The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (16 page)

“Bookmaker,” Tom repeated. He shook Wentworth’s hand. “I’m happy to meet a bookmaker, sir.”

“You take an interest in books?”

“I surely do. I was a lawyer once, and had to read the worst kind of books. Now I’m free to read what I like, when I can find it.”

“You have an extensive collection?” Wentworth asked, knocking his glasses up his nose with a finger to see Tom better.

“No sir. Fifty volumes or so, but I keep trading them with our neighbors for others.”

“Ah. And you, young man—do you read?” His eyes were the size of eggs behind his spectacles, and they held my gaze with ease.

“Yes, sir. Tom taught me how, and now that I can I enjoy it more than almost anything.”

Mr. Wentworth smiled briefly. “It’s refreshing to hear that San Onofre is a literate community. Perhaps you’d like to take a tour of our establishment? I can take a few moments from the work here, and we do have a modest printing arrangement that might be of interest.”

“We’d be delighted,” Tom said.

“Lee and I will go get some lunch,” Jennings said. “Back shortly.”

“We’ll wait for you,” Tom said. “Thanks for bringing us here.”

“Thank the Mayor.”

“Keep kneading until you get a perfect consistency,” Wentworth was saying to his students, “then begin to roll out the water. I’ll be back before the pressing.”

He led us to another room with good windows, one filled with small metal boxes set on tables. A woman was turning a handle on the side of one of these machines, rotating a drum on which a piece of print-covered paper was clamped. More pages covered by print were ejected from the bottom of the box.

“Mimeograph!” Tom cried.

The woman working the machine jerked at Tom’s shout, and glared at him.

“Indeed,” said Wentworth. “We are a modest operation, as I said. Mimeographing is our principal form of printing here. Not the most elegant method, or the most long lasting, but the machines are reliable, and besides, they’re about all we’ve got.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” Tom said, taking up a page to read it.

“It suffices.”

“Pretty color ink, too,” I put in; the ink was a bluish purple, and the page was thick with it.

Wentworth let out a short, sharp laugh. “Ha! Do you think so? I would prefer black, myself, but we must work with what we have. Now over here is our true pride. A hand letter press.” He gestured at a contraption of bars holding a big screw, which took up most of the far wall.

“Is that what that is,” Tom said. “I’ve never seen one.”

“This is what we do our fine work on. But there isn’t enough paper, and none of us knew, at first, how to set type. So it goes very slowly. We have had some successes, however. Following Gutenburg, here is our first one.” He hauled a big leather-bound book off the shelf beside the machine. “King James version, of course, although if I could have found a Jerusalem, it would have been a difficult choice.”

“Wonderful!” Tom said, taking the book. “I mean—” He shook his head, and I laughed to see him at a loss for words at last—it took a pile of words to do it. “That’s a lot of typesetting.”

“Ha!” Wentworth took the book back from Tom. “Indeed. And all for the sake of a book we already have. That’s not really the point, is it.”

“You print new books?”

“That occupies at least half our time, and is the part I’m most interested in, I confess. We publish instruction manuals, almanacs, travel journals, reminiscences.…” He looked at Tom, his eyeballs swimming in the glass of his spectacles. “As a matter of fact, we invite all survivors of the war to write their story down and submit it to us. We’re almost certain to print it up. As our contribution to historical record.”

Tom raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

“You ought to do it,” I urged him. “You’d be perfect for it, all those stories you’ve got about the old time.”

“Ah, a storyteller?” said Wentworth. “Then indeed you should. My feeling is, the more accounts we have of that period, the better.”

“No thank you,” Tom said, looking uncomfortable.

I shook my head, perplexed once again that such a talky old man would so stubbornly refuse to discuss his own life story—which is all some people can be gotten to talk about.

“Consider it further,” Wentworth said. “I think I could guarantee the readership of most of the San Diego residents. The literate residents, I mean to say. And since the Salton Sea people have contacted us—”

“They contacted you?” Tom interrupted.

“Yes. Two years ago a party arrived, and since then your guides Lee and Jennings, very industrious men, have supervised the reconstruction of a rail line out there. We’ve shipped books to them, and they tell us they’ve sent them even farther east. So distribution of your work, though uncertain, could very well span the continent.”

