Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  Dragged out of its winter sleep, I guessed, by the same rude shakeup that sent us all scrambling for a way out.

  Something jammed into my back. I turned. It was Jimbo’s elbow. He held his biathlon rifle, pointed skyward, but I could see the clip was in firing position.

  “You can’t stop a bear with a twenty-two,” I hissed.

  My brother hissed back, “Got a better idea?”

  Of all times to decide not to duck out, Jimbo chooses this.

  In my earphones a voice was advising calm and I didn’t know if that was the standard evac spiel or if emergency communications had caught up with the bear.

  The bear wasn’t calm. It was trapped and snarling and it lowered its anvil head and began to come our way.

  I was deafened by screams. I lost Jimbo again and then I saw him worming his way out front of the crowd, rifle held high. He yelled “back up, back up” and the crowd did its best, heaving backward but there were just too many of us squeezed in at this block party, and the people farther back could not hear, over the screaming, my brother’s cries.

  The bear heard. I saw the silhouette of teeth, and then the big cinnamon started forward again, all its anguish homed on Jimbo.

  Jimbo shifted into marksman’s stance and like he has done a thousand times before he brought the rifle to his cheek and sighted and squeezed off a round.

  There was a bellow from the cinnamon that stopped my heart.

  Someone nearby yelled Jimbo you idiot.

  But it looked for a moment as though Jimbo had done the right thing, for the bear froze and twisted, focusing its rage on the pinprick in its shoulder.

  “Okay,” I said, heart beating again.

  At both ends of no-man’s-land the crowds had shut up.

  There was gunfire upcanyon.

  Jimbo raised his rifle again and I elbowed him because across the gulf, Eric had appeared. He had both hands wrapped around his service weapon, leveling it at the bear.

  And now the bear and I had two marksmen to worry about. A shooter with a glass eye and the knowledge that accuracy is not his trademark, but he’s got a whole lot more firepower than the other shooter, who’s armed with a weapon meant to knock down mechanical targets.

  Eric sidled along the road. The bear turned, nose into the air, and zeroed on Eric. They were no more than a couple of truck-lengths apart. Eric eased forward, waiting, it seemed, for the bear to lift its chin and present its best target.

  I wanted to scream.

  There was gunfire, again, upcanyon. The bear reared up.

  And now the crowd behind Eric convulsed, and five Guardsmen trotted into the clearing, one behind the other like a line of geese. They carried heavy artillery and the cinnamon hardly had time to shift its focus to this new threat before they’d wheeled into a firing squad. The bear seemed to flinch, and then the sound of automatic weapons swamped all else, even its roar of surprise. The shooters fired for what seemed minutes, shredding the bear until the wall of snow behind it was splashed red and cratered with plugs of fur.

  Jimbo fumbled to eject his clip. “Let’s go.”

  He was shoving me, everyone was shoving again, back the way we’d come, back toward the cars. I didn’t need shoving, I had plenty of adrenaline pumping me along. And then someone said “bears” and Jimbo caught it—bears, plural—and my dumbshit brother turned with his rifle under his arm and fought his way back toward Eric. By the time I caught up Eric was saying, “Bears are all down, bears aren’t the problem.”

  I said, sick on adrenaline, “What is the problem?”

  “Pileup.” Eric pointed back toward town, the way we’d come. “Back in that throat where the canyon starts.”

  I looked. Vehicles to the horizon. No access.

  “How big?” Jimbo asked.

  “Big.”

  I said, “How big is big?”

  Eric met my look. “It’s all clear up ahead. Be ready to move in fifteen minutes.”

  I was looking back, toward the throat of the canyon. I said, my own throat constricted, “No way out.”

  “We’ll get them out,” Eric said.

  “Walter’s back there.”

  “I’ll check,” Eric said.

  “No, I will.” I started off. Vehicles to the horizon, and way back there, beyond the throat—beyond the pileup—vehicles waiting to get out. Walter was in the group behind ours. How many neighborhoods to a group, how many vehicles to a neighborhood, how many miles back in the canyon was Walter’s Explorer? Beyond the throat? I started to run.

