The Crank

It went faster after the first turns.

For a minute every inch was a jolt, a hard short jerk up through the steel into the car, with a long pause between while the two men leaned their whole weight on the handle. Then, between one jerk and the next, the jerks stopped. The wheel was moving smoothly, slowly, the way it had at half past nine when there had been a motor and lights and music, and the red car ahead was sliding down past the window a foot at a time, and the sky was turning in the window like a page.

“It’s moving,” said Theo. “Freddie, it’s moving.”

“He’s taken the brake off.”

He did not know that. But the hard part with a train was always getting it to start, all that weight standing still, and once it was moving the weight was on your side. Below, the man with the ponytail was leaning back on the handle now instead of forward, holding the wheel rather than pushing it, one hand on a lever at the side of the box, looking up at the cars with the face of a man bringing a heavy train into a short platform. Brannigan was on his feet beside him with the radio.

The blue car went over the top and started down.

---

He saw it all on the way down, in order, like stations from a train.

The beach, empty, the siren still going on top of the lifeguard’s hut, no lifeguard. The surfboard on the sand where it had been dropped. The long wet line of the water’s edge.

The bluff, coming back out of the thinning dust: the cliff raw and yellow where the pieces had come away, ice plant hanging off the edges of the gaps like torn carpet, and at its foot the pieces themselves in great heaps across all six lanes, cars buried to the windows, cars on their sides, a palm tree lying across the road with its head in the sand. People climbing over the heaps. People getting out of cars. People running across the beach towards the stairs.

And the stairs. All six flights, the earth gone on either side of them and the concrete still standing, like the bones of something, and the footbridge at the bottom with the heaps of earth against its legs and people running over it. Up the zigzag, from the bridge to the top, a long dark line of people close together, slowly, too slowly. A queue.

He looked for Ellicott in it and could not find it. He looked for the top, and the sign, and could not see either through the dust lying thick and brown along the top of the bluff.

“They’ll be on the stairs by now,” said Theo. “Won’t they? Kimura was going fast.”

“Yes.”

“Nearly at the top.”

“Yes,” said Frederick, who did not know.

---

It came again halfway down.

No noise this time. A shake, short and hard, as if the whole wheel had been kicked. The car swung out on its hinge and the wheel stopped dead with a jerk that threw them both against the bench, and from the pier and everywhere came a long rising cry from a great many people at once, the sound a crowd makes when it sees the thing it was afraid of.

Five seconds. Ten. Then it stopped. The car swung, and creaked, and was still.

“Is it starting again?” Theo was holding his arm hard enough to hurt. “Freddie. Is it the big one again?”

“No. It’s stopped. It was short.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it stopped.” His own voice was shaking. He made it stop by deciding to, the way his mother did on the telephone. “It’s an aftershock. Mr Paredes said. After November there were hundreds. They’re not the earthquake. They’re the earthquake,” he looked for the word, “settling.”

“Settling.”

“Like a house after you’ve moved the furniture.” His father had said that once, about a government. “It goes on making noises for a while.”

The wheel began to move again.

The man with the ponytail had not let go of the handle. He was on his knees at the box exactly as before, as though the second shaking had been somebody else’s business, bringing the cars down, and Brannigan was crouched beside him with one hand flat on the boards and the other on his back, holding him steady. Mr Abernathy stood where he had stood, by the gate, head back. He had not even put a hand out to the rail.

He had not stopped counting.

---

The cars came down to the gate one at a time and went past it, empty.

At half past nine there had been thirty-two cars on the wheel, only four with people in, and two of those had come down before the blue one went up. Now there were two cars on the whole wheel with anybody in them, theirs and the green one below, and the empty ones came round ahead of them, red and yellow and green and blue, swinging, doors shut, and went past the gate and up the other side. Thirty-one. Thirty. Twenty-nine.

The pier came up the way the ground comes up under a landing aircraft. The bend in it, close to now. The long ragged gap where the rail had been, broken timbers sticking out over the water. Half the carousel roof lying in a heap of tin and wood in the middle of the boards, and through the open door the horses still on their poles with their mouths open, and one off its pole, on its side on the floor with its legs in the air.

The clock, leaning on its green post. As the car came level he could see the face that looked out to sea. It had stopped at nine forty-one.

And Mr Abernathy’s face, close now, turned up to the blue car. Grey. The grey of the dust on the bluff, all over, his hair grey with it, and his brown jacket. A long cut across the back of his left hand, hanging at his side, with the blood running down between his fingers and dripping onto the boards, and his lips still moving.

The blue car came down to the gate and stopped.

