Footprints of Thunder (12 page)

Newberg, Oregon

Time Quilt: Saturday, 11:20
P.M.
PST

R
ipman was keeping time from the driver’s seat of Cubby’s van while Cubby stared at the Taco Bell sign. John was spread out on the bench behind them. All three of them had Big Gulps wedged in their crotches. Ripman kept calling out the time and revving the engine.

“Two minutes, big guy. You got two minutes! No way you’re gonna win. I can taste that pie already.”

“Cram it, Ripman,” Cubby growled.

All three of them slurped periodically on their Big Gulps. It was the last turn of the last round, and the loser was buying Hostess pies. Ripman was way ahead, so the contest was between Cubby and John.

They were twenty miles out of Portland in Newberg, one of the too-small towns that had nearly faded into obscurity when the interstate had bypassed it thirty years ago. The motels, drive-ins, and restaurants that had eked out a modest living off the highway traffic were mostly gone now, and the town was at the mercy of the big paper mill. Given another two decades of urban growth, Newberg would be absorbed into the urban sprawl of Portland. For now, however, fifteen miles of forests and farms separated Newberg from the city.

John, Cubby, and Ripman normally played road anagrams on 82nd Avenue or 122nd in Portland, but they’d gotten bored and craved new territory. So they found Newberg. There was a little college there, and they drove around for a while yelling out the van windows at the coeds. When they tired of that they found lots of opportunity for their game along the highway.

They started on the west side of town at the Dairy Queen, one of the old-fashioned kind with no eating space inside. A reader board outside advertised specials on blizzards and banana splits.

BUZZARDS $1.99
 

BANANA SPLITS $1.99
 

SUNDAES $1.49

Ripman studied the sign for a minute, waited until there was a lull in the traffic, then reshuffled the letters so the sign read

LIZZARD LIP SUNDAES $99.99

He left the rest of the letters in a pile on the ground. Cubby loved it, and John had to admit it was a high scorer.

John went next, picking the AM/PM sign. The sign read

PARTY TIME? WE HAVE BEER AND ICE

when they pulled in. John switched the letters around so the sign read

PARTY?
 

WE HAVE RICE AND BEET

Ripman called it a “piss poor effort,” and Cubby just snorted agreement.

When John challenged Cubby to do better, Cubby picked the D &. D video sign:

JOIN OUR VIDEO GOLD CLUB

MEMBER DISCOUNTS

Cubby hopped out and came back a minute later. As they pulled out they read

RODEO MOLD ONE DIME

Ripman cackled his approval, pulled into the 7-Eleven and made John buy Big Gulps.

When Cubby finished this round, one way or another he was going to have to tell them he had to get home. It was nearly eleven-thirty, and under no circumstances could he take the chance of staying out past midnight. His parents would be home from their trip by now, and he didn’t want them to think he’d been out past curfew every night.

The worst part would be telling his friends he had to get home, “Jeez,” Ripman would say, “they’ve really got you whipped. What a wuss.” Cubby wouldn’t say much in words, but his crooked smile and raised eyebrows would say as much as Ripman did in words.

John was always the first to have to get home. His father was a psychologist and occasionally taught parenting classes. His credibility depended on how he raised his own kids, so he was meticulous in that area. “The keys to good parenting,” his father always said, “are consistency and discipline.” While John had a clear set of rules that were virtually inviolable, Ripman’s father didn’t care what he did, as long as he did it somewhere else. And Ripman was usually somewhere else.

Cubby’s father was the worst though. He was the most popular minister in the state and even had a regional following on cable TV. He “trusted” his son. He “trusted” him enough to buy him the van, and “trusted” him enough not to put restrictions on him, except one. He had to be in church every Sunday morning and every Wednesday evening. Otherwise, until he violated his father’s trust, what Cubby did was “between his son and the Holy Spirit.” As far as John knew, Cubby had never done anything to violate that trust. At least not anything his father knew about. There was no way to know what the “Holy Spirit” knew.

“All right, Ripman,” Cubby said with confidence in his voice, “get me under that sign. This is for Hostess pies, right?”

Ripman put the van in gear and pulled up. Before it stopped rolling Cubby had his head poked up through the sunroof and was holding the long-handled sign changer, which Ripman had “found” and Cubby kept in his van. Overhead signs always earned more points.

