Here on the eastern outskirts of Bright Beach, on the side of the hills that offered no view of the sea, the tireless desert encroached when residents were not diligent. Sage and wild sorrel and all manner of scrub bristled where backyards ended.
The recent storm had blown tumbleweeds out of the barrens. They were snared in domestic shrubs, piled against one wall of the house.
Green during this rainy season, the lawn, lacking a sprinkler system, would be crisp and brown April through November. Even in this lush phase, it was as much weeds and creeping sandbur as grass.
Carrying one of the six blueberry pies, Edom walked through the unmown lawn and up the swaybacked steps onto the front porch.
This was not a house he would choose to occupy when the quake of the century rocked the coast and leveled mighty cities. Agnes's instructions, unfortunately, were that Edom must not merely drop the gifts and run but must visit for a short while and be as neighborly as it was within his nature to be.
Jolene Klefton answered his knock: dowdy, in her early fifties, wear ing a shapeless housedress. Flyaway brown hair as lusterless as Mojave dust. Her face was enlivened by a wealth of freckles, however, and her voice was both musical and warm.
'Edom, you look as handsome as that singer on the Lawrence Welk Show, you really do! Come in, come in!'
As Jolene stepped aside to let him enter, Edom said, 'Agnes was in a baking frenzy again. We'll be eating blueberry pie till we're blue. She said maybe you'd relieve us of one.'
'Thank you, Edom. Where is herself this morning?
Though she tried to hide it, Jolene was disappointed-anybody would have been-that Edom rather than Agnes was at her door. He took no offense.
Bill swung into a chair and hooked the canes on the back of it. He held out his right hand to Edom.
The hand was gnarled, the knuckles swollen and misshapen. Edom pressed it lightly, afraid of causing pain even with a gentle touch.
'Tell us all about the baby,' Bill encouraged. 'Where did they get the name-Bartholomew?'
'I'm not really sure.' Edom accepted a plate with a slice of cake from Jolene. 'Far as I know, it wasn't on their list of favorites.'
He didn't have much to say about the baby, only what Agnes had told him. He'd already related most of those details to Jolene.
Nevertheless, he went through it all again. He embellished a little, in fact, stalling for time, dreading a question that would force him to share with them the bad news.
And here it came, from Bill: 'Is Joey just bursting with pride?'
Edom's mouth was full, so he was spared the expectation of an immediate answer. He chewed until it seemed that his slice of cake must be as tough as gristle, and when he realized Jolene was staring curiously, he nodded as though answering Bill's question.
He paid for this deception, the nod, when he tried to swallow the cake and couldn't get it down. Afraid of choking, he grabbed his coffee and dislodged the stubborn wad with hot black brew.
He couldn't talk about Joey. Breaking the news would be like murder.
Until Edom actually told someone about the accident, Joey wasn't really dead. Words made it real. Until Edom spoke the words, Joey was still alive somehow, at least for Jolene and Bill.
This was a crazy thought. Irrational. Nevertheless, the news about Joey stuck in his throat more stubbornly than the wad of cake.
He spoke instead about a subject with which he was comfortable: doomsday. 'Does this seem like earthquake weather to you?'
Surprised, Bill said, 'It's a fine day for January.'
'The thousand-year quake is overdue,' Edom warned.
'Thousand-year? ' Jolene said, frowning.
'The San Andreas should have a magnitude eight-point-five or greater quake once every thousand years, to relieve stress on the fault.
It's hundreds of years overdue.'
Well, it won't happen on the day Agnes's baby is born, I'll guarantee you that,' said Jolene.
'He was born yesterday, not today,' Edom said glumly. 'When the thousand-year quake hits, skyscrapers will pancake, bridges crumble, dams break. In three minutes, a million people will die between San Diego and Santa Barbara.'
'Then I better have more cake,' Bill said, pushing his plate toward Jolene.
'Oil and natural-gas pipelines will fracture, explode. A sea of fire will wash cities, killing hundreds of thousands more.'
'You figure all this,' Jolene asked, 'because Mother Nature gives us a nice warm day in January?'
'Nature has no maternal instincts,' Edom said quietly but with conviction. 'To think otherwise is sheer sentimentality at its worst. Nature is our enemy. She's a vicious killer.'
Jolene started to refill his coffee mug-then thought better of it. 'Maybe you don't need more caffeine, Edom.'
'Do you know about the earthquake that destroyed seventy percent of Tokyo and all of Yokohama on September 1, 1923?' he asked.
'They still had enough gumption left to fight World War Two, Bill noted.
'After the quake,' Edom said, 'forty thousand people took refuge in a two-hundred-acre open area, a military depot. A quake-related fire swept through so fast they were killed standing up, so tightly packed together they died as a solid mass of bodies.'
'Well, we have earthquakes here,' Jolene said, 'but back east they have all those hurricanes.'
'Our new roof,' Bill said, pointing overhead, 'will hold through any hurricane. Fine work. You tell Agnes what fine work it is.'
Having gotten the new roof for them at cost, Agnes subsequently put together donations from a dozen individuals and one church group to cover all but two hundred dollars of the outlay.
'The hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, back in 1900, killed six thousand people,' Edom said. 'Virtually obliterated the place.'
'That was all of sixty-five years ago,' Jolene said.
'Less than a year and a half ago, Hurricane Flora-she killed over six thousand in the Caribbean.'
'Wouldn't live in the Caribbean if you paid me,' Bill said. 'All that humidity. All those bugs.'
'But nothing equals a quake for killing. Big one in Shaanxi, China, killed eight hundred thirty thousand.'
Bill wasn't impressed. 'They build houses out of mud in China. No wonder everything falls down.'
'This was back on January 24, 1556,' said Edom with unhesitating authority, for he had memorized tens of thousands of facts about the worst natural disasters in history.
'Fifteen fifty-six?' Bill frowned. 'Hell, the Chinese probably didn't even have mud back then.'
Fortifying herself with more coffee, Jolene said, 'Edom, you were going to tell us how Joey's coping with fatherhood.'
Glancing at his wristwatch with alarm, Edom bolted up from his chair. 'Look at the time! Agnes gave me a lot to do, and here I am rattling on about earthquakes and cyclones.'
'Hurricanes,' Bill corrected. 'They're different from cyclones, aren't they?'
'Don't get me started on cyclones!' Edom hurried through the house and out to the station wagon, to fetch the boxes of groceries.
The blue vault above, cloudless now, was the most threatening sky that Edom had ever seen. The air was astonishingly dry so soon after a storm. And still. Hushed. Earthquake weather. Before this momentous day was done, great temblors and five-hundred-foot tidal waves would rock and swamp the coast.
Chapter 25
