Wild Child (5 page)
Apparently they’d found shelter somewhere, in the little gas station-cum-grocery that was La Conchita’s sole commercial establishment, or maybe in one of the cars stalled behind me. There were people out on the pavement, hunched-over forms wading through the mud and shouting at one another, and I thought I heard the distant keening of a siren—police, fire, ambulance—and wondered how they expected to get through. You might find it hard to believe, but I really didn’t think much about the danger, though if another section of the hillside were to let go we’d all be buried, no doubt about that—no, I was more concerned with the package in the trunk. Why hadn’t they called me back? What were they waiting for?
I could have been slogging down the road already, the cooler propped up on one shoulder, and somebody—I thought of an ambulance from the hospital—could have met me a couple miles up the freeway. But no, the ambulances would all be busy with the wreckage in front of me, with people trapped in their cars, bleeding from head wounds, their own organs ruptured, bones broken. Or in those houses. I turned my head to look out the passenger’s side window at the ghost of La Conchita, a rectangular grid of split-level homes and trailers bereft of electricity and burdened by rain, and the ones up against the hillside, the ones that had been there ten minutes ago and were gone now.
Just then, just as I turned, a streaming dark figure surged up against the car and a woman’s face appeared at the window. “Open up!” she demanded. “Open up!”
I was caught off-guard—startled, actually, the way she came up on me. It took a minute to react, but she didn’t have a minute, because she was pounding at the window now, frantic, both hands in motion, her eyes cutting into me through the smeared-over glass. I hit the button for the window and that smell came at me, that graveyard stink, and there she was, a woman in her twenties with smudged makeup, mud in her hair and her hair wet and hanging loose like the frayed ends of a rope. Before the window was all the way down she thrust her head in and reached across the seat to grab hold of my wrist as if to tug me out of the car, going on about her husband, her husband and her little girl, her baby, her little girl, her little girl, her voice so strained and constricted I could barely make out what she was saying. “You’ve got to help,” she said, jerking at my arm. “Help me. Please.”
And then, before I knew what I was doing, I was out the driver’s side door and into the mud again and I never even thought to crank the window back up, her urgency gone through me like an electric jolt, and why I thought to take the gun, to tuck it into my waistband, I’ll never know. Maybe because panic is infectious and violence the only thing to soothe it. I don’t know. Maybe I was thinking of looters—or of myself, of insulating myself from whatever was out there, good, bad or indifferent. I came round the front of the car, the mud to my knees, and without a word she grabbed hold of my hand and started pulling me forward. “Where’re we going?” I shouted into the rain, but she just tugged at me and slashed through the debris until we were across the inundated railroad tracks—running now, both of us—and into La Conchita, where the mud flowed and the houses lay buried.
Though I must have passed by the place a hundred times, doing eighty, eighty-five, with one eye out for the CHP and the other for the inevitable moron blocking the fast lane, I don’t think I’d actually stopped there more than once or twice—and then only to get gas and only in an emergency situation when I’d been so intent on a delivery I’d forgotten to check the fuel gauge. What I knew of La Conchita was limited to what I’d heard—that it was cheap, or relatively cheap, because the hillside had given way in ’95, obliterating a few houses and scaring off buyers and realtors alike, and that people kept coming back to it because they had short memories and the little community there, a hundred fifty houses or so and the store I mentioned, exerted a real pull on the imagination.
This was the last of the Southern California beach towns anybody could afford, a throwback to earlier, happier times before the freeways came and the megalopolis ate everything up. I’d always meant to stop and look around and yet never seemed to find the time—the whole place couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile from one end to the other, and that goes by in a heartbeat at eighty-five.
