The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  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.

  “The villagers knew better than to stick around. They packed what they could and fled into Thailand and just about doubled the size of the refugee camp Jules had set up. He got some more tents from the U.N. and never quite enough rice to go around and kept the place going. The villagers didn’t sit around moaning, though. They planted a new crop of rice and set up a school system and a village council. They showed whatever-it-was quality that had helped them resist so long. It was all pretty good for a year.

  “Jules must have told someone the story because the press heard about it, and the journalists starting coming and going. About then the Vietnamese, to their everlasting credit, got fed up with the genocide in Cambodia and sent their own army in to stop it. Maybe that was the trigger, or maybe the journalists … I know Jules blamed himself. Anyway, late one night a brigade of Khmer Rouge came across the border and shot every man, woman, and child in the refugee camp.”

  “Awww,” she said, like something deflating. “That’s sick.”

  “I was gone, but I got the horrible letter from Jules that summer. His English was great but a little stiff. He ended with the expression: ‘Catastrophe like this is just too big for us to measure ourselves against it. I cannot accept this, Jack. Even courage such as that can be rendered meaningless.’ ”

  “God,” she said. “It makes you want to live simple and pure.”

  He must have frowned.

  “You know, to even things up for all the privileges you had.”

  “That’s the point I’m making,” he insisted as he inched the car over the bricks of a fallen wall. “You can’t even things up.”

  “Wasn’t God supposed to spare the world from destruction if somebody found seven just men?”

  “Terrific. So we’re all gonna die if there’s only six. Suramarit was a whole village of them.”

  “Then what’s your rule?” she asked with real fervor. “What do you do in life?”

  “You do your duty, you just don’t kid yourself it’ll save the world.”

  “… Switchboards are jammed from Santa Barbara to San Diego.” The radio blared out and they both jolted in surprise. “Please don’t try to call. If you have a medical emergency, we’ve been told you should place a white bed-sheet on your roof and rescue units will get there as soon as they can. Kelly?”

  For the last few minutes he hadn’t even noticed the crackle of the dead radio. Lee Borowsky leaned forward and stared ferociously at the volume knob as if to read some answer there.

  “Bob, my uplink is still working. I’m out in Burbank and it looks like the IKEA store has completely collapsed. I … it’s horrible. The whole three stories is just a pile of rubble, and the parking structure, too. I have no way of knowing how many people were inside and the police aren’t letting anyone get close. They’ve blocked the road completely with their black-and-whites. Off to my left I can see a fire about two miles away toward the Burbank Airport … cracks in the pavement … Bonita … Glenoaks off that way.…” The voice was breaking up.

  “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, I think we’ve lost touch with Kelly Stockman. As you know, at about two thirty-eight this afternoon the Burbank–North Hollywood area suffered a severe earthquake series that seems to have been centered somewhere near the edge of the hills. Our instruments in the studio gave a preliminary reading in the range of seven-point-five on the Richter scale, but we’ll only know for sure when we reestablish contact with Frank Olmos over at Caltech. First reports said it was an unusual type of earthquake that we’ve never experienced before. There was one severe upthrust at two thirty-eight. That was the one you probably felt as a sharp up-and-down movement if you were close enough to the epicenter. The first quake seems to have set off a second tremor of a different type, a rolling shock about eight seconds later. The second quake may have been even bigger than the first one and it seems to have been centered a few miles farther south, directly under the hills. We’ll know better soon when Frank—Frank, are you there?”

  The reporter came on, working over a scientist at Caltech who insisted she didn’t know anything more yet. The reporter badgered her for a while to reveal what she didn’t know, and Jack Liffey lost interest. He knew what he needed to know: the second jolt, the one with the side thrust, had been right under the hills. He’d guessed as much, because the damage was getting worse and worse as they climbed the hillside. Probably the only thing saving the hill houses from even worse was the fact that they had resilient wood frames and were rooted in bedrock rather than floating on alluvium like the buildings down below. But some of the older ones from before the war, particularly on the south flank of the hills, might not have fared so well. Especially if they weren’t bolted to their foundations.

  “Oh, holy shit.”

  He braked and then stopped.

  “Jack. What is that thing?”

