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jerrygabriel.net Weather Cottonwood Review, winter 2003 It was going to be my birthday in a few days and I decided enough was enough. Let's say I didn't feel exactly present. I told Sarah on the way back to her parents' house that I wanted to break it off. I'll be the first to admit that it must have seemed somewhat capricious. Sure enough, Sarah was a little dumbfounded at first, sitting slack-jawed over in the passenger seat. But then something appeared to sink in and by the time we'd snaked our way back to her town, she told me that she thought it had been inevitable, which was a way of thinking about it I hadn't bothered to reach. I generally did not see the world so absolutely as evitable and inevitable, possible and impossible. "Are you still going to spend the night?" she asked me in her driveway. The truth, of course, was that I wanted to be out of there, but I was tired and it was a two hour drive back to Columbus, and it was already nearly two in the morning. I could have slept some at a roadside rest, I thought, and then gone on, but I figured, why not just sleep here and get up early, be gone before anyone rises. "Is that all right?" I asked. She nodded sadly, but was otherwise quiet, not too awfully different from her usual manner. I slept soundly on her older sister's bed in the basement, where I had slept the other nights I'd stayed at her parent's house, and I woke early, well rested despite the brief sleep and the events of the previous night. I found a note under my door with my name on it as I was dressing and I picked it up and put it in my pocket without unfolding it. When I opened the door, Sarah was there, too, curled up, asleep, one of those four-color pens and some cream-colored stationery next to her limp hand. I crept past her-she didn't stir, whether because she was asleep or embarrassed, I didn't know or care-and I carefully made my way upstairs. The kitchen was brightly lit and quiet. I stole a bagel and banana from the counter. I thought I was away and was already mentally going through the music selections I had in my car when I saw that her dad was in the driveway, washing his Cutlass Sierra. It wasn't even seven yet. "Did a real number in there," he said. "Is that what you call it?" "Well," he said, pausing dramatically. "What's your next conquest?" He was a bit of a pill-a bitter man. Kind of an asshole, actually. An English teacher at Sarah's high school here in Horace, Ohio. A Dodger fan, no less. Would sit there in front of the TV ad nauseum cheering on those hapless fools. "You prefer that I marry her and live unhappily for forty years?" I asked him. This seemed to cut to the quick. "Look, Cassanova. You can play by your rules if you want. Just keep in mind that every dog has its day." He used an awful lot of clichés for an English teacher. "That must mean something," I told him, though I knew very well what it meant. He answered me anyway. "You'll get bit by your own medicine someday," he said. Needless to say, I found Mr. Montgomery not to be the sharpest guy on the block. "Look," I said. "I'm sorry I've hurt your daughter. She'll be okay I think. It's not like I've left her at the altar." "True," he admitted, but then, as if his inner struggle with all of this were right on the surface, he said, "Just for the record, I never liked you." "You really find it necessary to tell me that?" I asked. He shrugged. What a wiener. "Fortunately for me, Mr. Montgomery, your opinion doesn't hold much sway outside that house." He was getting really mad. "Get out of here," he said. "And leave that banana and bagel. Those are mine. Go earn your own food." "Sure," I said, and I threw them on the dewy lawn. I got into my car, the sturdy Renault Alliance. Nineteen eighty-six Car and Driver "Car of the Year." "Also for the record," I said out my window, "I never liked you either." I could see that it no longer mattered how far either of us took it; things between us were, so to speak, shot. "I don't give a good goddamn what you think," he yelled, aiming the hose nozzle in my direction, only the water didn't quite reach me. I turned on my windshield wipers just for fun. "You don't need to bother coming back," he said. He put his thumb over the nozzle so he could get a real taut stream of water, but I was just ahead of him and had my window up by the time he got it straightened out toward my head. It splashed against the window. I goggle-eyed him as I drove off. I was nearly to the highway running between Columbus and Cincinnati when my car gradually lost power and, after a little sputtering, stalled. I tried it six or seven times, but it was done for-wouldn't even turn over. I got out