Wrong Turn

Momentous events can hinge on the smallest of decisions...

         “Hospitals?” Renato shouted. “I hate hospitals! Don’t even get me started.”
         “You hate everything,” his older partner countered, taking a pull of the beer I’d bought them.
         “And not without good reason,” the young Latino declared. “The best place to be if you’re gonna spend time in a hospital is in a coma.”
         I’m sorry. My name is Eric Zullo. Yeah, don’t ask. I was a journalism student at the University of Texas, and my assignment was to interview some of the lunatics that chase tornadoes up and down the alley every spring. Mind you, serious scientists were one thing, but I was looking for the freelancers, the colorful characters akin to modern day Vandals, looking to “loot” a big storm for that once-in-a-lifetime video or sound recording that would bring them fame and fortune. The meteorology students I talked to told me that that particular chimera didn’t exist, and even if it did, the professionals with their high-tech gear and equipment were the only ones who had a chance to capture it. That didn’t mean they weren’t out there trying.
         I had found them eventually, holed up in a honky-tonk along a deserted stretch of two-lane highway between Jasper and Marshall. Tipped off by their dinged-up vehicles drawn up together in the lot outside, I had entered to find a half-dozen of them around two of the tables to the side of the bar. They had two radios going, one tuned to the National Weather Service, the other to a commercial station in Shreveport. I bought them a round, introduced myself, and Renato and Homer invited me to join them at their table. I ordered a burger and fries and sat down to listen. They weren’t shy about talking.
         “Not the waiting room?” Homer asked.
         “Worst place you can be!” Renato asserted. “They want you to die in there. Sterile, like a sci-fi torture chamber. They start trying to depress you to death before you get to the check-in desk. And when you’re in the waiting room with nothing but old magazines to look at, what are you waiting for?”
         “I give up,” Homer replied.
         Renato turned his intense gaze on me.
         “You’re waiting for somebody with a God complex to come out and tell you that someone you care about has died, that’s what. Better to be unconscious for the whole time you’re there.”
         “That’s a sorry way to look at things,” Homer declared.
         “Yeah?” Renato shot back. “You remember that girl we had with us a couple of seasons back?”
         “Who, Pauline?”
         “No, no, she was the radar operator. No, I’m talking about that photographer, the pretty one. Mel, we called her.”
         “Oh, right, Mel. That was what, five, six seasons ago.”
         “Don’t see what difference that makes.”
         “Mel... What was her name, Melissa?”
         “Melanie. Melanie Cooper,” Renato corrected, looking distractedly toward the grease-stained window.
         “Yeah, that’s right. Well, Mel was a looker. Face of an angel, body of a devil if you get my drift.”
         “Too bad she was a lesbian,” Renato added.
         “She wasn’t a lesbian, Rainy, she just wouldn’t sleep with you.”
         “Same thing.”
         “Whatever. Everybody on the crew and everyplace we went wanted to get into her pants, but that’s another story. She was a freelance photographer who sort of attached herself to the crew. None of us much minded. We’re all away from home for a few months at a stretch, and she was a nice piece of eye candy, but that’s not the story. She was after that holy grail of pictures, and she got some good ones, make no mistake.”
         “The girl was nuts,” Renato allowed.
         “The girl had bigger balls than most of you guys,” Homer said. “She drove an old Dodge pickup. It was full of dings, and the back window was cracked, all from being hit by flying debris. You need to understand, when you’re chasing an F4, if you’re gonna get close enough to do anything meaningful, junk’s in the air and you’re gonna get hit. You allow for it. Window cages, plywood armor, whatever you think will make your truck a little more survivable. Well, Mel didn’t think that was close enough. She liked to take her pictures from close enough to shake hands with it. She’d rather dance with a funnel than a handsome man, and that’s what finally brought her down.”
         “Tell me about it,” I said, leaning forward. I was about three-quarters convinced he was going to tell me one of those harrowing life-and-death stories that always end with, “What do you think happened? I died?”
         “We were up in Arkansas around Fort Chaffee and we stopped into a roadside diner to lubricate the pipes, you know, and there were some army guys from the post there. Mel got into a conversation with one of ‘em, they put on a show on the dance floor, and I gather he asked her to come to a party that some of his buddies were throwing. He wrote something on a napkin and gave it to her. I assume it was an address, and he rolled out. She hung around to finish the sandwich she’d ordered, and made ready to follow him.”
