Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“What I’ll have,” he said, turning again to look at it, “is a real sense of them, and if I’m lucky, a sense of where I fit in with them. A context. If I’m very, very lucky, maybe I’ll know what it is they’re saying to me. That would be worth anything. Why does there have to be a ‘then what’? There’s not going to be an end to the knowing about them; there’s no ‘then what’ on the horizon, because there’s not going to be a then, in the sense that I ever know enough about them. Does that disappoint you?”

“No, it doesn’t. Knowledge for its own sake—it’s a very pure concept. I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being, sometimes,” I said, but deep down a small part of me was disappointed, and I knew that he knew it. I suppose I thought that once he satisfied his passion for them, he would take his knowledge of earthquakes and do something with it to benefit mankind. Predict, warn, mitigate…

I looked at him helplessly.

“It’s just that all I’ve ever known about, really, is helping,” I said. “I don’t know how to let go and just…be. I’m sorry. I know that disappoints you . I think I could learn.…”

He reached over and pushed the blown hair off my face, very gently.

“I think you can, too. That’s why we’re up here. You don’t disappoint me, Merritt. There’s a joy to being with you for me. Watching you up here is like watching a kid learn to play for the first time in its life. One thing we’re going to teach you is how to play. I don’t give a shit whether you learn to love earthquakes or not. It’s enough that I do.”

Tears stung my eyes. When had play left my life? When Crisscross and I had stopped our weekend jaunts together? When Glynn had grown past babyhood?

When had Pom and I stopped playing? Had we ever really done it?

“I play,” I said, trying for lightness. “I swim with the Rattus ratti , remember?”

“Oh, Merritt,” he said.

“Don’t,” I said fiercely, blinking hard. “Don’t or I’ll cry, and I just goddamned well do not want to do that.”

“Well, we’ll start with Forrest, maybe,” he said, accommodating me. “Y’all can gambol in the glades, play a little Nerf ball, maybe take a shower together. See what happens. Work right on up from there to some serious playing.”

“Speaking of Forrest, where has he been?” I said. “I miss his bright eyes and sweet smile.”

“Forrest takes off sometimes,” T.C. said. “I don’t know if there’s a great sadness in him, or if he’s got a lady friend somewhere, or what. I used to think it meant an earthquake was on the way. Animals, especially cats and rats, will leave an area where one is about to hit, or so the saying goes. But he’s done it the whole time he’s been with me, and it hasn’t meant a quake yet. I thought when I found him he’d make a great canary—you know, an early warning system—but he’s a dud at that.”

“Where did you find him?”

“Curtis brought him to me, in his mouth, like he was holding an egg,” he said. “Something killed his mama, apparently; he was just getting hair on him. Not the most attractive time in a rat’s life. But Curtis was so proud of him that I just had to take him in. I fed him with an eyedropper and made him a nest out of my old socks. I think it was my socks he bonded with. Curtis has been jealous ever since. I named him Forrest because he looked so much like my father when he started to go bald. His name was Bedford Forrest, after…well, you know. Curtis I named after my cousin in Jackson, because he never could resist a good-looking woman, and neither can my Curtis. I like to keep the names in the family.”

“Why did you leave Curtis at home?”

“Curtis once came damned close to taking a header off Point Reyes after a cormorant, and that’s a four-hundred-foot drop straight into the Pacific. I had to tackle him and practically sit on him. He knows he’s supposed to retrieve, but he doesn’t have an ounce of sense about where to do it. Just like Cousin Curtis again. Look at those ridges over there, Merritt. See how they knock the whole landscape off-kilter? That’s from past quakes. They call them shutter ridges. There are creeks here that are less than half a mile apart, but they run in opposite directions. The quakes have done that, too. And there are about fifty small ponds in this valley that have absolutely no reason to be up here because of the low rainfall, but here they are. They sit on the tops of those ridges; you can see one or two from here. Sag ponds. All from the fault.”

“Are we close to the fault here?”

“I’ll show you in about five minutes,” T.C. said.

A few minutes later he stopped the Jeep. Just ahead of us in the road was a strip of darker asphalt, as if workmen had patched the place where a pipe of some sort had gone through it. T.C. swung down and held out a hand to me, and I scrambled out behind him. The wind had picked up here and was blowing sheets of fog out toward Tomales Bay.

“Step over the patch with one foot,” T.C. said, and I did. “No, leave the other one where it is. Now. You’re straddling the top of the San Andreas fault. Half of you is on the North American continent, and the other half is off the continent entirely, on the Pacific plate.”

Instinctively I pulled my errant foot back onto the continent. He laughed. “You’re right to be careful,” he said. “In a few million years that half of you could be in Alaska, and the other half would still be here.”

“It’s not much of a fault, is it?” I said. “I guess I expected a huge fissure with smoke pouring out of it or something. But you’d never know it was down there if it weren’t for that patch.”

“I’d know,” he said, studying the earth where, deep below, the great snake slept. “It’s like a monster organ playing down in the earth to me. It always surprises me when nobody else hears it.”

I looked at him nervously.

“Metaphorically speaking, of course,” he said, and took my arm and guided me back to the Jeep.

“The fault hasn’t moved here since the 1906 quake,” T.C. said. “The folks who know think it’s due. Earthquakes sometimes come in pairs, and some of the hoohaws think that Loma Prieta might be the first of a pair up here. Which means, I guess, that the fault right here could go anytime. But I don’t think so.”

“The soles of your feet are telling you it won’t be here?” I said lightly.

“No. They’re not telling me anything. Nothing but the singing I hear everywhere along a fault. It’s in the mountains further south that my feet and the earthquake get together.”

“What does that feel like?” I said seriously. I wanted to know. At that moment I cast my lot with T.C.’s obsession, or whatever it was.

“Like electricity, I guess,” he said. “It runs right up your legs to the middle of you; sometimes it makes your arms and hands weak. It’s like…sex in reverse. If you take my meaning.”

“I take it,” I said, and felt myself redden. This is perfect, just perfect, I thought furiously. I have been with him a little over a day and already I have cried twice and blushed about forty times. The only thing left is to swoon or get the vapors. I’m glad Glynn can’t see me.

The thought of Glynn whipped my face like cold, wind-driven water. I sat up straighter and smoothed my hair with both hands. What in the name of God did I think I was doing? Bouncing along in a Jeep at the edge of the world with a madman who had already announced that he was going to take me to bed and howl like a wolf when he did it; batting my eyes and talking half-dirty to the same madman and loving every minute of it; asking him to kiss me, for God’s sake. I am somebody’s mother. She is not at all far away from me now.