Bruno

I was riding my bike home from work one afternoon when I stopped at a little fresh produce market along my usual route. I picked up some vegetables and a few other things to make dinner, stuffing everything into the backpack I carried whenever I rode.

The news was playing on a television behind the counter. A tornado watch had been issued for Delray Beach.

“They always say there’s a tornado coming,” I said to a man standing in line beside me. “Then they say one touched down, but I never see or hear anything.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he said. “You see all that devastation on the news, but it’s never around here. It’s usually somewhere in the Midwest.”

We laughed about it. Then it was my turn at the register. I paid, put the rest of my things into my backpack, and pulled on my waterproof windbreaker, just in case. Then I got on my bike and headed home.

About two minutes after leaving the store, I noticed that the sky ahead of me had grown unusually dark. I was pedaling straight toward it, but I still didn’t think much of it. This was South Florida. Dark skies and sudden rain were nothing new.

Five minutes later, I was about a third of the way home when it started raining. The wind picked up, but at first it was nothing more than rain and a strong breeze.

Then, without warning, everything changed.

The wind hit with such force that I could no longer pedal. It was blowing me and the bike sideways. One second I had been riding through the rain, and the next I was fighting to keep from being carried down the street.

There was nowhere to go. No doorway. No awning. Nothing I could duck beneath. There was a building across the street, but I couldn’t see any activity inside, and the rain had become so intense that I could barely see the building at all.

Beside me stood a tall cement utility pole. I grabbed it with both arms and held on.

I threaded one foot through the metal bar of my bicycle, using the weight of the bike to help keep me anchored. The wind kept lifting and moving it, banging the metal into my leg, but I couldn’t let it go. Without the bike weighing me down, I didn’t know if I could keep myself on the ground.

I pressed myself against the pole and held on.

Through the rain, I heard someone shouting.

“I can’t believe this!”

I turned my head toward the voice. That was when I saw him.

A boy in a school uniform was coming down the street with a backpack strapped to him. He wasn’t walking. The wind was carrying him in my direction. He couldn’t stop himself, turn around, or fight his way back. His feet were barely staying on the ground.

As he came close enough, I reached out, grabbed him, and pulled him toward the pole.

“Hold on!” I yelled.

He wrapped his arms around it.

“Don’t let go!”

“I’m not!”

The wind kept trying to pull him away. I held on to the pole with one arm and wrapped the other around him. His feet lifted from the ground. Mine were moving too, but my foot was still tangled through the bicycle, keeping me from being pulled away.

The rain was driving directly into our faces. It forced its way up our noses and into our mouths until it felt as though we were drowning while standing in the middle of the street. I had to turn my head just to breathe.

The windbreaker I had put on at the market was plastered against my body. The boy’s uniform clung to him. Within seconds, both of us were soaked through. Then the temperature dropped, and the rain became painfully cold.

“I don’t know if I can hold on anymore!” he shouted.

“I’ve got you,” I told him. “I’ve got you. Don’t let go.”

His feet lifted again, but I tightened my arm around him. The bicycle continued twisting and slamming into my leg as the wind tried to tear it away. I could feel the metal doing damage, but there was nothing I could do about it. I held on to the boy. He held on to the pole. We stayed that way while the storm tried to rip both of us loose.

It may have lasted only two or three minutes, but it felt much longer.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the pressure began to ease.

The rain stopped forcing itself up my nose. The boy’s feet touched the ground and stayed there. My bike stopped pulling against my leg. The wind weakened, the rain softened, and then it simply stopped.

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Once I was sure it was over, I carefully pulled my foot out of the bicycle. Then I turned to the boy.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Bruno.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“School.”

He told me he attended the middle school down the road. He was only twelve years old. He had forgotten the money he needed to ride the bus, so he had been walking home.

I had seen that bus pass shortly after I left the market. If Bruno had remembered his money, he would have been on it. He would have been safe instead of being blown down the street.

For some reason, we crossed the street to the building we had barely been able to see during the storm. Bruno didn’t have a cell phone, so I gave him mine to call his mother. He told her what had happened and where we were.

I stayed with him until she arrived to take him home.

After that day, I never saw Bruno again.

His school was along my regular route, so whenever I rode past it, I looked for him. I watched the students coming and going, hoping I might catch a glimpse of him in his uniform or see him walking with his backpack.

I never did.

My leg remained bruised and sore for a long time where the wind had repeatedly slammed the bicycle into it. The entire area turned black and blue. It was painful, but whenever I looked at those bruises, I thought about what might have happened if I had let go of the bike, the pole, or Bruno.

Before that afternoon, tornado warnings were something I heard on television. They were stories from somewhere else, usually accompanied by pictures of devastation in places far from Delray Beach.

I had even laughed about the warning minutes before riding directly into it.

But tornadoes do touch down in Delray.
And when they say one is coming, I believe them now.