the stairway and pick them off leisurely with the long guns (this scenario seemed plausible last night, in the dark, but now strikes Randy as a bumpkin's reverie).
Amy's turned some balusters from the veranda's railing into a nice bonfire in the front yard. She stomps a crushed saucepan back into shape with a small number of deftly aimed heel-strokes and cooks oatmeal. The Shaftoe boys throw whatever looks potentially useful into the back of the U-Haul, and check the oil in their hot rod.
All of Charlene's stuff is in New Haven now. In Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik's house, to be specific. He has generously offered to let her stay there while she looks for a house; Randy predicts she'll never leave. All of Randy's stuff is in Manila or in Avi's basement, and all of the disputed items are in a storage locker at the edge of town.
Randy spent most of yesterday evening cruising around town checking in on various old friends to see if they were all right. Amy went with him, taking a voyeuristic interest in this tour of his former life, and, from a social point of view, complicating things incalculably. In any case, they didn't make it back to the house until after dark, and so this is Randy's first chance to see the damage in full daylight. He orbits it again and again, amused, almost to the point of giggling, by how perfectly destroyed it is, taking pictures with a disposable camera he borrowed from Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe, trying to see if there is anything left that could conceivably be worth money.
The house's stone foundation rises three feet above grade. The wooden walls of the house were built on top of that, but not actually attached to it (a common practice in the old days, which, at the time he blew town, was on Randy's list of things to fix before the next earthquake). When the earth began to oscillate side-to-side at 2:16 in the afternoon yesterday, the foundation oscillated right along with it, but the house wanted to stay where it was. Eventually the foundation wall moved right out from underneath the house, one corner of which dropped three feet to the ground. Randy could probably estimate the amount of kinetic energy the house picked up during this fall, and convert it to an equivalent in pounds of dynamite or swings of a wrecking ball, but it would be a nerdy exercise, since he can see the effects for himself. Let's just say that when it smashed to earth the whole structure suffered a vicious shock. The parallel, upright joists in the floors all went horizontal, collapsing like dominoes. Every window and doorframe instantly became a parallelogram, so all of the glass broke, and in particular all of the leaded glass was rent asunder. The stairway fell into the basement. The chimney, which had been in need of tuck-pointing for some time, sprayed bricks all over the yard. Most of the plumbing was wrecked, which means that the heating system is history, since the house used radiators. The plaster fell from the lath everywhere, cumulative tons of old horse-hair plaster just exploding out of the walls and ceilings and mixing with the water from the busted plumbing to make a grey slurry that congealed in the downhill corners of the rooms. The hand-crafted Italian tiles that Charlene picked out for the bathrooms are seventy-five percent broken. The granite counters in the kitchen are now seamed tectonic systems. A few of the major appliances look repairable, but ownership of those was in dispute anyway.
'It's a tear-down, sir,' says Robin Shaftoe. He has spent his whole life in some Tennessee mountain town, living in trailers and cabins, but even he has enough real estate acumen to sense this.
'Is there something you wanted to get out of the basement, sir?' says Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe.
Randy laughs. 'There's a filing cabinet down there . . . wait!' he reaches out and puts a hand on Marcus's shoulder, to prevent him from sprinting into the house and diving like Tarzan into the stairway-pit. 'The reason I wanted it was because it contains every single receipt for every penny I put into this house. See, it was a wreck when I bought it. Sort of like it is now. Maybe not as bad.'
'You need those papers for your dee-vorce?'
Randy stops and clears his throat in mild exasperation. He has explained to them five times that he was never married to Charlene and so it's not a divorce. But this idea of living with a woman to whom one is not married is so embarrassing to the Tennessee branch of the Shaftoes that they simply cannot process it, and so they keep talking about 'your ex-wahf' and 'your dee-vorce.'
Noting Randy's hesitation, Robin says, 'Or for the IN-surance?'
Randy laughs with surprising heartiness.
'You did get IN-surance, didn't you sir?'
'Earthquake insurance, around here, is basically unobtainable,' Randy says.
This is the first time it dawns on any of the Shaftoes that as of 2:16 P.M. yesterday afternoon, in an instant, Randy's net worth dropped by something like three hundred thousand dollars. They skulk away from him and leave him alone for a while, taking pictures to document the loss.
Amy comes over. 'Oatmeal's ready,' she says.
'Okay.'
She stands close to him with her arms folded. The town is uncannily quiet: the power is off and few vehicles are on the streets. 'I'm sorry I ran you off the road.'
Randy looks at his Acura: the gouge, high on the left rear fender, where the bumper of Amy's U-Haul truck took him from behind, and the crumpled front right bumper where he was forced into a parked Ford Fiesta. 'Don't worry about it.'
'If I'd known-Jesus. The last thing you need is a body shop bill on top of everything else. I'll pay for it.'
'Seriously. Don't worry about it.'
'Well . . .'
'Amy, I know perfectly well you don't give a shit about my stupid car, and when you pretend otherwise, the strain shows.'
'You're right. But I'm sorry I misapprehended the situation.'
'It was my fault,' Randy says, 'I should have explained why I was coming here. Why the hell did you rent a U-Haul, anyway?'
'They were all out of regular cars at the San Francisco Airport. Some kind of big convention at the Moscone Center. So I displayed adaptability. '[20]
'How the hell did you get here so fast? I thought I took the last flight out of Manila.'
'I got to NAIA only a few minutes after you did, Randy. Your flight was full. I got on the next flight to Tokyo. I think my flight actually took off before yours did.'
'Mine was delayed on the ground.'
'Then from Narita I just grabbed the next flight to SFO. Landed a couple hours after you. So I was surprised that you and I pulled into town here at the same time.'
'I stopped over at a friend's house. And I took the scenic route.' Randy closes his eyes for a moment, remembering those loose boulders on the Pacific Coast Highway, the roadway shaking beneath the tires of his Acura.
'See, when I saw your car, that's when I felt that God was with me, or something,' Amy said. 'Or with you.'
'God was with me? How do you figure?'
'Well, first of all, I have to tell you that I left Manila not out of concern for you but out of burning rage, and a desire to just feed you your ass on a plate.'
'I figured.'
'It's not even clear to me that you and I constitute a potential couple. But you have started acting towards me in a way that indicates some interest in that direction, so you have certain obligations.' Amy has now started to get pissed off and begun to move around the yard. The Shaftoe boys eye her warily from across their steaming oatmeal bowls, ready to Spring into action and wrestle her to the ground if she should fly out of control. 'It would be just ... totally... unacceptable for you to make those kinds of representations to me and then jet off and cuddle with your California sweetheart without coming to me first and going through certain formalities, which would be awkward but which I would hope you would be man enough to endure. Right?'
'Absolutely right. Never felt otherwise.'
'So you can imagine how it looked.'
'I guess so. Assuming you have no faith in me whatsoever.'
'Well, I'm sorry for that, but I will say that on the flight over I began to think that it wasn't your fault, that Charlene had somehow gotten to you.'
'What do you mean, gotten to me?'
