The Cracked Earth (23 page)

“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.

“H
OW 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 of 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.”

He thought involuntarily of his daughter. He imagined her in the back of some brutish frat boy's car, and shuddered. She would grow up to be whatever she would be and there was not a thing he could do to protect her.

“Growing up's not a speed event,” he said.

“I could give you a blow job and show you.”

“Knock it off, kid. You're not that tough yet and I'm not that corrupt.”

A big Lincoln Continental sat abandoned in the middle of the road with all its doors open. He checked as they walked past, but the keys were gone. A plastic bag of tomatoes sat on the passenger seat.

“Mom made me this mess. You better face it. She even latched onto my boyfriends if she could. It's like a dark parable or something. She had this way of touching guys at the door or kissing them or holding their arms, you know, so you couldn't really object because maybe it was just one of those stupid greetings that all her Hollywood tribe use, those aging over-made-up women who are eternally kissing each other at doorways, and if you complained she'd just laugh at you like you were some naïf out of Kansas, but it was more than a big hello and the boys damn well knew it. They'd cop a little feel and she'd tingle a bit to show they had permission to do it next time and maybe do a bit more and, Jesus, the next time they'd show up for a date with me, they'd be all het up and nervous before they even got there.”

She seemed to need to jabber, but there was a brittle brightness that worried him. They passed two teenage boys who were slamming lengths of iron pipe into what was left of a stucco ranch house. They worked methodically, sweating and knocking off chunks of stucco as if they were paid on piecework. She didn't even notice them.

“There was a time I was away with my dad on location in New Orleans for a few weeks while he was making, I think it was
The Awakening,
and she hired two of my friends to paint the back bedroom. One was an ex and the other one of these Judases was still supposed to be seeing me. She got them working with rollers and edgers and things and then she joined them to help out, and
whoops,
she gets a little bitty spot of paint on her designer work shirt,
oh dear,
so she has to take it off to protect it and then they go on working until,
whoops,
here's some paint on her Calvin Klein jeans and they have to come off, too. And there she was painting away in her bra and panties in front of two of my boyfriends, nonchalant as hell, and she spatters a bit on one of the boys, and to be honest I don't know how far it goes after this because it's the damn ex who told me all this just to hurt me and I covered my ears and got away as fast as I could and the other one just turns beet red when I bring it up and won't talk about it. How can I forgive this woman for things like that? I mean, I'm serious, I think I actually
want
to forgive her. Even if she did buy me at a slave auction and then lose interest.”

“You ever do therapy?”

She scowled and took his arm as they walked.

“I feel there's this great big beautiful life waiting for me, waiting up ahead somewhere to bust into colors someday, but I got to get around Mom first. I don't mean avoid her. I've got to find a way to make all this anger turn into something good in me so I can love her, no matter what, like some kind of Gandhi.”

She gripped harder and harder and he sensed that forgiveness was indeed what she wanted, but she had no way to get there.

“Honey, you had a pretty exotic upbringing, all right, but you're not the only adopted kid who was treated bad. It may be a weird path you're on, but you're not Daniel Boone. Why don't you talk to some of the people who've left messages along the trail?”

“Who?”

“I don't know, but I'll find you somebody good if you want.”

“You've been sleeping with her, haven't you?”

This kid was a pretty tough nut, he thought.

“Is it just the sex?” she said querulously. “I don't get it. I mean, is it those big breasts or the things she does in bed or what? Do you really
like
her?”

He sighed. “A minute ago you wanted to forgive her. She's a bright woman, you know. Way back when, when her contemporaries were off in college or out in the world learning how to relate to each other as people, she was too busy being a movie star. All she knows is her magnetism. It works for her, and she's relied on it all her life. That's
her
problem. Mine and yours—that's nothing so straightforward. Yeah, she's got a hook in me. Just like your boyfriends.”

She punched him in the arm. It wasn't playful at all. She hit him again, trying to hurt.

“Ow. Hey!”

“You lousy fucker!”

And then she was crying and holding him, and they had to come to a stop. “I'm so scared. I think I've killed her with my hatred.”

