Now she came and stood in the sun beside me and leaned comfortably against me. We stood that way for a bit.
“If I were you I would never leave him,” she said presently, and I turned to look into her face. Tears stood in her eyes.
“He’s so torn up over you he can barely talk. But we did, a little bit. About you. I would give a whole lot for a man I loved to say the things he did.”
I could not speak. I hoped desperately she was not going to tell me what he had said. She didn’t. There did not seem to be anything at all to say, so I said nothing, either. We leaned together in the mounting heat, smelling the scent of sunburned pine, feeling our shoulders press together. I thought that I could easily sleep standing there.
“But then,” she said briskly, “I’m not you and he’s not Pring, and if anybody did say those things to me I’d probably smart off at him and ruin it. Y’all packed? I guess we ought to get this show on the road.”
The trunk of the Mustang was up, and the top was down, and we were ready for the road, and the wind, and the sun. But I did not think that this time we would sing.
Glynn came out with her duffel and slung it into the trunk. I put my bags in and Laura slammed it shut.
“Well,” she said.
“Did you see Curtis?” Glynn asked Laura, and Laura nodded.
“He’s up there with his daddy, helping him fiddle around with that junk under the shed. He said to tell you he’s waiting for you to come say good-bye.”
“Then I think I will,” Glynn said, and looked at me, waiting. I nodded.
“Pick you up in a minute,” Laura said.
Glynn started up the trail, and then came running back and hugged us both, hard. She looked cool and pure and young again, with her clean, shining skin and the palomino hair falling in a soft bang over her forehead. I could smell the soap and shampoo; she had showered again, I thought. Her cheek was still damp, and cool.
“We really are a family, aren’t we?” she said, muffled in my hair. “We went through all this whole crappy week and we came out still a family. I’m so glad.”
“Me, too,” I whispered, and Laura hugged her hard and said, “Cain’t nothin’ bust this act up, pardner,” and Glynn laughed and turned to the trail again.
As on the first morning when I had started up the trail toward the tower, lost in fog, we heard Curtis before we saw him. He was barking, sharp, steady, peremptory barks I had never heard before. He barked steadily and did not stop, and as he came nearer, the barking got louder, and we could hear the thudding of his feet before he exploded around the bend and shot toward us like an arrow.
“Oh, you old dog,” Glynn cried, stretching out her arms. “You couldn’t wait!”
But he did not run into her arms. He danced before us, staring hard into our faces, barking, barking. When we did not, for a moment, respond, he jumped up and put his feet on Glynn’s shoulders and barked into her face.
“What?” she said helplessly.
I saw the note in his collar then. No bandanna this morning, just a scrap of torn paper stuck under his worn red leather collar. It was perforated, and there were words scrawled across it in red. The paper from T.C.’s homemade seismograph, the pen from it.
I took it from Curtis’s collar.
Get out now, it said. The red pen skidded off the paper in a scrawl. I stared at the note, and then at Glynn and Laura. Curtis barked and barked.
It smote me then like a great wave, cold and numbing.
“There’s an earthquake coming,” I said, forcing the words through shaking lips. “We’ve got to go now.”
Laura gave a small scream and instinctively crouched in the doorway with her arms crossed over her stomach. Glynn, white-faced, turned and headed for the house.
“No!” I screamed. “Not in there! Stay out in the open, lie down!”
Curtis was a sleek, dark missile as he leaped at Glynn and caught the tail of her shirt in his teeth. He pulled fiercely, and she stumbled out of the door and down the one granite step. He knocked her to the ground and leaped on her. I started for both of them.
It hit then.
You seldom hear them, all the experts will tell you. You will, of course, hear the roar and crashing of falling masonry and collapsing beams if you are near man-made structures, and you will hear the whipping and long, tearing cracks of trees splitting, and the thunder of their falling, and later you will hear the shrieks of car and house alarms and the icy crystal tinkle of shattering glass, and even later you will hear the fire and rescue alarms, and perhaps the cries of those who still live. But you will not, in all odds, hear the quake itself.