and walked back to town, which took the better part of a half an hour. It was already getting hot. I found a service station in Horace called Ray's Shell. I loitered by the front door for twenty minutes until Ray showed up and I explained my situation to him. He nodded while he put on coffee, smoked a cigarette, opened the cash register and counted the money. Eventually, two more guys appeared, and Ray called one of them over. "Earl," he said. "This gentleman broke down out toward the reservoir. You take him out there in the tow and get his car-at least see if you can figure out what the deal is." "Yep," Earl said, sleepy-eyed. "Follow him," Ray instructed. I did. The wrecker we took was vintage 1964. It merely had a chain and a lift bar-none of the bells and whistles of the contemporary models; none of those handy lift ramps. "Probably gonna be blistering today," Earl observed. I sat quietly. "I'm Earl Turner," he said. "Nate Holland." "You live around here?" he asked. "No," I told him. "Up to Columbus. I have a girlfriend down here." "Who's that?" he asked. I rattled off the first girl's name I could think of. "Her name's Celia." "Celia…?" "Holcomb," I said, only afterward realizing that I had conflated the names of two previous girlfriends: Celia Watkins and Mindy Holcomb. Weird. "Don't know her," he said. "She's not lived here long," I told him. He nodded. It didn't take us long to reach the car. He got in and tried it, then took a quick look under the hood. "Alternator's probably dead," he said. "Killed the battery." We towed it back to town and he talked to Ray for a while. Ray disappeared into the garage where my car was for nearly a half an hour. Eventually, he came back outside and smoked a cigarette. I was sitting on the ground, leaning against the glass window of the office. "It's your alternator," he said. "I an get one in from Columbus this afternoon, but we ain't got nothing around here for it. Not even rebuilt." Like some war pilot lamenting the wileyness of an enemy, he took a hard drag on his cigarette and, simultaneously exhaling and speaking, he said, "No-good Frenchies." "How much?" I asked him. "Hundred and sixty-five or so with labor." "Shit," I said, shaking my head. I didn't have a lot of spare change for new alternators. "I'd appreciate it if you'd not swear," he told me. "Sorry," I said, feeling a little foolish. "Well, what do you wanna do?" "Yeah," I said. "I'm going to be needing the car." "Roger," he said, as in aye-aye, and turned and walked back inside. I walked down the block to a diner and ate some bacon and eggs. I stayed for a long time and read all of the morning paper, drank a lot of coffee. Nothing of note had happened in the world. There was a big drug trafficking bust in Florida and there was a picture of some Feds standing in front of a yacht-looking thing full of what was apparently clear bags of cocaine. There had been flooding in Bangladesh, and there were awful pictures of that too. And here in the U.S. the governor's convention was going on in Missouri and there were a bunch of these guys mouthing platitudes on the ozone layer. Also the Dodgers lost to the Padres in ten innings, which gave me a silly sense of satisfaction. When I came back to the station, I positioned myself in a shady spot in the grass away from the noise of the auto-bay. I covered my head with the paper like characters are always doing in old Laurel and Hardy movies, and I fell asleep. Later, I woke up when the sun fell on me; it was one of those hazy Midwestern days in which the horizon and the clouds sort of mesh, gradually dispelling the belief that there's anything separating them. I lay there and stared up into the sky for a long time, just spacing. Then I started to think about what I was going to do when I got back to my apartment. I couldn't think of one thing, actually, and imagined I would be doing something very similar to what I was doing here, and thus came to the conclusion that, except for the money, this wasn't all that inconvenient. While I was lying there, Ray appeared over me. "You awake," he said. "Yep." "Listen. I've gotta send Earl over to Vansickle County to pick up a wrecked bug. If you're interested, I'd pay you eight dollars an hour to go with him and help him when he needs it. Might not be anything to do, but it would save me having to send one of my mechanics. You wouldn't be more 'an a couple hours and by then we'll probably have that French-mobile of yours up and running." I had to think for a few seconds to understand that when he said "bug" he meant a Volkswagon and not an insect. Of course it makes no sense, an insect wrecking, but that is the way my mind tried to translate it. "Sounds like a fine deal," I told