The Cracked Earth (22 page)

“Jack!”

He was cursing the Concord, thinking the engine was acting up outlandishly, when he saw a Thunderbird slew across his path and come to a stop on the shoulder. He braked in time, but a minivan wasn't so lucky and plowed into the rear of an old Camaro. All of a sudden cars were slantwise all over the road and the road itself was bucking and rolling in a way that made no rational sense.

He heard a noise like the whistle of a teapot and thought he saw a flash of light and all he could think of was a junior-high teacher bellowing “Drop!” and a mushroom cloud rising in the distance. Then the car, which he'd thought he'd got safely stopped, jolted up and down, bottoming hard like an elevator that had hesitated a floor too soon before free-falling the last few feet. Something roared in his ears. Lee Borowsky threw herself onto his side of the car and clung to him, and he stuck an arm through the steering wheel for grip as if they might be bucked right out the open window. As his head jerked involuntarily on his neck he regained enough sense to realize what it was and that if they were still okay now, they'd probably live through it.

There was a starburst of sparks up ahead where a power cable tore out of a pylon above the freeway and he thought he saw a palm tree hurled straight up in the air, though it seemed pretty unlikely. When he got his neck stabilized and looked the other way, a jet of fire was cutting right through a house down the freeway embankment. The violent shaking had ebbed to a side-to-side roll like a slow ferry in a swell. A quarter mile ahead, the power pylon leaned at a precarious angle and he watched with awe as one more joggle of the earth sent it over in slow motion. Girders snapped like toothpicks as the big frame broke up across the entire width of the road, trailing cables and gobs of sparkler flare. To the south, the Hollywood Hills had disappeared into a haze of dust. He guessed the hills were probably still there under all the dust that had huffed into the air.

Lee Borowsky's hands worked hard on his biceps and she pressed against him with her eyes shut.

“It's okay, little one. It was just what it was.”

Just when he thought it was truly over, there was another quick tremor, and another, and he realized the aftershocks would go on for months, diminishing little by little but now and again offering up a nastier shiver as a tease and reminder. Months later, aftershocks would still start nightmares throughout the city and spook those pets that weren't already out of their minds. He thought of Loco and then put the dog right out of mind. There were more important worries.

He looked at his watch: 2:40. Maeve and Kathy were both still in their schools, and after a generation of study commissions and rebuilding they were the safest buildings in the city. Marlena would have been down in her mailbox shop. Nothing he could do could help her. The phones would be down for hours and clogged for days after that and the major roads would probably be impassable.

He felt a strange nausea of dislocation. Things wouldn't be the same now, and he didn't know how he felt about that. His heart thumped away in his chest like a trapped animal. People were getting out of their cars to look around, unsteady on their feet. An old couple had made it up to the chain-link along the edge of the freeway and had their arms around one another, sobbing. A man in a leather jacket stood in the bed of a pickup waving a single finger up at the sky and shouting something that was lost in the din of car alarms and horns. Children bursting out of a yellow school bus were applauding and frolicking. Just past the off-ramp an old VW bus had slid into a Texaco truck that was beginning to brew up and he decided he'd better get off the freeway while he could.

Jack Liffey extricated his arm from the small, tight hands and started the stalled car.

“That was a big one okay, but not
the
big one.” As if words would normalize it. Though he noticed his mind shied away from one word. Earthquake.

She put her head down and covered it with her arms, as if to make it all go away. He backed and inched the car around the Thunderbird. The surface of the freeway was cracked up like a dried mudflat, but none of the gaps seemed more than an inch or two wide. Far away there were plumes of black smoke and he heard a steady pop-popping from somewhere, like popcorn in a skillet. A policeman was working at righting his toppled motorcycle, leaning against it with all his weight. Not far off the road he could see a ten-story glass building leaning to one side, its grid of rectangles squashed out of true and a lot of the glass broken out.

Jack Liffey steered the car slowly down the Laurel Canyon off-ramp, and as he descended he lost his perspective on the city. Damage became local, personal. A chimney had fallen tidily across a front lawn, a family crouched in the street, craning their necks in every direction. A four-story apartment house was only three stories high, having collapsed neatly on its dozen parked cars. He was the only vehicle moving, and then he remembered the radio and switched it on. It crackled anxiously. Long ago the tuner had frozen up on an all-news AM station, but it seemed to be off the air. He turned the volume way down but left it on.

A big frame house was wrenched off its foundation, as if rotated a few degrees from true, and he felt a chill thinking of similar houses.

“Lee, honey. We're okay. You can sit up.”