---

The man with the ponytail had the gate open before the car had stopped swinging, found the key on his ring without looking, unlocked the little door, pulled it open and stood back.

“Out. Both of you. Now. Mind the step.”

Theo pushed him from behind with both hands, quite hard, and Frederick stepped over the gap onto the boards, and the boards did not move, and his knees nearly went because they did not move.

Theo came out beside him.

Mr Abernathy looked at Frederick, and at Theo, and at Frederick again, with his grey face and the blood running off the ends of his fingers. Then he said, in the voice he used at a quarter past eight every morning, level and dry and not in the least surprised:

“Hanover.”

“Here,” said Frederick.

“Hartigan.”

“Here,” said Theo, and his voice broke in the middle.

Mr Abernathy nodded once. Then he looked down at his left hand as though he had just been told about it, and put it in his jacket pocket, and said, “Right. Go.”

---

Brannigan had his arm.

He had come round the gate while Mr Abernathy was speaking, and had Frederick by the upper arm, not hard but completely, the way you hold something you have decided not to drop, and was already turning towards the land, and Frederick was turning with him because Brannigan was very large and had decided.

“Sir. With me. Now. Don’t stop for anything.”

“No,” said Frederick.

It came out of him before he had decided anything. He planted his feet. Brannigan stopped, because he could have moved him anyway, easily, and had not yet decided whether to.

“Not yet.”

Above them the green car was coming down, slowly, with Castellanos in it very upright on the bench, looking down at them through the window. Ten feet. Half a minute.

“Sir.” Brannigan’s voice was perfectly level and his hand did not move. “Sergeant Castellanos would want me to take you now.”

“I know he would.”

“He’d tell you the same.”

“I know he would. He’s one car. He’s coming. Look, he’s right there. Half a minute.” He did not take his eyes off the green car. “I’m not going down this pier without him. I’m not leaving anybody on this wheel. Not anybody. Not one.”

Brannigan looked at him.

He was more frightened than he had been at the top, because at the top there had been nothing he could do and now there was something, and it was the wrong thing, and he was doing it anyway. His voice had been his mother’s, the one she used at a desk with a pen in her hand. Brannigan had been trained for nine years to do exactly one thing at this moment, and it was not to stand still on a pier.

“Half a minute,” said Brannigan.

“Half a minute.”

“Then I carry you. If I have to. Sir.”

“Then you carry me.”

Brannigan did not let go, and did not move, and stood beside him saying something low into the radio, and looked up at the green car with him.

Theo had taken Frederick’s other arm with both hands, the way he had held it at the top, and was standing there holding it, looking up. If Brannigan carried him, Theo was going to be carried too.

The man with the ponytail brought the green car down a foot at a time to the gate. He had its door open in two seconds, and Castellanos came out sideways before it was fully open, the way he went through doors, and was on the boards, and looked at Frederick once, all over, the cut above his eye, the blood, Brannigan’s hand on one arm and Theo’s on the other, and took all of it in, and said none of it.

“Run,” said Castellanos.

---

They ran.

All of them: Frederick and Theo and Castellanos and Brannigan, and Mr Abernathy with his hand in his pocket, and the man with the ponytail, who locked the steel box first, quickly, without looking, the way you lock your front door in the morning, and came after them. Past the carousel and the horse on its back, past the shell shop with its shutter half down and buckled, past the coffee place with its windows gone and cups all over the floor, past the clock leaning on its post and stopped at nine forty-one, round the bend where the pier had been pushed sideways, with the long gap where the rail had been on their left and nothing between them and the drop but air.

Castellanos on his right, between him and the gap. Brannigan on his left. Theo in front, arms going, the way he ran at the end of a race on the river when the cox was screaming. Mr Abernathy behind; he could hear him breathing, a man of fifty-eight in a brown jacket running down a broken pier. He did not look round. Castellanos had told him once that you never look round when you are running.

His eyes went down to the boards, the way they do when you run on something you are not sure of, and through the gaps, the ones Marcus had told him not to look at, he saw the water.

At nine o’clock it had been green and moving, washing round the piles.

It was much further down now. Below where the water had been, the dark wooden legs of the pier had a band on them, pale and rough and crusted, barnacles and weed and the little black shells of mussels, wet and shining, that had been under the sea and were not under it now. Two feet. Three. More. And the water at the foot of the piles was not washing round them. It was going away from them. Pulling out, the whole sea, west, steadily, quietly, as though somebody had pulled the plug from the bottom of the world.

He did not stop running.

“It’s going out,” he heard himself say, in a voice he did not know.

And Castellanos, beside him, without turning his head or breaking stride, said, “I know, sir. Run.”