him. "He'll be leaving here just after lunch. You plan on eatin anything?" "I'll just grab a sandwich," I said. "Take me five minutes." I had a sandwich made at the diner I'd eaten at and while they made it, I called my boss on my calling card and told her that I'd had car trouble and wouldn't be able to make it on time this afternoon. "I want to see documentation of this engine work," she told me. "Of course," I said. "I'll have it notarized." I was kidding of course. I assumed she was too, but who knows. Earl liked to talk about baseball. One of his son's played in a youth league and so I heard all about that. He was upset about the game dying and was convinced it was happening fast, that kids today cared more about clothes than playing ball, which was the first I'd heard that particular slant on the argument. And then there was soccer, which was a whole other subject. It was a communist sport, Earl said. Once they brought soccer in wholesale, he was saying, we'd have our very own politburo soon enough. I kept my mouth shut on these topics. I thought Earl was a smart enough guy who, with a captive audience, took things just a step further than he should have. "What do you do up to Columbus?" he asked me. "Go to school," I said. "State, is it?" "Yeah." We were quiet. The radio fizzed and occasionally I could make out some distant Motown. "How do you like it?" "School?" "Yeah." "It's alright," I said. "I don't love it." "You studying to be a doctor, or what?" Even Earl seemed to see that this was a strange assumption. He added, "I don't know. Business or something?" "Teacher," I said. "High school history teacher, probably. Maybe an engineer, though. I'm not quite sure." He nodded. I waited for him to say something jokey about train engineers, which he didn't, and then I waited for him to say how long he'd been at this job and all that, but he didn't say anything else. We entered Vansickle County. It was way down there, tucked away in a corner of the state I'd not really seen before, and I took note of the place and stacked it against the rest of the state and country that I knew, cataloging it. Earl lit a cigarette and offered me one, which I turned down. After a number of turns onto unmarked roads, I asked Earl how he was navigating exactly. "Like a bird, captain," he said, enigmatically. I didn't press the issue. I guess if you live your life in one place, you eventually learn your way around. Soon we came onto the wreck scene. There was a semi and a VW bug involved and a deputy sheriff was there by himself directing traffic. The road was one of these minor state routes that had maybe been a prominent thoroughfare before World War II, but had gradually become less important as the interstate system went in. The bug was blocking part of the road, and what little traffic there was eased by in the one open lane, guided by the deputy; the semi was lying on its side in the first few rows of some soybeans as if asleep. It had taken out a hefty-looking fence in getting there. We pulled up next to the deputy. "Anyone dead?" Earl asked. "Naw," the deputy said. "Couple broken bones probably. How you gonna do this?" Earl surveyed the situation, noting the disfigurement of the car's front end. "I'll pull it from the back to get it out of there, and then I'll set her down and switch it around for the drive home," he said. The deputy nodded and we positioned ourselves. We rigged up the axle to the lift and then Earl slowly levitated the car with the hydraulic controls on the side of the truck. He had me get in the truck then and pull it forward and to the side of the road, to where we could get an angle on it, and then he set it down like he'd said, and got back into the truck and maneuvered around to the other side of it and picked it up again. It was pretty torn up and hard to situate in a way that would keep it from pulling to the right, but we got it to where Earl was satisfied, more or less. The deputy was brooming off the road then. "You all have an awful lot of these sorts of mishaps down this way," Earl said. "I know it," the deputy said. "Had a godawful storm couple hours back. I reckon one or the other of em lost their way in the rain." "Shit happens, eh?" Earl observed. "Sure does," said the deputy. "How's come we get called and not a wrecker from Carthage?" Earl asked the deputy. We were sitting there in the middle of the road, and Earl was absently pulling out a cigarette with his two hands resting on top of the steering wheel, while he talked to the man. "Only wrecker in Carthage got his license suspended for DUI." "Ah. And whose mess is this to clean up?" Earl asked, thumbing toward the 18 wheeler. "Mack is sending some people down from Columbus to take