She sat back and uncovered her eyes, but there was something crazy inside, unfocused. It reminded him of the look he'd seen on Loco.

“The last time I was at your mom's house,” he started, trying to keep his voice as calm as he could, “there was an earthquaking contractor's truck out front. Do you know what he was doing?”

She swiveled mechanically toward him and he braked as a little silver sports car went past very fast, honking its horn maniacally. He felt a tiny spurt of rage at the recklessness, but pushed it away. A thousand emotions spiraled through him—dominated by a deep unease that had been kicked up off the floors of an ancient sea. What was certain was not certain any longer. She started crying, her head jerking in spasms.

“Lee?”

“Dad was after her for years to get the house bolted to the foundation. He said …”

Everyone in L.A. knew what the Whittier Narrows thrust-quake in 1987 had done to the old Cal-bungalows that had only sat on their foundations by weight.

“Do you think they had time to bolt it down?”

“How would I know?”

Up the higher slopes of the hills he began to see houses and trees appearing through the dust. They looked curiously untouched above the haze, part of a safer universe. He stopped at a dead traffic light. Ventura Boulevard had cars stopped every which way and people out of them to sit on the curbs or hold one another. Power wires looped slack from pole to pole, a few fallen to earth. A big sycamore was snapped in two right in the middle, the crown of the tree resting across a navy-blue four-wheeler.

“The freeways are going to be out of the question. We just might make it there over the hills, if they're not blocked by rubble. There's a Thomas Bros. in the glove box.”

“I don't need a map. I grew up here. If you can get past that truck, turn at the doughnut shop.”

He got past by jumping the curb and running half a block on a sidewalk littered with glass. The old Concord had a nice high clearance and his steel radials seemed to sneer at the glass.

H
E BOUNCED HARD OUT OF THE ALLEY AND HEADED UP
R
OBIN
Terrace, then had to swerve immediately to keep from running over a tiny dachshund wearing a plaid tweed suit. For a moment he thought it was a hallucination and then he glanced back and clearly saw the determined blur of the little legs going downhill. Loco would have had the dog for lunch, he thought, but would have spit out the suit.

“Do you think Mom's okay?”

“They do statistics at that rich-kid school?” He hoped a bit of gruffness would help keep her from spinning out of control. “The last two of these things killed less than a hundred each, and the basin holds eight million people. Do the math.”

He could see by the glaze in her eyes that she wasn't really listening.

“We can always hope she was out pruning the roses,” he said.

Just before rounding the first big curve on the hillside, he stopped for a moment and looked back at the Valley, thinking of Lot's wife. Several pyres of dark smoke rose into the unearthly blue afternoon sky and one really impressive billow of flame far away shot up a couple hundred feet where a big gas main had ruptured. There was little major damage visible, though. The high-rises had been strengthened and strengthened again after previous quakes and quake commissions. Cracking the window, he heard a symphony of car alarms and sirens over the faint boiling hiss of his own dead radio. All this played out against a rumble that was like some machine turning over deep in the earth and was probably only his imagination. The traffic lights he could see were all out. It would be a dark night ahead.

As he drove on he saw there were people standing out on all the terraces and patios, looking out over the city below with binoculars and telescopes. He remembered reading about the rubbernecks who'd driven their horse carriages out of Washington, D.C., to gawk at the Battle of Bull Run. He noticed that these particular rubbernecks were not standing too near the edges of their suspended decks.

“Jack.”

“That's me.”

“I'm so scared.”

She was shaking with some inner horror.

“I've got away with so much,” she explained.

Looking over at her, he noticed the vulnerability of her thin limbs. Someone could have snapped her wrist like a carrot.

“I've been privileged. I had the best education money could buy in this town. I had all these famous and important people to dinner in the house. I had a big movie star get drunk and feel me up in my own bedroom. I sat in my living room and had a long conversation with Joseph Heller about how he wrote
Catch-22.
I never went hungry for an hour and all I'd ever give beggars was a quarter. I have this feeling that the time has come to make me pay for all that.”

“You mean all
this
was so the gods could punish
you
for being ungrateful?”

She looked blankly at him, too frantically focused on her own feelings to see the absurdity.

“It doesn't work that way, kid.”

He braked hard. A section of road was tented up like a giant dropped book and water gushed out of the opened pages. He steered close to the barrier at the edge of the road, closer, and felt his fender scrape gently along the metal. A little less paint on the fender, he thought, and so what? He was past.

“Why not?”

“From the first time some saber-toothed tiger killed somebody's beloved child, we've all had that urge to find the
reasons.
It's just human to want order, but you can't have it. There are no reasons for things, and it'll make you mad to look for them.”