“You agree that communication extends that far?”

Wentworth shrugged. “We see through a glass darkly, as you know. I have in my possession a book printed in Boston, rather well done. Beyond that, I cannot say. I have no reason to disbelieve their claims. In any case, a book by you might just as easily reach Boston as that book reached me.”

“I’ll think about it,” Tom said, but in a tone that I knew meant he was just killing the subject.

“Do it, Tom,” I objected.

He just looked at the big press.

“Come see what we have printed so far,” Wentworth added by way of encouragement, and led us out of the printing room to a corner room, again a chamber bright with sun, its windows overlooking the point break below. This was the library: tall bookcases alternated with tall windows, and held books old and new.

“Our library,” said Wentworth. “Not a lending library, unfortunately,” he added, interpreting perfectly the greedy smacking of Tom’s lips. “This case contains the works printed here.” Tom began to examine the shelves of the bookcase Wentworth indicated. Most of the books on them were big folders, filled with mimeographed pages; one shelf held leather-bound books the size of the old ones.

Wentworth and I watched Tom pull out book after book. “
Practical Uses of the Timing Device From Westinghouse Washer-Dryers,
by Bill Dangerfield,” Tom read aloud, and laughed.

“It looks like your friend might take a while,” Wentworth said to me. “Would you like to see our gallery of illustrations?”

What I really wanted to do was look at the books along with Tom, but I saw Wentworth was being polite so I said yes sir. We went back into the hall. Before a long window made of several large panes of glass the hall widened, and against the wall opposite the window were pictures of all sorts of animals, drawn in bold strokes of black ink.

“These are the originals of illustrations for a book describing all the animals seen in the back country of San Diego.” I must have looked surprised, for the pictures included some animals I had seen only in Tom’s tatty encyclopedia: monkeys, antelopes, elephants.… “There were very extensive zoos in San Diego before the war. We assume that all the animals in the main zoo were killed in the downtown blast, but there was an annex to the zoo in the hills, and those animals escaped, or were freed. Those who survived the subsequent climatic changes have prospered. I myself have seen bears and wildebeest, baboons and reindeer.”

“I like the tiger here,” I said.

“I did that one myself, thanks. That was quite an encounter. Shall I tell you about it?”

“Sure.”

We sat down in wicker chairs placed before the windows.

“We were on a trek beyond Mount Laguna. Do you know Mount Laguna? It is a considerable peak twenty miles inland, and the snowpack lies heavy on it nearly all the year round. In the spring the streams in the surrounding hills gush with the melt, and in their steeper sections they can be quite impassable.

“Our expedition to Julian was dogged by bad luck every step of the way. The radio equipment we had been told of was demolished. The library of Western literature I had hoped to relocate was nowhere to be found. One of the members of our expedition broke an ankle in the ruins of the town. Lastly, worst of all, on our return we were discovered by the Cuyamuca Indians. These Indians are exceedingly jealous of their territory, and parties traveling in the area have reported fierce attacks at night, when the Indians are least afraid of firearms. All in all, it was a bad day’s march, our injured friend between us in a sling, and Cuyamucans on horseback observing us from every open hilltop.

“As nightfall approached I struck out ahead of my party, to scout possible camps, for our slow progress meant we would be spending the night in Indian territory. I found nothing very suitable for night defense, and as it was getting near sundown I retraced my path. When I got to the small clearing where I had left my friends, however, they were not there. Their tracks were confusing, but seemed to lead north, and over the sounds of the rushing streams in the area I imagined I heard gunfire in that direction as well.

“While I was pursuing my friends the sun went down, and as you know the forest begins immediately upon that departure to get very dark. I came to a steep creek; I had no idea where my party had gotten to; I looked at the creek, momentarily at a loss. Staring through the dusk at the tumbling water I became aware of the presence of another pair of eyes, across the creek from me. They were huge eyes, the color of topazes.”

“What are topazes?” I asked.

