The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  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.”

  THE 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.

  “Lord though every power is yours,

  And all your deeds tremendous,

  Now, when heaven’s gates are closing,

  Let your grace defend us.”

  “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.

  “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 per
imeter 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.”