As in:
If, the night before, Ben had been up at 3 a.m. watching the Weather Channel, instead of digging beneath his pillow in search of sleep, he would have heard late-night meteorologist Percy Pipes. Percy was riffing on Florida and the ways Florida dives south, and becomes “something like a meat thermometer.”
What was fascinating, he said, is that people in New Orleans and Pensacola might even see snow later in the day thanks to a deep horseshoe-shaped plunge in the jet stream. But it was also going to be 87 degrees in Miami, and somewhere over south Florida the spilled “frozen drink” of late season arctic air was going to meet the calypso warmth boiling up from the tropics and “look out for the blue thunder when that happens, yeowza.”
Percy really did say “yeowza,” which in his mind was a better choice than “boo-ya” for a 3 a.m. audience of people who were probably more interested in the gushing Billy Mays advertisements for stain remover and a new tool for removing dandelions.
Ben first noticed the low hanging, impossibly blue-black curtain of clouds over Miramar, just a half minute after Charisse told him to look for the North Miami Beach exit. His first thought was that the Everglades may have caught fire. But then he saw the white mountain top of cumulonimbus towering high above the dark curtain. What got Charisse’s attention was the shaft of lightening unlike anything she’d seen before. It seemed as thick as a city block and flicked twice in the exact shape, with a gnarled rightward bend in it near the ground. She was already pulling onto the exit to Dania Beach when the report of thunder hit, sounding like someone had just blown up Miramar.
Their simultaneously exclaimed obscenities collided in mid air.
Charisse removed her sunglasses and placed them in the change pit in front of the stick shift between them. She quickly steered the car into a bank drive-thru lane, where there was, at least, a concrete shelter from the marble-sized hail stones. Still, the lightning strikes were terrifying.
When the hail stopped for a minute, she pulled out and headed for a nearby Motel 6, where they quickly checked in and got a room in which to get out of their soaked clothing. The storm, they learned later, killed eight people. Three were struck by lightening and five drowned after a water spout destroyed their yacht.
Charisse could hardly stop eating the night before, but now she had completely lost her appetite. As he was drifting off to sleep, Ben had a premonition that he would never see New Hampshire again, nor even Georgia.
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