But I was here now, right in the thick of it, skirting the tentacles of mud and hurrying past houses that just sat there dark and untouched, fumbling on up the street to where the slide had broken through, and this woman, her bare legs mud-streaked and her shoulders pinched with urgency, never let go of my wrist. And that was strange, a strange feeling, as if I were back in elementary school and bound to one of the other kids in some weird variant of the three-legged race. Except that this woman was a total stranger and this was no game. I moved without thinking, without question, my legs heavy with the mud. By the time we reached the top of the street, a long block and a half in, all of it uphill, I was out of breath—heaving, actually—but whether my lungs burned or my shoes were ruined beyond salvage or repair or the finish on the car was damaged to the tune of five hundred bucks or more didn’t matter, because the whole thing suddenly came clear to me. This was the real deal. This was affliction and loss, horror unfolding, the houses crushed like eggshells, cars swallowed up, sections of roof flung out across the street and nothing visible beneath but tons of wet mud and a scatter of splintered beams. I was staggered. I was in awe. I became aware of a dog barking somewhere, a muffled sound, as if it were barking through a gag. “Help,” the woman repeated, choking on her own voice, “goddamnit, do something, dig,” and only then did she let go of my wrist. She gave me one frantic look and threw herself down in the muck, flailing at the earth with her bare hands.
Again, as I said, I’m no hero—I’m barely capable of taking care of myself, if you want to know the truth—but I fell in beside her without a word. She was sobbing now, her face slack with shock and the futility of it all—we needed a shovel, a pick, a backhoe for Christ’s sake—but the tools were buried, everything was buried. “I was at the store,” she kept saying, chanting it as her fingers raked and bled and her nails tore and the blouse clung wet to the hard frenetic muscles of her digging, “at the store, at the store,” and my mind flew right out of my body. I snatched up a length of two-by-four and began to tear at the earth as if I’d been born to it. The dirt flew. I knew nothing. I was in a trench up to my knees, up to my waist, the mud sliding back in almost as fast as I could fling it out, and she was right there beside me with her martyred hands, looking like Alice, like my Alice when I first met her with her snaking hair and the smile that pulled you across the room, Alice before things went bad.
And I wondered: Would Alice dig me out? Would she even care?
Back, shoulders, bending, flinging, gouging at the face of the earth: will it sound ridiculous if I say that in that hard labor, that digging, that sweat and panic and the headlong burning rush of adrenaline, I found my wife again? And that I saw something there, something in the fierceness of her need and the taint of her smeared limbs I found incredibly sexy? I didn’t know the husband. I didn’t know the little girl. I was digging, yes—in my place, the average person would have done the same—but I was no hero. I wasn’t digging to save anybody. I was digging for her. And there came a point, ten, fifteen minutes into it, when I saw what was going to happen as clearly as if I could predict the future. Those people were dead down there, long dead, choked and asphyxiated, and she was going to grieve, this hot young woman, this girl in the muddy shorts and soaked-through top whose name I didn’t even know, who kept saying over and over that she’d gone to the store for a can of tomato paste to add to the sauce, the sauce simmering on the stove while her husband set the table and the little girl bent over her coloring book. I saw that. The grief. The grief was only to be expected. And I saw that in time—six months, a year maybe—she was going to get over it, very gradually, in a tender and fragile way, and then I would be there for her, right there at her side, and she could cleave to me the way Alice couldn’t and wouldn’t. It was biblical, is what it was.
And I was a seer—a fortune teller—for fifteen hard minutes. But let me tell you, digging for somebody’s life is a desperate business, and you don’t know your thoughts, you just don’t.
At some point a neighbor appeared with a shovel, and I couldn’t tell you whether this guy was thirty or eighty, ten feet tall or a hunchbacked dwarf, because in one unbroken motion I flung down the two-by-four, snatched the shovel from him, and started stabbing at the earth all on my own, feeling the kind of ecstasy only the saints must know. I was shoulder-deep, slamming at something—a window frame, shattered mullions and teeth of glass—when the cell in my right front pocket began to ring. It rang on and on, five times, six times, and I couldn’t stop myself, the motion of pitching forward and heaving back all I knew, the dirt looser now, fragments of shingle appearing at the bottom of the hole like treasure. The ringing stopped. Shingle gave way to splintered wood, chicken wire and fragments of stucco, an interior wall—was that an interior wall?
