The Hand

He did not know the streets.

All nineteen stations of the Santa Monica line, beach to Plaza, by heart. Franklin on a rise a mile inland. Pico a long straight road running east from the sea. But on Thursday he had walked up here in a line of pairs, looking at the dog by the fallen flats and the bell lying in the road, and he had not once looked at a street sign. Somebody had always known where they were going.

At the bottom of the street a green sign leaned on its post: 22ND ST. The cross street’s sign was face down in the gutter. He turned left, to keep the school on his left. If he kept it there he would come round to the field. He thought so.

The people from the houses were out in their front gardens and on the pavement and in the road, in the heat, some with chairs, many with small radios held up. From three of them at once, out of time with each other, came his own voice.

Get down. Get under something. Cover your head. Hold on.

An old woman in a dressing gown had her radio to her ear. ¡Agáchense! ¡Cúbranse! ¡Agárrense! Then Bill: that was the King, live from Santa Monica, at two o’clock, when the aftershock struck; we are told that it measured six point four. She looked up and saw him going past, bleeding, and her mouth opened, and nothing came out.

---

At the second corner a girl of about twelve had a blue cool box open on the pavement in front of a house with no windows, full of bottles in ice, and she was holding them out to everybody who passed, one each. He took one.

“You’re bleeding.”

“It’s a cut. It’s nothing.”

“You’re him.” Flat, a fact, like the name of a street. “On the radio. You told everybody to get down.”

“Yes.”

“I got under the kitchen table with my brother. Because you said.” She reached into the ice again. “Take two. You look like you need two.”

He took two.

---

At the third corner a big dusty car with a crack across the windscreen pulled up, and the man leaned across and wound the window down.

“Hey. Kid. You’re him, aren’t you? Where are your people? Get in, I’ll take you.”

“On the field at Franklin. Or on Pico. I don’t know.”

“Get in.”

A bottle in each hand, blood in the corner of his eye. You never get into a car with anybody who isn’t us. At four, at nine, at fifteen. The man was kind, and frightened, and meant it.

“No, thank you. I’m going to walk. It isn’t far.”

“You sure?”

“I’m not allowed in cars.”

“You’re the King. Who’s going to stop you?”

“Nobody. That’s why I’m not.”

The man laughed once, not unkindly, and drove on round a palm tree lying across the road.

---

He heard the house before he saw it, at the fourth corner. Not the low voices calling names. Short, hard ones.

Lift. Lift. Again.

Wait. Listen.

The houses on either side were standing, old wooden ones with porches, pale blue and yellow, windows out, gardens full of roses. Between them was a long low heap of grey timber and pale-blue boards and tiles and glass, a sofa, the legs of a table sticking up, a picture frame, a whole house come down into its own garden. The roses in front of it stood untouched, pink, in full bloom.

Eight people on it. A big man of about fifty in a vest, grey to the elbows, kneeling at the far end pulling at a board, and a girl of about Frederick’s age in a school sweatshirt pulling the same board. Two men from next door, a woman with a spade, a boy with a crowbar. An old man on the next-door steps with his head in his hands.

They were digging in one place, a small hollow at the back where the timber was highest. The man in the vest held up his hand, flat, and everybody stopped, and he put his head down to the boards.

Frederick stood perfectly still on the pavement.

From inside the heap, very faint: three taps. A pause. Three taps.

“Mamá, te oigo. Te oímos. Ya vamos.”

---

He set one bottle down by the roses and pushed the other into his pocket, and went in through the gate and up onto the heap. Nobody stopped him. Nobody was looking at anything but the hollow. He knelt by the boy with the crowbar, who looked at him, and looked again.

“What do I do?”

The man in the vest turned. Red eyes, a moustache grey with dust. He took in the torn collar and the blood and the face, and Frederick watched him decide it did not matter in the slightest.

“When I give you a board, pass it to him. He passes it on. Keep your feet off the middle. The middle’s her.”