         “He was probably gonna rape her,” Renato grumbled.
         “And she’d still be alive, wouldn’t she? She’d laid a fiver on the table, put on her coat, and just cleared the door when word came over the radio that an F4 was building right up the road. You don’t get many opportunities like that. Most of the time, you hear about a big one, and it’s on the other side of the state, or some river you can’t cross, or something, you know? So we pay up and head for our trucks, and as we’re starting to roll, Mel’s truck comes down the parking aisle and sets up at the exit with the left turn signal on. We came up behind her, and I called her on the CB. Told her the queen mother of all storms was forming up just up the road, and did she want to come. Her right signal came on, she turned out ahead of us, and led the way up the highway.
         "Well, I didn’t have to give her any more directions. This thing dropped not much more than a mile ahead of us. The base must have been a quarter-mile across. It crossed the highway up ahead of us, and we started maneuvering to get behind it. That’s the only reasonably safe approach, that, or from the right side of its path if you can’t get behind it.”
         “Why’s that?”
         “If it turns, it’s most likely to go in the direction of rotation, and that’s counterclockwise, so, to the left. Well, as we passed a little farm road that went off to the left, Mel turned onto it. I knew right away that wasn’t good, and I radioed to ask what she was doing, but she didn’t answer. Both hands on the wheel and eyes on the cloud, no doubt. So I admonished her to be careful, and me and Rainy went about our business, got our pictures, took our readings, and all that. National Weather said our instrument readings were very useful, though they never told us how, and I sold a series of pictures to the AP that let us buy some new equipment.”
         “And Mel?”
         “Yeah, Mel. After the dust settled, we couldn’t raise her on the radio, so we went down that farm road. We eventually spotted her truck upside-down a quarter mile out into the field. We had to walk out there. Even our four-by would barely manage the road itself, never mind that saturated field. We found her hanging upside-down. Her seat belts had held.”
         “For all the good that did her.”
         “Yeah. Well, we cut her down and took her to Fort Smith General. It was standing room only, as you might imagine after a storm like that, and a hundred ambulances must have pulled in after we got there. They took her in for prep, and we were in that waiting room for about six hours before they came out to tell us that she didn’t make it. She had a depression in her skull that caused her brain to swell, and that’s what killed her. They said it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d had a helicopter standing by, the damage was done before we got her out of the truck. And that’s why my young friend hates hospitals. Plus, I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that I killed her.”
         “You never told me that,” Renato said.
         “Why?” I asked him. “You didn’t tell her to go down that road. In fact, you just said you told her not to.”
         “That was pure Mel,” Homer replied. “We all knew she’d take any chance no matter how crazy. Going down that road was a wrong turn, and all of us knew it, but that was just the second wrong turn. The first was when she fell in with us. If I’d just kept my mouth shut, she would have turned left and gone to her rendezvous with her soldier and whatever that would have led to, but I didn’t. I told her about the storm of the century right up the road, and she turned right instead. She died because I couldn’t leave it be.”
         “It was what she wanted. She could have gone left anyway.”
         “No, she couldn’t, and I knew it. And I told her about it anyway.”
         Homer ordered another round for the crew as the mood at our table at least turned somber for a while. I heard a few more stories, then a call came out about an F3 forming just across the border in Louisiana, and everybody manned their vehicles like an air force crew scrambling for an intercept.
         I spent a few more days with these guys collecting stories and photos, but when I got back to San Antonio, the one I chose for the paper was the story of Melanie Cooper, how she died, and the effect she’d had on this crew of roughneck storm chasers that spent their free time doing a thing that I never quite came to understand. Mrs. Lowe gave me a C+ and printed the story in the back pages of the student union paper, a grade for which I never forgave her, given what went into it. I was somewhat vindicated when the San Antonio Times picked it up and it won a minor award from the South Texas Journalists’ Society, and it turned out all right in the end. I have a wife and two little tornadoes of my own now, and a job in the business that supports us all comfortably, but I’ve never forgotten the Blacksky Stormhunters, and a thunderstorm never closes in that I don’t think about Mel, and wonder what drove her to give her life in pursuit of that one great photo.
         My wife doesn’t get it, and I’m not sure that I do. Maybe someday the grand epiphany will come to me, but for now, my heart goes out when the sky gets dark and threatening, to this young woman I never met who died alone in the tempest, and I wonder where she’d be if she hadn’t taken that one wrong turn.