by Lou Cadle
Erupt
By Lou Cadle
Copyright © 2013 by Cadle-Sparks Books
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.
www.loucadle.com
Erupt
By Lou Cadle
Section I: One month before
1
Section II: The Three Days before
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Section III: The Day
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
South Flank. Afternoon.
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Section IV. After
31
32
Section I: One month before
1
Camas, Washington.
Chad Keppler feared he would drop the “woman.” Halfway to safety, the building behind them burning, dragging her along the asphalt, he was losing his grip on the hundred-sixty-five-pound load. If he did drop her, she could fry here. Get hit by burning debris. Suck down toxic smoke.
Move, man!
He adjusted his grip and dug in, pulling, his thighs burning, lungs aching, finally yanking her over the finish line. He looked over at Francie Quill, who held a stopwatch.
She shook her head. “Sorry, Chad. You’re at almost nine minutes now.”
He had seven minutes to finish all six requirements. He had failed the physical test to qualify as a firefighter. Failed again. He studied the dummy as if it might have an explanation for him. “I thought maybe—” he panted “—if I convinced myself it was a woman, you know, with kids and a real life, I’d fight harder.” He shook his head in disappointment, not at the blue-clad faceless dummy, who was blameless, but at himself.
“Are you giving up?” Francie asked.
“Never. All I ever wanted to be was a firefighter. I have good scores on the written test. Heck, I could write it. I’m going to do this.” But not today. He sat down on the dummy.
“Don’t hurt her!” Francie said.
He wanted to be joked out of his disappointment, but even Francie’s teasing couldn’t help him right now. He did get up off the dummy, though. “Dang, dang, dang,” he said.
Rick Mauch, one of the battalion chiefs, strolled up, peering at the clipboard where Francie was entering the time. “How a man got to be your age without cussing any worse than you, Chad, I’ll never know.”
“You don’t know my gran,” Chad said, stripping off the borrowed regulation parka. “About the third time you get walloped on the ear, it reforms you.”
Francie gave him a sympathetic smile. “It’s not your ankle, is it?”
“It doesn’t hurt.” He glanced up at Mt. Hood in the distance, its top lost in cloud. He had fallen on the McNeil Point trail last October, hurting his Achilles tendon, and rehabbing the injury had been a slow process. He hated to admit it, but it might not be as strong as it once was. “I’m fine,” he said.
“You can take the test again in September.”
“I know, I know.” This was his second try. The first time, he had missed passing by eighteen lousy seconds. So close. It had been like feeling his fingertips touch a pile of hundred-dollar bills but having a gust of wind come and snatch it all away. He shook off his self-pity and forced a smile. “Thank you, guys.”
“See you for pizza later?” Francie asked. “Six o’clock.”
He shook his head. “Gotta work.” Not that he wanted to join a celebration of guys who had passed the test. Petty of him? Yeah, it was. He wasn’t proud of that. He was grateful he had the legitimate excuse of work.
When he got back home, he called his mother in Astoria and left a message telling her the bad news, asking her not to call back until tomorrow. Her sympathy would be too much right now. He poured himself a ginger ale, pulled up some Punch Brothers music on the computer, and sat down in the funky 60’s chair he had found at a garage sale for two bucks. The upholstery was awful, a matted green shag, as if Oscar the Muppet had been kicked down a hill and then killed for his pelt, but the chair felt so good, it didn’t matter that it was a little gross.
He nursed his ginger ale and thought about today, about how to shave those extra seconds off, where to shave them. Problem with piling on more training was, he wasn’t really unfit. He had the wrong build, was the thing, upper body muscles that responded to training while his legs lagged behind. And the legs were the whole secret to the firefighter test, legs and wind. Climbing ladders, hauling hose, dragging the dummy. All about the legs.
Ever since he was a little kid watching fire engines speed by on the street, their sirens screaming, their horns blasting, he had wanted to fight fires. He wanted the fire station, a pole to slide down, shiny trucks kept clean by frequent washing, the camaraderie of the dinner table, the ringing of bells, the sirens winding up, hauling ass to jump onboard, saving people. More than anything, that: saving people. The truth was, he believed it was noble work, to risk yourself to save the life of a stranger. Noble—now that thought, he’d never admitted to anyone else.
And now he was down to one more chance to pass the test. Either that, or he’d have to give up the dream.
Enough. Enough of sitting here and sulking—that never solved anything. He was going to do some laundry before his shift at the Liberty Theatre where he took tickets and swept up popcorn. At dawn, he’d be stocking shelves at the Safeway. Two jobs and keeping in shape meant hardly any time for a social life. Had to pay the bills, though, and still try and make the dream come true.
^ ^ ^
Mt. Hood, Oregon.
Norio Greer needed a break. He sat on an andesite outcrop and shrugged off his backpack.
