John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

The cell door opened, not far, not even halfway. Another carabiniero called the first into the hall. The two conferred in a whisper, but they couldn’t hide anything from Barbara. She could read the pretty boy’s smile, full Elvis all of a sudden.

“E sicuro , Jay?” she barked. “Tutto skuro?”

The man who’d come to door met her look. He didn’t smile, or not quite, but he gave a very different sort of shrug from what she’d seen downtown.

“Your father’s safe, guys.” Barb made it a point to catch Paul’s eye first. “The man is safe.”

Now both the policemen were nodding.

“And as soon as we can,” she went on, “we are all of us going out to the Refugee Center. It could be tomorrow, it could be the next day, but we are going to get some backup from NATO and ride out to Papa’s place.”

The middle child was grinning more broadly than either of the carabinieri. He thrust a pair of fingers inside his open collar, exposing an inch more of hairless chest.

“It’s time,” Barbara went on, “we stop playing around.”

“Water buffalo?” Dora said. “Like in Africa?”

“This isn’t Africa,” Sylvia said, forcing a laugh. “This is Italy. Don’t try to tell us they’ve got water buffalo.”

JJ went on pointing out the Humvee window. “Guys, hey. Even I wouldn’t try to confuse you about what continent we’re on.”

“Girls, look, what do you think those things are?” Chris was pointing too. “Moose? The mozzarella, like, the cheese? That’s where it comes from.”

Around them the landscape seesawed, here a scabbed, balsitic ridge and there the grass velvet of a creek plain. Across the more level areas sauntered the buffalo, hefty-shouldered and brick-brown, their horns like question marks. The NATO caravan had first taken the family through the Phlegrean Fields, north of the city — a low-rising outbreak of the same magma that underlay Vesuvius to the south. In the Fields the ground turned to dust around smoking fumaroles, mounds of pale flinders, like smoking dumps of extracted teeth. Two thousand, three thousand years ago, these badlands were said to house a gateway to the Underworld, the poisoned spring where Ulysses spoke with the dead. Yet soon enough the gravel and chalk gave way to actual fields, rippling with mid-June vitality. Low hillsides sprouted mixed greens in mouthwatering layers, while others flowered lavender, crimson, milk-white. Vest-pocket orchards and grape arbors cut rows and terraces across the flatter spaces, squeezing every workable inch of the nutrient-rich soil. Farther inland still, between the vine-rows and fruit trees, there began to appear the small herds of buffalo.

“Mozzarella?” Dora was asking.

“Best mozzarella in the world,” Silky Kahlberg said. “Da bufalo , know what I mean? Vera da bufalo.”

“Sure,” said JJ. “The truth comes from buffalos. Old Neapolitan saying.”

The NATO man chuckled, paternal, or the movie version.

“Yeah well,” Chris said, “JJ, if the choice was between asking you and asking a water buffalo.…”

Kahlberg chuckled again, and Barbara allowed herself a laugh as well. She was going to have to learn to relax around the Lieutenant-Major. Certainly she enjoyed the benefits that came with having him somehow on call. She liked his van’s state-of-the-art air conditioning, for starters, a terrific relief on a morning when she’d woken up itching. Last night Jay had put something extra into his thrusts; he’d wanted to kindle a special glow for today’s visit. Then too, the mother was glad they didn’t have to share the ride with a machine gun. Instead Kahlberg had arranged for a pair of soldiers in a second vehicle. This escort looked serious, bulked up in powder-blue helmets and vests, with a semi-automatic and a pistol each. But Barbara and the kids rode weapon-free. So it appeared, anyway; the mother couldn’t help wondering about what the liaison man wore under his jacket. A white jacket, this time, and before the abbreviated caravan set off, as he’d huddled with the soldiers, he’d kept touching his lapel. His lapel or whatever he carried under it.

“Actually,” the man was saying now, “out in your father’s camp you’ll find some folks believe that kind of thing. These people, they’ll fall for every kind of superstition you could name.”

These people? Barbara looked to Paul, but he’d cupped his eyes against the tinted window. Her Lakota child, following the buffalo.

“For this population,” Kahlberg continued, “a lot of them anyway, the quake set off, mn, millennial fever. You understand?”

Chris turned from the window. “They thought it was like, The Rapture?”

‘You got it, son. Some of these old boys, they figured it was the end of the world. That quake, it did leave them at the end of their ropes, anyhow.”

Was that a reference to Jay’s near-kidnap? A desperate stunt at the end of someone’s rope, the day before yesterday?

Barb and Kahlberg had been circling the subject since she’d first gotten in touch to set up the visit. This morning too, though the mother had taken care not to sound nervous in front of the children, she’d fished for a guarantee that she wasn’t exposing them to real danger. Give the liaison credit, he’d said all the right things. He’d echoed the children’s father almost word for word.

Papa swore that the worst weapon brandished against him had been a piece of kitchenware. Also his would-be kidnappers never even got off the campgrounds, let alone came close to a getaway car — and not because the former Fordham lineman had put up much of a struggle, either. Rather, Jay explained, other Center refugees had stepped in. The people on the Jaybird’s side had far outnumbered the troublemakers, a handful of clandestini only. Five or six young men, no more, claimed they acted out of solidarity with a downtown group on hunger strike.

Pretty strange, hey? , the father had said. A hunger strike in Naples .

Barbara, listening, sensed a different sort of urgency in her man’s chatter. His hope for the marriage, that’s what she heard, a hope bucked up by the mere mention of a family trip to the Center. So his storytelling came across as one part brag, one part gee-whiz, and overall nothing to be frightened of During the brief struggle, he assured them, a crowd of refugees had surrounded the would-be abductors and made sure il capo Americano never suffered a scratch. By the time the carabinieri had picked up Barbara outside the church, the worst was over. By the time Jay was through talking, that night, the whole business had dwindled to nothing more than another story about Papa’s job. And like all such stories it came with a moral.

My people in the tents , the husband declared, they’ve seen enough destruction .

At the opposite end of the table, Barbara drained her wine. She liked the taste anyway, a local vintage, the Tears of Christ.

Destruction , Jay went on, that’s never the answer .

Yet here she was two mornings later, en route to her husband’s worksite. It hadn’t escaped Barbara’s notice, either, that the Jaybird had traveled with an armed guard these last couple of mornings. His helmet-ck-vest shared the same car. Plus what did it tell her when their NATO liaison suggested that the mother and the kids wait a couple of hours after the father left, before they headed to the camp themselves? Nevertheless here she sat, ignoring the itch between her legs, more of her husband’s recklessness. She sat there and allowed the kids to ride out past the gate to Hades.

If she intended to destroy this family, she had to make the trip. She had to get a whiff of the air outside their cliff-top bubble.