Free Zuni Stew: A Novel by Kent Jacobs Page B

very unhappy.” She handed him a battery-powered lantern.
    Jack brushed past her. The clinic door was broken off the hinges. In the darkness, he worked his way to the pharmacy. He slipped, reached out to regain his balance, and sent a stainless steel tray flying. The white metal cabinets had crashed to the floor. Pills and broken glass covered the linoleum tiles. The X-ray machine had been tossed across the room and bent in the middle by the 7-point-magnitude quake.
    Without thinking, he picked up a phone. No dial tone.
    
    Admiral Zeller was awakened by a phone call from the state police. Dulce had sustained a Richter 6.9 earthquake, larger than the one five years earlier.
    “Any information on the clinic? Any fatalities?”
    “Nothing confirmed. It’s too remote.”
    After hanging up, he sat on the side of the bed, groping for a pack of cigarettes. His wife asked him what was wrong.
    “That poor guy,” was all Zeller could say.
    
    Farmington, nearly ninety miles away, had experienced the tremor. Mario bolted from bed, cursing New Mexico. His inclination was to get in the car and get the hell out of the damned state and back to civilization.
    Down the street in another motel, Lori sat up in bed, feeling the rumbles. Distant, and fading. She would ask about it in the morning.
    
    Tito roused, his body absorbing the earth’s rumbling, though it was occurring some one-hundred-and-thirty miles away. Opening his eyes, he saw his father standing at his bedside, silhouetted against the light in the hospital hall.
    Louis Paul held the flat palm of one hand over him. “Still, my son, the gods are anxious about something. Listen.”

    13

    M ario shaved, occasionally glancing at the small bathroom window, hoping to see some daylight. He told the desk clerk he would be staying another night.
    At a truck stop on the outskirts of town, he ate a breakfast burrito. He spoke to no one. Driving east on US 64, he cursed as the sun rose—he was driving straight into it. Barely seven in the morning.
    
    Lori’s alarm went off at seven o’clock. Her stomach growled. She dressed quickly and headed down the street. Huevos rancheros at Lupe’s Restaurant. Everyone, especially Lupe, was talking about the earthquake. She also overhead a delivery man say he had talked to his sister in Dulce the day before, and everyone on the reservation was coming down with some awful bug. People were really sick, and that was before the earthquake.
    She finally picked up a local radio station in the SUV. A dead-pan voice said, “The epicenter was the Jicarilla Apace village of Dulce, eleven miles from the Colorado border, in a remote mountainous region. The U.S. Geological Survey said the initial quake measured 7.5 magnitude at about 11:30 PM. and a 5.2 magnitude aftershock two hours later.
    “Ambulances from as far away as Farmington to the west and Taos to the east are currently attempting to reach the vicinity.”
    Off came the sandals, on went hiking boots. Shopping for supplies, water, groceries. A Styrofoam cooler and ice. When she got on the highway, the sun was high in the sky.
    
    State police cars re-routed all traffic at mile marker 127, detouring around a buckled gap in the pavement. Mario’s car dragged bottom, letting out a steel-screeching scream. He had to whip the wheel to avoid boulders. The car groaned down the main and only paved street in town. Power company workmen leaned against their trucks, sharing coffee from thermoses with telephone linemen. The air smelled of diesel fuel. Belching D-Cats attempted to clear a side road.
    It was easy to find the PHS clinic—pickups packed the lot. He counted three exits, then parked behind a dense stand of junipers. He tore off strips of red duct tape with his teeth, creating a cross on his aluminum-sided gun case. Makeshift, but real enough to get around the line and into the packed waiting room.
    At the reception window, he said, “I’m from