Carry Me Home (36 page)

Day broke gray. The rain increased. Bobby stepped off the trail, slipped, caught himself, gritted his teeth. All he wanted to do was fish but his mind wasn’t with it. New thoughts, half thoughts, rushed in, on. The nation’s economy ... another sharp increase in the jobless rate ... sharpest continuing climb since 1958 ... California jobless rate up to 5.9 percent ... real estate market tightening ... his first listing, a twelve-year-old four-bedroom home in the Martinwood subdivision with pool for $41,500 ... $4,000 overpriced ... never sell it ... eating nothing but raw rice and the office’s coffee-service sugar cubes ... like being socked in without resupply ... Cambodian Incursion elation, Kent/Jackson State depression ... fuck em all I gotta eat, I gotta sell ... anniversary of Hamburger Hill come and gone without my notice except Coleman and Bartecchi mentioned something ... 1/506th at a place called Ripcord ... Grandpa’s letter ... knee-deep in maple syrup?

Wapinski flicked the rod tip aiming under the deadfall. The worm arced in low, just nicked a twig, caught, then whipped around a branch wrapping the line tight. “You slimehead,” Wap growled. He pulled. He yanked. The rod bent, the branch swayed, the worm remained tangled. “Shit. First damn cast!” He reeled in as much as possible, grabbed the line beyond the rod tip, pulled until it snapped. He tied on another hook, impaled another worm. The rain came harder. He cast again, timidly, the bait falling short of cover. He let the worm sink, reeled in, added a split shot eighteen inches up the line, recast and caught the same branch as on his first cast and again couldn’t dislodge the hook. His ire multiplied. Again he reeled in, snapped the line, tied a new hook. One fuckin year, he thought. One fuckin year home. No dough. Lots of bills. Living off Red, who’s intermittently frigid ...

San Martin considered itself to be a canyon town, a perfect all-American community, a municipality with well-kept homes, manicured lawns, excellent schools, and state-championship quality tennis, golf and baseball teams. That very little of the town actually stretched back along San Antonio Creek into the ravine—it wasn’t really a canyon at that point but a pass between South and North Peaks—made no difference to anyone.

Highway 101 through San Martin was a four-lane limited-access highway. Driving time to San Francisco at midnight was thirty minutes, up to triple that during commute hours. Radicals may have been burning Carl Street in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco; Native Americans may have been in their thirtieth week of occupation of Alcatraz; UC Berkeley Professor Angela Davis may have been fired by university regents because of her proviolence, pro-communist rhetoric; and two lovely blondes, tall and thin, may have been walking hand in hand with a bearded dwarf on Market Street—all three naked—to protest the war in Viet Nam; but in San Martin the main concerns were still family income, the price of groceries, the high-school baseball team’s record, and the proper length of one’s lawn. Indeed, the most controversial issues in town were whether eighth grade girls should be allowed to wear strapless gowns to the Moving Up dance, and whether town fathers had the right to ban municipal workers from wearing crotch-high miniskirts. The 1970 census placed the population of San Martin’s perfect All-American community at 22,646, of which 98.6 percent were white.

Bobby got a hit, just a tap, yanked immediately, hard, pulled the bait out of the fish’s mouth, the worm, line and sinker snapping back, overhead, tangling in a bush behind him. He did not turn but stood rigid. Jilted by Stacy one year ago ... Jody-ed Pellegrino ... He checked his watch. It was six thirty and he’d barely had his line in the water. Again he reeled in, now following the line to the bush and untangling the snarl in the leaves. On the trail a man and a woman jogged by, oblivious to him and to Josh, who had sought silent refuge under a bush.

For another half hour Bob Wapinski fished the hole under the deadfall catching but two sunnies. The rain abated. Two more joggers went by. Wapinski followed the shoreline rushing his casts, not concentrating, thinking he and Red should move south into Marin County, work Tiburon where four-bedroom condominiums with views of San Francisco were selling from $55,000, even $60,000. Or Belvedere with homes in the $80,000 range. Now
there
was a commission! And those people were buying! He bit the inside of his cheek, thought, We’ve got no plan, no future, just two nice people living together, trying to make some money. A third set of runners appeared on Cataract Trail. One saw Bob, waved, called out, “Fishin’s better at the Upper Res.”

