15

When Captain Dodd reached the slide area a county firetruck had just arrived and taken position a safe distance away.

Dodd drove around the firetruck. He didn’t stop until he was at the edge of the slide, the front wheels of the patrol car up to the hub caps in the mud.

The five-thousand-watt searchlights on the firetruck swept slowly up and down the slide, raking the slope from top to bottom for a sign of life, of anything.

Dodd got out and for a long while followed the searching of the light, not really hopeful. He felt changed, as though something invisible but substantial had come between himself and existence. The rain did not seem the same. Neither did the car beside him, the night, the place. His senses were altered. He could see and hear just as well as before but now it was as though he were seeing and hearing from a different dimension. His sense of smell was more acute. The odor of the mud was dank, offensive.

He brought his hand to his face, both hands to his cheeks, and his hands and cheeks seemed slightly anesthetized. When he swallowed there was a bitterness to his saliva.

Moving, but with a reduced sensation of movement, he got back into the car.

He sat there all night.

Frequently his mind offered him the thought of all the lives the slide had taken.

He refused it — until dawn.

Then he got out again, cramped, stiff. He found a path down to the beach. From there, for the first time, he could see the scope of what had happened.

The slide was from the crest of Sheep Hill, thirteen hundred feet, all the way down to the ocean. The entire side of the hill, at least a thousand feet wide, had shed a deep layer of itself, gathered its tremendous wet mass to crush and bury everyone, everything on its way.

Everyone, everything, everyone.

With the surf lapping at his ankles, Dodd slowly scanned the muddy steep. He noticed it was still running down and shifting here and there.

Against his usually realistic disposition, Dodd gazed at where the highway was covered under and he imagined Lieutenant Porter popping up out of the mud there, Porter waving and shouting, floundering but savable. And Madsen, too, and Chief Croy, the television people. All of them.

Coming back from the fantasy, he came all the way back. The sense of being outside himself left. He was exhausted, hungry, thirsty, soaked.

And angry. Clear through.