Authors: David Ebershoff
Linda sent the note to Charlotte, who read it while nibbling her lip. She wrote a note and returned it to Linda. It arrived safely, unnoticed by Miss Winterbourne’s patrolling eye, but when she read it, Linda let out a little gasp.
Linda Stamp is in love!
She didn’t know what was more shocking, the note itself or Miss Winterbourne’s claw landing on her desk and plucking the note and raising it to her face. Miss Winterbourne’s eyes narrowed, and she said, “Class, I have some news.” The students perked up, hair bows and cowlicks rising and ears warm and red from stale schoolroom air pricked up too.
“You’ll be interested to know that our very own Linda Stamp is in love. Unless one of you claims this note, I’ll assume Linda wrote it herself, and she will spend the afternoon clearing the brush around the outhouse.” The students sat upon their hands and Charlotte pushed her nose into her book and Linda was alone, and although she had expected life to treat her differently, she hadn’t expected life to mishandle her so unjustly. Nor had she expected the betrayal from Charlotte, who at that very moment closed her book and claimed the note’s authorship.
At the end of the day, Miss Winterbourne sent Linda and Charlotte with a pair of scythes into the thicket at the top of the hill, and she sent Bruder, who had arrived to fetch Linda, home.
“He didn’t even argue with her,” Charlotte pointed out. “He left without you.”
“No one can argue with her.”
“But didn’t you say he does whatever he wants?”
For two hours they cleared the brush, the spiky branches scratching their forearms, and when at last Miss Winterbourne released them, they walked down to Charlotte’s house. A certain bond, too tentative to discuss, had looped the two girls together this afternoon, and each sensed it, although differently: Linda believed that Charlotte was her friend, and Charlotte believed that she would keep Linda honest. As they
walked down the hill, their swinging arms brushed, and the blood from their scratches, just two tiny drops, mixed.
Charlotte lived with her father in a blackie on a strip of beach where the widowers and the loners and the gimps huddled in a village of outcasts who scraped the sea for their living. People said that these men were too grimy, too greasy with fish oil, too accustomed to scratching in impolite corners of the body, to marry. “Who would have them?” asked Margarita. “You’d be doomed to filth.” The blackies were lined with tar paper, their walls smudged with kerosene oil and pipe smoke, fingerprints and fish scales and, in the loneliest cottages, missiles of mucus launched from the nostril’s silo. Any metal that wasn’t brass, even a belt buckle or a trouser button, would pit up with salt and flake away with black corrosion. The shacks stood so close to the surf that they didn’t have front windows, only a door on a perpetually crumbling hinge, and when the wind blew and the men were too drunk to remember to properly latch things up, the storm gusts would strip the doors from their frames like a bandage torn from a wound.
As they reached Charlotte’s blackie, the sun was setting and the ocean lay calm and golden and broken by nothing but the splash of a flyingfish. Charlotte offered Linda a cup of milk and lit a lamp and then a cigarette. Linda had never seen a girl smoke: the purply-gray smoke oozed in Charlotte’s mouth. Charlotte gave Linda a cigarette, and it dangled between her lips as she tried to figure out what to do with it.
“Did you hear they’re making plans to run electricity down here and out into the fields?” said Charlotte. “Finally someone’s remembering the blackies. Pup’s up off Point Conception chasing otters, but they say there might be lights in here by the time he’s home. I’m writing a story about it, from the rise of the first pole until the bulbs illuminate.” Lately when she set out to cover a story, she’d wear a broadcloth skirt and, hanging from her waist, a nickel watch with a shamrock etched into its case. She had started to say things like
Time’s a reporter’s enemy
and
And that’s just the way it is
and other sayings that Linda was sure Charlotte had learned from reading in the library the month-old newspapers from back east. “I’m going to tell the truth, and that’s just the way it is.” And soon Linda learned that the way it was in Charlotte’s stories, no matter how far from the truth, was accepted without skepticism: Margarita’s counter buzzed with items from the
Bee
whether they were correct or
not; it was as if it almost didn’t matter. “It might as well be true,” she’d heard Charlotte say.
“Do you ever worry about getting things wrong?”
“I haven’t yet.”
They were as close as either would get in her life to having a best friend, although certainly at this point neither pondered such a fate. But they mutually understood that each was in need of an ally before taking on the larger world. A few years ago, Linda had tried to teach Charlotte to fish, but out in the dory, Charlotte had tripped on the anchor line and plunged overboard. “I guess I was meant for terra firma,” Charlotte had said. “Hard land for hard facts,” she had said, laughing at her own humor, as she always did.