So he passed boards. One at a time, never two, out of the hollow to him, to the boy, to the man from next door, onto the lawn among the roses. Plaster. A drawer with spoons in it. A blue tile. A framed wedding photograph that the man in the vest looked at for one second and passed back. Every five minutes the flat hand, the silence, the head down, and every time the three taps.

The girl was Rosa. Her father called it once, sharply, when she reached too far in. The woman inside was her grandmother, Esperanza Ruelas, eighty-one, fifty-two years in this house. On Thursday she had refused to leave it, because it was standing and it was hers, and at two o’clock she had been in the kitchen at the back making coffee, because that was what she did at two o’clock. Rosa told him in a low quick voice without looking at him, passing plaster.

“Somebody went for the firemen. They said twenty minutes. That was forty minutes ago. Everywhere’s like this.”

“I know.”

“Grandma had the radio on in the kitchen. She always has it on.” Rosa stopped. “She was listening to you when it came down.”

---

At a quarter past three the man pulled out a long piece of wall, blue paint on one side and wallpaper on the other, roses on the wallpaper, and behind it was a gap. Low and narrow and dark, going down and in between two great timbers that had come down crossed like the blades of a pair of scissors, and held.

Light from cracks somewhere above. Black and white floor tiles. A table leg. And under the table, small and pale, a hand.

“Mamá, te veo. Te veo la mano.”

The fingers moved on the tiles. From very far in, an old woman’s voice, cracked and dry. He caught it the second time.

Tengo sed.

The man in the vest put his shoulders into the gap and got perhaps a foot. The timbers creaked and dust came down and Rosa said Papá, no, no, and he backed out and knelt with his hands on his knees.

“I can’t get in. If I push, the beams go.”

The boy with the crowbar lay down and reached in as far as his arm would go. Short. Rosa tried. Short. The hand was three feet past any of them.

Frederick looked at the gap. The two timbers. The width between them, the height, the length, the hand at the end. He was the tallest person on the heap and by a long way the thinnest. You’re too thin. They’re not feeding you in that palace.

“I can get in.”

---

“No,” said the man.

“I can. I’m thinner than anybody here. My arms are longer than hers.” The voice from the bluff. “I’ll go in on my front. I won’t touch the beams. I’ll get far enough to reach her hand. I’ll give her water and talk to her till the firemen come.”

“You’re,” said the man, and stopped.

“I know who I am. It doesn’t make me any wider.”

The man looked at the gap. Then at his daughter, and she looked back at him.

“Slowly. If anything moves, you come out. Straight away. You don’t argue. If anything moves.”

“Yes.”

“Despacio.”

“Despacio.”

He took the second bottle out of his pocket, lay down on his front on the boards with his arms out, and went in.

---

Dark and close. Dust and coffee and gas and roses.

On his elbows, an inch at a time. The timbers so close above him he could feel them through his shirt, and he did not touch them. Head down. Shoulders low. A little dust came down from somewhere and he stopped and waited, and it stopped, and he went on.

If anything moves.

Nothing moved.

The tiles. The table leg. The hand: small and brown and very old, the skin thin and creased like paper, a thin gold ring worn almost through. The fingers moving slowly on the tiles, the way his father’s left hand moved on the blanket when it was looking for a word.

His arm went past the table leg. His fingers touched hers.

The hand stopped, and turned over, and took hold of his.

Stronger than Castellanos on his collar. Stronger than Theo at the top of the wheel.

“Señora Ruelas. Estoy aquí. Me llamo Frederick. Su hijo está afuera. Rosa está afuera. Los bomberos ya vienen.”

From under the table, close now:

“¿Frederick?”

“Sí.”

A pause. Then, very faintly, under a house, a small dry cracked laugh.

“¿El de la radio?”

“Sí, señora. El de la radio.”

“Me dijiste que me agachara. Y me agaché.”

---

He unscrewed the cap with his teeth, one-handed, because he was not letting go, and pushed the bottle in along the tiles. Her other hand found it. He heard her drink, small slow sips.

Then he lay there with the timbers over his back and the dust in his mouth, holding her hand, and talked.