But I heard it. I knew in that moment that I was hearing the very voice of the snake, and I know it now, though I am told over and over that I could not have. The quake was deep in the earth; its hypocenter was almost as deep as the Loma Prieta, and that was the deepest ever recorded on the San Andreas fault. No man-made drill has ever reached that black depth, where the earth is no longer solid. I heard its deep-buried war cry, like the long bellow of a great distant steer, and I felt its indrawn breath even before the ground began to move. In the instant that I felt my body come down over those of Glynn and Curtis, I thought, this is what T.C. means. This is what he hears; this is what he feels.
The shaking began then, a violent, furious, side-to-side heaving as if something unimaginably huge had taken the earth in its fist and shaken, and then the ground rolled like the sea, and we were flung from side to side so hard that we ended up on our backs, fully ten feet from the place we had hit the ground. I remember lying there with my arms stretched out over my daughter and the dog, watching the air thicken rapidly with swirling dust so dense that I saw the sun grayly, as if through morning fog, and felt a great hot wind driving particles of grit and bark and pinecone into my face and mouth. It was so strong a wind that even in that moment of blank terror I wondered at it. I had never heard of an earthquake wind. Only later did I hear someone saying that in the mountains the quake had been so severe that the whipping treetops stirred up a wild windstorm before they began to come down.
When they did begin to fall, the noise of their dying was louder than anything that had gone before: the long, shrieking cracks, the snap, the whistling of the hot wind, the great, following booms of their collision with the ground, the sighing rustling of their last limbs and leaves and needles as they settled into the treacherous earth. On top of their death cries came a long, shuddering, rattling thunder; I thought, idiotically, of the great elephant stampede in Elephant Walk. Elizabeth Taylor, hadn’t it been? Whipping my head to the side I saw that the lodge had settled in upon itself like those buildings you see demolished on TV, by implosion. The dust was now blinding. The screams of the redwoods went on and on.
Somewhere in there, the rolling and shaking stopped, but the trees did not. I became aware gradually that I was screaming at them, a high, endless dirge of fury: “You will not! You will not! By God you will not, you will not…”
I saw the one that would finish us. It was falling directly over us, slowly; so slowly that it seemed to have been filmed in slow motion. It came down and down, its scragged top denuded of needles, growing larger and larger. Still I howled in my rage, “You will not…”
Something like a great, black, scratching, spurring pterodactyl settled down over my face and then my body, shutting out the dust and the light and the sound of everything but my voice, still screaming invective. I waited for the darkness to swallow me, but it did not; there was a gigantic, shuddering thud, larger than any that had gone before, and a screech of tearing metal, and a great whistling of limbs, and the little knives of needles and branch tips cutting my face, and a great, diffuse weight sinking onto my body. But no more darkness came. There was a last thud, and the earth shook with it, and then there was silence. Nothing more. Just sun and dust and silence.
Much later, I don’t know how long, I felt a tentative squirming beneath me, and heard my daughter’s muffled voice crying, “
Mama? Mama!”
The redwood had come down sidewise across us, its top striking the Mustang. The Mustang had flattened, but it had held enough to take the main weight of the tree. The pterodactyl I had been its outer top limbs; they had been small enough so that they cut my face and tore my pantsuit to shreds, but their combined weight had not been enough to hurt me badly. I pushed the branches off me, stood up on shaking legs, grabbed the longest one and pulled. It lifted, groaning, off Glynn and, beneath her, Curtis, just far enough for them to wriggle free. They did not, though; Glynn lay there looking at me with great, empty eyes, and even Curtis was still. I could see his eyes though, dark and bright, moving restlessly about him, and see his doggy, panting pink grin through the gray mask of dust that he wore. Glynn wore one, too. She was a gray child, a daughter of dust.
“Move!” I shouted, and she did, wriggling out like a snake, and Curtis followed her, shaking himself so that dust flew and needles sprayed around him.
