He looked down at his arm, as if I had left a mark. The shock of it. His dweeb sister trying for cool. Cool, the state he desperately needed to return to. “Hey,” he said. He hooked his arm through mine. “Hey, you sure left the place a mess.”
We abandoned the Tip and followed the crowd. Resident Visitors were making too much noise, stirring up too much ash, and the gray bones of the town seemed to shrink from us.
Not ours anyway. The Town of Mammoth Lakes is now home to scientists, engineers, and government agents and it’s become a boomtown of trailers and behemoth vehicles. We came to the new town hall — seven motor homes parked in a U around stepped rows of metal picnic tables. A blue plastic canopy tented the area. There was a table with thermoses and platters of sandwiches and fruit, a table stacked with FEMA bulletins, a huge corkboard of photographs, and three wheeled carts with video displays.
Jimbo said “there’s the Stobe” and headed for the food table where Stobie was hovering as his mom, Lila Winder, unwrapped a tray of cookies.
Always the female who does the food.
“Cassie!” An arm enveloped me and a tall form bent. Hal Orenstein raised a camera. “For the Mammoth Times? I’m putting out an issue.” I smiled and he shot. He whispered, “The biggies are here today,” and nodded at a plump woman shouldering a minicam with the CNN logo.
Good, I thought. I unzipped the belt bag. Very good.
I passed into the throng, which under the blue canopy took on an underwater feel. The displaced citizenry seemed not sure what to do, where to look — at the videotapes of faintly familiar steaming landmarks, at the densely captioned photo montage of their volcano’s evolution, or at the realtime mess it had made. Many simply made for the food table. The place had an unreal air, a mix of science fair and refugee camp.
I wormed deeper, on the hunt.
Phil Dobie found me and we huddled. He wore his USGS jacket with the Volcanic Event Response Team logo. Very visible, very smart. He leaned in and his beard tickled my ear as he whispered, “you ready?”
“I need Walter.”
“Why?”
“We’re a team.”
Phil and I jostled on until we bumped into Walter, who had been hunting through the throng for me. I said “now?” and Walter nodded so I took the package from my pouch and passed it to Walter to give to Phil. A little team ceremony.
Phil set off.
“Over there,” Walter said.
I looked, and caught sight of Len Carow’s sharp profile and FEMA jacket, and beyond him the rest of the biggies — Council members and agency reps and reporters — and there of course was Adrian Krom.
Impossibly, Krom is smiling. He’s bald, that glossy brown animal pelt gone, but it gives him a drop-dead cool air like some massive shaved-head athlete. The skin of his face is marred, and he’s in shirtsleeves and the scar on his arm magnifies the effect, as if he’s undergone ritual scarification for admission to some secret tribe. He moves haltingly, his right leg apparently braced beneath his slacks, but you get the impression he could cover the distance in a lunge should the need arise.
He smiles as if he’s untouchable. He’s been untouchable since the chopper evacuated him to the hospital, untouchable through the months of rehab. In a Time magazine piece titled Road Back From Hell, he swears the real heroes were Eric and Mike, but the gist of the article is that he got caught in the eruption because he’d stayed behind to be sure everyone was safely out. And he did indeed succeed. The only ones to die were those who came in after the evac: some crazy sightseers who’d come by dog sled, three Japanese volcanologists and their chopper pilot — and the two volunteers, the heroes. Walter and I get a mention, as welclass="underline" I nursed Krom like an angel; Walter stood fast. The upbeat ending: Krom survived, and now he’s ready to return to duty, to challenge another volcano and save the day anew.
He did not notice me or Walter in the milling crowd.
Phil’s voice suddenly carried over the noise, “…and if you would direct your attention over here, we have some footage that…” and I didn’t catch the rest, undoubtedly lost in Phil’s beard, but it was all right because the crowd began to shift toward the video displays.
Walter and I buffeted our way through to the show.
There were two displays, and on each screen a different disaster movie. Here was a Mammoth Mountain montage — from treeless slopes to bald summit. Here was the fissure on Red Mountain, belching up steam.
People did a double-take.
It took them a moment to realize that while the Mammoth Mountain video was post-eruption, the Red Mountain fissure footage was pre-eruption.
Compared to the aerial views and tracking shots on the other screens, this fissure video was dull stuff. Single fixed camera angle. The only thing that changed was the buildup of snow — and, at the top of the screen, the date. And, for those science wonks in the crowd, the data crawl at the bottom showed daily fluctuations in mag field, strain rate, gas emission. Phil had started the video a couple of minutes ago, so we’d come in partway through.
“I don’t get it,” Lila Winder said.
Walter said to Lila, and to everyone within earshot — which was a good number of Resident Visitors and biggies—“Ask Adrian. It’s his video.”
Andy DeMartini bellowed, “Yo, Mr. Krom.”
I watched the display start again at the beginning, January ninth, and run to its end, February thirteenth. From the day after the Inn meeting to the day I found Gold Dust.
The day after the Inn meeting, Krom had taken me and Len Carow down to Hot Creek to see the activity, and Krom had showed off his specially-designed monitor. And then I’d left in a huff, and Len Carow had left to join Lindsay, and Krom had taken a ski up to Gold Dust to install the device so that it could monitor the fissure. And there it remained until Mike followed me to Gold Dust. He saw I’d found the place, he retreated to the parking lot, and after our confrontation, after I’d gone home, he’d skied back up to Gold Dust to retrieve the monitor. And then Krom stored it in his office. And then Lindsay came and took it. And then Walter found it in her safe. And then, at last, it came into my possession. After we were rescued, I’d opened Walter’s pack and learned what all the fuss was about.
I’d become something of a video junkie in the time after that, and this was one I watched again and again. Admiring the cleverness of the little microprocessor-controlled videocam he’d built into his monitor. Admiring the quality of the picture. It’s like you’re there. You can almost smell the sulfur. I could admire his solution to his timing problem. How easy. The monitor was his personal record of the fissure’s progression. It told him he had time — time to champion his evac route, time for me to find the fissure. He didn’t have to ski up there every day, he had the scene telemetered to his computer. How fucking easy.
I expect Krom admired it, as well, enough anyway to keep the data and video and not erase it. He couldn’t frame it and hang it on his wall of merit, but I expect he had liked to replay it now and then. Lift a margarita, make a toast. His triumph over Lindsay. Private celebration. Certainly, he never expected her to break in and steal it. Certainly, he never expected Walter to find it in her safe. Certainly, he never intended it to go public.
And here he came, disbelief on his scarred face.
For just a tick, I felt fear — fear that he would find a way to survive this — but Lila caught him. She got right into his face, and she’s big enough to do it, and she said, “You knew.” She’d evidently gotten it now, she’d seen on the video how Krom had been able to foretell the future on Red Mountain. “You knew,” she said, “you shabby excuse for a man.”
Len Carow, still glued to the tube, grew a thin smile.