The slope of Mount Hood towered hundreds more meters above him, glaciers bright in the midday sun. The snowfields loomed over him—it was avalanche season and he was ever wary of those. The volcano itself he feared not at all. He respected its potential power, yes, but he loved it, too, an obsessive love that outshone anything he had ever felt for the people in his life. The mountain rocks were easy for him to read.
His gaze swept around, taking in olivine, breccia, light gray dots of pumice far to his left, an old dike to his right. He could see the whole history of the place as a time-lapse movie, the tectonic plates colliding, the subsidence of the San Juan de Fuca plate making the magma that drove up the Cascades, the big eruption so long ago that had made the andesite block he sat upon, the smaller blasts, and finally the most recent belch from the volcano, from Lewis and Clark Expedition days, that had sprinkled pumice like salt over this side of the mountain.
Other people thought the mountain was beautiful. His geologist’s eye saw that but saw the story, too, an epic tale stretching back more than thirty million years, full of fire and brimstone—during the exciting times, at least.
Was this to be an exciting time?
Maybe. Norio was trying to figure this out. A month ago, it seemed certain things were moving in that direction. Increasing numbers of earthquakes jostled the seismom
eters for three weeks, some big enough for late-season skiers to feel on the slopes. A steam vent opened on the north face of the summit. The tiltmeters said the mountain was swelling, if only a few centimeters, to the north. Norio’s on-site solo research became part of a team effort, as the USGS emergency response team came down from Alaska, and as Cascades Volcano Observatory department heads ventured up and OSU geologists drove into the area to climb up and down his mountain.
Strangers leaned over his equipment and brought their own; they flew airplanes and helicopters overhead with even more instruments. Then, as quickly as it had come to life, the mountain settled back down. The few reporters from Portland who had followed the story quit asking for interviews.
Over their beers every evening, the scientists grumbled. It wasn’t that they were insensitive to the concerns of regular folks, not that they wanted catastrophe and destruction, but they wanted data. Good data, interesting data. Not one 2.2 earthquake per week, not the old rocks, all the baseline data that Norio worked on so carefully these past twenty months since he got the grant to study Hood. There was no Nature article in that.
Already the exodus of the interlopers had begun, the DIAL-LIDAR flown off to bounce its state-of-the-art lasers off Mt. Lassen. Visiting volcanologists, not even yet fully acclimated to altitude, had headed back down to sea-level paperwork and computers or to taking their seminars back from their Ph.D. students who had been left behind, as Norio once had been left, to do the scut work. But eventually, he had earned his way to the job he wanted, and he was doing it right now, alone, in his element.
Norio thought there was still something to be discovered on Hood. He wasn’t convinced the mountain was done. And he had been left alone to probe the mystery.
He liked solitude, liked the outdoors, or craved it, really, got a little crazy if he didn’t get frequent doses of both. He wanted just this: the glare of the sun off the glacier, the brilliant blue of the sky above, the thin clean air in his lungs, and the volcano, quiescent or rumbling, right under his feet.
And under his butt, a butt which was now cold from sitting too long. He continued up the slope to the cache of instruments: tiltmeter, seismometer, a small solar panel to power the DC system, and an antenna to communicate data with the USGS center in Vancouver every fifteen minutes. He cleaned the purple solar panel and pried the metal lid off the buried box that housed the instruments, checking battery power, scrubbing a wire brush across battery contacts until they gleamed, and tightening down cable connections to guarantee an uninterrupted flow of information back to Vancouver. Working alone on his mountain, trying to tease out its secrets, he was at peace.
But the volcano was not.
^ ^ ^
Central Nebraska.
Ellen Lennox tapped a chattering spiky-haired student named Jonah on the shoulder and gave him her best Bitch Librarian scowl, an expression that came more easily to her this spring than ever before. Her sour mood wasn’t so much because of the kids getting wilder as summer break approached, or from the chronic lack of funding for the school library, or because of that bizarre smell in the worn brown carpet (what was that?) that always wafted up in the spring. These were all normal irritations.
No, it was that some nutso book-banning extremist group had been petitioning the school board, who apparently all had left their balls in a lockbox back home, about a list of books that must, for the moral rectitude of the student population, be removed from the library. This list included, no big shock, everything from accurate science books to Harry Potter books and other innocuous fantasy fare. They had named over a hundred realistic Y.A. novels that dealt with rape, parental abuse, gangs, and bullying, issues that touched more than half her middle-grade students. She wasn’t the most patient of people, and having to bite her tongue and sound rational and balanced and as if she were listening to silly arguments during the meetings had worn her down well beyond her last nerve. She had one more appearance to make before the Loons and the Ballsless to guarantee the idiotic demands would get tabled until fall.
The bell rang, bringing her back to the present moment. On the way out, Jonah mumbled an apology to her. She smiled and said, “No harm done.” After putting books away, she grabbed her satchel and headed to the teacher’s lounge.
