| Chapter 6 - The School |
| We hadn�t found Greta even though we had walked all the way to Summit Road, which ran along the top of our mountain ridge. Just as we got there, a woman with a haunted look went zooming past us in a Jeep Cherokee going way too fast. She scared me. She must be hurrying home to her kids, I thought. I hope she doesn�t kill anybody on the way. Without discussion, without even thinking about where we were going, I started down Summit Road. Our shadows were long. In ten minutes, staying far to the side whenever a car came (usually too fast) (was everybody crazy?) (what if Greta got hit by a car?), we arrived at the school. As we entered the driveway, we passed the big sign that said GO CHEETAHS. Once again, a sense of detachment settled over me. Though I spent six hours a day at this place, I felt as if I were seeing it for the first time. I looked around. Dropping away from the schoolyard on three sides was a Christmas tree farm, over which you could see mountains and misty canyons, pine forest, orchards, scattered houses � and five plumes of smoke. Five houses on fire. The school buildings were still standing. Gutters and downspouts had detached from the roof and hung freely in the air. There were cracks in the sidewalks. Swallows had built dozens of mud nests under the eaves of the roof, and now all the nests had shaken loose and fallen like dry mud bombs onto the concrete passageway. The swallows were swooping and calling with no home to return to. Usually from the school grounds you could hear the distant muffled roar of traffic on the freeway, Highway 17, three miles away. Now it was silent. The highway was closed. This school where I had spent so much time seemed oddly familiar and yet not quite real, like a dream. I felt suddenly so much older then just a few hours ago. Things like the GO CHEETAHS sign � who cares whether the volleyball team wins or loses? My homework assignments for the night � I couldn�t even remember what they were. What did they matter? Posters announcing a Halloween Hop � kid stuff. A crack had opened in my life and I was now a different person returning to visit a school that I had attended long ago. I could be on the far side of twenty-one. I wasn�t just a teenager anymore. Groups of people were standing and sitting in clumps scattered on the grass of the playing fields. There were two groups of boys, sixth-, seventh-, eighth-graders who were the two visiting teams that had come for the volleyball tournament. Now the tournament had stopped, and they couldn�t go home. They couldn�t even phone home to find out if they still had houses to return to. Someone had carried bright blue gymnastics mats out of the multipurpose room and laid them on the baseball diamond. Lying on the mats were about a dozen injured people, tended by a woman. Diane. I had been wandering about in something of a daze, but when Josh spotted the injured people on the mats, he headed right toward them. I followed, and Jon of course followed me. Diane, wearing rubber gloves, was tending to a women who�d been cut all over � by flying glass, I�ll bet � and was bleeding on to the mat. My stomach turned. Diane�s hair had dried unbrushed. �Can I help?� Josh asked. Diane nodded toward a first aid box lying open beside her. �Put on these gloves.� She was busy tying some gauze. Josh slipped the gloves on, took some scissors from Diane�s lap, and snipped where Diane was holding the gauze. A team had formed. I couldn�t help. I just didn�t have the constitution for it. Beside the bleeding woman lay a man with a broken arm that was pointing out from his body; beside him lay Billy mummified in gauze, unconscious. On another mat, Diane explained to Josh, was a pregnant woman who was in premature labor. Then the corner of my eye caught an unmistakable red parrot. To the side, peacefully staring up at nothing in particular, lay Mr. Wright. Him I could handle. I stood looming over him so that Jon and I were blocking his view of the sky. �Anything I can do for you?� I asked. �No, I�m quite comfortable,� he said. �As long as I don�t move.� Jon moved Squawk back where he thought he belonged, next to Mr. Wright�s head. �Thanks, Jon,� Mr. Wright said, he closed his eyelids. A moment later he opened them again. He was gazing right into my eyes. �You�re heroes,� he said. �I don�t know what I�m doing,� I said. �That�s the best kind of hero,� he said. �Unrehearsed. Fumbling. An everyday sort. A small hero. Bless you all.