The Man Who Caught the Storm by Brantley Hargrove

Author:Brantley Hargrove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

* * *

“YOU HAVE MY ONLY SON”

IN 2008, TWISTEX welcomes its youngest member to the team: nineteen-year-old Paul Timothy Samaras, a budding filmmaker and photographer. In his eyes, Tim is a giant. Fourteen years after his father first took him and Jenny to see a funnel cloud near Aurora, Paul wants to understand the nature of the work that has drawn Tim so far from home over so many years. If he can, in some small way, he’d like to become a part of Tim’s world. The truth is, Paul isn’t sure exactly what he wants to do with his life, and joining his dad on the hunt seems as good an answer as any.

Nearly a week after Quinter, he gets his first taste of the narrow escape. Near Tipton, Kansas, Paul pours from the truck alongside Tim and Carl, a video camera held at his chest, eyes fixed on the display monitor. He circles around to the probe deck at the rear, the frame bobbing as his feet pound over asphalt. His microphone registers the tap of rain against the camera, and the rasping of Velcro straps from the truck. Through his lens dance the dark silhouettes of working shoulders, a father seen through the eyes of his son. Beyond them, suspended mist and rain gather beneath a wall cloud like a load of cinders. Tim squats and places HITPR in the grass just off the side of the road. The frame moves on to Carl, who labors under the bulk of the much-heavier media probe.

The tornado is now just off the edge of the frame, a presence implied but unseen. Then comes Tim’s urgent voice: “Let’s go, man!” And all three of them appear now in the lens of Tim’s invention. Through the ground-level perspective of the media probe, Tim is seen shoving the probe deck back into the truck bed. There is Paul behind him, still filming. He’s lanky in a billowing black T-shirt and baggy jeans, his dark hair wild and blown by the rising wind, like his father’s when he was young.

Roughly thirty seconds have elapsed since they stopped here. Carl’s voice is tinged with panic: “Let’s go! It’s coming!”

Tim raises the tailgate but leaves the camper-shell window open and runs. Finally Paul lowers the camera and scrambles into the backseat. Rain skates over the road. The rear bumper dips as the front end lifts and the GMC’s eight cylinders redline. The tornado core soon flares into view. Vegetation and debris appear as oscillating streaks. A faint multiple-vortex structure washes over the probes.

Paul would have seen the spectral merry-go-round suction vortices dancing over the fields toward them at roughly thirty-three miles per hour. He would have heard their waterfall rushing. He might even have caught the scent of threshed grass. This is his father’s world, in the tarnished light under the clouds. The beating in Paul’s chest when they make good their escape—this is his father’s adrenal high. Next to it, the days are but interludes once the skies go quiet.

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