I let go of the branch and it snapped back, and I sat down hard on the ground and closed my eyes. Later, they told me I could not possibly have lifted the branches, but I simply looked at them in their ignorance. I could have lifted them with one hand; the rage was that strong. I could not even tell where I left off and that red, boiling rage began.
Like the quake, the rage ended suddenly, too, and I simply sat on the ground with my daughter kneeling beside me and Curtis at her side, nosing her all over, nosing at me. I did not open my eyes. Later, in a moment, I would get up and we would go away from here. They were not hurt. I was not hurt. We would go away, we would go home.…
“Mama,” Glynn was shaking me. “Mama, Aunt Laura! Help me get Aunt Laura out! I can hear her.”
I could too, then. She was crying softly, from the heaped, dust-swirling mess that had been the lodge. We could not see her, the dust still swirled so thickly, but I could follow the sound of her, and led by Curtis, we ran to the pile of rubble and leaned down to it.
Like us, the treetop had saved her. The treetop and the doorframe, hewed all those years ago from thick, solid Western pine. It still stood, like a ruined but not vanquished arch of a fallen Greek temple, and beneath it, under tangles of bare black and green, Laura lay huddled on her side, her eyes screwed shut, crying.
She lay in a fetal ball, wrapped in her arms, and also like me, she was completely whitened with leprous dust, and runnels of shocking red blood cut down her face and arms, from the little knives of the needles and branch tips.
“My baby,” she sobbed. “My baby, oh, God, Met, my baby.”
It was a kitten’s sound, with no breath behind it. I reached in among the branches and lifted her to her knees. Still, she cried. Still, her arms wrapped her stomach. Still, her eyes were shut tight. Glynn and I pulled the branches off her and stood her up between us, and I looked her over sharply. I could see nothing amiss but the scratches and the dust.
“Can you talk?” I said. “Open your eyes, Laura, and look at me. I think you’re okay. The tree took the weight of the house off you. Open your eyes!”
She did, looking at me with white-ringed golden eyes. Her pupils were black and huge, but her breathing seemed all right, though shallow and very slow. Shock, almost surely; I had had all the right Red Cross courses. But nothing else that showed. Perhaps, after all, we would be all right.
“My baby,” she whispered again, and I looked quickly between her bare, bloodied white legs, but saw no terrible, spreading stain.
“Are you in pain? Do you think you’re bleeding?”
“No…no…”
“All right. Then your baby’s probably fine. They’re a lot tougher than we are. We just need to go slowly now—”
“Where are we going to go?” she said in the breathy whisper that had taken the place of her rich voice.
“I’m going up to T.C.’s,” I said, sure of it in that moment. “I’ll go up there and get him, and he’ll take us out in the Jeep. Listen, this is wonderful; he’s got a complete earthquake kit that he keeps in an old safe on the porch, with first-aid stuff and food and bottled water, and flashlights and blankets and…and everything. I know right where it is. I’m going to walk up there now, and we’ll come back in the Jeep and get you. You all sit down. Glynn, sit your Aunt Laura down and put her head between her knees and keep her still, and if she starts to bleed take off your shirt and press it up there and hold it—”
“I want to go with you,” Glynn began to whimper. Her eyes filled with tears, and they tracked down through the white dust, leaving snail-like trails. “Don’t go off and leave us; what if it comes back; what if Aunt Laura’s not all right; what if something happens to you—”
“No,” I said calmly and firmly. A ringing, faraway peace had fallen over me, now that I knew just what to do, now that I knew where to go.
“You’re perfectly all right but your aunt is in shock, and you cannot leave her. The earthquake is not coming back. If you feel anything else it will be an aftershock and will not hurt you. What on earth could happen to me? I’m just going a quarter mile up the trail—”
“Mama—”
“You are not a child, Glynn,” I said, and she fell silent and looked at me out of her minstrel’s face.
“All right,” she said softly, and I gave her cheek a quick pat and started up the trail.
Beside me, Curtis whined and whined, dancing in place, looking from me up toward the invisible tower, and I said, “Okay, Curtis, you marvelous, darling hero, you. Go home. Carpe diem.”