Cubby, at six foot five inches with a heavily packed frame, filled the opening in the roof. The football coaches drooled every time Cubby walked by, but Cubby had never had any interest in their game. The biggest guy in school, he was about the gentlest. If you looked at his face closely enough you could see the babyish look of the pale blue eyes and the rounded facial features, but you had to look quick because Cubby had learned that the best way to avoid having to be tough is to look tough. Cubby had the tough look down cold. He’d stare at you glassy eyed and not blink or flinch no matter what you did, and then he would talk slowly, and simply, with a lot of menace in his voice but no cursing. It was pretty effective. John didn’t know anyone else who could act that tough without swearing their brains out.

Cubby popped down from the roof and tossed the gripper toward the back.

“Hit it, Ripman.”

After Ripman swung out of the parking lot, he and John looked back at the sign, which had started with:

TODAY’S SPECIAL
 

BURRITO, TOSTATA
 

OR TWO TACOS AND LARGE COKE
 

$1.99

Now it read:

TACOS TASTE LIKE BUTS SMELL

Cubby had to invert the
w
to get the
m
and used the
1
from $ 1.99 for one of the
l
s but there was no rule against it and it could earn you extra points. It was the best anagram of the night, and Ripman was cracking up.

“Elemental. I love it. El-ahh-men-tahl.”

Elemental was Ripman’s favorite superlative. He used it for everything that pleased him. When John and Cubby first heard him use it they thought he meant
elementary,
like the word Sherlock Holmes was always using to insult Dr. Watson. Ripman was clear though, it was
elemental
, and it meant the simple and basic things—the things that life was really all about. And to Ripman that meant things that didn’t depend on other things. That was Ripman’s dream. To live a life that didn’t depend on other people, on things, or on society.

Ripman was a self-proclaimed woodsman, but you didn’t call him a survivalist to his face. Survivalists weren’t elemental enough for Ripman. To Ripman the chink in the survivalists’ armor was their dependence on technology: freeze-dried food, water recycling systems, solar-powered stills, and automatic weapons. To Ripman, an elemental person was someone who needed only a knife to survive, not an Uzi.

“Elemental!” Ripman exclaimed again. “Cubby, once again you stumbled uncontrollably into a winner.” To John he chortled, “Get your wallet out, it’s pie time.”

Eager to get back, John was just glad the game was over. At the 7-Eleven they all piled out and went in to select their pies. Cubby picked apple, as always. John picked a berry pie and Ripman the lemon. Cubby was reading the front page of the
National Enquirer
when John and Ripman headed out the front door.

“Jeez, John, why do you buy those things?” Ripman asked.

“What things?”

“Those berry pies. I mean it doesn’t even say what kind of berries are in it. For all you know they could be dingleberries.”

John was going to tell Ripman to cram it when he noticed a car pulling in next to Cubby’s van. It was a jacked-up 1969 Chevy Camaro painted primer gray, and it looked like it would always be a fixer-upper. There were two too-large Pioneer speakers wedged into the back window, blasting out some indistinguishable hard rock sound. Now three guys who were looking for trouble climbed out. The driver, the smallest of the three, was a little shorter than John at five foot eight but had huge shoulders and arms. His head was huge too, and his large lopsided mouth was shaped permanently into a wise-guy grin. He looked like a dwarf that had been inflated to normal size. All three guys wore faded Levi’s and jean jackets, and their hair was shaved close on the sides. The biggest one was about six feet tall and hung back a little from the other two. He was uncommonly ugly and wore his hair down so that it covered half his pimply face. When the driver stepped out in front of the others, they assumed tough guy poses behind him, “What are you assholes doing in our town?” The creep, John knew, was referring to him and Ripman. John also knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. Unfortunately, Ripman didn’t.

“You talking to us?” Ripman said, with a surprising amount of menace in his voice.

John had known Ripman since his freshman year in high school. Their homeroom turned out to be PE class and the ex-marine gym teacher had screamed out their names as he worked through the alphabet assigning locker mates. “Ripman, Roberts, number two thirty-eight.”