Now Wapinski passed from the Lower Res into the ravine of the upper creek. The trail here was much farther from the water. He slowed, watched the fast water, the pools. Fishing currents was different than fishing lakes or even slow water holes in streams. One can catch fish in still water without concentration but fishing riffles and rapids requires intense focus. Wap climbed the bank, studied the stretch. Water cascaded over a series of large boulders about five hundred feet upstream, then eddied into the bank, dumped and narrowed into a deep channel. He descended toward a switchback, approached the water cautiously, squatted, added a heavier split shot, edged forward. Now he cast across and upstream. As the current propelled the bait downstream he reeled in, then let out as the worm tumbled by. He reeled in, cast again, this time closer to the opposite shore. Now he was fishing. Now there were no thoughts of women, of money, of politics. He worked the far bank dropping his worm at one-foot intervals up the creekside, missing a few casts, recasting before moving up, always working the bait downstream after the initial upstream toss. He felt a hit, a light tap through the line, the rod, into his wrist. He paused, counted ... four, five, six ... flicked the tip. In still water one lets the fish take the bait because the fish isn’t in a rush. In rapids a trout will dart from an area of protection to the rushing bait and back to its cover in the snap of your fingers, perhaps still not taking the bait but certainly testing it, moving it, mouthing it. Wap reeled in, replaced his worm with a fresh one, recast toward the exact same spot, missed it by two feet. Again he reeled in, recast, aiming, hitting the spot, the bait dropping into the current, then Tap! Pause. Pause. Flick! The line came alive. Wap raised the rod tip, kept the line tight, not really interested in playing this fish, his first real fish of the day, wanting to have one in his creel before chancing a play. The fish tugged, leaped slapping the water surface, tail-walking, a beautiful spotted pink, gold-green rainbow flashing, then under, dashing downstream slackening the line, Wapinski reeling like mad trying to keep tension, trying to keep the trout from throwing the hook, adrenaline rushing. Ten feet away Bobby raised and reeled and lifted the trout and flicked him up on the bank where the fish flopped wildly and did throw the hook and fell back toward the water as Bobby dove into the bank grasping, fins and hands flashing until Bobby clutched the trout in both hands, laughing and smiling and estimating it was at least thirteen inches which he was certain was huge for the San Antonio and wait until he showed it to Coleman in the office on Monday.

Every fish is a thrill to catch but none as thrilling as the first trout of the year caught in rapids. He pulled two more, smaller ones, from that spot, then worked up to the eddy below the large boulders and caught a brook trout, then another rainbow which he played until the fish was exhausted, then carefully brought it in, unhooked it and let it go.

Now he again checked his watch. It was 9:50. He had not made it to the upper reservoir, had never been there, decided he’d push on then speed up his return. Near the upper dam he climbed back to the trail, clambered up the steep staircase to the top and beheld a lovely, seemingly secluded mountain tarn. He thought to check his watch but purposefully decided against it. Quickly they set out.

A quarter mile up the narrow trail, the trail several hundred meters from the small lake, he smelled smoke. Just a whiff. He glanced back, up, left and right. He stepped off the trail, glided smoothly, silently into the thick stand of fir, listened. From the lake he heard voices. Josh sensed his caution, stepped close, quiet, glancing curiously with that furrowed brow, head atilt. Bobby put his hand lightly on Josh’s head, ran his fingers to the back of his ears, massaged softly, slowly. Quietly they moved through the trees toward the tarn. There was radio music playing very low, the voices of a man, a woman, the giggle of a child. He could not see them. The radio ceased. Back on the trail he heard the footfalls and heavy breathing of another jogger. The jogger passed. Wap could not get a fix on the voices. Slowly he and Josh descended through the forest. Through branches he saw a hint of fluttering cloth. He stopped, crouched. Through the lower, less dense foliage the image was clearer yet he was still uncertain. He discerned a dark plane—interpreted it as the roof of a tent. He was about to reverse his course when he saw a whitish cloth move and realized it was a woman’s dress. He focused on her as intensely as he’d focused on the cascades, connecting her to the tent, the other voices, imagining her movement pattern as he’d imagined that of the unseen trout, attempting to devise a means of happening upon her. Again voices. They were quiet, nearly camouflaged. He suspected they were hiding, squatting illegally on water district property. He backed out, coaxed Josh back, then penetrated the woods fifty yards down trail and noisily worked his way to lake edge. There he saw a young man attempting to fish clear water with white string and a branch.