“Yellow diamonds, I should have said. As I met the gaze of those unblinking eyes, the tiger who owned them stalked out of a clump of torrey pine to the bank of the stream directly across from me.”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed.

“No. He was a fully grown Bengal tiger, at least eight feet long, and four feet high at the shoulders. In the dim light of that glade his winter fur seemed green to me, a dull green banded by dark stripes.

“He appeared from the clump so suddenly that at first I was merely appalled at the catastrophic proportions my bad luck had reached. I was sure I was living out the last moments of my existence, and yet I could not move, or even take my eyes from the unblinking gaze of that beautiful but most deadly beast. I have no notion of exactly how long we stood there staring at each other. I know it was one of the central minutes of my life.

“Then the tiger stepped over the creek with a fluid little jump, as easy as you would step over that crack in the floor. I braced myself as he approached—he lifted a paw as wide as my thigh, and pressed it down on my left shoulder—right here. He sniffed me, so close I could see the crystalline coloring of his irises, and smell blood on his muzzle. Then he took his paw from me and with a nudge of his massive head pushed me to my right, upstream. I stumbled, caught my balance. The tiger padded past me, turned to look, as if to see if I were following. I heard a rasp from its chest—if it was a purr, it was to a cat’s purr as thunder is to a doorslam. I followed it. My astonishment had gone outside itself, and prevented all other thought. I kept my hand on the tiger’s shoulder, where I could feel the big muscles bunch and give as it walked, and I stayed at its side as it wound between trees on a path of its own. Every minute or two it would turn its head to look into my eyes, and each time I was mesmerized anew by its calm gaze.

“Much later the moon rose, and still we walked through the forest together. Then I heard gunshots ahead, and the beast’s purring stopped, its shoulder muscles tensed. In a clearing illumined by moonlight I made out several horses, and around them men—Indians, I guessed, for my party had no horses with it. More gunshots sounded from trees on the other side of the clearing, and I surmised that my friends were there, for just as we had no horses, the Cuyamuca Indians had no guns. The tiger shrugged off my hand with a twitch of his fur, a twitch that no doubt usually removed flies, and strode ahead of me, down toward the clearing.”

“Hey!” Tom cried, hurrying around the corner of the hallway. He held one of the books printed on the hand letter press firmly before him, and gestured with it at Wentworth.

“Which one have you found?” Wentworth inquired. He didn’t seem disturbed by the interruption of his story, but I was squirming.

“An American Around the World,”
Tom read. “
Being an Account of a Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 2030 to 2039.
By Glen Baum.”

Wentworth uttered his sharp, spontaneous laugh. “Very good. You have found the masterpiece of our line, I believe. Besides being an intrepid adventurer, Glen can tell a tale.”

“But is it true? An American went around the world and returned just eight years ago?” Put that way, I understood why Tom was so flabbergasted—I had been stuck with the tiger in the back country—and I got out of my chair to have a look at this book. Sure enough, there it was:
An American Around the World,
right there on the cover.

Wentworth was smiling at Tom. “Glen sailed to Catalina in 2030, that is certain. And he reappeared in San Diego one night in the fall of 2039.” His egg eyes flickered and something passed between the two men that I didn’t catch, for Tom laughed out loud. “The rest you have between those covers.”

“I had no idea this kind of stuff was still being written,” Tom said. “How wonderful.”

“It is, isn’t it.”

“Where is this Glen Baum now?”

“He took off for the Salton Sea last fall. Before he left he told me the title of his next book:
Overland to Boston.
I expect it will be as interesting as the one you hold.” He stood up. Down the hall I could hear Jennings, joking with the woman in the mimeograph room. Wentworth led us back into the library.

“So what happened to you and the tiger?” I asked.

But he was rooting in a box on the bottom shelf of one case. “We have a lot of copies of that book. Take one with you back to San Onofre, courtesy of the New Green Tiger Press.” He offered one of the leather-bound books to Tom.

Tom said, “Thank you sir. This means a lot to me.”

“Always glad to get new readers, I assure you.”

“I’ll make all my students read it,” said Tom, grinning as if he’d just been handed a block of silver.

“You won’t have to make us,” I said. “But what about the tiger that time—”