Fault Line Read online

“Jim? Do you have a message for him?”

  “Yes,” he said, forcing his voice to be level, calm. Forcing himself to do his job. “Tell him the welds are sheared. Not just one or two but a whole run of them. Got that?”

  “Welds sheared,” she repeated slowly, taking time to write it down. “Stadium. Whole run of them. Okay …” Her voice trailed off into the muffling that told Jim she had put her hand over the receiver.

  “Did you get that?” he asked.

  The muffling sound stopped. “Yeah. Sorry, Frank Malone’s here. He’s waiting to talk to the soils engineer.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Frank will know what to do.” Fred. Frank. Man, I’m losing it, scrambling up names.

  Jim closed his eyes, forced himself to breathe deeply. Frank would know how to deal with this. He’d clear the stadium, red-tag it. There was snow forecast, and with that additional load and just a little wind, it could come down like the hand of God and smite him dead.

  12

  ONCE LOGAN DE PONTIER HAD LEFT AND FAYE AND I WERE inside her house, with the door firmly shut, I lost my cool entirely. “What was that all about?” I demanded.

  Faye’s shoulders slumped tiredly as she tossed her jacket across an overstuffed leather chair. “I just came from the doctor’s.”

  “You’re dodging the question!”

  “She confirmed that I am pregnant.”

  “As if you had any doubt. But just why in hell—”

  “Pumped up like a nickel balloon.”

  “Faye!” She was beginning to cry again, and I was not done being mad at her.

  She began to flail her arms. “Knocked up! With child! In an interesting condition! In the family way! One month gone! Gravid! Parturient!”

  “Parturient?”

  “Too many years of Latin. Or as the Spanish say, embarazado, which, most appropriately, is derived from the obvious root.” She began to stamp a foot on the hardwood floor in a spot where it was not covered with one of her spectacularly huge Navajo rugs. “I! AM! EMBARRASSED!”

  “But parturient? I’ve never even heard the word.”

  Faye threw her sunglasses and purse down on the floor and stalked through an archway into the adjoining dining room on her way toward the kitchen. “Technically, it is not the correct term. It would suggest that I am much further along than I am. There’s another one I’ll have to deal with if I keep this thing. ‘How far along are you?’ Shit!”

  “‘This thing’?” I said, following her through into the kitchen. “This thing? And if you keep it? This morning it was a child, which, you will recall, you wanted.”

  I had to duck quickly to dodge a bowl of fruit that Faye now threw at me. The ceramic turned to ballistic shards as it struck the wall next to my head.

  “Child? Try parasite! Yesterday I had a life. A good life. Boring perhaps, but I was in charge of it. Today I discover that I have picked up a hitchhiker, and now you tell me half the mountain is on its way down the hill into my living room!”

  “Kitchen. It’ll hit this end of the house first.”

  The fruit bowl was followed by a pitcher and two plates. When she got to saucepans and other objects unlikely to break, and it became clear that she was no longer aiming but just interested in making a lot of noise, I figured I had accomplished the mission of helping her to get mad enough to vent her feelings. At least for the moment. Sure enough, after a clattering of stainless-steel pot lids, she dropped down onto her knees, planted her face on the floor, and began once again to bawl.

  I switched the gas on underneath the kettle for tea and got down next to her. Very gingerly (because I was as yet new to this business of having such a close, direct, and downright blunt friend as Faye) I put an arm around her.

  She kept her face hidden. “I’m so confused,” she crooned. She began to rock back and forth with the force of her emotions.

  “I’d be surprised at you if you weren’t.”

  “Oh, Em …”

  I straightened up a little and began to massage her back. “You’re a good person, Faye. You’ll do the right thing, whatever that is.”

  “I don’t want to do anything,” she blubbered. I want to go back to yesterday, or last month, when I did not have this decision, or this responsibility. I want to be just dumb old Faye again, fat, dumb, and happy—”

  “Skinny. No one can ever call you fat, you lucky burn.”

  “—and just messing around like it didn’t matter.”

