“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.

“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.”