Trains. The Pomona line, Mr Paredes, the five-car sets, the bridge over the Santa Ana that sang. The six-oh-two. The nineteen stations of the Santa Monica line in order, and at the end she said otra vez, and he did them again. His father, who could not talk, and the wheel in Vienna, and how his father had held his mother’s hand the whole way round and pretended it was for her. Every so often, faint, sí, or mi hijo, and once, quite clearly, ese padre tuyo es un mentiroso, that father of yours is a liar, and the dry laugh, and he laughed too, with his face in the dust.

Then hands on his ankles.

---

Big hands, at the mouth of the gap, round both ankles, gentle. Not pulling. Holding, the way you hold a rope somebody has gone down on.

He could not turn round. He did not need to. Something went out of his chest that had been in it since sir, once, over a crowd.

“Sir.” Castellanos, hoarse, very quiet. “I’ve got your feet. I’m not going to pull. The firemen are here. They’re putting a jack under the beams. When they say, you let go of her and come back to me. Not before.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t let go of her before they say.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“No, sir. I know you weren’t.”

---

Outside, short hard voices. Ready, ready, on three. A long metal groan. The timbers over his back creaked and moved, up, an inch, two, and grey-gold light came in full of dust, and he could see her face.

She was on her side under the table with plaster in her grey hair and her eyes open, looking at him. Very small, very old. A cut on her forehead over the left eye, exactly where his was. Smiling.

“Ya. Now, kid. Let go. Come back.”

He let go. Her fingers stayed open on the tiles where his had been.

He went back the way he had come, an inch at a time, Castellanos’s hands on his ankles guiding and not pulling, and then he was out on the heap on his knees in the white light. Two firemen went past him into the gap on their fronts; a third worked the jack. The man in the vest stood with Rosa’s face pressed into his chest, both of them shaking.

Castellanos was kneeling beside him. The grey suit was torn, the jacket open along one shoulder seam. Blood on his hands, not his own. Dust grey in his hair, so that he looked older. And in his left hand, held against his chest, a strip of pale blue cloth.

Frederick’s collar. He had carried it the whole way round.

Neither of them spoke.

Castellanos sat down on the boards with his knees up, as Theo had sat on the floor of the blue car, and put his head down on his arms.

---

At a quarter to four the firemen brought her out on a long orange board with straps, in her grey dress, hands folded on her chest, eyes open. As they passed him she turned her head and unfolded the hand he had held and held it out. He took it for a second.

“You’re too thin,” said Señora Ruelas, in English, in a voice like dry paper.

They carried her down past the roses to the ambulance coming up the street with its lights going, her son and Rosa with her. Frederick sat on the heap and laughed until he could not breathe, the tears running down through the dust, and Castellanos lifted his head and looked at him as though he had lost his mind, and then, slowly, laughed too.

---

At ten to four, from the end of the street, high and cracked and furious: Freddie. Then FREDDIE.

Theo, running up the middle of the road past the palm tree and the girl with the cool box, faster than Frederick had ever seen him run. Behind him, round the corner, in a long line of pairs, the sophomore class of Ellicott High School. Kimura at the front with her arm up. Brannigan beside her, very large, with the radio. Señora Ruiz with the folder. Lucía and Priya and Marcus and Felix and Devon and June. At the back, his good hand on the shoulder of the last pair, the other wrapped in a T-shirt, Mr Abernathy.

Theo came through the gate and across the garden and up the heap and took Frederick by both arms, hard enough to hurt, and held on, and said nothing at all.

The line stopped at the gate by the roses.

Mr Abernathy came to the front of it in the brown jacket, grey with dust, and looked at the heap, and the firemen, and the jack, and Castellanos on the boards with a torn collar in his hand, and Theo, and Frederick on his knees with blood on his face and his hands black to the wrist.

“Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy, in the homeroom voice, level and dry and not in the least surprised.

“Here.”

He nodded once, and looked at the list on the back of the water carton in his good hand, and made a mark at the bottom, where there had been a gap since two o’clock.

“Fifty-eight,” said Mr Abernathy, to the street. “Fifty-eight.”

He sat down on the low garden wall among the roses, and took off his glasses, and put his face in his good hand.