“I
feel
I did something wrong.”

“Of course you do. Have you ever been punched out?”

She shook her head.

“I was blindsided in a bar once. The guy was going for somebody else. The first time it always makes you feel
guilty.
That's that damn mechanism we have that demands reasons. If we get hit, we must deserve it. But we damn well
don't.
”

She stared dully.

“And if that's not enough for you, Lee, there's not a god anywhere who could work it out so that colossal mess out there only punished those who deserve it.”

“What if we all deserve it?”

“Then I tell you He's being damn lenient to let
me
off.”

She smiled finally, but it was fleeting. “I'm scared, Jack. I don't really care why.”

“So am I, honey. That's why we're going to find your mom.”

T
HEY
got through a number of minor roadblocks, scabs of earth and ice plant that had come down from the hillside, until they came around a curve on a steep patch just past Sunshine Terrace. A sparkling red Mercedes 450 was about two-thirds of its original length, nose down on the road. When he drifted up close, he saw the remains of an expensive Swedish table saw peeking out from under the car to block the last few feet of the road. There would be no eking past this mess. Up the hillside, resting on tall stilts, he could see the garage where the Mercedes had come from, its back wall blasted out and a fancy Swedish wood lathe still hanging precariously by a 220-volt electrical cable.

“Go back to Sunshine,” she said. “I know how to get through.”

Getting-Lee-Home had become their whole life, the trials involved substituting for any real thought process, and that was just the way he wanted it. He backed down to Sunshine, where they could look out over the Valley again. The monstrous gas flame had grown noticeably, and he wondered if it was one of the big conduit pipes that brought the gas in from Texas. There were a half-dozen other fires, but he knew the Valley was much too spread out to be gobbled up by fire the way San Francisco and Tokyo had been. The eight-lane roads made great firebreaks.

Around a bend he saw the first sign of fire in the hills, a small eucalyptus going up like a torch, and then a little farther a hillside house was fully engulfed with no sign of firemen. The flames were so bright they hurt his eyes, and a neighbor in a bathing suit was up on his own roof with a hose. Jack Liffey was surprised there was still water pressure.

“Jack!”

A motorcycle had come around the bend abruptly, idling and popping on the wrong side of the road, an erect young man glancing around himself in a daze. He corrected his course and waved like a racer taking an exhausted victory lap and then he was gone. Sunshine Street dead-ended on Halcyon, and Lee pointed right, upward on Halcyon. It was narrower than any road they'd been on, too narrow really, one of those hilly lanes where you cringed at each oncoming car, but nobody seemed to be coming down. And then they found out why. About half of a stilt house that had once inhabited the cliffside above Halcyon was in a heap across the road, as if somebody with a bulldozer had simply driven up and pushed it over the hill. A green sectional sofa looked as if it had ridden the rubble down and now sat proudly atop the pile of stucco and plaster, a dozen tones of lilac and chartreuse and prickly with broken two-by-fours. A purple designer toilet stood on the pavement a few yards away as if guarding the approach.

“Aw!” she moaned. “Chrissake!”

She was out her door, staring up at the ragged edge of what remained of the house, and he stepped out, too. It was a day for dogs, all right. Whoever lived there had kept a rottweiler. The big dog had been leashed and the hand end of the leash had been tied off on a stair rail, and when the floor had gone the dog had fallen into space and now the motionless body swung in the breeze straight overhead. It turned as it swayed—
precessed
was the correct word, he thought. The legs were stiff, as if frozen in mid-stride.

“C'mon, Lee. We can clear enough of this to get through.”

“It's an omen.” Her head was thrown back, and her gaze was captivated. There were always details that stood for the whole and you had to keep them from meaning more than they should.

“There's no such thing.”

“Mom loved rottweilers,” she countered.

“I loved the Cambodians, but it didn't help them much, either. Come on.”

They started by scrambling up the pile and hurling the sofa off to the cliff side. Under the sofa he saw piles and piles of plain brown books, some of which showed a fierce bearded face in silhouette. It was the collected works of Lenin, and mixed in were other works of politics and social history. If you really liked symbolism, he thought, you could probably find something in that. He kicked again and again, sending volumes of Lenin flying. Lee stooped to get hold of a reading lamp and she pried it out of the pile of muck and leaned it delicately against the bougainvillea on the hillside.

“Jack!”