He was off like a shot, in silence, and I listened until I heard the thudding of his feet in the dust fade, and then began once more to walk. Only then did I realize that my left arm was hanging useless at my side, and that no matter how I tried, I could not lift it. It did not hurt, but when I tried again to move it a sharp, not-unpleasant shock rather like electricity shot up into my shoulder.
“Okay,” I said aloud. “To hell with it. I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt. T.C. will fix it.”
I talked aloud the entire time I was on the trail. It was chatty talk, with a sort of hilarity bubbling just under its surface. The path looked nothing like it had before; trees were down across it, and the spill of a small rockslide blocked it at one point, so that I had to climb over it, and far over to my left, at the edge of the forest, I could see that earth had opened in a great fissure that whipped off into the depths of the woods. Beside it, trees were torn off midway up their trunks. I could not see into the depths of the opened earth. But the long, golden rays of sunlight still fell, incredibly, though now on ruin. Ferns were pulped and most of the small flowers and bushes buried by a rainstorm of needles and thick white dust. I turned my head back and did not look again.
“What a shame,” I said. “It’s such a pretty place. Maybe it will be like those places in the wilderness where there is a wildfire; maybe the flowers and trees will come back even stronger.”
But I knew that it would be far out of my lifetime before these redwoods stood tall again. The knowledge did not seem to pierce the shell of the peace, though.
“Well, so, this is what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll put a sling on this arm and put Curtis and the kit in the Jeep, and we’ll take some food and water with us in case we can’t get through for a while, and we’ll pick up Laura and Glynn and we’ll get as far as we can today. Maybe we can get all the way through with no trouble. If we don’t, they’ll be looking for us pretty soon, and they’ll probably find us before we get to them. They’ll patch us up and give us something clean to wear, and put us on a place home. Laura will come with us, of course. No more of this silliness about not having the baby. Oh, wait, oh damn…Pring won’t know yet there’s been an earth-quake. Well, then…no, Stuart is dead. How could I have forgotten that? Poor Stuart. But the forest service must know somebody’s been at the lodge; but then, how would they? T.C. hasn’t seen anybody this week that I haven’t seen, and they sure haven’t been the park service. Maybe Marcie’s father and stepmother, then…
“Pom will come.
“Won’t he?”
I walked on in the sun, muttering busily to myself. The silence was larger and deeper than I had ever heard it. No birds sang. The great, surflike breathing of the redwoods was still. Nothing rustled in the undergrowth, nothing chirped or buzzed or clicked. It was hot and still and it seemed to me that I walked and walked without making any progress, and that the sun was frozen in its arc overhead, and that it was no time at all. My own chattering voice was the only sound that went with me.
And then there was a sound, and my heart dropped like a stone and froze as solid as black ice in my chest, and I stopped. It was a howl; a terrible, primal animal howl of pain and desolation, and it rose and rose and rose through the heat and swirling dust until I thought that my eardrums would burst with it. And then it stopped.
“Don’t do this, T.C.,” I whispered, breaking into a trot. “This is just too much. This is not fair.”
I came into the clearing on rubbery, leaden legs and stopped. There was no tower, no shed, no Jeep, no surrounding trees. Only a huge, dust-whitened pile of rubble, like that the lodge had disintegrated into; only a swirling cloud of dust; only the stems of maimed redwoods; only their fresh-torn yellow flesh.
Only Curtis, lying at the edge of the rubble pile, his head on his paws, whining and whining.
I went across the clearing to him, stepping over branches and chunks of wood and metal and once a recognizable piece of T.C.’s earthquake machine, the part that had been, I thought, the hi-fi speaker. I knelt down at the edge of the monstrous pile and put my hand on Curtis’s back. He thumped his tail, but did not move.
“T.C.?” I asked experimentally, and the answering silence was so terrible that I did not speak his name again. I did not look around for him, either. I sat down on the earth cross-legged, like a child playing Indian, and laid my hands in my lap.
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