Pasadena (23 page)

When Linda returned the kit to the store, Margarita offered a discount on its purchase. “Typically it’s a dollar and a half, but I’ll give it to you for ninety-five cents.” Linda declined. A vague fear had descended upon her, a worry she likened to the dread of not being able to feed herself. She had looked up the word “passion” in Edmund’s abandoned dictionary and skipped ahead to the final definition:
lust
.

“I know you think you don’t need it,” Margarita said, unpacking a shipment of barber’s egg shampoo. “But you will. It’ll happen even to you.”

Linda left and stood on the store’s porch; the rain ran in sheets from its eave. Los Kiotes Street, paved two summers before, looked slippery and dangerous, and she watched an automobile skid cheerfully into a hitching post. What she knew was this: She wasn’t like Valencia or Margarita, or anyone else. Her needs were different, and they’d remain so. But what waited ahead for Linda she couldn’t say. Would she one day work at the Cocoonery, separating the stalks of bird-of-paradise and packing the bundles of gladiolus and transplanting the Christmas poinsettias? It’s what girls from the ocean farms did. Or they would marry a hand and move into a shadowy hacienda in the foothills, giving birth in a back room. The unlucky ones had a sick father to tend to, each morning dampening a rag in a basin and dragging it across his underside. A few girls tended shops in Oceanside, selling sun hats to tourists or bolts of lace to daughters of men whose pockets had become lined in the latest rush for real estate. One girl she knew put on a pair of dungarees and took a job at the first filling station in town, Walthau’s, pumping gasoline and wiping the inland dust from the grilles. A couple of girls headed south to San Diego, donning the gray uniforms of the trolley transport, tearing tickets in two as the cars jangled along Union Street. Each waited for marriage impatiently, or so Linda had heard them say. Only Charlotte had escaped, but to where?

It caused a shudder to rise in Linda as she pulled down her hat and
stepped into the rain. Then she saw the flyer nailed to Margarita’s bulletin board:

On the porch, a stranger was handing out employment forms, shouting, “Join our crew! Join up today!”

“What exactly are you doing, anyway?” asked Linda.

“We’re stringing electricity out into the scrubland around town. I’ve got miles and miles of wire ready to go up.”

“Why would you want to do that? Those are nothing but sand fields and dried-up river plains. Nobody lives out there but a family of coyotes.”

“We’re making the way for progress, young lady.” The real-estate developer’s name was Paiver; his padded throat supported his greasy round face, his cheeks bright with burst capillaries. He used his overworked, nail-bitten fingers to cup his mouth and shout, “Come help your village grow!” Paiver was busy handing out flyers to the men entering and leaving Margarita’s, and he assured anyone who would listen that he paid the best wages in the village. He handed a flyer to Hammond Moss, who didn’t know how to read but said he’d sign up anyway. “About time the countryside gets some lights,” he said.

“Now, young lady, if you’ll excuse me,” Paiver said, “I’ve got to put a crew together to raise a thousand electricity poles.”

He went into the store, and Linda stood on the porch and watched the silver rain run from the roof. Margarita’s father, curled on an avocado crate, was drying a cat with his bandanna, and he reminded Linda to sign up inside for the electricity-pole crew. “It’s our civic duty.” He was a Sprengkraft, bulbous-nosed, white-haired, Rhône-blue eyes, a mind as foggy as a winter beach, and he cooed over the cat,
“Spaten, Spaten.”

By morning the rain had stopped, but the sky remained a swollen hide, and the muscular gray nimbostratus was hanging so low that Linda thought perhaps she could touch it were she to climb the first electricity pole. And Linda decided she’d join Paiver’s crew.

“You can’t join his crew,” said Dieter.

“Why not?”

“He’s not looking for little girls.”

She was learning not to get angry, to ignore her father instead, and she said, “I know for a fact that Mr. Paiver needs as many people as he can get.”

“You’re too busy here,” he said.

“I am?”

“You and your mother and Bruder have got to finish the staircase.” The three had begun erecting the one hundred steps before Christmas, and now the scaffold of stairs clung to the cliff face half-finished and skeletal. Valencia had worried that the rains would weaken the foundation, but Linda had insisted that each morning they rise and continue pounding through the winter patter. But now Linda was bored with the project and wanted to sign up for the pole crew, and a clenched fist pushed its way up her throat.