  “You can’t tell me you never thought this through. That’s not like you.”

  “Oh sure. It’s easy when it’s some infinitesimal statistical possibility. But now it’s a baby.”

  “Embryo.”

  “Don’t split hairs,” she wailed. “We’re talking about a life. A whole, separate life.”

  I stopped rubbing and kept just one hand in the center of her back. “There you’re wrong.”

  Faye turned her head and looked at me, her face wet with tears.

  “It is not a separate life,” I heard myself say. “Not an independent one, at any rate. Not now, and not for years. We’re not like lizards or turtles who just lay an egg and wander off. You’re talking about a human child, one of the most dependent creatures to ever suck air into its lungs and cry for dinner. Hell, even calves can stand up just as soon as they’re born. You’re talking about an enormous demand on your resources, and you don’t just get to say good-bye. Not now, not ever.”

  Faye’s face contracted. “You’re scaring me, Em.”

  “You should feel scared. Sure, you’ve got the money to do as you please. You won’t be out on the street. But what you’re feeling is the part that gets left out of some of the pro-life propaganda. This is going to have an enormous impact on your life, regardless of what happens. And you have a right to life, too.”

  Faye rested her cheek on the tiled floor. “Are you saying I should get an abortion?” she whispered.

  I stared down at her, my mighty woman friend brought to her knees, and felt a wave of something—energy, life, chi—sweep through my being. In that moment, sensing the little life that pulsed within her womb, I knew two things: that I could never end a life within me, and that the decision to end or continue was so deeply personal, so pivotal to the very definition of a woman’s soul, that I would defend to the death my friend’s right to end it if she must. And I would stay by her if she continued. “No. It’s your decision. Either way, I would help you cry.” I felt warm tears spill from my eyes.

  Faye reached up and touched them, amazed.

  AN HOUR LATER, we were curled up in the living room with soft afghans, a dwindling plate of chocolate-covered shortbread cookies, and our second and third cups of herbal tea.

  Faye leaned back against the cushions. “Imagine me a mother,” she said. “I remember my own mother. She used to take me up to her room in her parents’ house—my grandparents’ estate—and let me play with the dolls she’d had as a girl. It was the nice part of going there. I loved it, in fact. Just the two of us, with those dolls. It was more like having a sister than a mother.”

  “Why didn’t she bring her doll collection to her own house?”

  Faye shot me a look. “She didn’t have permission. You don’t know my grandparents. They have their rules. You don’t upset the household. You want to suffer, try pissing off my grandfather by being a child. Imagine me all done up in hair ribbons and pinafore, being seen but not heard. Hell, I didn’t really exist in that house, except in that room with those dolls.”

  “Sounds awful. How did you stand it?”

  “I have it to thank for my early interest in Buddhism. You know, thanking your petty tyrant for the opportunity to learn. Detachment. Equanimity. Understanding your adversary. That sort of stuff.”

  “You mean it warped you,” I said cheekily.

  “Yeah. I suppose it did. Oh well, the old man left me a wad of money, so I suppose I should be grateful, even if he did force me to do things his way.”

  That reminded me of Faye’s
performance around Logan de Pontier. I decided it was time to give her some heat for it. “Nice going with the UGS geologist,” I said. “Speaking of ‘my way or the highway,’ you embarrassed the hell out of him, Faye.”

  Faye snorted into her tea. “Uh-uh. He was pleased as punch. It was you that was embarrassed.”

  “The hell. What you selling?”

  “He was kind of cute.”

  I set my tea mug down rather hard. “Faye, I am engaged to Ray.”

  “Engaged to be engaged, and—”

  “I prefer not to mess up what I’ve got, if you don’t mind.”

  Faye reached for another cookie so she’d have something to examine as she said, “Has he called you since he got home? I noticed you checking your phone messages while I was getting the tea and cookies together.”

  I frowned into my mug. “No. He hasn’t called.”

  “Did you drive by his work and see if his car was in the lot?”

  “I managed to restrain myself.”

  “Have you called him?”

  With some heat, I said, “No!”