care of it." "Gotcha," Earl said, lighting his cigarette with the truck lighter. "Well, you keep 'em straight round here." "Will do, boys," he said and Earl put the truck in gear and pulled away, in the direction of Horace County. We were talking about cars and he wondered how I could possibly drive a Renault. "Nobody makes junkier cars than the French," he said. I explained that my particular model-produced, if he insisted on pushing things, in Canada, not France-was "Car of the Year" according to Car and Driver. He was not impressed by Canadian manufacturing and suggested that the French either owned the magazine in question or had bribed the right people or, he said, done some other stuff, if I knew what he meant. "What's your girlfriend do down here?" he asked some time later. "She works at a Ponderosa Steak House somewhere around here." "Good food," he observed. "But she goes to school up to Columbus. That's how I know her. She's just down here for the summer." "You two planning on getting married, then?" "Probably not," I said. The sky above was starting to darken and Earl observed that we were probably going to be getting some weather. He turned on the radio-said he wanted to see what sort of news on the situation could be scared up. "You married?" I asked. "Seventeen years," he said. "You don't look old enough really for all that." "Just barely," he told me. "What's your wife's name?" "Collette." "How many kids?" "We got three, all told. The oldest one's a junior at Horace High." We rattled along and every seven or eight miles or so, Earl pulled over and we checked on one of the straps that held the car in place because it had dry rot and was threatening to break. "Ray's been saying for ages he was going to replace this," he explained to me. "But he never does and it just keeps getting worse." "Things get in the way sometimes," I observed. "I reckon they do," he said, "but he's going to have bigger bills to pay than a new strap if he don't take care of this soon." The storm moved in swiftly and overtook us before we'd taken too much notice of it. The radio eventually told us of tornadoes touching down in three of the five neighboring counties. Not five minutes after this announcement, we saw our very own tornado. It was to the south of us and it was unclear in what direction it was moving or how big it was or if it was touching down. But it was a damn ominous site, sort of evil almost, if some naturally occurring phenomenon could be called evil. "This is a damn mess," Earl said. "I can abide all sorts of things, but I do not care for tornadoes." "Should we pull off?" "Well, hell yes we should pull off," he said. "But you've got to find someplace safe first. You let me handle things here." I said nothing. It made sense. I didn't know anything about tornadoes. Where I came from in the southeast of the state, we rarely had tornadoes, whether that was because of the hilly nature of the region or some other more complicated meteorological phenomenon, I'm not sure. We turned off the county road we were on and drove for half a mile on gravel before coming to a bridge. The rain was making it hard to see anything by then and the thunder and wind had ratcheted things up considerably. We stopped just short of the bridge, pretty much right in the middle of the road; there were steep banks on either side, but no where else to put the truck and the bug. "Let's wait it out," he told me. Everything I'd heard about tornadoes seemed to be true. They are loud like trains and it is this noise that is the terrifying business. Also-and I don't know the science of it-but there is something that changes about the very color of the sky, too; it turns a sort of spooky, jaundiced hue, something much different than your average thunderstorm. There was a moment there when I was convinced the tornado was going to take us and the bug and the wrecker and probably the bridge too and send us all back over to Horace County or beyond. Earl seemed to comprehend this and he grabbed my shirt with one hand and the bag containing my sandwich with the other, shut the door with his elbow and then guided me toward the bank. We slid down the incline and waded through some dense weeds-a regular snake pit it would have been in other conditions. Below the bridge there was more noise-trees cracking and falling and branches being thrashed around in the swollen creek, but all in all, it was more hospitable than above after you got used to the darkness and the gurgling of the water. We found a dry spot above the creek's banks where there was plenty of space. It looked like this had been a hangout for some local kids, equipped with a fire pit and sitting stones and graffitied walls. "Well," said