Again, Dieter told his daughter she couldn’t work alongside the men, and the two fought, each turning red and hot-throated, and Linda and her father simultaneously regretted that each did not understand the other, that neither tried to listen, and the shouting rose over the steady surf until at last Bruder said, “Let her go if she wants.”

The cottage fell silent and Linda and Dieter looked at him as if neither understood what he had said.

“Why shouldn’t she join the crew?”

It was settled, and Linda slipped Dieter’s slim-handled mallet into her pocket and laced up her boots. And even more astonishing than Bruder’s taking Linda’s side was his subsequent announcement that he would work alongside her on Paiver’s crew: “We’ll dig some holes and lay some poles.” And the two left for Margarita’s porch one gray-skyed morning.

Bruder was a deliberate man, and he had understood the implications when he and Dieter had struck their terms, but every night since then he had sat erect upon his bed and picked at the plaster in the wall and ignored the book in his lap and looked through his window across the fields to Linda’s cottage. He had become miserable in a way that he hadn’t thought possible, and equal to his disappointment in himself was his suffering. It was difficult to live near her and not reach to stroke the soft fur upon her arm. There had been an hour not long before when he had assured himself that patience would bring him
life’s riches, including Linda, and he had violated his own philosophy. At night he would descend the bluff and walk the beach, the surf rushing past his thighs, and the moonlight would guide him and he would test his voice against the ocean’s roar and his hollering would be lost to the waves and his face would become damp with salt and mist. He would call her name as loudly as he could, and he would realize that his yells were nothing against the Pacific—Linda’s ocean, as he thought of it—and his throat would hoarsen and Bruder would return to the Vulture House worried about his future. He realized, during these weeks, that he was as obsessed about future and fortune as the next man, maybe more so, and this disheartened Bruder, for it meant that his scorn for most men in the world would fit snugly around him too. He had never had Linda, yet he had managed to give her up; a few acres of onion fields separated them, and the knowledge that those acres were on their way to becoming his own brought no comfort at all. An image entered Bruder’s mind: of himself as an old man alone with his land; and although he had planned for that moment since he was a boy at the Training Society, hiding with a book in the walnut grove, sleeping like a bear in the trees, now the image, obtainable and true, delivered cold fear. Bruder, who had always wanted to be alone, now wasn’t prepared to live out his fate. And on the road into the village, he took Linda’s hand.

“What’s this?” she said. “You don’t talk to me for weeks and weeks, and now you want to lay your hand on me? Not so fast!”

“Linda, things aren’t so simple.”

“They never are.”

As the crew assembled on the porch, Paiver said that he wasn’t hiring girls, but Bruder defended Linda’s skills and Paiver folded his fat arms across his fat chest and Bruder stood close to the man and said, “I don’t think you understand.” Most of the other men who had signed up for the crew were hands and fishermen who all knew Linda, and they said, with morning-whiskey breath, “She’s all right. You can’t ask her to leave. She’s just one of us.” Linda let the others defend her, and eventually Paiver was persuaded to hire her.

But laying poles turned out to be even duller work than building a staircase. They stood around for an hour waiting for Paiver’s orders and at last he said, “All right, men. You’re off to bring some civilization to the dreaded frontier.” He cupped his fingers around his mouth and
warned the crew that a drooping electricity pole was a disaster waiting to happen, either today or down the line. At first he was unaware of his pun, then he chuckled over it and felt smart: a man who deserved to be developing the land. “We were all put here for a reason,” he liked to say, and Paiver—who would run out of cash before the lines were strung, abandoning the scrubland with one thousand utility poles sticking out of the ground—sent the crew on its way.

They boarded a buckwagon and rode to the edge of town, where the roads ended and the fields and irrigation ditches stopped at the scrub-land’s sagebrush gate and the chaparral stretched into the foothills, as it always had. The wagon halted at the corner of Miss Winterbourne’s property, her little lettuce field waiting for spring, and in the front window of her bungalow a roller shade descended and a long finger curled back a corner for a peek. A second wagon, rickety on narrow wheels, waited in the gully between the road and the field, its bed stacked with dozens of poles of stripped Sierra Nevada pine cleared from the western slopes not far from Yosemite and sent south on rail. The wood was a pale blond, the knots smooth and dark, and the poles were shorter than Linda had expected. She worried that the wires might droop dangerously low, tripping a mule deer or, even worse, catching a condor’s white underwing. When Paiver arrived in his car, she pointed this out to him. “Another word from you and I’ll send you home,” he growled, and Linda stepped back and bumped into Bruder, his chest hard against her shoulders.

