Peter Hernon - 8.4

“Where were you trying to get to?” the cop said, still trying to be helpful.

“The University of Memphis,” Elizabeth said.

“That’s way across town,” the cop said. “You really got yourself lost.”

Elizabeth nodded, half listening. The sight of the dead looter didn’t bother her nearly as much as something else. She’d noticed the cracks in the foundation of the store. Some of them were more than six inches wide. They were huge. Bigger than anything she’d seen in Los Angeles after the Northridge quake.

THAT EVENING LAUREN AND BOBBY MITCHELL HAD a late supper—cornbread, baked ham, fruit salad. Bobby’s favorite meal. He’d been working so hard lately around the boat dock, never complaining, that she wanted to reward him.

They lived in a two-bedroom ranch house with cedar siding set back on a hill a couple miles from Kentucky Lake. Bobby took care of their two quarter horses, Sam and Rob Roy. He did most of the work in the stable, cleaning out the stalls twice a day and laying down fresh hay before he left for school and, again, after he finished his homework in the afternoon.

As she set out the dinner plates, Lauren had the radio tuned to a station in Memphis. It was a call-in show, and they had a man on from the University of Memphis, a geologist. They were talking about the earthquake.

Memphis still wasn’t anywhere near back to normal. Parts of the city remained without electricity and water. It looked like the final death count stood at thirty-nine, including seven bricklayers who died when a wall fell on them. A section of the I-240 freeway had collapsed at Union Avenue, crushing a beer truck and its driver. An old warehouse filled with paint was still burning on Cotton Row on Front Street near the river.

The geologist mentioned that the quake’s epicenter was near Mayfield, Kentucky.

“Grandma, we’ve played them in basketball,” Bobby said. The small town was only thirty miles to the west.

“Shush. I’m trying to listen, son.” The man was talking about aftershocks.

There’d been a couple of them, nothing severe, but definitely noticeable. Strong enough to keep her on edge.

“The biggest we’ve had so far was a magnitude 3.2,” the geologist said in his slow, soothing Southern accent. “The activity appears to be subsiding—at least as far as the bigger aftershocks are concerned. But we could feel minor shakes for weeks, maybe months.”

Lauren figured they’d been lucky. Their dock and home had only minor damage. A couple of broken windows. Some cracked plaster and maybe a chimney that would need tuck-pointing. Some neighbors hadn’t been so lucky. There were a lot of damaged foundations and broken sewer and water pipes. A farmer over in Campbell, the county seat, had his whole barn collapse. It fell down like a cardboard box.

The damage had been far more severe across the state line in northeastern Tennessee. There’d been reports that people had actually seen the ground moving like the waves of the ocean. She still had trouble believing that.

Lauren went to bed about an hour later. As she did every night, she lay there thinking about her husband. There were moments, especially as she waited in the dark for sleep to come, when she had to fight back her anger at him for getting himself killed. He’d promised he was going to quit the mines, promised it again at breakfast the morning of the cave-in. He’d said he’d had enough. And then he left for work at 5:00 in the morning carrying a thermos of hot coffee and a lunch pail and never came back.

She couldn’t help the way she felt, blaming him for leaving her without a husband. She needed him.

Later, when she tried to remember what happened, piece it all together in the right sequence, she couldn’t recall exactly what had awakened her. She didn’t think it was the aftershock. Not at first anyway. For some reason she woke up and glanced at the clock on her nightstand; it was just after two in the morning. She heard the furnace kick on. It was cold, below freezing.

She’d started to drift off again when the ground began to shake. Her four-poster bed jostled on the hardwood floor, rocking sideways. She sat bolt upright. A framed photograph of her husband fell over on the dresser. Dishes and coffee cups fell from open shelves in the kitchen, shattering onto the floor.

Lauren slipped into a sweatshirt and pulled on a pair of jeans and boots.

She thought the big aftershocks were supposed to be over. This was definitely one of the stronger ones.

Bobby hurried into the hallway with a flashlight. It was the first Lauren realized that their power was out.

“Grandma, my Michael Jordan poster fell down,” he said excitedly. The poster over the bed was his most prized possession. He wasn’t frightened in the least. This was fun.

The horses were whinnying and snorting out in the stable behind the house. The quake had spooked them. Lauren went to the back door and looked up at a beautiful, starlit sky.

“Listen! What’s that sound?” Bobby had put on his school jacket and was standing next to her on the porch.

She heard the deep rumble. The pounding of rushing water. She realized immediately what it was. What it had to be. They’d opened the discharge gates at the dam.

It took a moment for that to register. She’d lived near the lake two years and they’d never come close to fully opening the gates, which regulated the flow of water into the Tennessee River and drove the huge hydroelectric turbines.

The river levels were already at flood stage. The Tennessee was dangerously high, so why were they releasing water? It didn’t make any sense. It would only put a lot of extra pressure on the already weakened levees.

Lauren flung on a coat and told Bobby to go back to bed.

“I want to go with you, Grandma.”

“No way, Jose,” she said, scooting him back to his bedroom. “You go to sleep, and that’s an order. I’ll be right back.”

LAUREN drove onto the dam—Route 641 crossed right over it—and stopped at the first overlook, one of several places where motorists could pull off the two-lane road and admire the view of Kentucky Lake. There was no traffic at that hour.

Lauren got out of her pickup. There was a strong, cutting wind off the water. She hardly recognized the lake. Whitecaps were running four and five feet high, the action as rough as during the earthquake two days earlier. Spray flew up as the waves hit the broad, curving wall that plunged vertically to the water. The crashing sound was barely audible over the roar of the water pounding through the dam’s open gates.

The huge gates—a row of twelve, each the size of a tractor trailer stood on end—were on the opposite side of the dam about midway across the lake. That’s where water was released into the Tennessee River, and where the control house and generators were located. At that point, the dam was more than two hundred feet high.

Staring into the blackness of the lake, Lauren saw the lights of the marinas flickering along the far shore. Her own dock and boathouse were up a long cove that ran back about two miles from the dam.

The cold spray stung her face. She got back into the pickup and drove to the powerhouse. To get there, she had to go to the far end of the dam, turn off on a service road, and double back through a series of curves that ended at the parking lot. On the riverside of the dam now, she got her first look at the massive gates. The lake water was ripping through them in long, white plumes, thundering down thirty feet into the wide canal that fed the Tennessee River.

The powerhouse, a three-story building made of gray stone, was built on a shelf close to the riverside of the dam. On the front of the building that faced the highway, the word KENTUCKY was spelled out in big red letters. The facility regulated the flow of water through the locks, which powered the dam’s hydroelectric generators.