The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  He gave her ankle a little squeeze and crawled over the broken threshold and immediately felt the cool. He let his eyes adjust to the dimness. There was a smell of plaster dust and something brassy at the back of his throat.

  “Jack, tug so I know what it feels like.”

  He did.

  “Break a leg. That’s what the movie people say.”

  “My luck’s still good.”

  He crept, moving his knees carefully through the lumpy mess, crossing what looked like a utility room. The washer and dryer were holding up the ceiling, leaving a tunnel. Then he wriggled into a tiled hallway where he felt a runner carpet under his knees, and where he could barely see. He wished he’d found a flashlight. A match would not be a good idea. Now and again, when he let his imagination work for a moment, he was almost petrified with fright. This was the fate with his name on it, his very own: buried alive in a space the size of a coffin.

  He tugged twice, and heard Lee’s faint voice. “Gotcha. Go for it!”

  The world got confused now. Things were not at their accustomed angles and even the floor had given up the level and seemed to slant downward.

  “Lori,” he called softly. It was the first time he’d used her name, as if it carried a magic that he didn’t want to waste. And he realized that he didn’t want Lee to hear him using her mother’s name, as if his voice would reveal too much.

  “Lori. Speak to me.” He stopped to listen. There was a throb from the walls that was probably his imagination. The silence was complete, not like a silence at all, but a profound absence. He rubbed two fingers together near his ear just to make sure he could hear.

  “Lori.”

  He crept deeper into the dark and looked above him. Where the ceiling was gone, a little diffuse light was visible, and another foot on he could see the crack high above, giving himself a shiver. Not unlike the tiny high spark of light you’d see from down a well. Aftershock, he thought suddenly, his imagination exhibiting things starting to shift, the lighted crack widening abruptly, then snuffing out with a roar. If only they would schedule them at regular intervals.

  “Lori!” He was using up the magic. He tugged twice on the twine, but it seemed slack and there didn’t seem to be any response. He imagined Lee gone away, fallen asleep, attacked by a ravaging band of outlaw bikers who’d been unleashed by the quake. He could tell his mind was doing its best not to think too closely about the coffinlike walls.

  “Lori.”

  The building creaked and he heard something settle hard. It was like a beast grazing unseen only a few feet away in an impenetrable jungle. He put his arms up involuntarily to protect his head, but nothing fell near him. As he went forward he felt a lassitude taking him over, something robbing the last of his energy.

  “Lori, speak please. I can’t stay here much longer.”

  He heard a small distinct sound, like a heavy sack dragged an inch across concrete. It did not sound like more settling.

  “Lori? Are you in here?”

  His hand found the jagged edge of the floor. It had fallen away or torn away, and he tried to see into what lay below.

  “Lori?”

  The dragging sound came again and he wondered if it was a rat. He tried to remember if there were any pets. Of course, it could be Anita or the gardener. Or an opossum that had harbored in the basement.

  “Lori. It’s Jack. Please.”

  And, strangely, it was not her name but his own that held the magic.

  “Jack … Jack …”

  It was almost without breath, and it came from a few feet below him in the dark. He wanted to laugh and cry.

  “Lori! Are you hurt bad?”

  “Oh, Jack. Don’t look at me.”

  He laughed, he couldn’t help it. “I can’t see, Lori, it’s dark. Tell me where you hurt.”

  There was a long wait. “How long has it been?” she asked finally.

  “Since the quake? I don’t know. Over an hour. We had trouble getting here.”

  “I can’t hang on.”

  “Yes, you can.” And then he remembered Lee. He tugged twice, then twice again, hoping she would take it for a sign. “Lee’s here, too. She came back on her own hook. She wanted to find you. She was afraid for you.”

  “Honest Injun?”

  It was such a strange thing to say he laughed again.

  “She came to forgive you, of whatever it is she thinks she has to forgive you for.”

  He heard a sob, and in one strange moment, superstition run wild, he wondered if he shouldn’t have said that, if the mistrust and suspense, the paralysis of emotion between the two women had been a kind of prop that prevented the final collapse. The floor began to tremble and he heard a ripping near his ear. The surface bucked and something crashed down below.

  “Oh, Lord, no …”

  Lee’s scream penetrated to where he lay as the floor punched sideways, and then the whole house came in with a roar. When it was all over he was on his side, immobile. His head was wrenched sideways, and a surface pressed his cheek hard, but somewhere in front of him was one tiny, hard point of light. He could move his right foot slightly, but nothing else. Dust was choking him and rubble filled all the space around him. His fate had found him, he thought. The coffin with his name on it—and a terrible panic swelled inside him, swelled and then bloomed like a nuclear blast. It blew a plug and the terror rushed out with enough glare to light the world.

  22

  THE MORAL ORDER

  HE REMEMBERED A WHOLE LOT OF FROTH ALL AROUND, A vanilla universe, white on white, billowing up with a medicinal smell and then a kind of white tunnel, and he wondered with a shiver if it was the White Tunnel, but he recalled reading somewhere that that was really just an artifact of the way consciousness decayed back from the edges of the visual cortex as the brain died, and then he figured if he was thinking stuff like that, he probably wasn’t dead after all.