It was a Saturday morning, and the men would be working Saturdays for a month, burying the poles in what Paiver called stand-up graves. “Six feet under. The trick to a sturdy pole is six feet under.”

Above them, the sky was balling up with westerly clouds and storm. In the distance, the ocean was fighting itself, the waves slapping the face of its surface. The water punched itself black, and wind lanced the boiling surf, releasing the whitecaps’ ooze. Three pelicans hung low, suspended in their wait for ink squid. The brief and violent California winter excited Linda, the four or six weeks in January and February when everything donned a coat of gray and damp. There was something dramatic about the rainy season that Linda looked forward to. It made her think of her mother’s youth—why, sometimes Linda doubted she could believe Valencia’s nearly biblical tales of flood and fire if she didn’t live at Condor’s Nest, where the winter drowned the
soil and had swollen Siegmund’s Swamp to its toyon rim; where the brittle autumn torch-lit the canyons, casting an orange glow brighter than an electricity pole could ever transmit.

At last Paiver began to divide the crew into pairs, assigning each team a spot every thirty feet along an old cow path. When he got to Linda, Paiver said to Bruder, “She’s yours, my friend,” and Bruder and Linda walked for about half a mile with pickax and shovel. There was nothing out here but the sandy land and the wiry wild sage and the rosemary shy in winter and the flooded gopher holes and the trails of shrew shit. On a sunny day there’d be a rattler or two sunning on the flat rocks, and lizards fast and colorless, and the spearmint smell of California burning itself to death. But today smelled of nothing but the future of rain. Far off, the ocean churned coldly, and barely visible was a thread of smoke stitching its way out of Miss Winterbourne’s chimney.

“Why on earth is he running poles this far out of town?” said Linda. “There’s nothing here.”

“One day there will be,” said Bruder.

“You can’t farm this soil.”

“They won’t be farmers. They’ll just be people needing a place to live.”

Lately there’d been more talk of it, at Margarita’s counter and in the
Bee
and even between Dieter and Valencia: the clearing of land, the rise of the bungalow, the people arriving in six-seater automobiles. Things had slowed down during the war but nothing would stop them now, the
Bee
’s land-listing column liked to say. A stuttering doughboy and his French bride had built themselves a beam-and-stucco house up the road from Condor’s Nest on land Linda had assumed uninhabitable; the well they had dug was questionable at best, and the acre of property didn’t come with an easement to the ocean. The vet couldn’t farm or fish, and so he introduced himself to the village as a housebuilder. By the road he erected a billboard that said:
NEW HOMES IN
20
DAYS
. But it was hard for Linda to imagine people living this far out of town, this far from the ocean, on land without a tree. So the story went: even Donna Marròn’s cattle had turned around at what was now the far edge of Miss Winterbourne’s lettuce field. The land was so dull and red-soiled that even at Margarita’s counter it was dismissed as worth less than the patch of soil at Condor’s Nest.

Bruder began to open a hole with the pickax, but on his first swing the point sank dully into the mud. He took the shovel and dug up a spadeful of sludge and tossed it over his shoulder. He had repeated this no more than five times when Linda asked, “And what am I supposed to do?”

“Watch me.”

“It’s going to take all day. I thought maybe there’d be some sort of hole-digging machine. Like an apple-corer.”

“Linda, can’t we just work side by side?”

She didn’t know what he meant by this and doubted its tenderness, but then she stopped herself; and for a long while he worked and she watched him silently. The sky continued to darken, and Bruder rolled his sleeves past his elbows, and as he swung the shovel, the hairs on his arms danced and his throat filled with blood and his shirt dampened and Linda could see all his flesh. She lay down and propped her cheek with her hand, and Bruder swung and looked to her, swung and looked again, and the rhythm overtook them and the day slipped on, and Bruder forgot what he had promised Dieter, and Linda forgot that Bruder had ever withheld his love. Bruder forgot that Dieter had warned that she was a dangerous girl, and Linda forgot that Bruder was an unknowable man. They were young, and each hoped to become another person in another life, and the shovel dug a hole in the soil never before touched by man.