The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (15 page)

With a tap of the knuckles on the desk the Mayor raised his voice again, sounding relaxed and reasonable. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Barnard. The largest resistance group on this coast is centered around Santa Barbara, we’ve heard. We met some of them out at the Salton Sea. We need to connect with them, and present a unified opposition to the Japanese on Catalina and the Santa Barbara islands. The first part of that task is to rid Orange County and Los Angeles of all Japanese tourists, and the traitors who guide them. So we need you. We need Onofre to join the resistance.”

“I can’t speak for them,” Tom said. I bit my lip and stayed silent. Tom was right; it would have to be voted. Tom waved a hand. “It sounds … well, I don’t know if we’ll want in or not.”

“You’ve got to want in,” the Mayor said fiercely, fist held over the desk. “This is more important than what you want. You tell them they can make this country what it used to be. They can help. But we all have to work together. The day will come. Another Pax Americana, cars and airplanes, rockets to the moon, telephones. A unified country.” Suddenly, without anger or whispery passion, he said, “You go back up there and tell your valley that they join the resistance or they oppose it.”

“Not a very neighborly way of putting it,” Tom observed, his eyes narrowed.

“Put it any way you please! Just tell them.”

“I’ll tell them. But they’ll want to know just exactly what you want of them. And I can’t guarantee what they’ll say to it.”

“No one’s asking you to guarantee anything. They’ll know what’s right.” The Mayor took a long look at Tom, his little eyes bright. “I would have thought an old timer like you would be hopping with joy to hear of the resistance.”

“I don’t hop much these days,” Tom said. “Bad knees.”

The Mayor circled the desk and bent over Tom’s chair, looked at Tom. With both hands he trapped one of Tom’s. “Don’t lose your feel for America, old man,” he said hoarsely. “It’s the best part of you. It’s what kept you alive for so long, whether you know it or not. You’ve got to fight to keep that feeling, or you’re doomed.”

Tom pulled his hand away. The Mayor straightened up and limped back around the desk. “Well, Ben! These gentlemen deserve to enjoy a little of the partying outside before they retire, don’t you agree?” Ben nodded and smiled at us. “I know you men had a hard night last night,” Danforth said, “but I hope you’ll have enough energy to join the folks outside for at least a short while.”

We agreed that we did.

“Before we go back out, then, let me show you a little secret.” We stood and followed him out of the room. He bobbed down the hallway to another door, and pulled a key from his vest. “In here is the key to a whole new world.” He unlocked the door, and we followed him into the room, which contained nothing but machine parts, scattered over three tables. On the biggest table was a metal box as big as a boat locker, covered with knobs and dials and gauges, with wires trailing out of it from two openings.

“Short wave radio?” Tom said.

“Exactly,” said Ben, beaming with approval at Tom’s good guess.

“We’ve got a man coming from the Salton Sea to fix this thing,” the Mayor whispered. “And when we do that, we’ll be in touch with the whole country. Every part of the resistance. It will be the start of a new age.”

So we stood there and stared at it for a while, and then tiptoed out of the room. When the Mayor was done locking the door we went outside onto the freeway, where the band was still playing. Instantly the Mayor was surrounded by young women who wanted a dance with him. Tom wandered off toward the west railing, and I went for the drink table. The man behind the table recognized me; he had helped dock our boat when we arrived at the island. “Drink’s on the house,” he declared, and poured me a cup of tequila punch. I took it and walked in circles around the dance floor. The women dancing with the Mayor held close to him and danced in slow circles. I was feeling the drink. The music, the electric lights glaring off the concrete, the bright rugs thrown here and there, the cool breeze, the night sky, the eerie ruined skyscrapers rising blackly from the murk around us—the incredible news of the American resistance—it all combined to put me in a blaze of excitement. I was on the edge of a new world, truly. I twisted through the crowd to Tom, who was leaning against the fat railing, looking down at the water. “Tom, isn’t it grand? Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Let me think, boy,” he said quietly.

So I walked back over to the band, subdued for a moment. But it didn’t last. The girl dancing with the Mayor was the blond who had served our table at the feast. When she gave way to another girl I hurried out among the dancers and swept her into a hug.

