I frowned at the apple in my hand, turning Mrs. Evans’s words over in my head, and then brightening with a conclusion. “Are you Nitpick?”
He laughed. “I am not,” he said. “I’m Vietnam Tim.”
“Oh. Okay.” I hesitated. “I’m Diana. My mom probably told you about me.”
“No,” he said. “She didn’t.” He stood up, moving down the steps of the porch with a noticeable limp. “You coming?” he asked.
I scrambled after him. “Are you a photographer, too?”
He crossed the dusty expanse of lawn and slid open the peeling door of the barn, which groaned on its track. “Sure.” He shrugged. “Sometimes.”
I blinked into the darkness. Suddenly there was a shriek like someone was having their skin flayed from the bone. I flattened myself against the wall, and then the barn flooded with light.
Vietnam Tim stood with his hand on the chain he’d pulled to turn on the bare bulb. In front of him was a single stall, in which a mangy brown donkey stood, making that horrible sound. “That,” he announced, “is Nitpick.” When I didn’t move, he plucked the apple from my hand and held it over the edge of the stall door. “He’ll take your fingers off if you’re not careful. He’s also the closest thing to a Democrat you’ll see in this fucking hellhole.”
My eyes flew to his. “You’re not supposed to curse in front of me.”
“Why not? You heard that word before?”
I nodded.
“Then I ain’t telling you something you don’t already know, am I?”
I inched closer to him and the stall. As a city girl, the closest I ever got to animals was the Bronx Zoo. There was something so visceral about this donkey, with its velvet eyes and nicotine teeth. “It has eyelashes,” I marveled.
I looked up to find Vietnam Tim staring at me. “You don’t get out much, do you?” he said.
“I’m nine.”
He nodded. “Fair point.”
“Are you here because there isn’t any rain?”
“I’m here because I’m betting there’s gonna be rain, real soon. I’m a tornado chaser.” When I blinked at him, he narrowed his eyes. “I go all over the country, trying to stay one step ahead of the storms.”
“I didn’t know that was a job,” I admitted.
“Me neither, but I been doing it for a decade,” he said. “Came back from the war so messed up in the head that I needed to find something worse off than I was.” He glanced down at me. “You ever seen a tornado?”
I shook my head.
“It takes three things to make one: vertical air movement—like the kind in a thunderstorm, a change in wind speed and direction inside that thunderstorm, and lots of space so the twister can expand.”
I wondered what it was like inside the heart of a thunderstorm. All I knew about tornadoes came from The Wizard of Oz and the Twister movie, which I hadn’t been allowed to watch. I looked nervously over my shoulder at the rectangle of light and sky through the open door of the barn. I didn’t even like it when I went to school and Mrs. Hathorne was out sick and we had a substitute teacher; the thought of a catastrophe that might sneak up on me was utterly terrifying. “How can you tell if one’s coming?”
“Hail,” Vietnam Tim said. “Roaring. Thunder. A yellow sky.” He reached out and gently stroked the ears of Nitpick. “Wind can get past two hundred miles per hour for an EF5 tornado. I’ve seen five of ’em, firsthand.”
“Why would you want to be there for that?”
His eyes lit up. “Because everyone else is running away,” he said.
Nitpick chose that moment to bolt at some imaginary slight and gallop out of the open rear door of the stall into a fenced pen outside. I imagined Vietnam Tim standing like a superhero as a dark black funnel cloud raced toward him. It was the way I sometimes imagined my mother in war zones and tsunamis and all the other gateways to hell—fierce and fiery and invincible.
“Your mom might have come here for the drought,” Vietnam Tim said, “but she’s an adrenaline junkie, just like me.”
I did not know what an adrenaline junkie was, but I knew a stupid idea when I heard it. “Well, I think it’s pretty dumb to sit around and wait to get hurt.”
Even as I said it, I thought of all the nights I tried to stay up, straining to hear the sound of my mother opening the door of the apartment, of the whir of her roller bag wheels on the wooden floor.