Volcano Watch

CHAPTER FORTY

Alone, in a cute little motel room in Bishop. Chintz pillow shams, wildflower walls, street view through white ruffles. There was the sound of TV coming through the thin wall from Jimbo’s room next door. When he’d left my room he’d said he was going to get some sleep. Not likely. I heard the tattoo of his fingers drumming a table. I felt the thump-thump-thump of his feet bouncing the floor.

Unlike me — I was glued to the set and I didn’t move a muscle.

I watched King Videocable’s live action team on the spot at the intersection of highway 203 and the chasm blasted across it where the bridge had been. Highway 203 had been severed about halfway between town and highway 395.

On the Mammoth side of that wound there was an endless line of parked vehicles — the vehicles not caught in the pileup, the vehicles blocked by the pileup and forced to reverse direction on Pika and head back into town. They’d fled as far as they could, from town out highway 203 until they were stopped by the chasm. I searched for Walter’s red Explorer but the line of vehicles stretched too far for the camera to capture.

Refugees swarmed past parked vehicles. Refugees on foot, on skis, on snowmobiles, every one of them laden with bundles and casting ghostly shadows under the intense white of the big CalTrans lights. Refugees pausing to look at the ground when a quake hit, and then moving a little faster. And when the live action team zoomed in for a closeup, the refugees squinted into the cameras and groped for a sound bite. I recognized most of them. Knew them well, or casually, or enough to greet in passing. I didn’t care. Didn’t care that my old high school teacher Jack Altschul was leaving Mammoth with nothing but the pack on his back.

I waited for Walter.

On the other side of the chasm, the refugees were hustled into vans and trucks and buses and ferried down 203 to 395, and then the forty miles south to Bishop. If I shifted my view from the TV to the street outside I’d see them rumble through town.

My eyes stayed on the tube. The next refugee fixed in the lights would be Walter.

The camera cut to an aerial view of Pika Canyon, the live action team’s eye in the sky floodlighting the pileup of vehicles that choked the narrow throat. Vehicles entangled with vehicles, vehicles on top of vehicles, vehicles looking like they’d tried to crawl up the canyon walls. There was a patch of burnt-out vehicles, where quakes had shaken the unstable edifice and the friction of metal on metal had sparked leaking gas tanks. The smoking skeletons were dusted with Forest Service fire retardant.

I searched for Walter’s Explorer in the mess.

The camera cut to an aerial of highway 395. The evacuees had overflowed Bishop and were now on the way to the next towns south, Big Pine and Independence.

The camera cut to Adrian Krom, as it’s been doing every half-hour or so through the night. He was framed in front of the burnt husk of a truck on its side. He wore the same clothes I’d seen on him twenty hours ago at the intersection of 203 and Minaret. Now he seemed to sag within the big parka. Now the pelt hung loose. His face was washed quartz-halogen pale, his eyes squinty. He looked like he’d had a rough twenty hours. He looked beat.

He looked beaten. The interviewer, some ingratiating Bishop news anchor, was saying “you couldn’t have foreseen the bears,” and Krom seemed to shrink. He said no but he took responsibility nevertheless. I sat forward on the nubby chenille bedspread and if I could have reached through the screen I would have taken him by the neck and screamed you lost, you were supposed to get all of us out and you didn’t. But I didn’t have to throttle him. He knew. He looked beaten.

There was a big quake, and the camera jimmied.

I heard a shit through the wall.

When the camera steadied again on Krom, he’d changed. Maybe the anchor didn’t catch it, but I did. Krom was rallying. He leaned into the microphone and answered a question the anchor hadn’t asked. “We’ll have them out by dawn,” he said, voice nearly burnt out.

Then he made a movement, which I’m sure the anchor didn’t catch. But I did. Krom inclined his head, the slightest move — he made a little bow.

I’d seen that bow eons ago, midnight at Hot Creek, as he bowed to his enemy and gave it the finger.