Now Charlotte said, “Did I mention that I’ve got my nose into something else right now? I’d tell you if I was sure you could keep a secret.” Linda assured her that she could, and Charlotte summed her up with her steel-colored eye. “Did you know that something funny’s going on out at the Cocoonery?” Linda asked what, and soon Charlotte, like a split melon, was spilling what she held—for even more exciting to Charlotte than discovering a good story was passing it on.
The Cocoonery—every town has one or two such buildings—had risen opulently years before for a purpose long since gone obsolete. Sometime around the turn of the century it first opened as a silkworm farm. A Minnesota real-estate developer by the name of Mina Van Antwerp, birch-faced and set with a Nordic jaw, had settled one hundred acres in the hills east of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, establishing what she called the Minneapolis Beach Colony. She arrived in California with a plan to turn the soil into gold or, in this particular case, raw fluttering spinneret silk. Miss Van Antwerp placed ads in the newspapers of dug-in snowy northern towns, Duluth and Boulder Junction and Fargo and even Winnipeg, offering five-acre get-rich-quick plots to anyone interested in growing mulberry trees. With a team of ranch hands she built the Cocoonery: thirty feet high, crossbeams of ponderosa tied with strips of leather soaked in oily water, tin roof, sliding barn doors on all sides to let in the sun and, eventually, a railroad car. Inside, the trays of silkworm larvae were stacked to the ceiling, each drawer incubating hundreds of thousands of silkworms. But Miss Van Antwerp was a better saleswoman than sericulturist, and—to her great
shock—the silkworms hatched while the mulberry trees were still saplings. With nothing to eat, the hundred million worms devoured themselves, and the most Darwinian cannibals, engorged for a single night, proceeded to starve to death. The collapse of the Minneapolis Beach Colony followed immediately, homes abandoned months after they were built, deeds to worthless land crinkled up and tossed from fleeing buckboards. For years the Cocoonery stood empty on the hillcrest, where the winds blew from every direction and the grasses dried to every shade of gold. Then, just before the war, Herr Beck, whose inheritance had come in the form of gladiolus bulbs, bought the building and reestablished the Cocoonery, this time as a co-operative where the growers brought their plants and cut flowers. Under Beck’s organization, the produce was sold to distributors from Los Angeles and Riverside who backed their railroad cars into the building and pulled out with their perfumed freight: poinsettias in autumn, secreting narcissus in winter, ranunculus in spring, honking gladiolus in June, bird-of-paradise flapping across the yellow span of summer; and asters and blue-belled delphiniums and cabbage-size peonies and roses as big and white as eggs on two-foot stems. Those trains, chugging along a special track that ran to the Cocoonery’s gate and up its little hill, hacked coal-cough across the surrounding farms, including Condor’s Nest; the engineers tossed their Hapsburg root-beer bottles into the gully along the tracks and, embarrassingly, the limp, deflated balloons of their syphilis-avoiding condoms. And now a fleet of pickup trucks pop-gunned their way across the fields out to the Cocoonery:
crack! crack! crack!
, their wheels digging rutted shortcuts into the scrubland around the hill. The trucks drooled tarry oil into the roads, leaving Linda with another farm chore, to scrape the black gunk from the hinny’s hooves. And the girls who worked at the Cocoonery, cutting stems with dull knives and potting three hundred poinsettias a day with bloodied fingertips: sometimes they’d come into the village and smoke on Margarita’s porch and whistle at the traffic. Even Linda knew that the Cocoonery had rapidly changed the eastern hill country. Last year, one of the girls had been stabbed in the throat with a pruning knife; and every few months a girl fled, her swelling stomach hidden under the folds of her apron. No, flower distribution wasn’t all that went on out there, Charlotte explained. “It’s turning wild.”
Linda asked Charlotte what, exactly, she meant.
“Why don’t you come with me on Saturday night, and together we’ll have a look-see.”
It was a few miles past the village, beyond the lettuce fields and the dairy farms and up in the folds of the foothills. On this Saturday night in October, stars and the dimpled moon lit the way along the railroad track, and it was colder inland than by the shore. She and Charlotte didn’t speak, the gravel loud beneath them. Charlotte had told Linda to wear shoes she could run in. “Run?” “Just in case.” Charlotte said that they shouldn’t take the main road out to the Cocoonery—“Then they’ll see us, and we most definitely aren’t supposed to be there”—and Linda’s heart quickened over what they might find.
