“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!”
AND JUSTICE FOR ALL
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.
Charlie liked to think of himself as the one person in Los Angeles who couldn’t have cared less. He had not watched the trial on television, nor read the stories about Marcia Clark’s hairdo. He didn’t give a damn about Lance Ito’s hourglasses, and he wouldn’t have recognized Mark Fuhrman if the detective had waved a blood-stained glove in his face.
He’d met Simpson as a kid, when Charlie’s grandfather had taken him to see the Heisman Trophy winner play at USC. After the game, they’d been escorted into the locker room, and O. J. had signed young Charlie’s program: “O. J. Simpson, number 32.” There had been something flat and distant in O. J.’s eyes — shark’s eyes, rolling over from gray to black. Charlie had gone home and put that program in the back of his closet. Years later, he finally threw it away.
Now, from what little Charlie knew or cared, O. J. Simpson had killed his ex-wife and also the man who’d seen him do it. He had left his own blood at the crime scene and had carried the blood of his victims back to his home. What could be more scientific or empirical than that?
Still, Charlie felt a twinge of curiosity, as if his indifference had somehow unraveled and worked its way inside him like a tangle of worms. He tried to focus on the screen, but soon he pushed away from his work station and went over to where the technicians still clustered and conjectured around the TV.
“Hey, Charlie. You want a piece of this?”
Charlie pulled out a bill. “Guilty,” he said. “On both counts.”
Tuesday morning, for the first time in a long time, there were no reporters waiting on the sidewalk in front of Charlie’s apartment. Navaro sat in the early mist smoking a Pall Mall on the steps, and he gave a small laugh as Charlie came outside.
“Look at you,” said the landlord, sweeping his arm across the empty lawn. “Yesterday’s news.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said, stopping at the bottom of the stoop. “Too bad they won’t stay away.”
Navaro took a long drag off his cigarette and exhaled a ghostlike spray of smoke into the air. “He’s gonna walk. You know that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ever heard of ‘reasonable doubt’?”
Was there nothing else to talk about? Charlie wondered. Nothing at all?
“Four hours,” Navaro continued. “You don’t condemn a man in four hours.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Charlie started walking.
“Eight million of my tax dollars, pissed away …”
“Yeah, well …”
“Justice!” Navaro spat on the pavement. “No such thing as justice with these lawyers running wild. That Johnnie Cochran’s got everybody so worried about a riot they forget two people got their throats cut!” The angry old man’s voice got low. “All you need is money in this world. Y’got money, you can kill whoever you want.”
At nine-fifty on the morning of October 3, the city of Los Angeles drew a sharp collective breath of anticipation, then grew silent as a tomb. Television sets emerged from office desk drawers, and workers gathered before them with the reverence of the faithful. In bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens they watched, as the honorable Judge Ito welcomed the jury into the courtroom for the last time, and O. J.’s granite jaw quivered and was still. They watched while they drove the freeways, or sat down in restaurants, and on the sidewalks; they saw the images multiplied in the windows of appliance stores. They watched and they waited, until the bailiff stumbled: “In the matter of the people versus Oren … Orenthal James Simpson …”