But Charlie Richter lived in the world of doubt and deliberation, and suffered from the disease of integrity. Was predicting earthquakes any better than snooping around, telling someone her husband or his wife was unfaithful? Was he providing a service? Or just gossiping scientifically, on a global scale?
Whatever the case, in the past week he had come to be perceived as a doomsayer, less a scientist than a hack. First came the governor’s speech, and now everyone from Maggie Murphy to Jay Leno found fault with Charlie’s work. What a laugh! Suddenly, everybody was a seismologist.
More than ever before, Charlie lived and breathed and slept with his numbers. At the moment, in fact, he was eating with them — at the bar of the Authentic Café. What could he do, he wondered, to prove this earthquake beyond a reasonable doubt? And what did “reasonable doubt” mean? As a legal expression it referred to past events, but Charlie was venturing into the future. What could he do when everyone was so numerically illiterate?
Charlie left his wonderings and looked up. He didn’t expect to see anything, but there, across the dining room, was Grace, having dinner with a long-haired man of unknown identity. Charlie wondered if she had spotted him earlier, when she’d come in; and then he considered what she’d do if their eyes were suddenly to meet. It was a game he played to test a woman’s love, a silly and unscientific game, but Charlie played it anyway. And this time, he won. Grace covered her mouth with a napkin and jumped up from her chair. When she excused herself, her companion looked concerned.
Charlie stood as Grace approached somewhat defensively.
“Are you OK?” she asked him. “I tried to call you.” She looked back at her table and smiled.
“It’s been …” Charlie suddenly felt depressed.
“Ian and I broke up.”
“Really?” He brightened, but without letting her see. Then she noticed Charlie noticing the long-haired man.
“It’s business,” she told him. “A film maker.”
“When did you and Ian …?”
“This morning.”
He smiled. “How many times have you two broken up?”
“Don’t make fun of me, Charlie.”
Henny Rarlin got up then and strode across the restaurant, embarrassed that a man of his stature would be left sitting alone. Grace explained to Charlie that Henny had made Die Hard as a Rock. He thrust his hand into Charlie’s and spit out his name like an Uzi fires bullets. Then, he took Grace by the elbow and tried to steer her toward their table.
“What are you doing?” she said, and pulled away.
Diners looked up as Henny Rarlin ranted. “Are you having dinner with him, or me!?” Charlie gestured for his check, and Rarlin said something he couldn’t hear. Grace slapped the film maker’s face, and stalked out of the restaurant. It all happened so quickly, Charlie just laughed.
It was laughter, probably, that gave him the idea. His body’s convulsing, the release of tension, the movement of unnoticed muscles. Five minutes later, at a pay phone on Beverly, Charlie called someone at ABC News. Then he jumped into his car and headed east on the 10.
Outside of Indio, he saw them — the vans, the crews. A helicopter hovered. When he pulled up, a sea of microphones came through his driver-side window, so he told the one about the Pirate and the Parrot, and they all laughed.
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.
BEDTIME STORIES
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.