Earl. "This is going to put us behind some." He was doing an admirable job of shrugging the whole business off if he in fact could not truly abide tornadoes. I found a concrete block and sat on it and Earl handed me my sandwich and told me to eat it, and not altogether kindly. I wasn't much up for eating the sandwich, but I did as he said. He crouched nearby and lit a cigarette. Rainwater was blowing in some. "So what went wrong with you and your little girl?" he asked. He had to talk loudly to be heard. It was an obvious ploy to get us off the tornado, but I didn't mind. Normally I would have played dumb, naturally, but I knew it didn't matter what Earl knew. It really didn't matter what anyone knew. I didn't have any answers to any questions about my girlfriend, Sarah, or a number of other topics that related directly to my existence. "Usual," I said. I bit into the sandwich. I'd gotten a BLT. "The usual," Earl repeated. "Which is?" "Which is I've not got a clue," I told him. He seemed to me the very bastion of calm. He laughed. "You'll get used to not having a clue," he told me. "I'd rather not," I told him. "You don't got to," he said. "But if you want to, you get used to it." I didn't say anything to that. "Course you can just chuck the whole thing, I guess," he said, "but then where are you?" "That's sort of the plan at the moment," I said. He thought on that for a minute. "Yeah," he said. "I can see your way of thinking on it." We watched the wind snap off a twenty foot branch upstream a ways. The water pulled a discarded clothes dryer along as if it were made of airtight plastic. We were quiet for a long time, and the noise of the storm subsided slowly and over time I got over my fright. We waited there for nearly half an hour until it seemed to have passed completely and the sky had lightened some. "I suppose we should mosey back to town," he said, putting out his fifth cigarette. "Alright." Back up top, there were tree limbs strewn about everywhere. The truck and bug had been untouched, though, and from where we were-this being summer and the trees densely foliaged-we couldn't see too much in the way of real damage, and couldn't discern if the tornado had passed close by or not. "This CB used to work, but it don't anymore," Earl said, seemingly by way of apology. "Else I'd call in and tell Ray the situation." We headed up the road some and found a spot to turn around, which was tricky with the bug on back in such a narrow road. Several times we had to stop while I cleared away fallen tree limbs out of the way. When we eventually got back to the main road, I remembered that I'd left a bag of things on the floor of Sarah's sister's room. I closed my eyes: how could I have forgotten my bag at that house? I might have done without it and all its contents, but inside there was a watch that had belonged to my father who had died some years ago. I wore it even though it was junky and about forty years old because I didn't have much to remember him by. It did a poor job of telling time and did so with little sliding digits like most watches use only for the date. When we got back to Horace, I asked Earl to drop me four blocks from Sarah's and told him I'd be at the shop in less than an hour to pick up my car. I made my way to the backside of the house through a wooded path Sarah had taken me on that ran adjacent to the high school where her dad taught, and where she herself had graduated two years earlier. The whole Montgomery clan was supposed to be down to Cincinnati today, at Sarah's little brother's cello debut, which was happening at some arts institute. The next Yo-Yo Ma, I thought, and laughed to myself. One arm of the path led straight to the Montgomery's backyard and I paused there and looked around the place. The woods were soaked, like some Philippine place, and the heat had come back with a force equivalent to the storm itself and it was downright stultifying. I sweated through my clothes in no time. There was an old, rusted swing set in the Montgomery's yard. The yards on either side of them also had swing sets, and the yards on either side of them did too. I couldn't believe it. It was possible, I guess, that this was some sort of skewed sample-that there was a swing set manufacturer in Horace that tested its products on the local population. Barring that, however, it was as if every yard in America had one of these things. They were something, apparently, that could not be done without nor shared. Everyone had one and now everyone's kids were the age of Sarah and here the swing sets were, rusting from weather and disuse. Left here long enough, they would eventually get swallowed up by the earth, seeping into the ground, reverting back to their