I want you to come out from there right now, I said prissily in my head. This is not funny.
Then I said, thought, oh, of course, he’s gone for help, to get a truck or a car or something.
But I knew he had not. He would have taken Curtis with him.
I looked down at the dog. It was only then that I noticed that his paws were bloody, and his muzzle, and that he had laid his head on something that he was guarding, for he would not lift his muzzle when I tried to see what it was.
“Are you hurt, sweet dog?” I said, and picked up his paws, one after another. He let me do that. The blood was damp-dry and I could scrape it off, and when I did I saw no torn flesh, no injuries.
“Oh, good,” I said to him. “I couldn’t have stood it if you’d been hurt. Okay. Good. Good.”
He lifted his head then, and laid it on my knee, and I saw that what he had been guarding was a pair of metal-rimmed glasses, mended with tape, whole except for the lenses, which were spiderwebbed with cracks. I looked from them to the rubble pile. I could see then that Curtis had tunneled far into it, but that the debris had slid back down and filled it partly in. I did not move to clear it out.
I lay down on the earth beside Curtis, carefully, because my electric shoulder and arm spat and crackled at me. No pain followed, though. I stretched myself full out and laid my injured arm at my side and put the other one around Curtis. He wriggled until he had fit himself into my side, and we lay there together, silent and still. I worked my good fingers under his chin and picked up the shattered glasses and cupped them loosely in my palm.
At first, even in the pounding sun, my body was cold. The earth itself and the rubble and dust upon it were warm, but they gave no heat to my body. I was as cold and stiff as if it had been a long, terrible arctic cold that felled me. Only Curtis, in the curve of my arm, was warm. He did not move.
Very gradually though, so gradually that I was only aware of it after it had happened, warmth seeped up from the earth and into my body. It seeped into my stomach and flattened breasts, out to the end of my fingers and toes, into my cheek where it lay pressed into the dust. The cold and stiffness drained away, and my body seemed to melt into the very earth. I shifted to feel it even closer, and then lay still. Curtis still did not move.
Far below me the earth spasmed again as the great snake, sated, flexed itself voluptuously. Rage flooded back, but it was a dull rage, abstract.
“You fucking bitch,” I whispered to her. “You seduced him. You talked to him and you sang to him and you made love to him, and then you never told him. You didn’t tell him. He loved you, and you didn’t tell him…”
But she had. Told him just far enough in advance so he could send his emissary flying to us: Get out now.
I closed my eyes again, and waited, and the rage gradually slunk away and the warmth came stealing back. It was as if his body lay beneath me, giving me its warmth through the broken earth.
“Hey,” I whispered. “You there?”
Always, I heard, though not with my ears.
“You got your wishes, you know,” I said into the earth. “All three of them. And now you won’t ever have to leave. Only I have to do that. Don’t worry, though. I’m not going for a while. Not for a long time.”
Stay.
Maybe I will. Maybe I will.
And I lay there, not moving, joined to him through the earth as I had been above it, only a day ago. I closed my eyes and drifted in silence and time, Curtis heavy and warm against me, the earth softening below. This is not bad, I thought. This is good. Presently I felt the stiff, bloodied white mask on my face split with a smile, and I wondered if, when it happened, he had been dancing.
12
It was Glynn who led us out. Glynn and Curtis, walking side by side, she with a stout branch she used for a walking stick, Curtis padding steadily beside her, head and tail down, wearing the harness she had fashioned that carried some of our supplies. Forever after when I thought of valor, I thought of my tall daughter going before me, the dog like a patient wolf by her side.
I don’t know when it was that she came to me at the ruin of the tower. I know I heard her calling me up the trail before I saw her, heard the anxiety and the last remnants of the child in her voice, and heard her cry of fear when she saw me lying on my stomach with the dog beside me, motionless. It seemed that the sun was higher, directly overhead perhaps, but the thick, sullen heat of the past few days was gone. It was as if the snake had loosed her grip on the very skies when she was sated, and let the winds blow free again.
