Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Show me the way to go home, instead,” I said lightly. “I’m asleep in this chair. If I don’t get out of here I’ll be comatose.”

He laughed and accepted the change of tone. He paid the check and we went back to the Jeep in the slanting light of late afternoon. We talked lightly, of light things. I was comfortable again, soothed. It had been, after all, I thought, a perfectly wonderful afternoon. On the way home we stopped for groceries. When we were back up in the mountains, just turning off onto Caleb’s road by the mailbox, I said, “Tell me about the earthquakes. I know they’re important to you, but I don’t know how they fit.”

He said nothing, and I looked over at him. His face was closed. He still did not speak, and I said, feeling myself redden again, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No. I’m sorry. I was rude. You’re right; the earthquakes are important. I’ll tell you about them one of these days.”

But he did not speak of them anymore, and I was silent until we reached the fire tower. Some of the shine had gone off the dying day. I realized that I really was tired, terribly so. I wanted only to sleep. Only that.

“Come on up and I’ll see if there are any calls for you,” he said, parking the Jeep. “And I’ll feed you. You don’t want to eat alone on your first night on your own. I make a terrific pasta and mussel thing.”

“Really, T.C., I think I just want to go to bed,” I said, and blushed again, and he grinned. But he did not pick up on it.

“I can’t hold my eyes open,” I added hastily. “It’s been a fast three days.”

“The air up here does it to you,” he said. “Let me just run up and check the machine, and then I’ll drive you on down. Curtis, stay.”

He disappeared from the car and went past the tarp-covered shapes of his mysterious machinery, up the stairs of the tower. I laid my head back against the seat and thought nothing at all. Curtis, asleep on the backseat, groaned in a doggy dream and fell silent again. When T.C. got back into the Jeep I was dozing, too.

At the door of the lodge he stopped, a bag of my groceries in each arm. Twilight was falling fast down here on the ferny earth, but up in the tops of the redwoods day still rode, golden and glorious. The old silence was back.

“I’m sorry about the earthquakes,” he said. “I really was rude. I’m used to sort of guarding all that from people. But you’ll understand about them, I think. Let me take you on a tour of earthquake country tomorrow, and tell you about what I do up here and why I do it, and show you my toys. I haven’t really done that with anybody else. Caleb thinks I’ve got tinker toys or something up there.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

“Besides, you haven’t finished telling me about you. I want to hear the rest tomorrow.”

I smiled. “You know all there is to know about me now,” I said.

He looked at me for what felt like a long time. His face was attentive and serious; it was a considering look.

“No, I don’t,” he said softly. “I don’t know all about you. I don’t know nearly all about you.”

He shifted one bag into the crook of his left arm with the other one and with the right pulled me toward him and kissed me. He had to bend far down, even with my height. It felt, after Pom’s compactness, strange, exotic, like embracing another species. It was not a passionate kiss, but it was a long one, and soft, and seemed to search my mouth for some essence, find there some truth about me. I felt the long bones of my arms and legs turn to water, and the tears start again in my eyes. But it was not me who finally pulled away. Propped against my leg, Curtis groaned happily.

T.C. put my bags down on the door step and looked owlishly at me over the glasses, which had slipped down his nose.

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it, little lady,” he drawled. I watched him wordlessly as he shambled off up the trail, Curtis at his side. At the hairpin bend in the trail he suddenly leaped into the air and clopped his heels together. He looked like a puppet dangling loosely in midair. When he thumped back to earth he did not look back. Curtis barked and gave a desultory prance, and fell to following T.C. sedately again, as if he had never broken stride. Then they were gone around the bend.

I began to laugh helplessly. I took the groceries in, still laughing, and dumped them on the kitchen table, and went into my bedroom and simply fell full-length onto the bed. I did not remember my head hitting the pillow. Deep in the night we had a short fusillade of thunder and lightning, and a hard, straight rain, and it woke me enough to shuck off my clothes and crawl under the covers, and as I did, I began once more to laugh. When I awoke, many hours later, my mouth was as dry and stiff as if I had smiled all night in my sleep.

9

What woke me was a soft scratching noise at the front door. I sensed it more than heard it; all my senses were sharp and open, even before my eyes were. I got up blindly and pulled on the red-and-black checked shirt. It fell to my knees, and made a fairly proper robe. By the time I got to the door my feet were freezing, and I was awake enough to realize that I hoped my caller was T.C.

But it was Curtis who stood there, framed in fog, panting happily and wearing a red bandanna around his neck. I usually hate that when it is done to dogs at home, but up here the bandanna seemed as apt and proper as if a mountain man wore it; a useful object, utilitarian. There was a note rolled and thrust into it.

“Come in, Curtis. Carpe diem,” I said, and he came inside and sat down in front of me and looked up, waiting. I took the note and scratched his ears and he went over and flopped down in front of the cold fireplace. A log fire was laid, and I touched a match to it before I unrolled the note. Curtis sighed in contentment and stretched out full-length before the snapping flames.

“It was the least I could do,” I told him, and read the note.

“I’ll pick you up at nine,” it said. “We’ll be gone most of the day, so bring a warm shirt and a poncho. There’s one hanging behind the kitchen door. Tell Curtis he can stay till I get there. Hope you slept well.”

Instead of a signature he had drawn one of those detestable smiley faces, only this one wore an unmistakable leer. I laughed aloud, a backwash of last night’s glee flooding me.

“There’s absolutely nothing as irresistible as wit,” I told Curtis. “Even if it’s the dumbass kind that puts bandannas on dogs and draws smiley faces. See that you remember that, dog. Stay funny and cute and you’ll have lady dogs falling all over you.”

Curtis thumped his tail without opening his eyes, and I went to dress warmly and get the poncho from behind the kitchen door.

Just past ten we were on the Golden Gate Bridge rattling toward Marin County and Point Reyes, where T.C. wanted to start my earthquake tour. At that time of morning the traffic was light and the fog lay out at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, piled up like whipped cream. Below us the steel-blue water heaved and rolled, and a brisk wind played the bridge like an instrument, making it sway slightly, but palpably. T.C. had unsnapped the plastic side curtains of the Jeep and the wind and cold blue air poured in on us, and I held fast to the bottom of my seat. I had thought the mountains and the red-woods would seem inimical to humans, but somehow it was here, on this consummate iron-red handwork of man, hung between two great and beautiful human habitats, that I felt the animus. I felt light-headed and uneasy, as if, should I let go, the wind would take me and eddy me out and down like a feather into that cold sea, or toss me so high into sunshot nothingness that I would never come back.