T
HE
top of their Everest wasn't far. Skyridge went up another steep block to Mulholland Drive, famous for following the crest of the whole range of hills. Unfortunately the big retaining wall that had held this bit of Mulholland up there at the top had given way and a whole lot of asphalt and fill had come down to where they stood, leaving a sheer thirty-foot cliff. All around he could smell the exhalations of damp earth and that mildewy root smell of ripped-up weeds. A good climber with ropes could do it, he thought, looking upward. Maybe a bad climber, but the ropes were still part of the bargain. Some contractor would get rich rebuilding that road.

“Jeez,” she said simply.

“This is another fine mess you've gotten me into,” Jack Liffey said softly. She gave his biceps a squeeze where she was hanging on.

She pointed and he could see she was right. A huge gnarled live oak that was probably 150 years old rose from a backyard where some homeowner in the fifties had gone to great trouble to build around it rather than leveling the expensive hillside pad. If they were crazy enough, they could climb the oak and shinny out the biggest limb and jump to the shoulder of a short stretch of the road that remained up the hill, jutting precariously, like a bridge to nowhere.

He didn't like heights, but he could probably handle it.

“Let's do it.”

It was enclosed spaces that got him, the memento of a really bad afternoon spent treading water down a well where he had fallen when he was nine. Heights were a piece of cake by comparison. They picked their way through a rock and cactus garden to the big rough bole of the oak and he stood on a bench to boost her up to the lowest limb, self-conscious about placing his hand on her small, warm thigh. She reached down to give him a hand. She couldn't take much of his weight, but it was just enough to help him scrabble up the raspy black bark.

“We rise to fixed things,” she said. “An ascent out of the circles of hell.”

“Oh, be a kid for a while still.”

They boosted one another up two more limbs. He was getting queasy now, looking down at the redwood bench and cactus garden, and he kept a good grip on the jutting branches. It would not be a nice landing. Wind ruffled the deep green cupped leaves with their pointy edges, and his progress along the boughs stripped dried acorns that bonked off the bench below.

“Hey there!” It was a shrill but very calm voice.

He looked down to see, foreshortened, a teenager in a black homburg and curly locks. A young Hasidic Jew clung to a big black book and stared up at them hopefully, like a farmer looking for rain.

“Are you crazy?” the boy asked, as if it were a genuine question.

“Probably.”

“I'm serious, sir.”

“Well, if we weren't,” Jack Liffey said, “it would be a very good time to start. We're trying to get over to Avenida Bluebird to find her mother.”

The boy nodded earnestly. “Blessings on you.” He spoke for a while in Hebrew, and then he undertook to translate. “I just memorized that, sir. It is from the end of the Yom Kippur service.

“Thanks a lot,” Jack Liffey said. “I hope the gates are open for a while yet, though.”

“I think he's just peeking up my skirt,” Lee said softly.

“Oy,” Jack Liffey said.

“Good luck, sirs.”

The boy waved and walked gravely away. They boosted onto the big high limb now, the one they needed. He sat with his legs on either side and she sat sidesaddle. He felt a wave of exhaustion, the kind you got after a long period of nervous tension and he knew he had to fight it, but for just a moment he closed his eyes and imagined a soft bed. Somewhere far away a carillon was tolling the hour and a donkey was braying. Both stopped at once.

“Jack,” she said. “Wake up.”

“Just a momentary ebb of energy,” he said. “Let's do this one at a time. I don't like the size of the bough out there.”

She nodded. “I go first so at least one of us gets through,” she said melodramatically. It was academic because she was already ahead of him. She shinnied herself out and up. The branch slanted up at about the pitch of a roof and her weight didn't even disturb it. She gave a half-playful little “ooh” when she sidesaddled past a sharp place, and soon she was well above his head and the thinner bough was bouncing a little each time she boosted herself along. She nearly lost her balance once but tucked her legs up and stabilized.

“This is cool,” she said, and he had no idea what she meant. She couldn't possibly have meant the danger.

Out near the end she hung by her hands and could almost touch the shoulder of the surviving bit of road with her toe. She swung back and forth, boosting higher each time, and let go at the right moment to catch easily on a stretch of guardrail. She sat on the rail and slapped dirt off her hands.