“Dance with me too,” I asked her. “I’m from the north.”

“I know,” she said, and laughed. “You sure aren’t one of the boys from around here, and that’s a fact.”

“From the icy north,” I said as I awkwardly swept her into the polka. It made me a little dizzy. “From over glaciers and crevasses and great expanses of snow have I come to your fair civilized town.”

“What?”

“Here from the barbarous north, to see your Mayor, the prophet of a new age.”

“He is like a prophet, isn’t he? Just like from church. My father says he’s made San Diego what it is.”

“I believe it. Did he make a lot of changes when he took office?”

“Oh, he’s been mayor since before I can remember. Since I was two, I think Daddy said.”

“Long time ago.”

“Fourteen years…”

I kissed her briefly, and we danced three or four songs, until my dizziness returned and I had trouble with my bearings. She accompanied me to the tables, and we sat and talked. I chattered on like the most extravagant liar in California; Nicolin himself couldn’t have beat me that night, and the girl laughed and laughed. Later on Jennings and Tom came by, and I was sorry to see them. Jennings said he was taking us to our night’s lodgings on the other end of the platform. Reluctantly I said goodnight to the girl, and followed them drunkenly down the freeway south, singing to myself, “Oomp-pah-pah,” and greeting most of the people we passed. Jennings installed us in one of the bungalows at the south end of the platform, and I chattered at the silent Tom for two or three minutes before I passed out. “A new age, Tom, I’m telling you. A new world.”

8

Shotgun blasts woke us up the next morning. Jumping up to look out the door of our little bungalow, we discovered that the Mayor and several of his men were taking target practice, shooting at plates that one of them was throwing out over the lake. The man threw—the plate arched out—the shooter aimed—
bam!
—a flat sound like two wet planks slapping together. About one in every three plates burst into white splinters. The rest clipped the sparkling surface of the lake and disappeared. Tom shook his head disdainfully as he regarded this exercise. “They must have found a lot of ammunition somewhere,” he said. Jennings saw us in our doorway and came over and led us to one of the tables set outside the big house. There in the tangy clouds of gunpowder smoke we had a breakfast of bread and milk. Between the bangs of the gun I could hear the American flag snapping smartly in the fresh morning breeze. Every time a plate exploded the men hooted and talked it over. The Mayor was a good shot; he seldom missed, which may have been the result of taking his turn often. The rest of his men might as well have been dumping those plates into the lake by the boxful.

When we were done eating the Mayor gave his shotgun to one of the men around him, and clumped over to us. He looked a bit smaller in the sunlight than he had under the lanterns and electric lights.

“I’m going to send you back to Jennings’ house by way of La Jolla, so you can talk to Wentworth.”

“Who’s he?” Tom asked, without any pretense of politeness.

“He’s our bookmaker. He can tell you more about the situation Ben and I described to you last night. After you’ve talked to him, Jennings and Lee and their crew will take you back north on the train.” He sat down across from us and leaned his thick forearms on the table. “When you get there, you tell your folk just what I said last night.”

“Let me understand you clearly,” Tom said. “You want us to join this resistance effort you’ve heard of.”

“That we’re part of. That’s right.”

“Which means what, in actual terms?”

Danforth stared steadily at Tom’s face. “Every town in the resistance has to do its share. That’s the only way we’ll achieve victory. Of course we’ve got a much larger population down here, and we’ll be providing most of the manpower on this coast, I’m sure. But we need to get through your valley on the tracks, for one thing. And you folks could make raids up the coast a lot easier than we can, living where you do. Or we could base our raids in your river, depending on how we decide to work it. See, there is no set way, you should understand that. But we need you to sign up.”

“What if we don’t want to?”

The Mayor’s jaw tightened. He let Tom’s question hang in the air for a while, and the men around us (target practice being over for the moment) grew silent. “I can’t figure you, old man,” Danforth complained. “You just take my message to the people in your valley.”

“I’ll tell them what you’ve told me, and we’ll let you know our decision.”

“Good enough. I’ll be seeing you again.” He pushed back his chair, stood up and limped into the gleaming white house.