  Eric caught my arm. “I’ll find out where he is, Cass. I’ll see him on his way. If he’s behind the pileup, we’ll get him out. We got a lot of people stuck back there and you can be damn sure we’re not going to leave any of them behind. I give you my personal guarantee.”

  I shook my head. “I’m going to check.”

  “Aw shit, man,” Jimbo said, “you want a sister?”

  Eric said, “No.”

  I tried to move.

  Eric tightened his grip and said, weary, “You see those guys?”

  There were Guardsmen moving our way, monitoring the flow of the crowd. They moved like they were under fire. I saw one guy look up the canyon walls. He was skinny—all helmet and uniform. He planted his hands on his wide fatigue belt and scanned the cliffs far above. He looked like he was expecting a bomb to fall. His head snapped down. He spat. He didn’t want to be here. He looked like he wasn’t going to be patient with anyone who slowed him down.

  “There isn’t an option,” Eric said.

  Death by traffic jam.

  With a sense as strong as I have ever had of making the wrong choice, I let Jimbo tug me back toward our cars.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Alone, in a cute little motel room in Bishop. Chintz pillow shams, wildflower walls, street view through white ruffles. There was the sound of TV coming through the thin wall from Jimbo’s room next door. When he’d left my room he’d said he was going to get some sleep. Not likely. I heard the tattoo of his fingers drumming a table. I felt the thump-thump-thump of his feet bouncing the floor.

  Unlike me—I was glued to the set and I didn’t move a muscle.

  I watched King Videocable’s live action team on the spot at the intersection of highway 203 and the chasm blasted across it where the bridge had been. Highway 203 had been severed about halfway between town and highway 395.

  On the Mammoth side of that wound there was an endless line of parked vehicles—the vehicles not caught in the pileup, the vehicles blocked by the pileup and forced to reverse direction on Pika and head back into town. They’d fled as far as they could, from town out highway 203 until they were stopped by the chasm. I searched for Walter’s red Explorer but the line of vehicles stretched too far for the camera to capture.

  Refugees swarmed past parked vehicles. Refugees on foot, on skis, on snowmobiles, every one of them laden with bundles and casting ghostly shadows under the intense white of the big CalTrans lights. Refugees pausing to look at the ground when a quake hit, and then moving a little faster. And when the live action team zoomed in for a closeup, the refugees squinted into the cameras and groped for a sound bite. I recognized most of them. Knew them well, or casually, or enough to greet in passing. I didn’t care. Didn’t care that my old high school teacher Jack Altschul was leaving Mammoth with nothing but the pack on his back.

  I waited for Walter.

  On the other side of the chasm, the refugees were hustled into vans and trucks and buses and ferried down 203 to 395, and then the forty miles south to Bishop. If I shifted my view from the TV to the street outside I’d see them rumble through town.

  My eyes stayed on the tube. The next refugee fixed in the lights would be Walter.

  The camera cut to an aerial view of Pika Canyon, the live action team’s eye in the sky floodlighting the pileup of vehicles that choked the narrow throat. Vehicles entangled with vehicles, vehicles on top of vehicles, vehicles looking like they’d tried to crawl up
the canyon walls. There was a patch of burnt-out vehicles, where quakes had shaken the unstable edifice and the friction of metal on metal had sparked leaking gas tanks. The smoking skeletons were dusted with Forest Service fire retardant.

  I searched for Walter’s Explorer in the mess.

  The camera cut to an aerial of highway 395. The evacuees had overflowed Bishop and were now on the way to the next towns south, Big Pine and Independence.

  The camera cut to Adrian Krom, as it’s been doing every half-hour or so through the night. He was framed in front of the burnt husk of a truck on its side. He wore the same clothes I’d seen on him twenty hours ago at the intersection of 203 and Minaret. Now he seemed to sag within the big parka. Now the pelt hung loose. His face was washed quartz-halogen pale, his eyes squinty. He looked like he’d had a rough twenty hours. He looked beat.

