

And it was a whopper, from what we could tell. The wind raged outside the door and a huge tree fell right in front of the door. This mean that no emergency vehicles could get anywhere close so hopefully we wouldn't need one. Some guy who vaguely recognized addressed the auditorium and implored us to just stay calm, sit still, the auditorium itself was safe, with no windows and concrete walls on three sides. The pictures on the overhead showed a kind of weather radar which had a moving tornado literally passing right over our town. We could hear the wind raging outside and the sounds of other trees falling.

There was another problem in the form of a guy named Menk, paid by some mafia gang in Chicago to "deal with Maya" and get her "out of the picture." Menk is as close as it gets to a real bad guy in this story, although he had some redeeming features, and I didn't know about him at that time; he had simply found the auditorium, found Maya, and was disappointed that she had two men near her at the time. He had in fact had sinister motives starting with killing and rapidly coming down to kidnapping or some such thing, based on the fact that he too was taken in by her. It involved some shady business her father was involved in and, given the fact that the father was going to visit in the coming days, that's why it was urgent that she be "dealt with" in his bosses' words. He, though he was Russian, had never seen a tornado like this one. And, though he was not afraid to use weapons, he did not know if he could deal with two men, Nawaf and Diego, as opposed to just one, or perhaps Maya alone. Keep in mind, he looked distressed, but I didn't at that time know any of this, or know even who he was.

There were several classes, altogether maybe fifty people, in the auditorium, and another teacher, Adam, was taking a kind of provisional authority over them, telling them to stay put where they were safe, don't venture out, the tornado is upon us, that kind of thing. I was more than happy to just let my students know that Adam was right, listen to Adam. I tried to talk to Erina and a few other people who were curious about tornados in general. I felt the best thing was to sit still, let it pass, however bad it was, and then worry about getting home.

When I turned around, though, Mohammed was gone, and I was upset about it. Erina said he just waited until I wasn't looking, and left; at least he had told me that he was leaving. Huge trees were falling all over the woods and our biggest fear was that one would crush the building, but so far that hadn't happened; nothing stopping them from falling in the woods, though. The tornado was intense, but it was over in about twenty minutes. It was what they would call a derecho, a straight-line tornado, with eighty-mile-an-hour winds, damage to trees, power lines and houses all over town; it would change our town forever. The graduation plans were a shambles. Power was out through town and would stay out for weeks. Everyone's lives would be affected.

I got the sense that Maya and Nawaf would be an item from that time forward. Diego sensed that also and was sticking to Maya like glue knowing that if he let them be alone he would lose her altogether. He was possibly a distant cousin of hers, maybe related to the aunt at whose house she stayed, but his interest in her was brotherly; as an Argentine, he felt that she too, being at least part Argentine, should be watched over and protected. He was older than she was, and that was one reason she couldn't just tell him to back off and leave her alone.

Maya was off to Harvard soon; she had some kind of scholarship there and had to be there by a certain date. She was not a typical Israeli student; in fact, someone questioned whether she was even Jewish, if her father had lied about being Jewish in order to get out of Russia, and then, from Israel, had apparently come to the US himself. She was Jewish, she maintained, her mother being an Argentine Jew, but she would have no idea what to do about a Yemeni boyfriend.

Nawaf, for his part, was planning on moving to Michigan with his relatives, though again I wouldn't find this out until later. He was an intense kid, and also had relatives in town, and also, like Maya, had not even considered the consequences of falling in love with someone of another culture. One learns this the hard way. One loves who one's heart loves. I could practically watch him reconsider his choices, or, readjust his life to wanting this new, beautiful woman who he'd just met.

Menk, desperate to split up the three so he could get Maya alone or somewhere where he could enact his plan, started yelling at everyone to get up and leave. This was irrational and desperate, especially given the fact that the tornado was still just dying down and possibly not gone, so it was destructive and dangerous as well. Adam got quite upset that this guy who nobody knew would just yell at everyone and tell them to leave, and Adam yelled back; there was a shouting match. I signalled to my students not to go anywhere. It was a tornado, the last thing you want to do is stroll out the door for any reason.

But finally, we observed Ying, who snapped; she was one of my students as well. A young, pretty Taiwanese girl, she'd been coming unhinged recently and had started snapping at Erina, but at this moment, with Adam and Menk yelling at each other, and the picture of the tornado clouds on the weather radar moving and changing shape on the overhead screen, she started dancing at the front of the auditorium. She was silent and not trying to attract attention, but her dance was eerily reflective of the picture of the storm moving and she was clearly in a trance, like she was at one with the tornado and the picture of its cloud moving on the screen. Anyone who saw it, like me, was stunned and amazed at the way they fit together. Some, like Maya, Nawaf and Diego, possibly busy talking about other things, may not have even seen it. But it was truly incredible. I'd never seen anything like it.

I don't mean to make a drama about whether Nawaf and Maya actually got together, how, or when; in fact, there was no way even I could keep track of such things, outside of asking, and they might not tell the truth. Menk, with his dark intentions, was not going away, but she was safe from him as long as the boys were with her, and he finally left, I think, though Adam may have needed help to get him out of there. In any case I ran into both of them, Maya and Nawaf, sitting in the hallway of the building not far from my office, early in the morning, when I returned to gather up some of my things to leave town. My family was leaving town because we had small children and no generator and had no idea how long we would be without power. Maya and Nawaf, and the rest of my students, had no such luxury, with nowhere to go, but they told me they'd survived the night with no power and were doing fine. They were concerned about Mohammed, who they hadn't heard from, and also about Ying; they were well aware that Ying had gone over the edge mentally, and that was dangerous in a foreign country that had been struck by a tornado and had no services.

"And did you see all the trees fallen all over the place, all over town, on houses and cars, crushing everything?" Nawaf asked. In that sense, in awe of a derecho or powerful tornado, they had something in common. We all had lived through probably the most powerful storm ever in that town, in that area, and we were lucky. The grace of God, we agreed, they sitting in that hallway, out of sleep, and me, their teacher, just gathering a few things in order to clear out of town. Diego, they said, had a dog to tend to, who was panicking and causing trouble, and that was the only way they could get him to leave them alone; they smiled and laughed at that. The stories of Ying, Mohammed, and even Menk and Maya's father, I would find out later, all in good time, and it can only be described as unbelievable. Everyone whose car had been crushed, or dormer window, or was in the hospital when its power went out, had a story to tell, and we heard stories for months; some I'll tell. We all had to just take a break and let life return to normal a little.

the following is an experimental kindle vella chapter. let me know what you think!