  He let the rear wheels drift back into the curb and then killed the engine. They both got out and stared in awe. The road simply ended in a crevasse up against a sheer granite cliff at least ten feet tall, as if the Great Wall of China had been built across their path. Up at the top of the cliff a few inches of asphalt projected into space where the road started up again. The new cliff ran as far as he could see in either direction and at its base there was the three-foot-wide crevasse. He stepped carefully up to the dark crack in the earth but could not see bottom. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he felt a cold wind blowing up out of the blackness, as if the break went all the way down to a chilly hell.

  And straight in front of him, the Hollywood Hills were ten feet taller than they had been an hour earlier.

  “Looks like we’re on foot,” he said.

  21

  GROWING UP IS NOT A SPEED EVENT

  “HOW DO WE GET UP THAT?”

  “Good question.”

  They followed the edge of the chasm over a broken-backed retaining wall, through a noisy bed of ivy, and across a deep green lawn that had probably once been as flat as a golf green but now tilted steeply toward what rubble remained of a house.

  “Anyone there?” he called. He tried a few more times for his conscience, hoping they’d been away on vacation.

  The earth here had been torn into big jigsaw-puzzle pieces and each piece tilted a different way. He took her hand and boosted her from one piece onto another. In a second torn-up backyard, they skirted a concrete swimming pool that had heaved up out of the earth like a spit melon seed. It had tipped onto its side and emptied through a half-timbered Tudor. Finally he found what he wanted along the new cliff.

  “How far are we from your mom’s?”

  “Five or six blocks, I think. A couple blocks up to Mulholland and a couple down the other side. But things don’t look quite the same.”

  A good-sized masonry house that had once lived above the cliff had collapsed into a ramp of broken concrete and rock and jagged two-by-four ends. Water washed down the gradient, trickling from ledge to ledge like a designer waterfall. It would be a rough climb, but it was doable. He took her hand and they climbed, planting each foot carefully in the wet debris. His mind drifted and he started musing about how life was an overlap of the processes of assembly and disassembly. It had probably taken six months to assemble this house and ten seconds to disassemble it. But not all processes were so one-sided, he thought. Within a few weeks a lot of the jumbled hillside would be scraped and leveled and the roads would be rejoined by the inexhaustible acts of men. We were like ants, he thought. Nature wanted its crazy picnic, but human persistence could swarm Nature under, at least for a while. He boosted Lee Borowsky up the last few feet by standing in the prow of an orange canoe that stuck out of the hillside.

  At the top o
f the climb, a potbellied man in checked pants stood at the edge of a chunk of lawn swinging a fancy wood golf club to drive balls off into the city below. He had them set up a few inches apart and he stepped from one to the next, shimmied a moment, and then let fly with a distinct swish-pok in the stillness. It looked like a clean strong swing and with any luck he might make the freeway. Jack Liffey didn’t like the look in the man’s eye, and he shook his head at Lee and they skirted his driving green.

  The houses they saw up here had mostly survived. All the chimneys were down and walls were cracked open here and there, but most of them stood. It gave him hope. As she walked, Lee seemed shut in with a kind of contrition, like a child expecting to be hit. Her face had sharp lines and contours and he wondered if she would be good-looking in another few years or if she’d make one of those gawky transitions to a hard-looking adult.

  There didn’t seem to be many people about. A helicopter wove noisily along the crestline but kept going toward the Pacific until he could no longer hear its thwop-thwop. What he could hear ceaselessly, without being able to identify it, was a deep systaltic throbbing beneath the city itself, as if a tunnel deep underfoot carried the earth’s life force. It made his skin crawl.

  They came on an ornate Victorian birdcage parked at the edge of the road with a jet-black mynah squawking again and again, like a mechanical timing device. He thought of releasing the bird, but the owner was probably in the process of moving the cage to safety.

  “Hundred-dollar whore,” the bird challenged, or he thought it did. The words had been fairly distinct, and Lee chuckled once.

  “Did we hear right?”

  “That’s pretty cheap up here,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s an old bird.”

  As they passed, the bird tried again: “Suck you off, mister.”

  Lee laughed out loud. There was a touch of hysteria in the laugh. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’m not a little kid. I do know what a blow job is.”