� I accepted his blessing. A sweet feeling came over me. I had been running on adrenaline and reflexes for the last hour or so, reacting rather than planning, doing rather than thinking. If we were heroes, we were definitely the everyday sorts. Coping. Improvising. Small. Jon was staring at the other people on the mats with a particularly long look at the man with the broken arm that seemed to have two elbows working in opposite directions. Jon didn�t say a word. �Jon!� He looked up. It was Mrs. Lafeau, his teacher, the one he called Mrs. Lipo. �Jon! It�s so good to see that you�re all right. I�m so worried about everybody.� Normally when somebody said something like that, Jon would burp or do something equally rude, but right then he looked absolutely numb. What he did was walk straight to Mrs. Lafeau. She leaned down, opened her arms, and hugged Jon up against her enormous bosom. Jon offered no resistance. �Where were you when it happened?� Mrs. LaFeau asked. �Outside our house,� Jon answered. �The best place to be,� Mrs. LaFeau said, releasing him from her jiggling arms. �Outside. Where nothing can fall on you.� �Trees were falling,� Jon said. �And boulders. And apples.� �That must have been scary.� �It was.� I had never heard Jon admit that anything was scary before. �I was in the classroom, all alone,� Mrs. LaFeau said. �Suddenly the ceiling tiles started falling, and the lights started swinging and all the drawers shot out of the filing cabinet, and the bookshelf dropped all the book on the floor. I crawled under the desk, but I didn�t fit. And then the desk walked away from me. When it was over, the door was jammed shut. I had to climb out a window.� I would have giggled, imagining big old Mrs. LaFeau climbing out the classroom window or, even better, trying to fit herself under a desk, but at the time nothing was funny. Later, remembering, we all smiled. �Where is your father?� Mrs. LaFeau asked. Jon explained that he had gone to the World Series. �Would you like to stay with me right now?� Mrs. LaFeau asked. And she held out her pudgy pale hand. Immediately, Jon took it � latched on to it as he had latched on to my blue jeans. I saw that Mrs. LaFeau had several other children with her. I knew those kids. They went to childcare after school. Now, like Jon and me, they were earthquake orphans until their parents could find a way home. I looked back at the mats. Josh, still in his headphones, kneeled by the woman in labor, held her hand, and started talking to her. I didn�t see any medical supplies except the white metal first aid box that I recognized as the one that normally hung on the wall in the hallway by the principal�s office. Diane was talking about triage, which meant sorting people out according to how they were hurt. So Jon was latched to Mrs. LaFeau. Josh was occupied. And I� I was free! I still didn�t have my father. I didn�t know where my dog had run to or if she was okay. I didn�t know whether my house was going to fall down. But at least at this moment in this place surrounded by people helping people, I felt safe. And nobody was hanging on to my belt loop. I looked around. The sun was a flat orange blob sinking into the ocean. The lasts shafts of light swirled with smoke and dust. In those first moments of freedom I suddenly realized that I was hungry. Before I could do anything, however, Mr. Perkins came storming toward me. Mr. Perkins was a wiry little man with a thin bony face and wild bushy black hair that looked like a bird�s nest. He looked like a short Bill Cosby wearing a wig. We called him the mad scientist, but he was my favorite teacher. �Justin!� he barked. �Don�t just stand there. Come with me.� I fell in step beside him. He was walking, but I had to jog to keep up. �What do you want?� I asked. �We have to find out why there isn�t any water.� I followed his strides across the road and through the maintenance yard where they park the school buses. We could hear running water though there was no creek there. Soon we saw why: The big green water storage tank had cracked a seam. All the water was gushing out and gurgling down a ravine. �There goes a hundred thousand gallons,� Mr. Perkins said. �That was supposed to be our emergency supply.� �Where does it come from?� I asked. �Good question.� Mr. Perkins looked at me approvingly. He�d always liked me. And I liked him. I liked school. I was actually glad that the school buildings hadn�t fallen down. �It comes from a well,� Mr. Perkins explained. �The only way to get water out of the well is with the pump. The electric pump.