The Day the Earth Caved In by Joan Quigley

Author:Joan Quigley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781588366153
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE BLOCKS uphill from borough hall, Dave Lamb hovered on his front porch, scanning the horizon. From his post, he commanded a view of Locust Avenue, looking toward downtown. In his front yard, along Locust, red satin ribbons encircled his tree trunks, rustling in the afternoon breeze. Up and down the block, crimson strands dangled from tree limbs and fluttered from wrought-iron porch railings, like presents wrapped for Christmas.

Volunteers from Dave and Tom’s coalition had swept through the neighborhood before the governor’s arrival, looping streamers around stationary objects from construction sawhorses to utility poles, anchoring them with bunny-ear bows. The crimson bands, inspired by the yellow ribbons that had proliferated across the country during the Iran hostage crisis, had deepened divisions in town. For proponents, the strands symbolized the fire and bureaucratic red tape. Helen Womer snipped the filaments from the poles near her house, triggering a shouting match between her husband and one of the borough’s two part-time police officers. For Thornburgh’s visit, she reciprocated with a message of her own. At her request, Harry Darrah hung a hand-lettered sign from his front porch, up near St. Ignatius. “When the church goes, we go,” it said.

For Dave, who had battled inertia for more than a year, the red ribbons lodged more than a symbolic protest. Within the past week, after Coddington collapsed and public health officials ordered a battery of medical tests for Dave and his family, the state had offered to install the Lambs in emergency housing: a trailer home four blocks away, on a western Centralia baseball field. Dave viewed the gesture with wariness, not relief. If he accepted, he feared officials might abandon him. Worse still, they might bar him from participating in a relocation program, if they authorized one. Either way, he was trapped.

Downhill, about half a block away, Dave spotted the governor on the Andrades’ front porch, at the corner of Wood and Locust. Thornburgh had just sipped coffee in their kitchen and crouched down in their living room, under a shelf lined with their son’s athletic trophies, to inspect the carbon monoxide monitor. He had also dropped in on John Coddington next door, where he ribbed the ex-mayor, saying his recent hospital visit was “a heck of a way of getting attention.” Outside the gas station, Thornburgh knelt on the pavement and held his hand over a vent hole. “We’d better get you away from there, Governor,” said Coddington. “We don’t want you to die.”

Now Thornburgh strode toward Dave’s house, a few paces ahead of his retinue. Dave tracked the governor’s approach up Locust, where a vent pipe trailed steam across the street from his mother-in-law’s. As Thornburgh drew closer, past Coddington’s station and just beyond the white picket fence that surrounded the Lambs’ front yard, Dave climbed down the steps from his porch and walked out to the sidewalk, where he shook the governor’s hand and thanked him for coming. Inside, away from reporters and photographers, Thornburgh asked about Rachel, who lay upstairs in her room recovering from an asthma attack.

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