constituent elements. Their rust would seep into the water and contaminate it. We were all of us being contaminated by the gradual entropy of the world that existed before ours. It never ended, this cycle. I'd never broken into a house. I knew that the Montgomerys didn't lock their back door, though, so it wouldn't be messy, and I would be in and out in no time, and on my way home. Inside it was quiet. I stood animal-like for a moment, waiting to hear movement. I heard none. In and out, I repeated to myself quietly. No lingering. No bananas. None of those little star crunches her mom was always feeding me, though now that it came to mind, I was a little hungry. I saw on the cuckoo clock that it was just before three o'clock and reminded myself not to jump when the clock performed its hourly ritual. In the basement, the faux paneling, carpet and potpourri scent could not quite disguise the dank, earthy smell. This was a basement-practically what they used to call a cellar-and it was moist, just a half step removed from the earth itself. Sarah's sister had been in band, like Sarah and their little brother Phillip, and there were trophies and photos all around of those halcyon days. Camille-the sister-hugging two other girls in front of-what was it?-the Jefferson Memorial? Camille holding her clarinet to her mouth and looking toward the camera. I knew her sister some; she was also going to school at State. She was a senior and reserved and always seemed to be thinking the worst of you when you spoke with her. I didn't like her much and had told Sarah this one night. Strangely, Sarah hadn't minded. She said she didn't care about her sister either and didn't care if I hated her. Some family, I remember thinking, though every family has its little sticking points and resentments, and I'm sure that Sarah cared about her sister in some way that wasn't altogether explicable to me. I found my bag where I'd left it and I snatched it up, robber-like, and bolted upstairs toward the back door. But then I remembered Sarah curled up outside my door that morning and I decided to look to make sure everything was in order. I rummaged around the bag and noticed nothing out of the ordinary at first. Then my pulse raced. The watch, I thought. The watch itself was missing-the very thing I was worried about. It was a worst case scenario. What had she done with my dad's watch? I dumped the bag out on the kitchen floor and spread out all the contents. No watch. Maybe I had left it somewhere, I thought. I reconstructed the night before. Pizza Hut. The Harrison Ford movie. The party with her high school friends. The drive along the reservoir home. There was no place it could be, but either on my wrist or in my bag, and at last, I remembered putting it there, carefully, while I was lying in bed, a copy of Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent resting on my chest (I'd found the Reader's Digest Condensed version on Camille's shelf). I went back downstairs and looked around the room again. No watch. Back upstairs. I peered around the den, Sarah's bedroom. There was a picture of the two of us in a frame there. She worked quickly; we had only been dating for a few months. I searched the rest of the house, the bathroom, the cupboards, the vegetable drawer in the fridge. Why are you looking in the vegetable drawer, I thought vacantly. Nobody even puts vegetables there. Except the Montgomerys; their vegetable drawer was chock-a-bloc with iceberg lettuce and old celery and carrots. Not surprisingly, there was no watch. I looked around. Afternoon light shone in from the front room. The sitting room, these things were called. Nobody ever sat there. There were mints in a dish on a coffee table and I ate two of those. There were more Readers Digest novels here. And some sort of compendium called Foxfire that my mom had in her sitting room. No watch. I peered cautiously out the front window, drawing the curtains very carefully, not sure what I was looking for. It just seemed like that's the thing the burglar does from time to time-glances out the window to make sure the coast is clear. There was no one out; it was too hot. Plus, there had been tornadoes in just about every county within a hundred miles, and for all I knew, there were entire sections of Horace leveled. Hell, the Montgomerys themselves could have been killed, driving in their Cutlass Sierra toward metropolitan Cincinnati. I saw them, lifted up to about 300 feet, their car comically spinning around like one of those little maple seed propellers that fall in late summer. Weirdly, it was Sarah's dad's face that I saw, not Sarah's. He didn't seem able to scream, so he just sat there, seatbelted in, waiting for the end. It