� He looked across the road to the school and the orange, twilit sky. �There won�t be power for days.� Suddenly he was walking again, and I was jogging to keep up with him. �Did you lose your house?� �No. But it shook pretty badly.� �I guess some new rocks got formed today. Or at least got pulverized. Just think, Justin. We are taking part in a geologic event. What a privilege.� Somehow I didn�t feel privileged. Mr. Perkins, I decided, may be a good teacher but he�s also slightly demented. Back at the school Jon was still clinging to Mrs. LaFeau�s hand and Josh was still helping Diane with first aid. There were now fifteen bodies on the mats. Somebody was covering them with blankets loaned by neighbors from the houses nearby. There was a handmade afghan. And a comforter with bright printed trucks on it that had obviously come from some child�s bed. I stayed with Mr. Perkins. A woman with two children came up to him and asked where the bathroom was. Mr. Perkins pointed to the Christmas tree farm. �Pick a tree,� he said. I needed to go, too, but not that badly. Not yet. �Where�s the police?� the woman asked. �Where�s the ambulance? Where�s the Red Cross?� �Help is on the way.� Mr. Perkins said. �When?� �Soon.� The woman seemed reassured. She headed with her two children toward the Christmas tree farm. �What help is coming, Mr. Perkins?� I asked. He shrugged. �I have no idea. We have no contact with the rest of the world. They don�t even know if we have a problem here. They can�t drive here. They can�t phone here.� �Then why�d you tell her help in on the way? And soon.� �Because she needed to hear it.� It occurred to me that Mr. Perkins, like me, was operating without a sheet of instructions. More cars were pulling into the school, headlights blazing. The place was turning into a parking lot. Commuters who had been going home from San Jose to Santa Cruz had been forced to turn around when landslides blocked the roads. Now they were trapped on the mountain, and they ended up at the school. Local people were coming, too, their houses destroyed or else they were simply afraid to stay home with aftershocks still trembling and no electricity. Some people sat in their cars. Others wandered about. In the dark of the mountain, there were spots of light: houses, burning. I could see five or six fires. People - kids, parents, old folks � came up to Mr. Perkins and me and started talking. Sometimes I knew them; sometimes I didn�t. Age didn�t matter. Nobody was trying to impress anybody else or have power over them. We had all been reminded of a power much greater than ourselves. I told where I had been and how I had followed Greta out of the house, how Greta had somehow known that the quake was coming. Mr. Perkins told how he had been watching the tournament in the gymnasium when cracks snapped open in the floor and steel roof beams started to groan and bow. Everybody, myself included, just had to tell his or her stories over and over again. A teenage boy: �I was driving my truck. I thought I had a blowout.� An old woman: �I slept right through it. When I woke up, I couldn�t believe what I saw.� A bearded man: �I rode my house down the hill like a sled. I don�t know how I survived.� A girl: �I was swimming. Suddenly there was a four-foot wave. I thought somebody had blown up the pool.� A woman with whiskey on her breath: �My house hardly moved. It�s on bedrock. I had no idea how hard it was hitting everybody else.� Another woman: �It felt like somebody had jumped on my water bed. Only I wasn�t on the water bed.� An old man: �I fell out of my rocking chair.� A man with bloodshot eyes: �It threw us all over and into each other. I was watching my wife fly by me smashing from one wall into the other. I was trying to grab her but couldn�t. I finally got her on the third try before she flew out the window.� A boy: �I was on the toilet. It dumped me on the floor. And then it dumped on top on me.� A man with tattoos and a twitchy lip: �It was like Vietnam. Like a mortar attack.� A skinny woman with deep lines in her face and a Texas accent: �I was in Hurricane Hazel in Houston. I�ve been in fires. I�ve been in tornadoes. I�ve been robbed at gunpoint, but by God I�ve never felt anything like this.� As we spoke, the earth continued to vibrate beneath out feet. We were jumpy. And then, suddenly, we all became aware of a deep, distant sound. |