After the tornado hopscotched through town, I sat beside Bill on his collapsed roof, now slanting only a few feet above ground. My house, next door, was fine, except for the porch’s wooden rockers, which had gone visiting down the road, pushed by the madcap wind. Walking circles around Bill’s wrecked property, my husband tried to squeeze information on the phone from someone in the insurance company. Meanwhile, Bill and I pulled green knobs from a bag of pistachios. We wrestled them open with our nails, bit the kernel, and threw the empty shells into our newly minted wastebasket, made out of the Lambert’s novelty store sign, crumpled and blown a half mile east. If you looked into the concave metal, you could make out the words: We’re A-OK in Oklahoma! The wink was implied.
We’d salvaged some of Bill’s photo books and a buried file cabinet whose papers were somehow still dry. But almost everything he owned—torn, trashed, or mud-hugged – was a loss. He didn’t name the missing objects, but we’d been friends a long time, and I remembered some of the things he cherished—cornhusk hula dancers in the bathroom, the tacklebox that rattled with his children’s baby teeth, the signed crimson and cream football he kept by the bed, and a thousand other objects whose sentiment I knew nothing of.
Half of the furniture were thrift store finds or family hand-me-downs, and Bill said he didn’t mind much about them. But I was sorry about his house and offered clumsy consolation, saying, “I guess the divorce was a good thing to thank God about.” I meant that since his wife and four children had moved on to Nebraska three months earlier, they weren’t lounging at his place, settling into homework and housework, when it hit.
Bill shrugged.
Under the gaze of fire truck lights and flashlights and starlight, we turned our backs on the squashed houses and lost dogs. Vacant-eyed, we stared at the prairie and the moon’s empty eyeball. I tucked my coat around his shoulders. His skin flared pink like his whole body had been chilled, wind-whipped. Bill, who’d crouched in the basement of the grocery store when the alarm sounded, cradled a few blue fingers; when Bill arrived at his house, he’d closed the truck door with his hand still in the crease. But no broken bones.
He said, “Yesterday I saw a prefab house rumble down the highway and you know what I thought?”
I waited for the answer. Looking at the hushed, even sprawl of grass—my legs stretched out, arms behind me—I could imagine a world without wreckage. What did earliest man think, bedded beside the Euphrates, whenever a piece of weather dropped down? That God was shaking each clumsy fist he owned.
He said, “You could move a whole town, building by building, with just a fleet of flat-beds. Wrap up an entire city and set it somewhere else. Only now, I guess, you wouldn’t need the trucks or the time. Just a minute and that howling bitch of a Mother Nature.” The pistachio shell he tossed clinked, sounding like a hard bell.
My husband, Aaron, yelled to us over the whir of a backhoe moving debris from the Gersham’s house. “Don’t worry man, we’re building you a brand new place. We might even swing a Jacuzzi!” He pointed to the phone as if, inside that silver rectangle, were the secrets of safety and wealth. Then he walked off into bright and black gloom.
“Hear that? Bad things for the better,” I told Bill. I didn’t add that copies were cheap replacements.
Bill’s cough turned into a laugh, or vice versa. He picked at his half-broken nail. “After every disaster, people get on like rabid foxes.”
I didn’t know if he meant my husband gunning for money, or his drinking after Nancy drove off with his kids. I offered Bill our place for as long as he needed. In the morning I would grill up sausage, pour gravy, pound my knuckles into biscuit dough. Food always brought us back to earth.
His shoe tapped against the fractured roof. “Thanks, but I’ve got work early. The grocery’s still upright.”
Hard workers didn’t always make the best lovers. I’d married one and knew. Maybe that’s why Bill and Nancy broke apart. Even though Bill was a regular at our house, it took a week after she left for him to mention the news. And he only confessed after I said I hadn’t heard squawking from Dana’s trombone for a while. His daughter had practiced in the backyard because Bill couldn’t stand the burps coming out of that brass.
I leaned forward and patted Bill’s knee, as if this maintenance was the only thing keeping it in place. He’d broken his nail off, and fresh blood crowded out, anxious to breathe. Bill just stared at the tissue I pulled from my pocket, so I held his wrist and wiped the blood. Nearby, the beeps of a vehicle backing up sounded like alarm. The wall cloud had crumpled from its earlier ferocious beard and now separated to fill us with a clean, calm night. Now that it had punched us, the sky wanted to make nice. But if it was going to be a bully, I could live without it.
Under the safety of four stout walls and a wrought-iron bed, I would wake beside my husband the next morning, eat, and go to work. Other than Bill bunking in our living room, I could say nothing much had changed. I’d walk past the grocery and see Bill through the window, stacking tin into a skyscraper, or counting peaches, holding their ripe pink blush in the muffs of his hands.
Bill shifted his eyes up, looking for something. Sweat sagged down his forehead and crowded around his eyebrows. I wiped that away too. One shell after another, we tossed our discards into the belly of Oklahoma. The white pods in the air looked like fingernails, as if one by one, we traded in our body parts. When my hands weren’t occupied with movement, I clutched the shingles beneath me. There was no telling about the movements of the earth.
When we finished the pistachios, Bill curled his legs up and lay his head down. I thought about those flat-beds rolling by, fit for houses and Homecoming floats. I asked, “If you moved a whole town, refitting every block and building back in place, would it still be the same town, wherever it was?”
I looked over, but Bill didn’t answer. He’d peeled off two more fingernails and his hand throbbed a swollen mess. I inhaled and tried to take his arm, but he wouldn’t budge it from his chest. I needed bandages or gauze, paramedics, a psychiatrist, a phone. I needed my legs to move, but they had turned marble-like. “Bill, what in this world are you doing?”
He watched the nothing night above him. “You know what I wished after I saw the house? I wished they were here, Nancy and the kids.”
“Oh, hon. I know. You miss them. It’s a rough time.”
“No. That’s not what I mean.” Bill’s head rolled slowly left to right. “I mean I wished they’d been there. Inside the house. When it hit.”
We sat on the rubble of his desire. He closed his eyes, but I didn’t reach for his hand. My legs still felt too heavy to move and a thick fatigue was traveling up my nerves. You could lose everything all at once.
The brash yabber of a familiar voice announced my husband had come back around. I watched him walking up, phone still plugged to his ear. I waved because I wanted him to know that I was still here, things had gone awry, we were undone, and he was the only one to fix them. I waved because he leaned against the siding of our house, and I wanted him to stop because who knew what had been stripped off the structure; it only took a little pressure.
But all he did was wave back, as if we were floating in a distant parade.
Mabel Yu lives in Gaithersburg.