She had lied to Bruder: she’d told him she was spending the night with Charlotte, and she hadn’t been prepared for him to ask, “Doing what?” “Doing what?” she repeated, wondering if her promise not to tell anyone included him. “We’ll be mending socks. Her Pup’s coming home soon.” As it slipped from her mouth, the lie stung her with regret, and she knew he didn’t believe her. “I’ll tell you later,” she tried, but the lie was told, and what was it Valencia used to say when Linda was little? “You can’t unsay a lie.” Was that it? Was that what Valencia had said?
“Do you hear the music?” said Charlotte.
It greeted them, running down the canyon, a fast river of rhythm. Linda and Charlotte continued along the tracks in a ravine between two hills, and then the tracks turned and the hills fell away and they saw the Cocoonery. It sat atop a lone hillock surrounded by live-oaks, its glass walls lit and glowing, and
Zeltmusik
throbbed from the open doors. The tin roof reflected the torches staked around the building and on the hillside, the flames bent and broken in the wind and snake-black oil smoke slithering through a hole in the sky. Linda and Charlotte crept closer and found a sycamore’s Y-branch to sit upon to inspect the scene. Through the glass walls they saw a
banda
on a stage, the musicians in white silk shirts with ruffled sleeves: one man at a 750-pound parlor piano, a boy surrounded by bongos, a man in spectacles with a Sevilla mandolin on his lap, a fourth plucking a nickel-shell banjo. People were dancing in a line, men she didn’t recognize and girls more or less
Linda’s age, their faces shiny with heat and their blouses split open to reveal their breasts. For the most part the men looked like the fishermen and hands and migrants who traveled with the seasons; their shirtsleeves were rolled past their elbows, their denim jeans crusted with field soil, and their eyes bright with greediness and a vulnerable uncertainty and awkwardness about how to dance. Linda guessed they’d come from Oceanside and Escondido and maybe even from the apple orchards in Julian, and perhaps some of them were the bachelors who lived in the earth-hovels on the slope of Mt. Palomar, men who formed a disorganized but heavily armed regiment that made its living charging tolls to the Sunday drivers who ascended the mountain’s peak.
On the hill around the Cocoonery were dozens of motorcars, reflecting the torch flames in their spoked wheels and running boards and in the brass-trimmed bulbous horns screwed to their dashes. More cars than wagons, and Linda knew that the cars belonged to men who weren’t hands—men perhaps all the way from San Diego, shop owners and insurance salesmen and maybe even one or two of the real-estate developers who’d been turning up at Margarita’s counter in recent months, asking around about the ocean farms. At the foot of the hill, horses were hitched to the rail fence; the torches caused them to stamp nervously, and their rubbery nostrils flared, and the horses looked out of place. The music floated down the hill
car-rum-dum-dum! car-rum-dum-dum!
, the melody mixing with the men laughing and the loud girls telling jokes with punch lines Linda couldn’t hear and a happy, stumbling brawl over a bottle. There were four or five fishermen Linda knew from the pier, Barney and Beet Pete and H.D., who was really just a boy, too young to shave, as hairless as a honeydew, which was where he got his name. The fishermen were sitting outside the Cocoonery on overturned crates labeled live plants, rolling cigarettes and passing around a small jug; fish-faced men with popping, gelatinous eyes and mouths shaped like O’s as they tilted the jug toward their pouts. Other men sat outside on logs and crates, in circles lit by a fire in a ditch, and dogs were snapping at the sparks and chasing one another, and a pair of mongrels were stuck together in intercourse and a couple of men had to pull them apart. Men were humming and pouring wine from bottles and whiskey from burlap-wrapped flasks, and the torches revealed the wink of drink in their eyes.
“Look over there,” whispered Charlotte. “It’s Mr. Klift.” She wrote
his name in her notepad, the first in a list entitled “Who I Saw.” Marcel Klift was a lawyer with offices in both Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea and Del Mar, and he was dancing with a woman with a red fox tippet around her plump shoulders and a net-veil hat. Next to them was Dr. Copper in the black suit he wore when visiting the dying, but tonight with a cactus rose in his lapel. On his arm was not his doctor’s bag but a girl in a carelessly sewn dress. She was twirling around him, trying to get him to dance, saying, “Come on, Hal, move your feet!”