“You’re more apt to get a hit under those branches—” Wapinski began.

“Wha!!!” The man startled. “Where’d you come from?”

“Just walked in.” Bobby smiled attempting to set the man at ease. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“Christ no! You a goddamn warden? I didn’t catch nothin.”

“Geez, no.” Wap rested his pole on the ground, held his open hands out, palms down. “Just came to fish. You catch anything with that string?”

“Not trying to catch anything. Just watchin the lake. Julie wants to document who’s ... ah, I mean ... nobody comes up here but those idiots preparing for the Dipsea or the Cataract Trail Run.”

“The Dip ...?”

“Dipsea. The race. Like the Cataract Trail, except down in Mill Valley. Starts with like seven hundred steps.”

“Mill Valley?” Wap played dumb. He flicked his worm into the lake, glanced peripherally at the young man, thought he’s eighteen, maybe nineteen.

“You’re not from here, are you?” The young man stood. He looked shabby.

“No. From Pennsylvania. Just out here—”

“If you’re thinking of moving out here”—his voice was defensive—“don’t. And don’t get caught without a license.”

“Eh?” Wap reeled in, cast farther out, let his worm sink.

“You want to help us?” The young man’s voice changed.

“Help you do what?”

“You’re not a developer, are you?”

“Me! No way. I’m just—”

“Why don’t you talk to Julie and Presnell. We could use a little help. I’m sick en tired of this. I’m Baba.”

“It comes down to this—” Presnell said after Baba had led Bobby into the fir thicket of the small camp, and Presnell and Julie were comfortable that Bobby was neither a politician nor a developer, “last year the federal government ordered the town to install like this really expensive filtering system on the reservoir water.”

“Here?!” Wap was surprised. The lakes, especially the Upper Res, seemed pristine. He continued to assay the camp. The setup was shoddy. All four people, the three adults and a small child they called Natasha, looked gray, damp, undernourished. Presnell was particularly gaunt.

“We’ve been up here three months,” Presnell told Wapinski. “We drink directly from the lake. I record our daily intake. Look at Natasha.” Presnell gestured toward the child. “Perfectly healthy. But the town, instead of filters—”

Julie finished his sentence. “They drilled six wells into various levels of the aquifer.”

“That’s cheaper?” Bobby asked. He wanted to ogle Julie—dirt-coated, gray, thin, she was still attractive—but he turned back to Presnell.

“That’s how they sold it,” Presnell continued. “But this is what’s really going down. San Martin officially abandoned the reservoirs except the other side of the Lower Res, which they designated open space.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“No. Now the state Department of Public Health can change the land classification—no more protected watershed. This happens all over. That’s what we’re protesting. When the state approval goes through, the zoning can be changed. Then the Water District can sell the land. And the lake! Then it’s open to development.”

“Wait a minute.” Wapinski dropped his gaze, shook his head. “The people I’m here with, they’re real estate agents. I don’t think they know anything about this.”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not?”

“Where’re you from, Man? The moon? Wake up. The politicians, Man, and the developers already have options on the land. But they don’t want anyone to know. We’ve got people who can prove this.” Presnell leaned close to Bobby, then in conspiratorial tones added, “Options like the land’s worthless. Undevelopable. Cheap, Man. They’re stealing it. That’s the way it goes. Look out there. There’ll be roads coming right up here. A bummer, Man. We’re in somebody’s backyard. On top of their septic system. There’ll be a dock right there. And fuckin real estate agents and open houses inviting everyone—”

“Holy shit!” Bobby checked his watch. It was already noon. “Ah, I gotta go. But I want to talk more. I want to know about this. Presnell, wasn’t it?”

“Right on, Brother.”

“Okay. I’ll be back. I’d like to help.”

“Good. They sell it all off, it becomes private. No fishing.”

“You want some fish?” Bobby opened his creel. “To eat?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah! Thanks.”

“Victoria, Timmy’s sister,” Red said. “I guess you never met her. She moved in with Gino before you came out.”

“I thought, you know, we’d just go out and eat.” They were in the bedroom of their trailer on Bear Flag Place in Bahia de Martin. It was warm, windy, nearly six
P.M
. “Just us. To celebrate. It’s my first commission.”