The Cracked Earth (24 page)

“Mickey Mouse,” she boasted.

He wondered how stable that one stretch of roadway was, but there was a limit to what you could worry about. He blew out a breath and started inching out the limb. Balance wasn't much of a problem with his legs astride, but his progress was painfully slow. He noticed now that out toward the end he would be over a much more serious drop where the yard fell off to a ravine, perhaps another hundred feet down. He wondered why he hadn't noticed before.

“Cluck cluck cluck,” she said, then: “Nyah-nyah, come get me.” She stuck out her tongue. He wondered if she'd hit some drug when he wasn't looking.

The bough began to bounce and give. He went right into the sensation, the hanging in space, into the risk, until he convinced himself he was still lucky. It was all you could do. A little more than halfway out, where the taper had reduced the branch to about the size of his forearm, he heard a crack, like a pellet gun.

“Oh, jeez, Jack.”

“I'm okay.”

He hadn't felt any give at the sound. He shinned forward more gently, his hearing dancing anticipation of more cracking. The branch was starting to sag now and he was gaining less height than he wanted. It was clear he'd never make it the way she had, but there was nothing to do but go on. The yard was gone now and there were rocks far down, but he refused to look.

A
crick-crack
went through him like an electric shock and he felt the give this time.

She stood rigid on the cliff edge twenty feet away with both hands to her mouth.

He cursed himself for not losing those ten extra pounds. He thought of the rocks below, and then for some reason he thought of a tumbleweed with teeth. Celebrity will bite you in the ass, Mike Lewis had said. He could tell he was losing focus.

Crack.
It came much louder this time, and he held his breath, expecting to fall.

Might as well get it over, he thought as he shinned forward straight into the fear. He'd never thought it would be heights. It was supposed to be holes in the ground, staring up in panic at one tiny unreachable spot of light. Go ahead and break! he thought, inflaming his luck, and as if acquiescing, the big oak gave him back a continuous
pop-crack-pop,
like canvas tearing, and the bough broke behind him. About six feet of the limb sank like a broken arm.

“Eeee!” he heard.

But he clung hard, and by some miracle, the branches out at the tip caught on a clump of weed on the hillside and the green wood held like a hinge where it had broken. He saw he had a tenuous bridge to a point on the cliff only four or five feet below where she stood. He slid down as fast as he could and kept his weight on the bough to keep it from pulling free from the hill. Slowly he levered himself up and flattened against the slope. His head was just at her feet.

Distraction plucked at his consciousness. In a movie, he thought, the bad guy would try to kick him in the head now.

Without a word she knelt and gripped the guardrail with one hand and reached out to him with the other. He took her hand in one of his and used the other to grab at the weeds, doing his best not to put too much of his weight on her. The stringy weeds held, and one foot found a niche. He wriggled and shinnied and at last got a leg up over the edge, and she pulled hard on two fistfuls of shirt until he rolled up onto the flat. At last he lay breathless on his stomach. Only then did he relax and let himself feel how close it had been.

“You must live right,” he heard her say.

When he looked back he saw that the bough had sprung away from the slope and about a third of it hung straight down now, like the flag of a defeated nation.

“Thanks, kiddo. I guess it's not falling that's got my name written on it.”

“Now you're mixing metaphors. What got your name?”

“Probably women.”

When he stood up, he felt like a million. Luck mattered more than just about anything, he thought. But he knew that was the kind of brag you strutted out only after you'd had a big dollop of good luck.

They stood on a thirty-yard stretch of Mulholland that was untouched, but the asphalt fell away at both ends. Enough of the far shoulder remained, though, for them to make their way back to Skyridge. There, they found that a lot of the road had fallen the other way, too, carrying some of Skyridge down with it to the south of the ridge. They found a section of embankment that fell away gradually and they dug their heels to giant-step down the weedy slope, and soon they were on the unbroken part of Skyridge. They had crossed their Everest, Tenzing Norkay and Hillary. He wondered if she would recognize the names.

Just up the road an old woman sat on a lawn chair in the midst of the ruins of a house. She had an unlit cigarette in her hand and her arm went to her mouth and back down like a life-size mechanical coin bank.

“Mrs. Larkin,” Lee called.

The woman didn't seem to hear.

“Mrs. Larkin!”

She nodded as they walked up but didn't look at them.

“Are you okay?”

“I found the photos,” the woman said with a decisive little quaver. “The boat is gone, but I've got the photos.”

“Can we help you?”

“Not just at the moment. We thank you very much.”

Jack Liffey pulled Lee on. There would be a lot of hard-luck stories in L.A. that day, and at least the woman was alive.

The next three houses were pretty much intact and their spirits lifted. Then around a bend they could see the first bit of Lori Bright's still standing and Lee gave a squeal of joy and ran forward.

In a few seconds, though, Jack Liffey knew something was badly wrong. Lee had sunk to her knees on the road and let out an animal howl that ruffled the nape of his neck. When he hurried up to her, he saw that a fairly substantial steel-framed solarium was what had held up the masonry north wall of the house. The rest of the two-story house looked like a horse with a broken back. The middle had sunk a whole floor, and the south end where the entrance had once been had disintegrated completely. The rafters had tented up some of the house, but it didn't look like it was going to last.

She ran toward the house, calling “Momma!” and he caught up and grabbed her just before she dived into a gaping hole in the side wall.

“Let's check things out.”

They paced around the perimeter of the house. While she called, he studied where sections of floor and wall seemed propped up on something substantial and where they were only waiting for another tremor to settle. The trophy room onto the garden had survived, but it would never again be called high-ceilinged on some realtor's fact sheet. He could see no one was in the room. He checked the garage and found that all the cars were home, and he got a rusted-up pipe wrench out of the garden shed and shut off the gas.

If she had been in the front of the house, he thought, she was dead now, and if she had been right at the back, she would have stepped calmly out the solarium door and be sitting on the lawn. He decided if she was inside, trapped by rubble or a beam across her legs, she would be somewhere in the confused tangle at the middle, where the second floor had come down to mate with the first.

There was no answer to Lee's calls. He knelt and stared glumly into the lopsided opening that had once held the French doors onto the fountain alcove. Things were dark, but it seemed the best way into the tangle. He went back to the garden shed and got an old pry bar and a ball of twine he'd noticed.

“Jack, is she in there?”

“I hope not, but I've got to check.”

“I'm smaller. I should go.”

“I'm stronger. There's going to be some lifting and prying.”

“We can do it together.”

He shook his head. “If the house comes down on both of us, who goes for help?”

He tied the end of the rough twine to one of his belt loops and handed her the ball. “Don't hold me back but keep it a bit snug. I'll give you a double tug every minute or two so you know I'm okay.”

“What's this for? I can't pull you out.”

He met her eyes for a moment. “If it collapses, it'll help the firemen find my body.”

Her face sagged and he could see a tear. She sat and hugged his leg. “Oh, Jeez. I'm so scared.”

“I'm scared, too, kid. If there weren't a big eye watching me, I wouldn't do this.”

“What do you mean—God?”

He shook his head. “It's inside. I probably saw
High Noon
too many times.”

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.

H
E 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.

H
E
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.

T
HE
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 charge. 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.”

A
FTER
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 yourself. 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.