In all the time he had known him, John had never seen Ripman in a fight. Ripman claimed to be six feet tall but was probably a little short of that and on the thin side. He was big enough to discourage the bullies in school, but this one in Newberg didn’t look or act discouraged.

The leader snorted, smacked his gum a few times, looked Ripman up and down, then, with catlike quickness, snatched Ripman’s pie. The wise-guy grin got bigger as he held it up. Pimples snorted his approval.

The big dwarf turned back to Ripman.

“You want this back, asshole?”

Ripman didn’t answer, he just stared defiantly. The big dwarf smacked his gum and grinned some more. Ripman flinched when the hand came toward his head, but then held his ground when the big dwarf squished the pie into his hair.

“All right!” pimples chortled.

With a slow deliberate motion Ripman brought his hand up to his head and forcefully scraped the pie off, throwing it toward the big dwarf’s feet, splattering them with lemon filling. Then the door behind them opened and Cubby came out. He was doing his tough-guy routine.

“There a problem here?” Cubby asked in a voice two octaves below normal.

Cubby pushed past the thugs and opened the van door. The big dwarf was turning red, his blood boiling—apparently he knew his limits and Cubby was a little beyond them. John climbed onto the bench seat in the back, but Ripman surprised him by climbing into the passenger seat. It surprised Cubby too. He almost never drove his van, preferring to ride in the passenger seat, hollering out the window while Ripman drove fast and semirecklessly.

As Cubby started up the van and backed slowly out of the parking slot, Ripman maintained eye contact with the big dwarf. Suddenly the big dwarf spit his gum at Ripman, sticking it to the middle of the passenger window. When Ripman gave him the finger in return, the big dwarf nodded and glared, in commitment to see Ripman another time when Cubby wouldn’t be around.

As Cubby headed them north, Ripman sulked, staring at the glob of gray gum. John knew what was eating at Ripman. Unable to handle the situation with the big dwarf he’d violated his “elemental” principle by requiring Cubby’s help. They drove out of town in silence and darkness.

Cubby took them east on 99 toward Portland. As they climbed Breed’s hill out of Newberg’s valley, John could see the lights of the little town below them.

Then the lights went out. John managed to get a “hey” out of his mouth before a sonic boom rattled the van. All three boys gasped, and before their ears and hearts had recovered, the storm hit. The sudden wind drove the van across the lane onto the narrow shoulder of the road, bordered by large rocks. Cubby hit the brakes and fought to keep the van out of the ditch. Gravel machine-gunned the bottom of the van and the tires screeched as the van slid to a stop. Silently, they all stared out the van windows.

The wind roared around the van. John was horrified to see the fir trees on the other side of the road bending in half. Would they reach the van if they fell? The van rocked with each gust of wind and John honestly wondered whether it might be safer to get out. Then behind him, emerging from behind the hill to the west, he saw a funnel cloud was dancing through farmlands, ripping up crops and trees. John was seventeen years old and had spent all his life in Oregon. In that time he had never heard of a tornado in the state.

The funnel was stirring up so much debris and dust that the road and fields were obscured. If it continued on a straight line, John estimated, it would cut across the highway and then continue into the vineyards on the east side. A farmhouse on that side was a little north of the tornado’s path. When John looked back he realized the tornado was curving back into Newberg. John sat there helpless, watching in horrified fascination.

The tornado ripped through the nursery at the edge of town, shredding three greenhouses, then lifted into the sky and seemed to dissipate. Seconds later it was back, dropping to earth again, this time into the Ford dealership, first floating and then lifting Aerpstars and Mustangs. Then the funnel ascended again, widened into a swirling, angry cloud, and disappeared.

The three of them sat in silence for a minute and then, all at once, clambered out for a better look as the wind died down to a soft, restful whishing sound.

“Elemental,” Ripman said, surveying the damage in the valley below. “Let’s go take a look at that Ford dealer.”

“Forget it, Ripman,” Cubby gut in. “Take a look at the road.”

John looked back along the highway to Newberg. It was littered with fallen trees and debris from the greenhouses. They would need a chain saw and a bucket loader to clear a path to the Ford dealer. The road ahead was also covered with debris, but no,large trees blocked it. With one last look, and another “elemental” from Ripman, they climbed back into the van and headed home. They were all still on adrenalin highs and peppered their talk with “Did ya see that?”