was unsettling to see him like that, and to get my mind off it, I made myself think of the Padres beating the Dodgers last night out in California, poor old Steve Sax striking out with two on in the bottom of the tenth. I peered around the neighborhood and caught a quick flash of light from the driveway. I squinted. There was something glistening brightly there on the concrete driveway. Aw hell, I said. I opened the door and went out. There I was for all to see. I walked right over to the driveway. It was my watch-my father's watch-crushed. I picked up the pieces and held them in my hand. I considered their weight. Probably he'd bought it at a PX in Brownsville one afternoon all of those years ago, before a big night out. He'd probably shown it all around that night and several other guys had held up their wrists to show theirs-the same watch. Everyone would have had a big laugh and then there would have been more beers brought to the table and some grousing about this or that commanding officer. There would have been girls involved in there somehow, local girls, the grown children of majors and sergeants from the base, girls whose futures were uncertain, but most likely involved marrying an Airman First Class and eventually moving with him to his hometown in Oregon or Ohio. And now my father was gone, and probably some of those other guys were gone and the girls, too, some of them were gone. Brownsville probably wasn't the same-or if it wasn't Brownsville, then Roswell or Colorado Springs. It didn't matter; they were all different places now, I could only assume. People and things were always changing, disappearing, going away, dying, drifting off, slipping back into the ground. It was the only truth of being alive, it seemed to me while I stood there. I put the watch in my pocket. On the concrete, written in a pastel chalk-an orange the color of those ice cream push-ups-it said, "We're not quite even, but I feel a little better." I didn't know Sarah's writing well enough to know empirically if this was hers or not, but I knew it was not; insofar as she had a style, this was not it. It was her dad's. What a loon, I thought. It was spooky imagining him doing this in the hopes that I would come back and see it. How could he have known that I would? The neighborhood was perfectly still. I thought for a moment about what I might do to retaliate. I can't lie; I considered several heinous acts, the most devious of which was pissing in his favorite Dodger-watching chair. In the end, I didn't do any of those things and the reason was because Mr. Montgomery was a man who knew what he wanted. A guy like me, I realized, would always lose in a battle against a guy like him; he knew exactly what he was after and he was going to get it; he was going to persist and fight against everything and eventually he was going to prevail somehow, and that, above all else, was probably the most important distinction between the two of us. That old watch, I knew, didn't represent my dad anymore than his gravestone or the photos of him in Myrtle Beach or his old letters or even the stories I told about him. This was merely an old crushed watch that he had once owned. I decided to leave the watch for Sarah's dad and reached into my pocket to retrieve it, and accidentally pulled out with it the piece of paper I'd forgotten about-the note from Sarah. Why not go ahead and get all this over with at once, I thought. I threw the watch down and opened the note. It was damp from the rain and sweat, but legible. God knows how many drafts it took her, but it merely contained one line-four words, all told. I wish you well, it said. That was it. Love, Sarah. It touched me that she would eventually decide to tell me just this one thing, and for a moment there, I felt pretty small and wished that I could touch her hand and show her that I was human, that I felt, that I wished her well, too. I did wish her well. I wished everybody well. I turned and started on my way back to Ray's Shell then and the heat came down and blanketed me. I had a lot on my mind, I suppose, but soon the heat took it all away, which I can say was a little piece of heaven; it was one of those rare little gifts you get from the world that come along at precisely the right moment. I just walked and for that forty-five minutes, there was nothing but certainty. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my head, turban-style. No one was out. It was a Tuesday in the middle of July. It was hot-98 degrees, according to the Farmers and Merchants Bank on Wood Street. These were truths. This was the town of Horace, Ohio. What people called The Heartland. I had survived my first tornado today. Who knew what else I was to survive.