TORNADO

This story was first published as “The Tornado” in Double Dealer Issue 13. Buy it here.

Nobody up here had tornado insurance. Lady on the phone called it dwelling coverage. I never even thought about it. It rains a lot more than it used to. My yard been muddier than I remember. The goats got hoof rot. But I didn’t ever think about such a thing as tornados. Not out here, not on this hill.

Dotty started saying all the animals was going to ruin our lives. In a way I guess she was right. She didn’t like how it smelled. People don’t realize that free range chickens means heaps of chicken shit every few steps from the front door to the car. And a chicken don’t shit like any other bird. Chickens shit like men, more or less. I guess even I hate those fuckers sometimes. If I was to do it again, they’d all be penned up. There was a saying about all this I heard before, don’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit. Guy used to work at the plant said that all the time. I never understood what that meant. I probably still don’t.

She ain’t even said nothing. Just gone. Can’t call her, her phone don’t work. She blocked me on Facebook. I don’t have any of the other ones on my phone, lost the passwords. This was just after the twister came through and took everything. My chicken coop got flattened. What chickens ain’t been ate by foxes sleep up under the mow deck on the rider that don’t even run anymore. They’re scared to death somethings coming to get them I imagine. None of em laying eggs now. Unless they laying em somewhere I can’t find em. They’ve done that before. I left a set of work boots out on the front porch last summer and just forgot about em, stopped wearing em I guess. Well fall come around and I picked one up and turned it over and nine eggs come rolling out, broke all on the porch. Why they do that, I do not know.

I never understood why she got so sad. She liked chickens when we first got together up here. Shit, that’s all she liked. She said she wanted the kitchen to be chicken themed. She liked hand towels with red roosters on em. We got a little picture of a white chicken standing on a fence post. Found it at the dollar store bottom of the hill I think. Hung it up above the stove.

Last summer on her birthday I brought home 15 Rhode Island Reds. I go, Happy birthday sweetheart. I got ya the real thing. She goes, My life ain’t supposed to be like this. She started in on the crying and ran back to the bedroom. I don’t know how she was so upset already. She didn’t even know how much they was gonna shit all over the place yet.

The day of the tornado, you could just tell something was coming. I ain’t never seen such a dark sky. The wind gone through first. Power was out and I set right up there in the kitchen and watched my satellite dish go flying, and I mean fuckin flying across the yard. It moved like it owed someone money. But I’m the one who owes money now. I didn’t even think about tornado insurance.

Then I saw my rabbit hutches go. They dropped like dead deer and then they all come up into the air and spun. People don’t believe that when I say it. I seen probably 20 of my rabbits get thrown out the hutches across the yard and get their legs or necks broke and then get sucked right back up in the air, smashed into the ground and then picked up over and over. Most the rabbits were dead, some probably weren’t, but there they were floating out there like some kind of magic show. Like something out of a damn movie.

We got the rabbits before we got the Rhode Island Reds, way before we got the goats, believe it or not. Guess we done it all a little backwards here. Dotty said if I was gonna get into animals, I oughta be getting something cute, something a little one would like. What little one? I didn’t ask. I went out and got two New Zealand rabbits, a buck and a doe.

Dotty wasn’t fat or nothing but she wasn’t no little girl either. When she smiled you could really see just how chubby them cheeks was. I liked that. I liked how heavy her legs were. Lifting them up was like hauling lumber. I liked everything about her. Guess I still do.

I remember our first litter of rabbits she hung onto the little ones like she was in love. She set out there and pet em for hours. She knew what they were for, I don’t know what she thought their purpose was gonna be if not for meat. But then she come home from the store and found me holding one of em up at the legs with a club in my hand and she screamed, cursed me out and ran inside. I already had three of em skinned and quartered and in the cooler. I gave the meat to Lonny and his wife up the hill. She said if I killed another one she was leaving. If you don’t kill rabbits you just end up with more rabbits. We tried selling em as pets for a while, but no one wants one of these big mutant fuckers. Ours are all white with red eyes. Well they were anyway, I ain’t seen any alive since the tornado. They were right around 10 pounds. Ugly as sin. Worth a little bit of money on the fur market, but I wasn’t taking their fur off without killing em first, and Dotty said no more killing em.

The goats were up back of the house. Can’t see em from the kitchen so honest to god I don’t know what all happened to them when the tornado come through. You can only see em from the bedroom window. Dotty wanted to be able to see the garden first thing every morning when she first come up to live with me on the hill. But it was too wet up back there to grow anything so we put the goats where the garden was. After I watched my rabbits get sucked up and scattered, I went up to the bedroom window and looked. All my fencing come down. Broken, most of it. Didn’t see any goats. Still haven’t.