  He looked beaten. The interviewer, some ingratiating Bishop news anchor, was saying “you couldn’t have foreseen the bears,” and Krom seemed to shrink. He said no but he took responsibility nevertheless. I sat forward on the nubby chenille bedspread and if I could have reached through the screen I would have taken him by the neck and screamed you lost, you were supposed to get all of us out and you didn’t. But I didn’t have to throttle him. He knew. He looked beaten.

  There was a big quake, and the camera jimmied.

  I heard a shit through the wall.

  When the camera steadied again on Krom, he’d changed. Maybe the anchor didn’t catch it, but I did. Krom was rallying. He leaned into the microphone and answered a question the anchor hadn’t asked. “We’ll have them out by dawn,” he said, voice nearly burnt out.

  Then he made a movement, which I’m sure the anchor didn’t catch. But I did. Krom inclined his head, the slightest move—he made a little bow.

  I’d seen that bow eons ago, midnight at Hot Creek, as he bowed to his enemy and gave it the finger.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Dawn, and I did not see Walter.

  I spent an hour trying to reach Eric, routed from one command center to another, one official to another. When Eric finally called back I blurted “where is he?”

  “He’s gotta be out. His car was parked with everybody else’s, along 203. But I gotta tell you I did not personally see him leave. I blew that. I owe you, Cassie. Hang in there, okay? There’s nobody left in town.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You sound beat.”

  “Beyond.”

  “Please take care of yourself.”

  “You better believe it.”

  I called Walter’s cell phone. Then I dialed, for the fifteenth time since midnight, the motel down the street where Walter was booked. The desk clerk was beginning to worry.

  I went out to the Soob and unloaded the Lindsay and Georgia boxes and parked them in my room. I wrote a note to Jimbo. Antsy. Driving down to Big Pine & Independence. Check motels. Maybe got signals crossed with W. Got my cell on. I left the note on my dresser then locked the door. Jimbo has a spare key.

  I didn’t turn southbound on highway 395, as my note promised. The worried Bishop desk clerk had already phoned every motel and B&B in Big Pine and Independence for me. She promised to keep trying. She promised to call on my cell if she located Walter. I promised her a fancy dinner for her efforts, when this was all over.

  I promised, in my heart, to apologize to Jimbo for my lie, when this was all over.

  I turned northbound on 395, heading home. There was no traffic, just me following the long Sierra scarp. And then in the distance, just spilling over the lip of the caldera, which sits on the Long Valley plateau above Bishop like a hanging lake, came a National Guard truck down the highway grade. The last of the evacuators were now evacuating.

  And above and beyond was the unchanged bulk of Mammoth Mountain. The old mountain looks me in the eye: coming back?

  The Guard truck and I passed each other and I craned to look. The back end was half open and the guys in camouflage were slumped.

  I hadn’t really thought he’d be in there anyway.

  At the top of the grade there was a barricade. Nobody in sight. I went around it on the median. Just past the Hot Creek turnoff, I reached another barricade. This one was manned.

  I pulled over and checked in with my motel clerk. Nothing new.

  If a call came on my cell and caller ID said it was the clerk, or Walter, or Eric, I would answer. If a call came from any other number, I would not answer. I counted on Jimbo to sleep until noon. If he woke earlier, I counted on him to try calling a few times and conclude I was in a no-service zone, and then decide to try later. I counted on him to be Jimbo and go hook up with Bobby or the deMartinis. I counted on him not to alert someone that I’d gone missing, because I intended to be back before he put two and two together. I did not intend to have someone come after me and stop me. And if I encountered a problem, I did not intend to have someone come share the risk.