Glynn knelt beside me, beginning to cry, and I made an effort far larger than I thought I was capable of and sat up. Curtis, who had lifted his head at her voice, hauled himself to a sitting position, too, and thumped his tail faintly.
“I’m all right, baby. Just resting,” I said, my voice thick and cracked in my dry throat. It was as if I had not spoken for months, years.
“Oh, Mama! It’s all gone! Oh, God…Curtis! Mama, he’s got blood all over—”
“It’s not his blood, baby. He’s not hurt. I looked.”
She was silent. Then she said, “Is he…under there?”
I nodded. I was afraid to look at her. If the frail, shining shell around me cracked I did not think I could survive what rushed in.
Another silence, and then: “We have to dig. Mama, we have to dig for him. Lots of people survive earthquakes; you hear about them being found later perfectly okay—”
“No.”
“Mama—”
“No, Glynn.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I heard her begin to cry again, softly, and I touched her dust-whitened knee and said, “You can’t cry, baby. I’m sorry too, but that’s one thing that we just can’t afford right now. Later, but not now. Now we have to think what to do.”
But I could not think. I wanted only to sit in the sun beside the great, obscene mound of rubble and be very quiet and still.
Presently she reached down and took hold of my arm to pull me up. A great shaft of electricity shot up to my shoulder. I cried out.
“Oh, Mama, you’re hurt!”
“It doesn’t really hurt. It just sort of buzzes. But I can’t move it. I think it may be broken. It’s my left one, though. I can use my right one just fine.”
She sat back on her heels, her arm around the big dog, who leaned against her, his eyes closed. She scratched his chin in silence. Then she said, “Okay. We’re going to have to walk out of here. We’ll need some things to take with us. Let me poke around in this stuff and see if there’s anything.…”
It was not a voice I had heard before. I looked at her mutely. She looked back at me levelly, as if daring me to contradict her.
“I think we should stay here,” I said dreamily. “It’s warm right here in the sun, and the…wreckage makes a shelter from the wind. We’re close to the road. Someone will come before long. Your dad will come.…”
She looked at me, hope flaming in her eyes.
“Does Daddy know where we are?”
“Sort of. He knows we were up in these mountains; I think I told him Big Basin.”
She shook her head.
“That’s not good enough. You’re hurt. Aunt Laura is…I don’t know. She just sits there holding her stomach and staring. I don’t think we can wait for anybody to remember we’re up here. They may not even be able to get to us. We don’t know what the road is like—”
“Glynn,” I said, “how are we going to get a shocked, pregnant woman and a one-armed one out of here? What will we do if we don’t find our way to a town or something before it gets dark? We don’t even know what’s still standing; I have no idea how bad that thing was.”
Her chin lifted. She looked like she had when she had been a four-year-old, haughtily offended when someone told her she was too young to do something she wished to do. In spite of myself, I smiled. I felt the mask crack again.
“I’m going to get us out,” she said. “I’ve had eight yea
rs of scouting. I took that emergency course at school last semester. All I need is a few things for us to take along; didn’t you say there was an earthquake kit here somewhere? In an old safe? I don’t think I can get into where the lodge kitchen used to be, and the car trunk is…gone. But maybe a safe would hold.”
I drew a breath to argue with her, and then let it out. I was simply too tired to talk. Come to that, I was too tired to walk. Let her find that out for herself, later; activity and planning would be good for her now. In a moment we would see about Laura. In a moment.
“Here,” she said, “hold on to Curtis. I’m going to poke around in this stuff. There’s all kinds of things sticking up out of it.”
“Be careful,” I murmured, and put my arm around Curtis. He moved against me and tucked his head under my arm. He was warm and solid, and I clung to him, smelling the dusty smell of still-hot dog hair.
It seemed a long time later when I heard her cry out, “Here it is! Hot shit! Part of the steps held the rubble off it! Oh, thank God, it’s busted open, and there’s all kinds of stuff in it.”
