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?