Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

Looking closely at his watch, Charlie got out of his car, stood on a mound of dirt, and put his arms in the air till the crowd quieted down. “It’s gonna be between a 3.1 and a 3.3,” he announced. “Right where you’re standing.” A cacophony resulted, and twenty reporters hurled questions at Charlie. “One at a time!” he shouted. He turned to a sober-looking blonde whose hair appeared frozen to her head. “Yes?” he smiled.

But before she could say a word, the rumbling began.

EMMA GRANT SAT ON THE EDGE OF HER NINE-YEAR-OLD daughter Dorothy’s bed, tucking the child in. It was 9:30, and Dorothy was yawning, but Emma lingered, taking her time. She had lived all her life in this house in Northridge, but lately she had begun to worry about the windows with their cheap little slats of glass, and the building’s shoddy wooden frame. Now, staring at her daughter, she had a momentary flash of panic and, for the millionth time, felt a phantom rumbling in the ground.

The house was a one-family ranch, shielded from the street by a ragged spray of bougainvillea, with a postage stamp yard that was unkempt and long. When Emma’s parents bought it, thirty years ago, Northridge had been on the outer rim of Los Angeles’s suburbs, its wide, clean streets full of kids on bicycles and dads mowing the lawn after work. These days, the whole place looked like a construction site, with stacks of lumber and mountains of gravel piled up in driveway after driveway, the sounds of drills and hammers punctuating the air like the calls of angry birds. Only a few blocks away, condemned apartment complexes had been taken over by squatters and gangs, and the boulevards were littered with broken glass. It had gotten so Emma wouldn’t let Dorothy outside alone anymore. But whenever she pestered Henry to pull up stakes, he reminded her they’d just spent a fortune rebuilding.

Emma’s family had meant for it to be their starter house, but they had never moved on. Her parents had paid off the mortgage, and then died. And Emma couldn’t help feeling she had taken over their lives.

Her reverie was interrupted by what sounded like the chirping of a bird. Good, she thought, birds never chirp if there’s a shaker coming, but then the noise came again. It was Dorothy, sitting up in bed, eyes rheumy with exhaustion.

“Mom?”

Emma shook away her thoughts. “What?”

“Could you please let me go to sleep?”

In the living room, the Dodger game flickered across the TV. Nomo on the mound; Henry on the sofa. His big feet hung over the armrest like hams — but Emma could tell by the regular sound of his breathing that he was asleep. Sure enough, when she stepped through the doorway from the hall and came around the side, his eyes were closed, and his stomach rose and fell evenly, like a piston engine. She raised her eyes to the incomplete molding at the top of the walls. He’d been promising to finish it since January but, every night, after he drained four or five MGD Lights, he’d pass out on the couch. Molding forgotten, another promise left unkept.

“Henry.” Emma kicked the sofa, and he stirred with a groan.

“Huh?” He rubbed his eyes. “Time is it?”

“Almost ten.”

“Rough day.”

It was always a rough day for Henry, a rough week, a rough year, a rough life. Today he’d poured concrete on a job site, and hopefully tomorrow he’d be back out there again. Still …

“You gonna finish that molding, Henry?”

“I said it was a rough day.”

“The washer’s still broken; you said you’d fix that, too …”

“Come on, Em. Gimme a break in my own damn house.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

She took a deep breath and ran her hands down the front of her dress. “We’ll never sell if the work’s not done.”

“We’re not selling.”

“If that earthquake comes …”

“Let it come.” He stood up and headed down the hall.

Emma walked around the house turning off lights. She got a beer and sat down on the couch. She flipped channels for a few minutes, before landing on the news. The top five stories were about the coming earthquake.

She sat rigid, eyes fixed on the screen. Her stomach tensed during an interview with a man who was moving his family east. In the background a minivan waited, full of children and clothes. Watching him, Emma’s heart started racing, and she began to feel the way she might if she were contemplating her own death — nauseated, overwhelmed, as if everything she had, or was, was only a dream.

She clicked off the television and paced, checking the bolts that held everything to the walls. She pushed against the TV, making sure it, too, was fixed in place.

In her dreams, the television was always the first thing to go. Usually, Dorothy was still a baby, crawling around in front of it, laying her little hands across the screen. As it came crashing down, Emma could do nothing but watch. She would wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for equilibrium, as if the world had flipped inside out.

In Dorothy’s room, Emma watched her daughter’s gentle breathing. Then she headed to the kitchen for another beer. On the table was a stack of bills.

Oh God, she thought, and sat to keep from falling. It was going to be a long night.

SOME FRIDAY MORNING, TAKE SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD to work and get a load of the cars in the Formosa’s parking lot. They don’t serve breakfast there, but you can bet they served a whole lot of booze the night before. The place is packed Thursday nights with twentysomethings who haven’t learned how to drink. Or maybe they’ve learned how to drink but not how to hold their drink. Maybe they have something to drink about, some sad thing, some loss. They can’t find work. They work too hard. Or they work and work but don’t make a dime. Then again, maybe they’re worried about the earthquake.

As the waitress approached, Grace thwapped back the spittle of her Amstel Light and ordered another round. She wasn’t worried about the earthquake, or anything else, because she knocked on Charlie’s door every other night, for the latest science, the latest anything, whatever. She wanted to be near him. Kiss him. But she couldn’t bring herself to make the first move. What if he’d never even considered it? It would kill her if Charlie got this shocked look on his face and suddenly stopped trusting her. She had chosen, as the object of her desire, the busiest and most preoccupied man in Southern California. Still, she imagined that, when the earthquake came, she could be in his arms. What a sap I am, Grace thought. What a romantic sap.

As far as she was concerned, Ian Marcus, former sponge, present swaggerer and future prick — who was, at the moment, sitting across the room from her — didn’t exist. He, on the other hand, glanced in Grace’s direction often, surreptitiously as a millionaire can, or a six-fifty-against-a-million-millionaire, anyway.

He was different now. He looked better. He smiled more, and when he did, he smiled more truly, because suddenly he didn’t need anything from anyone. He kissed the ass of nobody. And that can be a pretty important thing.

Ian sat talking to a guy he had once written a spec script with: a buddy comedy, set in a beach town, called The Cape of Great Hope. Ian had never thought much of his writing.

“Remember,” the guy asked Ian, “when we talked last Christmas?”

“Last Christmas?”

“Like around Christmas? I think it was Damiano’s.”

“ When? ”

“We had pizza, late,” the guy said. His name was Jon. Ian didn’t know what he was talking about. “And you got a stomachache. Yes, you got a stomachache.”