I’d like to say they just run away and took up with some deer or something way deep in the mountains. I heard of people getting yearling deer in with their goats sometimes. They’ve got similar smelling piss. Makes em think they’re family. But I don’t know what happened to em. They mighta got picked up by that twister and taken with it, wherever it gone to next.

I know Dotty love me. I know she did. It’s why we got the damn goats. I work third shift at the plant, I have for a long while. Before I knew her I saved up, bought the trailer and the three acres up here on the hill. Then she come along and I guess I figured I had life pret near dicked. We’d have dinner before I go into work every night. She’d grab my hand sometimes real soft like.

“Baby, why can’t you call off?” she’d ask.

“Honey I get any more points I’m fired,” I’d say. “I called off too much already.”

She’d go, “I just get so lonely up here when you’re gone.”

I knew this guy Mark I went to school with. Guess that was a long time ago now. He lived up in the hills too, just not this hill. He got into raising goats and I thought that’s all he done for work. I always seen him posting about selling goats on marketplace. So I sent him a message about it.

Dotty and I went over pretty soon after. He had a hundred of the fuckin things. Dotty goes, “their eyes are freaky as hell.”

I said to Mark, “How do you make money on these?”

“I sell em. For meat mostly.” He slapped a black one on the flank. “There’s these folks up in the city, they can’t get enough of these sons a bitches. They give me 300 a head, cleaned and quartered.”

I couldn’t believe people in the cities liked eating goats. He thought they were immigrants. I asked if they were Mexicans. He said maybe Indians. Or maybe Muslims, Arabs.

We bought two doe and a buck from him right there, put em in the bed of the truck and drove slow down his hill and up our own. Had to build the fence quick, they kept wandering all over at first, getting the neighbors all pissed off. But Dotty was happy, and she smiled a lot even though she thought the goats were evil. She liked seeing me around the house working. I liked her to watch me. Thought if Mark could make a living on these things I could too.  But the tornado came through before I even got one slaughtered. And then Dotty left. I still work at the plant.

My daddy never let people know how he hurt. But I guess you could always tell, looking back. The way his eyes sunk right back, big old black circles under em. His hair fell out just overnight. He got real skinny. I didn’t know what happened, not long after that my ma was gone and I ain’t seen her again. I think I know what happened now, but ain’t no one around for me to ask. Don’t think I’d want to ask even if I could.

See when Dotty left, I guess I felt like I was gonna die. I still went to work, but I stopped caring so much, got in some heat over it at the plant. I didn’t care. We got these big mills where the material goes in to get ground up and make the pellets. I thought sometimes about getting in there head first, I really did. I’d look down into the mouth of the thing and I could almost hear it calling me in. But I don’t know how long I would feel it for, the teeth of it chewing my head open. I didn’t want to feel it for as long as it would probably take to kill me. And what if someone pulled me out with the job half finished, and I had to live with my head unzipped for the rest of my life. I know it could break my skull, they had us watch these videos about what all damage it could do, we gotta watch em every year. But I guess I’m a chicken shit, cause I never did.

I stopped eating too. Weird how that is, I wasn’t hungry there for a long while. My own hair started falling out. I hate how I look. I took down every mirror in the house. But I’m getting better, I am getting better. Lately I have started eating some. Nothing changed here at the house. Dotty never come back. I never heard from her. But I didn’t die, so I guess the only thing I could do was try to start living a little bit, even if I don’t want to much.

I been working out here on this fence for a couple of days now. It’s taking me a long time to get these posts in the ground. My arms are skinny now. I look at my belly sometimes and can’t believe how my ribs stick out as they do. It’s hard work getting these posts back upright all on my own. But once I get em in the ground a little bit of the way, it ain’t so hard to hold up. Funny how that works.

I’m building my pasture back I guess, and I don’t really know exactly why. I ain’t going back over the hill to buy more goats. I just don’t know what all else to do with myself, and I know this broken wood lying around the property don’t look good. I don’t so much have a plan. But I want the fence to get back up whether anything lives inside it again or not. And this morning I went down to the coop and kicked that wood around a little. It ain’t in such good shape. But I could probably make do, build something from it. Hutches are long gone, ain’t no bringing them back. I don’t know if I’d want to. The number of rabbits we had in there, it just felt cruel to keep em all packed in. So I guess I’m going to finish this fence here, and then I’m going to see about rebuilding the coop. If them goats are still out there somewhere, they might come back. Who knows. But I’ll be ready if they do.