  “Oooo. That does not sound good. So I saw this perfectly nice guy coming down the hill with you, watching you like he’d never seen anything quite so nice, and I’m thinking, This could be a good thing.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said defensively.

  “And he had nice buns. And the beard wasn’t half-bad.”

  I munched down another cookie before I said anything more. “I didn’t notice them. Ray’s a tough act to beat, Faye.”

  “You mean follow. You should go to that dinner tonight. In fact, I wasn’t kidding: I am going to take you there.”

  “Faye—”

  She held up a hand. “And I’m not just doing this to meddle in your love life, pal. You need to make more contacts in your professional life. Hey, I’m the one who has to listen to you gripe about the temp jobs you’ve been taking to pay the rent, not that you’ve been willing to move in here, where it wouldn’t matter if you paid me a red cent.”

  “I couldn’t do that. I need you for a friend, not a landlady I mooch off of.”

  “Your pride is surpassed only by your stubbornness.”

  “You’re going to need your privacy with Tom now more than ever.”

  “If he’s still talking to me after I tell him.”

  I threw my head back and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, is that what this is all about. Faye, he’s a cantankerous shithead, I admit, but a more honorable cantankerous shithead you would never find. And underneath it all, he’s really just an old softy trying to look after the people he cares about.”

  “So I’ll call Ray for you.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  She picked up the phone that lay on the end table next to her. “What’s the number?”

  “No.”

  She punched some keys. “I need a number in Salt Lake City,” she said into the phone. “The police station. Central.” When she had the number, she punched it in. “Hello, may I speak with Officer Raymond?” she asked, her hand going for another cookie. “Oh. Oh, I see. No, no message.” She hung up the phone and looked up at me. “He called in sick.”

  “Ray?” I said incredulously. “Sick?”

  “The duty officer said that Ray swapped shifts with someone. Sounds more like he called in well, the bastard.”

  “Now wait just a minute! We may be having our little problems with adjustment, but that doesn’t put him in the bastard category. Maybe he just couldn’t get back in time, so he swapped shifts rather than take another vacation day.”

  Faye looked at me like she wasn’t so sure.

  “Ray’s a nice guy, Faye,” I pleaded. Nice and romantic, I thought defensively, remembering the time he’d taken me dancing before I’d broken my leg late last summer. Nice and direct, I added to my mental tally, thinking of the three times he’d driven over the mountains to Colorado to get to know me before I even came to see him once. Nice and companionable, I mused, thinking of countless hours we had sat just holding hands and staring out into the world together. Ours was an unspoken relationship.

  She pursed her lips. “Yes, he is, Em. Too nice. His ma’s got him running so fast, he hasn’t got time for you.”

  Changing the subject from my conundrums back to Faye’s, I said, “Besides, Tom already knows about your little secret.”

  Faye had just been putting her tea to her lips and choked on it. She slammed the mug down on the end table and bent forward to put her hands in her face while she coughed. She managed to squeeze out a strangled “Noooo!”

  More gently, I added, “C’mon, you know the work he’s in. He read that one like it was up in lights. Want my opinion? He’s as scared as you are.”

  13

  The only man who was enthusiastic about the earthquake from the start was geologist Irving J. Witkind of the U.S. Geological Survey, who was living in a trailer on a rise to the north of Hebgen Lake, above the Culligans and Parade Rest, while he surveyed and mapped the area.

  When the first shock hit, he figured his trailer had somehow broken loose and was rolling down the hill. He charged out, intent on stopping it. From the way the trees were swaying in the absence of any wind, he knew it was a genuine earthquake. He hopped in his jeep and headed down toward the lake. He saw the [earthquake] scarp just in time to stop.

  “It’s mine! It’s mine!” he shouted as he got out of the jeep and realized the full measure of his fortune. His words will echo wherever geologists gather in years to come. Professionally, his once-in-a-thousand-lifetimes fortune in being on the scene of a major quake meant as much as discovering an unfound Pharaoh’s tomb would to an Egyptologist.