And then the cell began to ring again and I dropped the shovel, just for an instant, to pull the thing out of my pocket and shout into the receiver. “Yeah?” my voice boomed out, and all the while I was looking to the woman, to her hopeless eyes and bloodied hands, and there was the hillside poised above us like the face of death.
“It’s Joe Liebowitz. Where are you?”
“Who?”
“Dr. Liebowitz. At the hospital.”
It took a moment, shifting gears. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”
“Good. All right. Now, listen: we found somebody and he’s on his way to you, on a motorcycle, so we think—he thinks—he can get through, and all you have to do is hand the package over to him. Are you all right? You think you can do that?”
Yes, I was going to say, of course I can do that, but I didn’t have the chance. Because at that moment, somebody—some guy in a blue wind-breaker and a Dodgers cap gone black with the rain—made a grab for the shovel, and they’re saying I brandished the gun, but I don’t know, I truthfully don’t. What I do know is that I dropped the cell and wrestled the shovel away from him and began to dig with everything I had, and I could have been made of steel and rivets, a digging machine, a robot, all sensation fled out of my limbs and hands and back. I dug. And the woman—the wife, the young mother—collapsed in the mud, giving up her grief in a chain of long shuddering sobs that fed me like an intravenous drip and people were gathering now to comfort her and some guy with a pick starting in beside me. The cell rang again. It was right there, at my feet, and I paused only to snatch it up and jam it down the front of my pants, mud and all.
I don’t know how long it was after that—five minutes maybe, no more—until I broke through. I was stabbing at the bottom of the hole like a fencer parrying with an invisible opponent, thrusting away, when all at once the shovel plunged in all the way to my fist and everything went still. This was the miracle: he was in there, the husband, and the little girl with him, preserved in a pocket where the refrigerator and stove had gone down under a section of the wall and held it in place. As soon as I jerked the blade of the shovel back his arm came thrusting out of the hole, and it was a shock to see this grasping hand and the arm so small and white and unexpected in that sea of mud. I could hear him now—he was shouting his wife’s name, Julie! Julie!—and the arm vanished to show a sliver of his face, one eye so intensely green it was as if all the vegetation of the hillside had been distilled and concentrated there underground, and then his hand thrust out again and she was there, the wife, clinging to it.
I stood back then and let the guy with the pick work at the hole, the rain settling into a thin drizzle and a long funnel of cloud clinging to the raw earth above us as if the mountain had begun to breathe. People were crowding around all of a sudden, and there must have been a dozen or more, wet as rats, looking shell-shocked, the hair glued to their heads. Their voices ran away like kites blown on the wind. Somebody had a movie camera. And my cell was ringing, had been ringing for I don’t know how long. It took me a minute to wipe the scrim of mud from the face of it, then I pressed the talk button and held it to my ear.
“Gordon? Is this Gordon I’m talking to?”
“I’m here,” I said.
“Where? Where are you, that’s what I want to know. Because the man we got has been there for ten minutes now, looking for you.
Don’t you realize what’s going on here? There’s a woman’s life at stake—”
“Yeah,” I said, and I was already starting down the hill, my car up to the frame in mud and debris, the police there, lights revolving, somebody with a plow on the front of his pickup trying to make the smallest dent in the mudflow that stretched on as far as I could see,
“yeah, I’m on it.”
The doctor’s voice ran at me, hard as a knife. “You know that, don’t you? You know how much longer that organ’s got? Till it’s not viable? You know what that means?”
He didn’t want an answer. He was venting, that was all, hyped-up on caffeine and frustrated and looking for somebody to take it out on. I said, “Yeah,” very softly, more as an interjection than anything else, and then asked him who I was supposed to hand the package off to.
I could hear him breathing into the phone, ready to go off on another rant, but he managed to control himself long enough to say:
“Altamirano. Freddie Altamirano. He’s on a motorcycle and he says he’s wearing a silver helmet.”
Even before I could answer I saw Freddie, legging his way through the mud, the Harley looking more like a dirt bike in the motocross than a street machine. He gave me a thumbs-up sign and gestured to the trunk of my car, even as I waded through the muck and dug in my pocket for the keys. I was soaked through to the skin.