  The dreams got very busy for a while, but they stayed pretty white and frothy and then they calmed down and he really worked himself down into them, and finally he opened his eyes to see, up close, the face of his daughter, Maeve. Her eyes went wide and she shrieked and ran away. It was supposed to be a welcoming male figure, he thought, his dad or his beloved uncle Seamus beckoning him into the Whatever, so again he reckoned he probably wasn’t on the way to the Whatever. Dress warm, kiddo, he imagined Seamus warning him, and he chuckled. The idea of closing his eyes again was so delicious he did and he fell right back into the cotton fluff.

  HE opened his eyes and saw a big brass belt buckle. “Son of a bitch, he’s conscious.”

  Sergeant Flor had been leaning over him. Maybe he was going off to that place after all.

  “It’s important to be on time,” another voice said, then he nodded off again.

  THE next time he summoned the energy to open his eyes the room was full of women and they all seemed to start moving at once. Maeve and Kathy were there, and Marlena, looking wonderfully brown against all the Irish women, and they all ducked forward, looking close as if they’d just found a hair in the soup. Maeve gasped and beside her, amazingly enough, Lee Borowsky made an appearance, and they clasped one another and him all at once. If it was a hallucination, he wanted a lot more of it. He closed his eyes.

  “Stay with us, Jack,” he heard Kathy say. “We want you back.”

  Back? he thought.

  He opened his eyes again. “Where back?” he said. A part of him realized he wasn’t being very coherent, but it wasn’t worrying him. His throat had hurt like a bastard, though, at the two words he spoke.

  Kathy had an arm on each of the girls and was tugging them gently back. “It’s like grunion,” he thought he heard her say. “You mustn’t frighten his consciousness away by being too eager.”

  He wriggled his toes and found his right leg wasn’t responding quite right. He tried to peek under the covers.

  “All bits here?” Again his throat objected.

  Kathy seemed to have taken char
ge. She pressed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “You’ll limp a bit, but you’re all there. Praise the Lord.”

  “Whoever.” He couldn’t resist it. At least she hadn’t brought along that doofus who taught social studies that she lived with now. What was his name?

  Then all of a sudden he realized a woman was missing. He turned to Lee Borowsky. She stood arm in arm with Maeve, like sisters. They were almost exactly the same size, but Maeve was really big for her age. “Your mom?”

  Lee shook her head, but she didn’t seem weepy. He couldn’t make sense of it.

  “What?”

  “She died, Jack,” Kathy said softly.

  He stared at Lee some more, feeling hollow and confused, and they couldn’t seem to figure out what was bothering him. Why wasn’t she more upset?

  “It was two months ago. You’ve been in a coma.”

  “Show me a paper.”

  “Jackie, take our word,” Marlena Cruz said. “You was gone far away. Mrs. Bright is buried and all, weeks ago. I got Loco, he’s okay,” she added quickly.

  Lori Bright was dead. He couldn’t adjust to it. He remembered something he’d overheard, something about a father who’d been an immortal, but only until the girl talking had turned sixteen. Lori was huge and durable and so vital that taking her out of the world should have made something collapse. Like a house. It just wasn’t possible. He’d close his eyes and open them and then she would be there, smiling or beckoning or even raging at him for some reason.

  He rolled his head and felt it was encased in something. “Skull fracture?” he guessed.

  Kathy nodded. “Like going across the date line. Two months gone, just like that.”

  “If somebody hits you again,” Lee said, “you get the time back.”

  Only Maeve laughed, a schoolgirl giggle.

  “That’s my girl.” And then she burst into tears again.

  Lee comforted her and Kathy told him that Lee was staying with them for the time being. She’d be going to live with her dad as soon as he got back from location at Lake Malawi, but for the moment she was in the back bedroom in Redondo. That was when the nurse came and chased them all out. The doctors wanted to shine lights in his eyes and make him move his toes and parse sentences and count backward and things like that.

  He still worried about Lori Bright. When a light that brilliant went out of the world, how come he could still see?

  “I sent my kid to Eagle Scout camp last summer.”

  “I didn’t know they still did that stuff.”

  It was Lieutenant Malamud and Sergeant Flor again, standing off to the side, and he decided not to open his eyes.

  “Yeah, the camp had a survival course, you know?” Malamud said. “Kick them out into the woods for a couple days. Tommy showed them all up. Ate bugs, made a shelter, the whole shebang.”

  Flor’s voice started soft and then swelled as he came closer. “They didn’t have survival camps when I was a kid. It was just called hanging out on the block, dodging bullets and shit. I bet this guy could use a good survival camp. Esse, I think he’s awake. Liffey, talk to us.”

  Reluctantly he opened his eyes. “Hi.”

  “Your pals are here.”

  “Who?”

  “Us, asshole. We’re your pals because we haven’t dragged you up to the jail wing at County. Not yet.”

  Malamud elbowed in and took over. “Feeling any better?”

  “Better than what?”

  “I guess being dead awhile fucks up your perspective. You had a busy time there, right before the big Hillside Quake.”