This time the rumble was clearly discernible. Up the hill somewhere a man began to shriek. Metal clanged against metal like someone hammering away at sheet metal. The pile they stood on shifted. Looking up, he saw the dog bounce once like a bungee jumper hitting bottom. Lee Borowsky stumbled across the rubble and clung to him and he tugged her away from the cliff face. Plaster dust sifted down from above and a few more books swan-dived to join their comrades.

Maybe a 4.5, he thought. She sobbed inconsolably against his chest. He could feel the damp of her tears begin to seep through his shirt.

“Let's find your mom.”

He felt her nod. They'd lowered the rubble pile a bit and he thought he could bull the car up and over.

“Wait here,” he said. But her ninety pounds wouldn't have made much difference inside the car.

He backed the Concord to the curve and then came on fast with his foot down hard so the clunky old automatic wouldn't upshift. The engine roared agreeably and the car bucked a little, but it plowed straight through the edge of the pile, blasting books and plasterboard in all directions. There was one bad
clonk
on the underpan just before he cleared the rubble, but the car didn't seem to mind. She got in without a word, rubbing her eyes.

He looked back, but the angle of the hill hid the city, and all he noted was the dead rottweiler swinging and twisting gently on the air.

“I'm so scared, Jack. I'm sick with it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If only I'd stayed with Mom, if I'd been better …”

It wasn't rational, but he knew the feeling. If he'd only beaten the drink sooner, he might have saved his marriage, might have been there to protect Maeve and Kathy.… He hadn't even been there for Marlena or Loco. Protect the one you're with, he thought. That was all anyone could do.

A man who looked Indian or Pakistani knelt just off the road with his palms pressed together in prayer. Jack Liffey slowed and the man glanced up at the car, but made no sign to ask for help.

“I know I could have made it up with Mom. She didn't deserve the kind of contempt I poured on her. I feel so awful.”

“Maybe that's not such a bad way to feel,” he said, noticing her past tense. “I want to tell you a story. Just sit back now and buckle in. In 1971 I was working in a big air-conditioned trailer out in the bush in Thailand, monitoring radar screens to watch B-52s head in to bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was two removes from the real fighting, the kind of war you tended to inherit if you'd been to college. We had a lot of free time off-shift. Not far away was a Catholic mission run by the White Fathers, and I got to know a French priest named Jules de Retz who ran a little bush hospital at the mission. We'd sit on his veranda and swap Pernod for Scotch and we became pretty good friends.”

He took the turns cautiously, navigating around the surprises that waited on the roadway, rocks the size of a proverbial breadbox, a flowering shrub with a perfect rootball attached, a redwood chaise standing on end.

“I corresponded with Jules after I came home. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge took Cambodia, which was only a few klicks away, and within a year Jules found himself running a big refugee camp that had gathered around the mission. One group of these Cambodian refugees were truly remarkable. They'd come en masse from a village called Suramarit not far over the border. It took months for Jules to eke the story out of them. For the first few months after the Khmer Rouge victory, they'd been marched around by the little gung-ho guerrillas that had been sent out to stamp out bourgeois influences. The villagers had to abandon their homes and sleep out in the bush, and they had to sing ridiculous songs and chant slogans as they cleared new fields where nothing would ever grow. They ate half rations and a few of the older people died, but it was nothing like what had happened to the city people. Then the word came down to arrest anyone who'd been a village leader. There were about a dozen of them. They figured there'd be some sort of reeducation. The KR kids lined them up and taunted the old men in front of the village and then shot them.

“The same thing was happening all over Cambodia. It's pretty hard for us to imagine. At this point nobody would be surprised if the whole village had got demoralized, but they didn't. Another order came down to cull out all the secondary-school graduates. That was another dozen, but a strange thing happened. The KRs had a list of the diplomates, but they didn't know the people very well, and when they lined up the villagers, the people of Suramarit all gave the same name. They picked out the name of some poor illiterate peasant and they all insisted they were him. No matter how the soldiers strutted and threatened, not one of them ratted out the graduates.”

A crushed wardrobe made of stripped pine lay in the middle of the road, fallen from somewhere above, and it leaked what looked like silk dresses. He bulled it slowly out of the way with the car and went on. Lee Borowsky watched him with a fierce glare.

“It was one of those mass acts of bravery that happens from time to time, like the Huguenot village in France that refused to turn its Jews over to the Nazis and got away with it. In Suramarit it worked for a time, too, but they could see it wasn't going to last. One of the kid soldiers who'd gone soft on the villagers leaked the news that the next turn of the screw was going to be rounding up everyone who could read. Rather than wait around, the villagers jumped the soldiers in the middle of the night and disarmed them. Without their AKs they were just scared kids and they fled into the forest.