Thank you, I said in my head to him. You’re going to get us out after all, aren’t you?
Told you, he said.
Glynn had her things together in about an hour. From the battered safe she took two Mylar blankets, so thin they folded to washcloth size, and a first-aid kit and packets of freeze-dried food and coffee and trail mix, and a flashlight and compass and spare batteries. She found a map and folded it into the pocket of her jeans, along with matches and a folding water cup. There were plastic bottles of water, too, but they were too bulky for us to carry many of them, so she set aside only four. She made a sling for my arm out of an ace bandage and snugged it tight. Then she fashioned a kind of harness that fit around Curtis’s chest and neck and tucked the blankets and freeze-dried packets and trail mix into it. Curtis sat passively, but whenever she passed he thumped his tail, and she stroked his head. He had not moved from his position at the edge of the rubble pile, though.
Curtis and I sat together while she went back down to the lodge for Laura.
I’m so proud of her, I told T.C.
Kid’s got good genes, he said.
The only thing left to say then was good-bye, and I could not say that, so we sat placidly in the sun, Curtis and I, in the same companionable silence that the three of us had often shared in the last days.
When Glynn brought Laura up I felt a bolt of pure fear go through me. She walked like a little old woman, bent far over, her arms crossed over her stomach, staring straight ahead of her. She was whitened and bloodied and her clothes, like mine, were shredded by the whipping branches. Glynn lowered her to the ground beside me and I reached out and touched her arm with my good one, and she put her hand over it, but she did not speak or look at me. Her flesh was as cold as death.
I patted her in silence. Surely Glynn would see that we must stay here now. This woman could not walk.
But Glynn shook out one of the blankets and tucked it around Laura, and started a small, wavering wood fire in a spot of clear ground, and opened one of the bottles of water and washed Laura’s face and arms and hands gently with moistened gauze from the kit, and when she had cleaned most of the blood and dust and grit away, she put salve all over the scratches, and made instant coffee in the folding cup and held it to Laura’s mouth while she sipped it, and then gave her more water and with it two aspirin. Then she did the same to me. When her own face and arms were cleaned and salved, and we had all had heavily sugared hot coffee and aspirin, she stamped out the fire and scattered the ashes, and tied two of the bottles of water to her belt and made a belt for me out of the twine from the kit and hung the other two from my waist.
She stopped and considered her handiwork, hands on hips, and then went back to the safe and took out a heavy Swiss army knife and dropped it into her pocket. Then she came back.
“We have to go now,” she said. “It’s the middle of the afternoon. According to the map, if we turned right on the road instead of left like we usually do, we’d come to a little town called Boulder Creek that’s a lot closer than anything else. It’s south, I think. That’s where we’ll head. If the road’s clear we could maybe walk it by tonight. Or I could, and could bring people back for you, but we have to get on the main road. Nobody can see us in here.”
Laura said nothing, and I didn’t either.
“Get up, Mom,” my daughter said and held out her hand, and I pulled myself up with my right arm. I swayed dizzily, unreality boiling over me, but in a moment I was steadier.
“Help me,” she said, and together we got Laura to her feet. The coffee and aspirin seemed to have helped some; her eyes made contact with ours, and she smiled, the bleached ghost of her old smile.
“Merritt and Laura and Glynn’s excellent adventure,” she whispered. “Wouldn’t this make a movie, though?”
“How do you feel?” I said.
“Queer. Okay. Nothing seems real. The baby feels all right. Have I bled any?”
“No,” Glynn said. “I’ve kept checking. I think you’ll be all right if we take it slow, and we’ll rest real often.”
Above me the trees sighed, the first time in days I had heard that great, elemental breathing. The wind touched my face and ruffled my hair.
Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that’s me, he had said.
Well, I have to go now, I said to him. I’ve stayed as long as I could. We have to take care of everybody now.
It’s time, he agreed.
You mustn’t worry about Curtis; Glynn will love him forever and ever. So will I.
I know.
I think I will die from losing you.
Who said you were losing me? Don’t you remember anything?