  “So that’s what they’re calling it.”

  “We’re more interested in what you were doing. The Hillside Fault can take care of itself.” Malamud’s stare hardened.

  “I can’t remember a thing after my last birthday.”

  “That doesn’t fly, pal,” Flor put in.

  “We know you got plenty of fond memories. I’ll bet she was good in bed, with all that body on her. Did tricks, huh?”

  He saw red, but realized in time they were trying to goad him. He remembered that they had called her the OMB, the Old Movie Bitch. “What am I supposed to have done that’s irked you so much?”

  “You’ve gone and upset what our captain calls ‘the ethos.’ He means the moral order of things. He’s a real joker, he is,” Malamud said. Even Flor looked puzzled. “Cops always got their own plans for the way things should work out, who should be winners and losers. You went and meddled with the moral order, and that’s not nice. The captain is pissed, and when he’s pissed, we’re pissed.”

  He wondered if Monogram had been paying them off. “Really? I wish I could remember it, then.”

  “Stupidity is not a legal defense, guy,” Flor put in.

  “Did I kill somebody?”

  They just glared.

  “We’re not just students of the passing carnival,” Malamud said after a while. “If your fingerprints turn up in this thing somewhere, we will have your ass.”

  He relaxed. That meant they didn’t know much of anything, they just resented his meddling. He would probably never know exactly what had gone down between Mitsuko and Monogram and G. Dan Hunt, and the part the cops had played in it all.

  “I wonder what drives you, is it just revenge or some kind of honor?”

  He remembered Lori asking him if he would choose courage or happiness. Forced choices like that were always false. “I wish I could remember. Sorry.”

  AFTER another rest he found a bunch of greeting cards and a book on the table beside him. He read the names on the cards—Art Castro, Chris Johnson, Mike Lewis. Old friends. The book was Monty Python’s Little Red Book. It was big and blue. He wondered who would give him that. The flyleaf said, Get well, dude, and there was a small drawing of a beanie with a propellor on top. He smiled.

  A friendly black nurse looked in and told him the neurosurgeon didn’t want him overstimulated, so the visitors would be coming one at a time for a while. He thought about it for a while and figured it was a perfect opportunity for him to work out his relationship with all these women, one at a time, and he really meant to, but when the time came, of course, he didn’t.

  He felt a real warmth and even a little lust for Marlena, but he was still feeling guilty about getting starstruck and backing away from her. He let her tell him about Loco, who had got so hungry he’d torn open all the packaged food in what she called his “larder.” He wondered where on earth she got that word. He figured he and Marlena would work something out down the line a bit and he didn’t have to press things now.

  Kathy pushed his buttons right away by starting in on a bunch of things he ought to do and things he ought not to do and maybe it was time to give up his ridiculous notion of being Sam Spade. He kept himself from getting angry, but the warming idea of making peace treaties with everyone had fled like a stepped-on cat.

  Maeve was Maeve, and he wanted to joke with her forever, but she just kept bursting into tears. Anyway, he didn’t think he had that much to clear up with her.

  Lee was harder. She seemed to be storing away her grief over her mother’s death, weighted down by her screwy brooding guilt over causing it with her anger. She was pushing it down deep in herself, the way he dealt with things, and he could hardly lecture her about it. He told her that the last thing her mother had heard was how her daughter had come back to forgive her. She screwed up her eyes skeptically and demanded a lot of cross-my-hearts, but at last she seemed to believe him. He didn’t really know if it helped.

  It was a totally unnecessary death, and that was what was always hard. Lori Bright could just as easily have been out on the terrace drinking lemonade when the Hillside Quake struck. He wanted to tell Lee what he’d found out himself, the hard way, that there was a moral order out there all right, but it certainly didn’t come from Malamud and Flor. And it wasn’t just or merciful, either, just necessary, and you had to let it be and go with it. But that was something you had to figure out for your
self. You could forgive the gods all you wanted for what they did to you, but you had no right to forgive them when they hurt somebody else.

  The big thing that would go unsettled in him was with the woman who couldn’t be there, he knew that. He ached for Lori Bright with every atom of his tingling, creaky body. Whatever it was she had, all that glamour and excitement, that sultry energy, that pain and confusion, that sexual heat that was only a marker for something else—he’d probably never sort out all the reasons he’d wanted her so badly. And still did, and always would. And he regretted the fact that he wouldn’t be seen with her coming out of Spago or the Campanile. Some little kid pointing and saying to another little kid, But who’s that guy with her?

  He smiled. He’d probably missed his chance for good to be That Guy with Her.

  It’s never what it seems, he thought, brightening a bit. The movie star’s got just as many heartaches as you do, and the whole thing is just a trick, and if you really let yourself know that, it’s the only real victory.

  Gary Phillips

  PERDITION, U.S.A.

  When three young black men are gunned down within blocks of one another, Ivan Monk investigates for a possible link—and finds himself on the trail of a racial conspiracy centered in a small Northwestern town.

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  The body of a murdered Korean liquor store owner is unearthed during a groundbreaking ceremony at the infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie. As racial tensions increase, black private eye Ivan Monk searches for the killer.

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