Mac and Tim, the science teacher and band teacher, a pair of bespectacled and largely harmless nerds, sat drinking coffee together. She bypassed them to sit with her friend Claire, who taught ninth-grade English. “How are Pete and the kids?” Ellen asked.
“Same old,” Claire said. “How goes the war?”
“Last meeting is Tuesday,” Ellen said. “I’m building the bomb at home tonight.”
Claire laughed. “This too shall pass,” she said.
“So do kidney stones,” called Mac, a notorious eavesdropper.
Ellen raised her hand and barely kept herself from flipping him the bird, turning it into a brush-off wave instead at the last moment. She really wasn’t in a good mood at all. “It’s not the religious nuts that bother me so much—at least they’re acting out of their convictions, wrongheaded though they are. It’s the board members, who all secretly agree with me but who—” She stopped herself. “I’ve said this all before.”
“Twenty or thirty times,” said Claire.
“I’m sorry. You’re such a good friend, and I’m being a crappy one.” She knocked lightly on her head. “My bad. Tell me about your weekend plans. What are you all doing?”
“Nothing much.” Claire leaned forward. “What are you doing for yourself? To de-stress.”
“I’m considering becoming a problem drinker.”
“Seriously,” said Claire.
“Seriously? Reading. DVDs of ridiculously sappy old movies with Hugh Grant or dogs or preferably Hugh Grant and dogs. Mostly, I’m staring at the calendar a lot, watching the days tick off.”
“And then what?”
“Summer break, of course. Just like all of us.”
“I’ve been thinking about this. You should plan a vacation. A real one. That’ll remind you there’s something to life other than board meetings, and it’ll be a mental vacation right now just to prepare for it.”
“But I—” Ellen began. And she realized there wasn’t a good excuse to finish that sentence with. Hmm.
“Where have you always wanted to go? That you can afford.”
Ellen considered. “I like mountains,” she said. “Big ones. Not to climb. Just to look at.” The image of an off-season ski lodge popped into her mind. Big fireplace. Hot chocolate. Through a plate-glass window, a distant mountain peak, and all of it far from her worries here.
Claire nodded her approval. “Rockies, then. Or the Cascades, fly all the way out to Seattle and start there. Or Alaska, even.”
“I actually prefer driving if there’s not awful traffic.”
“Then drive, already. Go somewhere else, and use the planning for it to keep stress levels down until the end of the year. I’ll water your plants when you go.”
That imaginary ski lodge had looked idyllic. She felt better just thinking about it. Claire was right—though when wasn’t she? Ellen beamed at Claire, grateful for her practical approach to problems.
The Cascades, she thought, Oregon and Washington, she’d never been there. She felt the muscles in her shoulders ease the tiniest bit.
^ ^ ^
Portland, Oregon.
Jim Vang’s thumbs guided his hero through the corridors of the castle, opening treasure chests and grabbing weapons as fast as his fingers could manage.
“Yim Zoo.” His father called him by his traditional name.
Jim sighed, saved his progress in Final Fantasy, and looked up. “Father?”
His father stood in the doorway of Jim’s room. “Come into the kitchen. Your mother and I would like to talk with you.”
Aw, eff me sideways. What now? Jim shut off his phone and followed his father to the kitchen, where his father took his head-of-family place at the center of the table. Jim
took his minion spot at the end. His mother stood at the counter in one of her weird thrift-shop Tshirts, this one faded green with a big yellow cartoon banana slug on it, her hand resting on a can of coconut milk as if taking its pulse, until his father gestured for her to sit, too.
“When you were born in California,” his father began, and Jim thought, oh boy, here we go again. His father went on as if reciting from some ancient story, “I knew things had turned for the better, for after many years of not being blessed with children, you finally came. You were a healthy boy, and no evil spirits came.” The thinnest worry line appeared between his eyes. “But now there is something amiss with you, I think with your soul. I have called a shaman from Sacramento to come and see what it might be.”
No no no, not the shaman. Jim tried to keep his expression as neutral as his father’s, but inside he winced.
“And your mother, she has been reading American ideas on the Internet,” his father said, “and she thinks that we should consider those, as well. I agree, if the ways do not risk inviting a dab.” A demon, which none of Jim’s friends ever seemed to have to contend with, but then, they weren’t Hmong. Demons had it out for Hmong, it seemed. Father nodded to Mother to allow her to have her say.
“These websites say,” his mother said, “that we must make our communication and more family time. Clan time, too. And then you will choose better companions.”
My companions are just fine, thought Jim.
“We cannot have you in the gang,” his father said.
“Gang?” Jim blurted. The guys he sometimes hung with, a group of mixed Asians, all born in America, were hardly a gang. Sure, Tommy tagged, but he was pretty good at it, an artist, really. That was as close as any of them came to being gangstas. Where’d his father get this stuff?
His father ignored the interruption. “I have a good job here, or I would move our family to Sacramento or Saint Paul to protect you better from evil spirit.”
