The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  She turned away from him.

  “Let’s see, was this the yellow turnip or the boogie-woogie blue?”

  “Eat shit and die.”

  “You’re not synesthetic, are you? It was just something to make yourself feel interesting, like seeing flying saucers.”

  “I used to see color. It went away.”

  “I used to have a good job, so we’re even. We both feel abandoned by our destiny.”

  She stood up and rocked a little on her pigeon toes, glaring at him. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “A little.”

  “Is all this easy for you? Manipulating people, humiliating little girls, lusting after movie stars?”

  “Which of those questions would you like me to answer?”

  “The lust would do.”

  “The lust is none of your business.”

  She grinned a surprisingly feral grin. “Aha! Mom’s got you, too. The bitch goddess never fails.”

  “Let’s go have a talk with her.”

  “I guess I have to, don’t I?”

  “Yup.”

  She studied the mess of browns on the canvas unhappily. “I may as well. I’m not much of a painter and Danny’s got the movie under control.” She considered, as if one more good reason might just push her over the edge. “And I’m not very happy here. I need to be someplace where I can be happier.”

  She sealed up the paint cans and tubes carefully, then smiled apologetically. “You never know, I might be back.”

  JUST as they came outside a big goat kicked out a couple of pickets in the fence next door and squeezed through into the weeds where a sidewalk should have been. It offered a terrified and bewildered bleat at its freedom and bucked once, like a basketball player setting up to change direction in midair. When it came down, it headed up the ratty street as fast as it could go, trotting a bit, then working its hind legs together like a kangaroo, then trotting again, as if it was trying to relearn all the gaits at once.

  “Nature is out of joint,” he said.

  “Or something is rotten in the state of California.”

  He watched the goat diminishing up the street and thought about how seeing the animal burst its bonds like that made him feel the way he hadn’t felt in a long time, that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to try to control everything. It probably wasn’t a bad lesson, but on the whole it wasn’t his nature to let things develop at their own pace. It meant the really bad stuff would probably catch you with your pants down.

  He took San Fernando Road out of the scrubby town, past a sign that told him William S. Hart had once lived up a hilltop, and then he caught 14 and took it down into the spaghetti of high overpasses where it joined I-5 south, the Clarence Wayne Dean Interchange, named for the poor motorcycle cop who’d ridden off into blackness when the old overpass had come down in the 1994 Northridge quake. Lee Borowsky had gone quiet for a while, brooding over something or other.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  “I was thinking I’m too close to Mom to see who she is. It’s like trying to study an elephant from an inch away. All you know is it’s gray and rough and it’s got coarse hair and it smells pretty bad, and you don’t think it could be any other way because it’s all you know. It’s a dumb comparison. What’s my mom like to you?”

  “You can’t get past being her daughter. I can’t get past the fact she’s a movie star.”

  “So what?”

  “Maybe in your world that’s a so-what. But I was just a poor kid from the harbor. Where I grew up, most of the men worked with their hands and kids could play in the street after dark and divorce was pretty much unthinkable and everything that mattered, all the people that Life wrote about, belonged to some other world far away. When I saw her, her face was twenty feet high on the screen at the Warners.”

  “But you’ve seen her now as a person.”

  “And every time it carries all that baggage.”

  All of a sudden he had a revelation and it all seemed so simple—all that weird guilt he felt toward her. Back in his youth, Miss Lori Bright had lived in the magic faraway world of the powerful and carefree, courted by princes and kings. Now he was stepping across the magic line to touch her, and what he saw was a sad and anxious, slightly overweight woman who clung fiercely to the few quirks that still made her seem extraordinary to herself. It was his own effrontery crossing over that line that annihilated her magic. The relation between what he saw and what he remembered refused to settle, and in that tension was his heartache.

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “God only knows.”

  “Be careful of her, Jack.”

  He didn’t think he’d ever invited Lee to use his first name. He didn’t really mind, but it seemed a pretty big leap for a fifteen-year-old.

  As they descended into the San Fernando Valley she grew less intense. She started jabbering again, pointing out the sights, telling the names of the malls and the larger shops, and recounting adventures she had had hither and beyond. At the Ventura, he headed east, and he was just onto the Valley end of the Hollywood Freeway when it happened. They say being in a moving vehicle is one of the best places to ride it out.

  “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 majo
r 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.

  20

  JUST DOING YOUR DUTY

  HE BOUNCED HARD OUT OF THE ALLEY AND HEADED UP ROBIN 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.”

  THEY 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.