The Monsoon, by Tom Dinard

“Why is it that the sixth song on an album is always the best one?” Cyril Vienna asks, eyes fixed on the desert highway disappearing under the hood of his red pickup as the CD player clicks to “Flirtin’ With Disaster,” track No. 6 on Molly Hatchet’s Greatest Hits.

He’s talking 60 mph while driving 80, assuring me that everything is OK, which is what he always does when it isn’t.

“Now this isn’t bullshit or nothin’,” he says,  “but I wrote one helluva story in high school.” He says this knowing that writing is what I do and at the moment he sells meat and fish out of a big truck, a rolling refrigerator, when he’s not in his own vehicle, chasing things he might never find.

His unfettered Maine eyes sparkle the color of the Atlantic as he remembers the tale — something about his Army days. A long march followed by a night under the stars. An encounter with a coyote … or was it a bear? I’m staring out the window at the crumbling edifice of a long-vacated greyhound racetrack, wondering what kind of crowd — human or otherwise — that desolate place might entertain later tonight when the wild things come out.

It’s the last day in August and we’re on the outskirts of Phoenix, heading west to an I-10 exit called Tonopah. The sun won’t set for hours but the sky is getting darker by the minute.

At around three this afternoon, Cyril was enjoying the air conditioning in the apartment his chef buddy from back home is letting him stay in for the summer while he tries to get a good job. He was watching the Weather Channel, as always, and learned that something was hovering over downtown. He got in the truck and went, stopping at a Circle K to call me at the newspaper where I work.

“Look outside!” he yelled. “Go up to the roof if you can. Look southeast! I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes!”

I did what he said. A wall of sand was advancing toward the city — a giant, apocalyptic-looking thing seemingly thousands of feet in the air and coming quick. I pictured him for a moment, poised on the corner near the basketball arena and the modest assortment of skyscrapers, camera pointed straight up. I was sure that at that moment he didn’t care if he got swept up in the maelstrom and spit out onto concrete or if he disintegrated altogether with one glorious blast into oblivion.

Cyril and I had met at college in Tucson and partied together for two years, but he said he didn’t know what he wanted to do afterwards. I was a journalism major who had gotten a job right away at the paper, where I was laying out pages and editing the writing of other people while polishing my own creative meanderings, working my way “up.”

“You’re doing what you love, and there isn’t anything better than that,” he’d tell me once in a while, usually awkwardly tacked on to a conversation about football or classic rock or buying bricks of cheap reefer from the Mexicans in South Tucson while we drank Coors Light. “I have to figure out what I love.” I’d agree quickly and move on. We weren’t supposed to go there.

Today he called me exactly fifteen minutes after I climbed back down the sketchy roof ladder in a panic and scrambled back to my desk in time to proofread a story about the horse races up in Prescott.

“Did you like that?” he asked, laughing.

“What the fuck was that?” I said.

“A haboob,” he said. “Also known as a huge fuckin’ sandstorm that obviously scared the shit out of you.”

“I figured something like that. Either that or the world was ending.”

“I figured you figured. Now get ready.”

“For what?”

“I’m picking you up in a half-hour. The haboob means it’s coming, about seventy miles west of here if my meteorological skills are what I think they are.”

“What’s coming?”

“The monsoon,” he says. “We’re gonna chase the monsoon.”

Now he drives on, rifle-metal cool behind that wheel. “I can’t write like you,” he says. “I mean, you’re the best writer I know. But I can tell a story. You know that. And I think if I really put my mind to it, I could probably just tell my stories into a tape recorder or something, and then I could play it back, write it all down, and make something cool out of it. Maybe you could help me.”

“Sure,” I say, hoping he does it and hoping he never does it. “Just give me whatever you’ve got whenever you feel like it and I’ll tell you what I think.”

Cyril hasn’t been right lately. He went back to Maine after graduation, realized for the third or fourth time in his life that he would never satisfy his attorney parents, who wanted him to be a lawyer or actuary or legal aid or something like them, and came back to Arizona in February. He’s 26, two years older than me, and he’s crashing on the couch of a future restaurateur who poaches eggs every morning and mixes them with things like fennel and cumin seed and makes a scene about service at every food joint, even the Waffle House.

In March, he heard about a gig selling hot dogs and peanuts at spring training games from Judy, the fifty-year-old woman he’d see in the laundry room at the apartment complex. The money wasn’t any good, she told him, but there could be worse things than being outside in perfect weather, watching baseball and talking to cool people from all over the country. Cyril took the job and slept with Judy for a month until she “freaked out” on him, something he still hasn’t explained.

A few weeks later, he latched on to his driving job. His route took him all over the state and into Colorado and Utah. A few days ago, he came back into Phoenix on the other side of the freeway we’re on right now. He had been in Lake Havasu and Parker and Quartzsite and had made a few sales.

“Some orange roughy, a few bacon-wrapped filets, and a bunch of the half-pound sirloin burgers, although those never make me much money,” he says now. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?” I ask.

“I don’t know if I can stay here much longer.”

I’ve heard this before, so I don’t see a reason to ask why. No time to, either. He’s already seen a sign and his eyes are glowing again. Tonopah: five miles.

The sky has tarred up, and as I roll down the window I smell the coming storm through the sagebrush. Cyril has steered us off-road and we’re bounding down something he calls the Saddle Mountain Trail.

“Are we on the Paris-Dakar rally, dude?” I ask, slightly annoyed.

He’s somehow pulled out his camera and draped it around his shoulder.

“You won’t believe what you’re going to see in the sky,” he says. “Just a few more miles.”

We’re parked on a bluff, overlooking a dry arroyo, when the rain starts. It sweeps through the trail in black sheets. Cyril looks over at me and I’m sure he hasn’t been happier.

He rips off his shirt and wraps it around the camera as he bails out of the driver’s seat, scampering across the ravine and summoning me with his free hand. I can see that he’s screaming but I’ve got no prayer of hearing him above the deafening deluge. I can only watch.

I sit for at least an hour, powerless to move, having lost sight of Cyril about twenty minutes in, when the water rose about ten feet and began to rage like the runoff from a dam. And he was right about the sky. I’ve only been able to look for him in the split-second intervals of biblical, all-illuminating lightning. The only thing I know is that the truck is safe and I’m still alive and dry in it.

Hell blows through. The wash subsides. I’m hunched on the floor of the pickup, looking for a flashlight so I can get out and maybe find something.

A pebble hits the passenger-side window. I shoot up quickly, cracking my head on the bottom of the glove compartment, and look out. Traipsing confidently across the trail, tossing another stone my way, is Cyril Fucking Vienna. Still shirtless, smiling wide and raising his arms high above his head, he points his camera to the heavens.

***

Tom’s weathering storms right here …

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