  I hadn’t really expected the guys at the barricade to let me through. Didn’t matter. I had a Plan B. I headed southbound, as if going back to Bishop. Around a curve, out of anyone’s sight, I took the unmarked turnoff. I knew this Forest Service road—I’d taken it in summer, on field trips, and I knew where it accessed another lateral that would put me in the neighborhood of the Lakes Basin. I wondered, briefly, if Krom had walked that lateral in his quest for an alternate route. If he had, he would have rejected it because it would put evacuating traffic in the neighbhorhood of Red Mountain. I didn’t reject it. There was no other choice. Two miles uphill I turned onto the lateral, just wide enough for a snowplow. I crept along, fingers crossed, but within a few hundred yards the road ended. Hadn’t been plowed. Every available snowplow, I guessed, had been diverted to Krom.

  That much farther to ski. So I’d better get going.

  As I was stepping into my bindings I gave a glance to Lindsay’s doll. She has porcelain skin like Lindsay’s and a proud chin, and she brought me Lindsay’s voice, which I had lost in the crime-scene horror of her office. She says, sharp, don’t do anything foolish, honey.

  I promised to be wise.

  I followed the unplowed road, which banded the mountainside, and then began a gentle descent. The snow was slow but once the slope steepened I kicked into a smoother stride and picked up speed.

  Within two hours I’d reached the Lakes Basin. I came downcanyon in a tuck, trying not to think about the lay of the land, about the rift up on Red Mountain. There was no other way in. It was just that simple. Just ski. Don’t fall, don’t break an ankle. I tried not to think about Walter lying off the road someplace with a broken ankle. I tried not to think at all.

  The cell phone in my pocket was silent. Jimbo was sleeping, or he’d gone straight to breakfast without checking my room. I didn’t blame him.

  I focused on my stomach. It was hollow. Nothing to eat since last night in Bishop, and that was toast forced down me by Jimbo. Now, I was hungry. I fantasized swinging by the house and grabbing something. It’s on the way. Jimbo cleaned out the fridge but what about the freezer? Last time I looked there was a sweet potato pie, microwaveable. God, I wanted that pie. So creamy, like a sweet cloud in your mouth.

  The canyon road dipped below a ridge and the slope fell into shadow. I hit deeper snow, and had to work. My stomach growled.

  Jimbo ate the pie. I just knew it. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to the house because Walter was not there waiting for pie.

  There was something. I stopped. A rumbling, deep within the mountain. I waited, but detected no movement. The sound trailed off as the earth settled itself. Another quake. So what’s new?

  There was thunder and I looked up to the clear sky, and then to the ridge above me. Even as the thunder died another sound came—a thick sucking. In utter amazement I watched an entire section of snow detach from the bowl beneath the ridge and slide in a great slab downhill toward the road. The leading edge wrinkled over a cluster of boulders and loosened and slurried ahead of the main body of the avalanche.


  In slow motion, taking forever, I bent to release my bindings.

  Wind hit me, roared past me. The snow in front of my skis humped up and I felt the ground below me move. Snow exploded up and the crust under my skis crumpled. I was ripped off my feet. I gasped, inhaling needles of snow.

  Swim.

  But the snow’s got its own agenda and it’s tumbling me along like I’m a load of wash and I can’t see and can’t breathe and all I want in the world is to get my head above the snow. Then without knowing how I do it I’m swimming all right, fighting for the surface. Something hard bangs into my leg. My ski. A rock. I’m swimming, dog-paddling to beat all hell but I don’t know which way is up.

  And then the snow and I slow and finally come to rest and the snow, which only seconds ago had been liquid, turns to cement.

  I lay pinned. I could see nothing but my mind was free to roam and it dived down into the crevassed glacier, blue walls closing around me. I screamed.

  There was snow in my mouth. I spat but it was already dissolving on my tongue, creamy as sweet potato pie. I stuck out my tongue, tasting cold air. Free air. There was a hole in the snow around my face. Hope surged.

  My muscles convulsed, futile, but then my hand moved and I realized that my entire left arm and shoulder were free, encircling my face. I located the rest of my body. Right arm pinned across chest, legs bent at knees, toes wiggling in boots. Intact. With my free hand I probed the cavity. Walls were solid, cement. I pushed, panicking, then willed myself to stop and clamped my mouth shut. Don’t waste air. Slow small breaths. Get the cadence.