I remember. About the pine and spruce, and the redwoods in National Geographic, and the crab and the wine and the cold shower and the wet dog and the day-old socks and the Rattus ratti. I remember…
Then…Carpe diem, Merritt.
Carpe diem, T.C.
“Come on, Curtis,” Glynn said, snapping her fingers lightly. “Carpe diem.”
Slowly the big brown dog got up from his place on the earth. He looked back and whined softly, and then came to stand beside her. She put her fingers lightly on his head, and picked up her staff, and we began to walk. No one but Curtis looked back.
We walked for about an hour before we stopped the first time. We soon found our natural order: Glynn and Curtis in front, Laura and me behind. We had started out single file, with me behind Laura so I could catch her if she wavered and swayed, but she looked around so often to see if I was there that I soon moved up beside her. She trudged along, her hand on my right arm, looking down at her feet. After a time I looked down, too. Not only was the going slow and treacherous, with fallen trees and tossed boulders to pick our way around, but the sight of the blasted redwoods and the litter of bark and needles and dust was simply too terrible. By the time we reached the place where the lodge trail cut off Highway 9, we were sweating and I was shivering and rubber-legged. So was Laura.
It was time to stop, and we would have in any case, but what really stopped us was that the road was no longer there.
T.C.’s fire tower sat on the very top of the ridge that defined the spine of the mountains. The road was cut into the side of it, about a hundred feet down the opposite side. That hundred feet of blasted earth was all that was visible now. The earth had simply let go and flowed over the patched, bumpy old road, obliterating it as certainly as if there had always only been raw, clawed earth and shattered trees and rocks. We looked straight out into a sea of devastation that swept down to meet the next ridge before it rose again in a series of corrugations that stretched toward the suburban sprawl around San Jose. We could not see the suburbs there for the sea of diminishing ridges, and I was profoundly thankful. I could not even imagine what the human places must be like. This was awful enough, this casual, bomblike devastation of the wild places.
A
s far south as we could see there was no road, only landslide rubble and the great, hovering cloud of dust. I sat slowly down on the earth beside the twisted sign that said “Pringle,” which had somehow survived the slide, and drew Laura down with me. She leaned her head on my good shoulder and closed her eyes.
“Okay, let’s take a break,” Glynn said matter-of-factly, as if we did not stand in the middle of devastation and the very textbook definition of lostness.
She sat down and patted the earth beside her and Curtis flopped down panting, and she set about ministering to us once more. Water, and more aspirin, and a cup of water for Curtis, and spread out blankets for us to lie back on.
“Everybody put their feet up,” she said. “I need to think a minute.”
“Darling, I’m going to have to insist—” I began, but she shushed me impatiently.
“This can be figured out,” she said, pulling out the map and spreading it out on the ground. “I just need to concentrate. You take care of Aunt Laura.”
I was silent. On my shoulder Laura slept heavily. My other arm and shoulder throbbed savagely. I could not even remember when the pain had begun. I was somehow grateful for it. It focused me solidly in the now, kept at bay the river of grief and loss that waited up on the mountaintop to pour down over me. I refused Glynn’s offer of aspirin for that reason. I needed this pain as I needed air to breathe. If whatever conclusion my daughter reached about what we should do next seemed unreasonable to me, I would simply refuse to get up from the earth. There was little she could do about that.
It was only much later, looking cautiously back at that time under the wing of therapy, that I could see how close to passive, inert madness I had been.
“I think this is what we can do,” Glynn said later; I did not know how much later. “I think that if we walk along the ridge right where the landslide started, always keeping next to the edge of it, we’d be following the road, or paralleling it. You can tell where the edge is; it’s where the trees have fallen and the rocks have come out of the ground, where the ground is torn up. It’s as plain as if it had been marked. It may take us longer because we’ll be going through underbrush and rubble, but it’s just not that far to Boulder Creek. If we have to spend the night out, well, we’ve got all the stuff for it. We’ll get there tomorrow for sure.”
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