Begin to Exit Here by John Welter Page B

felt bad for her again.
    â€œI’m sorry for being so nasty. It’s not your fault I was a salad girl. I should’ve known that, by studying English, I was preparing myself for a career in lettuce and tomatoes.”
    She closed her eyes and sniggered almost silently, then shook her head.
    â€œDon’t apologize. You’ve been having a real bad week, and the pressure at this paper gets damned inexcusable, so don’t apologize for getting pissed off at what you
should
be pissed off about.”
    â€œAre you mad at me?” I said.
    â€œI’m not mad, no,” she said. “I think, like you, I’m exhausted. Do you feel okay, now?”
    â€œIf you’re not mad at me, I feel okay.”
    â€œI was mad at first, but I got over it. Kurt, you’re not the only one who thinks this job sucks sometimes. Sometimes I hate it as much as
you
do.”
    â€œNo, you don’t. I’ve had more experience at hating it than you have.”
    â€œOkay,” she said. “You hate it more than I do.”
    â€œThank you,” I said.
    She got off my desk and stretched her arms, then said, “So. Are you going to call the Institute of State and ask if someone could be found criminally negligent for letting Earth exist?”
    â€œYes. Someone should be in jail.”

15
    T hings slowed down in St. Beaujolais, and after an alarming week in which reporters at both papers found nothing seriously wrong, injurious, decadent, stupid, horrifying, or controversial to write about, the weather changed and we had a tornado.
    â€œThis is great!” Harmon said exuberantly when he heard the first report of the tornado over the scanner in a warning from the National Weather Service. Jumping away from his computer and the story he’d sullenly been writing about a request for a permit to build a mosque in St. Beaujolais, Harmon ran up to the scanner, knocking a chair out of his way, to write down more details on the tornado. His eyes looked gleeful, somber, and insane.
    â€œA tornado. It’s mine,” he said jealously.
    I walked to the scanner to give Harmon some experienced guidance.
    â€œStupid fucking bastard,” I said. Tornadoes aren’t fun. They kill people.”
    â€œKiss my ass,” he said, scribbling down the reported location and possible path of the tornado. The National Weather Service man said it was spotted touching down in a forest about two miles west of Small, where it was traveling northeast at approximately thirty miles an hour. All of us were gone in an instant, running to our cars to try and catch a swirling, evil mass of clouds that would indifferently destroy whatever they touched. There were three reporters and a photographer running across the street for cars.
    â€œShouldn’t we go in
one
car?” Rebecca yelled.
    I yelled, “No. We might all die together. Dying is private, don’t you think?”
    She looked like she was going to smile, and we kept running. Harmon raced away first in his black Nissan, eager to look at death and ruin, which made front-page copy in any paper in the world. I felt adrenalin and mild, dumb panic while looking up to study the dark gray edges of the thunderstorm swelled above us, but I told myself to be calm. I knew, from all those years in Kansas and Missouri, where all sane people become minor authorities on thunderstorms,that we were on the safe edge of the storm and that the tornado, traveling away from us, wouldn’t be here. I bought a Coke at McDonald’s. There was time.
    The storm and the tornado already had moved far north of town by the time any of us could have gotten onto the Interstate to chase it. There was some very light rain, almost pleasant, while I could see, a few miles beyond my car and over some of the forests on the hills scattered around town, the nearly solid black darkness along the horizon where the storm was still tearing things up. Behind it, to my left, the sun