“I think he’s done talking to you,” Jennings said after another long silence. “We can be off.” He led us back to our bungalow, and when Tom had gotten his shoulder bag we walked down the tilted ramp to the boats. Lee and Abe were waiting on the floating dock, and we all got in a boat and cut over the blue water to the lake’s north shore. It was a fine day, sky free of clouds and not much wind. We climbed up to a different train than the one we had arrived on, set on different tracks, ones that took us west along the shore of the lake. “Quite a terminal you have there,” Tom remarked, breaking his silence. Jennings began to describe every mile of the rail system, but since none of the names he mentioned meant anything to me I stopped listening and kept a lookout for the sea. We came to a big marsh just when I expected to spot it, and turned north to skirt the marsh’s edge. A heavily forested hill marked the northern end of the marsh, and we clattered along on a freeway that snaked through a crease to the east of the hill. Lee braked the car—I had learned to stick my fingers in my ears when he did that. “We have to walk to La Jolla,” Jennings said. “No tracks from here.”

“Nor roads neither,” Lee added.

We slid off the side of the handcar, and started up a trail that was the only passage through thick forest. It was more like what Tom called a jungle: ferns and creepers and vines wove the densely set trees together, and every lichen-stained branch was locked in a struggle for sunlight with ten other branches. Knots of torrey pine competed with trees I’d never seen the likes of before. There was a damp smell to the spongy trail, and fungus or bright green ferns grew on every log that had fallen across our path. Behind me Tom muttered as he walked, thumping his shoulder bag against his side. “Mount Soledad just another wet north face now. All the houses washed down. All fall down, all fall down.” Lee, striding ahead of me, turned and gave Tom a funny look. I knew just what the look meant: it was hard to believe Tom had been alive when these ruins had stood whole. Tom cursed as he kicked a root and mumbled on, unaware of Lee’s glance. “Flood and mud, rain and pain, lightning blast and fire burn, all fall down. And all that terrible construction. Ah ha, there’s a foundation. Was that one Tudor? Chinese? Hacienda? California
ranch?
” “What’s that?” Jennings called back, thinking he had heard a question. But Tom talked on: “This town was everything but itself. Nothing but money. Paper houses; this hill sure looks better with all that shit washed away. I wish they could see it now, hee hee hee.”

On the ocean side of the hill it was a different story. Where the hillside leveled off, forming a point that thrust out from the coast on either side, all the trees had been cleared away. In this clearing a few old buildings were surrounded by small wooden houses. The concrete walls of the old buildings had been repaired with redwood, and the new houses had been put together with fragments of the old, so that some had massive roof beams, others wide chimneys, others orange tile roofs. Most of the houses had been painted white, and the old concrete had been painted pale shades of blue or yellow or orange. As we descended the west side of the hill we caught sight of the clearing through the leaves, and the little village in it shone against the backdrop of the dark blue ocean. We came out of the overhanging branches of the forest, and the trail widened into a straight street paved with thick grass.

“Paint,” Tom observed. “What a good idea. But all the paint I’ve seen lately has been hard as rock.”

“Wentworth has a way to liquefy it,” Jennings said. “Same way he liquefies old ink, he tells me.”

“Who is this Wentworth?” I said.

“Come and find out,” said Jennings in reply.

At the far end of the street of grass, just above a small cove, was a low building made of tan blocks of stone. A wall made of the same sort of blocks surrounded the place, and torrey pines stood against the wall on both sides. We walked through a big wooden gate that had a tiger carved into it, a green tiger with black stripes. Inside the wall, grass alternated with patches of flowers. Jennings looked in the open door of the building, and waved us in after him.

The first room had big glass windows in one wall, and with its door open it was as sunny as the courtyard. A half dozen kids and three or four adults were at work on low tables, kneading a pure white dough that by its smell could not be bread. A man with black-rimmed spectacles and a salt-and-pepper beard looked up from a table where he was giving instructions to the workers, and walked over to us.

“Jennings, Lee,” he said, wiping his hands dry on a cloth tied around his waist. “What brings you out here today?”

“Douglas, this here is Tom Barnard, a … an elder of Onofre Valley, up the coast. We brought him down on the new tracks. Tom, this is Douglas Wentworth, San Diego’s bookmaker.”