Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

“I think I remember.”

“Do you remember what we talked about? That night you got a stomachache?”

“What?”

“We talked about Ear to the Ground .”

Ian took a nonchalant sip of beer. “So?”

“Do you remember spe ci fically what we talked about in regard to Ear to the Ground ?”

“What are you talking about, Jon?”

“Act two was basically constructed that night at Damiano’s.”

“What are you saying?”

“You know what I’m saying. You had them meeting on like page eighty, and I told you if you moved that up …”

“That’s pretty simple stuff.”

“What about the scene, Ian? I gave you the whole fucking scene with the seismologist’s wife!”

Jon disgustedly got up, nodded to a few people on his way to the bar, and ordered a Maker’s Mark neat. He turned once toward Ian and shook his head. Then he leaned over to an attractive woman in an old-fashioned dress.

“Do you know that the guy sitting over there is like one of my closest friends? That he just sold a script for a million dollars? And that he took an idea, took part of an idea, took all of an idea for an important part of his script, that just sold for a million dollars, and he won’t even admit we dis cussed it? I say this to you not wanting any money from him. Even if he were to offer it to me. If he said, like, ‘Here’s a hundred thousand …’”

“… you wouldn’t take it.” The woman smiled a little.

“No, I wouldn’t.”

She smiled again. “Here it is, a hundred thousand.” She pantomimed holding a suitcase.

“Maybe I’d take fifty.” He gave her his hand. “My name’s Jon, by the way.”

Grace tooks the stairs to her apartment slowly. She wasn’t drunk but she had eaten too little. She was exhausted and, frankly, sad. It felt like the weekend on Thursday nights at the Formosa, but Grace knew she still had to get through Friday. Suddenly she felt old, as though the once-promising flame that was her life had dimmed. Just then, Charlie opened his door, and their eyes met through his screen.

“Hey,” she said, and blushed.

He pushed open the screen door. “You okay?”

She didn’t answer.

“You want to come in?”

“No,” she said, “let’s play this scene right out here on the balcony.” The minute the words came tumbling out of her mouth she couldn’t believe she’d spoken them.

His eyebrows rose. He came outside, and the screen door slammed behind him. “Is this a balcony ?” he asked. And before she lost her nerve, she leaned in and kissed him. Then, without a word, she turned away, went inside her apartment, and went to bed.

DOROTHY REMEMBERED BEING LOST SOMEWHERE BEFORE the gauzy filaments of sleep were rended by what felt like an explosion. She remembered a loud bang, and then what sounded like the thudding of horse hooves, coming closer. She remembered looking for the horses, but seeing only black; there had been a crash like thunder, and she remembered opening her eyes.

Dorothy remembered spinning, as if a tornado had picked up her entire house and cast it carelessly to the ground. She remembered how the walls seemed crooked against the black, star-swept sky. She’d wondered how the stars could be so close; how they had crept through the ceiling into her room. She remembered the pain in her arm, and not being able to move. The last thing she remembered was her mother’s face, hanging over her own — a face wild as the moon, her mouth a red gash, crying, “Oh God, my little girl!”

It all seemed like a dream twenty months later, except for a small scar above Dorothy’s right elbow and aches that came and went with the rain. Then, this afternoon, while she played a game called Prom, with her Barbies on the living room floor, she remembered it again. Henry had been stretched out on the couch in his pajamas, face flush with flu, when they interrupted Ricki Lake to announce a 5.5 near Barstow, somewhere called China Lake. Dorothy’s mother had been laughing, but as she watched the news flash, her face drained of color.

“See?” she hissed at Henry.

He turned onto his side. “For God’s sake, Emma. We didn’t even feel it.”

“This time.”

Dorothy took the dolls into her room. Then she came back and stood by the door. “I’m going out.”

Her mother’s eyes flickered across the television screen, where a seismograph traced aftershocks in waves. “Where?”

“The park. I wanna climb a tree.”

“Be careful. And you stay in the park.”

Dorothy wheeled her bike into the driveway where, through the living room window, she could hear an argument revving up. She pedaled onto the sidewalk toward the park, past two abandoned buildings and another one under reconstruction.

They had spent two weeks in the park after the earthquake, living in a four-person Army tent, jumping up each time an aftershock shook the aluminum struts like so much Christmas tinsel. They ate canned food and shat in outhouses. There’d been hundreds of families, and kids running around, screaming in the mud, but Dorothy had been in a fresh cast and had missed most of the fun.

This afternoon, the park was barricaded. Dorothy watched as work crews swarmed the field; bulldozers and cranes had chewed the grass into a fine green pulp. Workmen operated a steamshovel next to a huge old sycamore, digging a trench at the root line.

A man in a hardhat and blue FEMA windbreaker materialized and spoke to Dorothy in a soft Southern twang. “Stay behind the line, honey.”

“What are you doing with that tree?”

“Bringing it down.”

“Why?”

“Clearin’ the field.”

“Why?”

“Instructions.”

“You’re afraid of the earthquake. Like maybe the trees’ll fall down.”

“Look, little girl …”

“My whole life I played in this park.”

“Well, you can’t play here now.”

Henry and Emma were still arguing when Dorothy got home, so she leaned her bike against the summer-singed bougainvillea and went around to the backyard. Her fort stood in the center of the grass.

The fort was little more than a lean-to, built of discarded materials Henry had scavenged for her from various construction sites. Inside, there was a stool and a wooden box for a table. She pretended some rusty aluminum casing was a stove, and near it an upturned milk crate served as a cradle for her favorite doll, a red-headed baby named Samantha. Dorothy sat down and rocked the cradle, leaning in and brushing the doll’s hair back with her hand. Gently, she pulled a thin strip of green cloth up under her chin.

“Still sleeping, Samantha? Don’t you wanna hear a story?” The doll looked up with blank glass eyes.

“Once upon a time there was a nine-year-old girl named Dorothy, who lived in Northridge, California. She had the power to move the earth.”

Dorothy got up slowly and moved to the exact center of the room. Placing her hands at the corners of the fort’s patchy roof, she began to shake the structure for all it was worth.

“Earthquake! Earthquake!” she shouted. “Oh baby, cover your head!”

Dorothy flung the cradle across the room, doing a spastic dance as she pretended to keep herself from falling. Samantha ended up crumpled in a corner, arms and legs splayed.

Dorothy lunged over to where the doll lay. She picked it up and held it in her arms, pressing the plastic flesh to her own. Tears welled in her eyes.

“Oh God,” she cried. “My little girl!”

CHARLIE WAS IN THE PREDICTION LAB, STARING INTO THE ash-gray glow of his computer screen, when word began to circulate throughout the Center for Earthquake Studies that a verdict had come down in the Simpson case. The whole beehive was abuzz: Secretaries chattered to each other animatedly, and technicians gathered in front of a small color TV, flipping back and forth between the Angels’ sudden-death playoff against the Mariners and CNN. Eventually, someone in the office started collecting money for a gambling pool, noting people’s predictions carefully in a ledger. The wagering had nothing to do with baseball; innocent or guilty — that was the question.