  —From The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake, by Edmund Christopherson. The 1959 magnitude 7.5 earthquake was centered about fifteen miles north of Yellowstone National Park.

  MY ADVICE, IN CASE YOU EVER CONSIDER THE OPTION, IS don’t ever mess with Faye Carter. Her way of dealing with stress can be ugly. Case in point: That evening, she did indeed drag me to that meeting at the Pie Pizzeria. And no, it was not a case of a pregnant woman having food cravings. She did not take bite one. She just hung there like a vulture waiting for death, insisting that I look like I was having a whee of a good time.

  It started like this, the moment we reached the table:

  Faye: “Hi, everyone, this is my friend Em Hansen. She’s a shy geologist who wants to drink beer and whoop it up, just like the rest of you.”

  Me (finding no words but plenty of body English, including, but not limited to, cringing and sheepish grinning): “Gaa-uhn” (Which probably means something in Arabic or ancient Tahitian, but, freely translated from Wyoming cowgirlese, means “I feel an intense desire to sink through the floor to the center of the Earth.”)

  Logan de Pontier: “Hey, Em, sit down. And what’s your friend’s name again?”

  Me (finding my voice at last, given this extraordinary setup): “Attila the Hun.”

  Faye (with meltingly lovely smile, self-deprecating hand gestures): “I’m Faye Carter. Attila is just my stage name.”

  Logan: “Ah. Great. Well, let me introduce you around. This is Wendy Fortescue. She works at the Seismic Station up here at the university. This is Ted Wimler, a compadre from the UGS. Hugh Buttons, director of the Seismic Station. Pet Mercer, science reporter for the Tribune. There’ll be a couple more coming. Come on and sit down. Can I get you a beer?”

  Me: “Oh God, please, yes.”

  Faye: “Not for me, thanks. My karma currently disallows it.” Everyone at the table seemed content enough to ignore that last remark. They shifted and shuffled around to make room for us to get seated, mercifully putting Faye in the back corner beyond the bulk of Hugh Buttons, where she could contemplate the graffiti on the brick walls if she liked. I sat at the other end of the table, across from Logan and between Pet Mercer and Ted Wimler.

  I had to strain to hear Hugh, who had apparently been in th
e middle of giving Pet Mercer and the others an update on the. earthquake situation. He was a big guy with a puffy stomach and elastic-waist pants, which made him look like a watermelon sitting in a shower cap.

  “We haven’t had very many aftershocks,” he said. “I had expected—or should I say hoped for?—maybe three or four times as many. But what we have does begin to paint the plane of the fault.”

  Pet pulled an almond out of a pocket and popped it into her mouth. I noticed that she hadn’t taken any pizza from the communal dish, and didn’t even have a plate in front of her. She said, “I’ve noticed that there has been surprisingly little historic seismic activity right along the fault. Why is that?” She passed him a map showing a black dot at the epicenter of every earthquake that had occurred in Utah over the past thirty years.

  Hugh stared meditatively at the map. “Yes, you’ve noticed our odd blank area right where the fault lies. Well, that’s because all these other quakes were fairly small, but there were a lot of them. Here, for instance. That’s the Book Cliffs. These are all rock bursts in the coal mines there. Tiny. But the earthquakes along the Wasatch fault, when they occur, are much larger, and the larger the quake, the further apart they occur temporally. If the fault slipped more easily, we’d have many small earthquakes for every medium one we do have. It’s got to do with the fault geometry and the way the stress accumulates in the rock.”

  Pet nodded. She said, “You’ve always taken pains to explain to me that the Wasatch fault is a zone, not one discrete plane.”

  “Right, it’s a set of fractures, and each one is in fact a zone of subparallel fractures, because a fault does not fail in precisely the same place each time.”

  “So which part cracked this time?” the journalist asked.

  Hugh inhaled and exhaled visibly, his bulk rising and falling with the action. “The hypocenter—that’s the actual point of slippage—was on the Warm Springs branch of the fault, the part that runs near downtown.”

  “Runs under downtown,” Pet suggested.