The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (17 page)

Jennings and Lee entered the room. “Lunch time,” Jennings cried. Apparently it was the habit in San Diego to eat a meal in the middle of the day. “Have a good tour?” Tom and I told him that we had, and showed him our book.

“Another thing,” Wentworth said, groping in a different box. “Here is a blank book, in case you decide to write that memoir.” He riffled the pages of a bound book, showing them to be blank. “Give it back to us full, and we will set about the task of reproducing it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Tom. “You’ve given us enough already.”

“Please, take it.” Wentworth held it out to him. “We have plenty of these. No obligation to write—but if you decide to, then the materials will be at hand.”

“Well, thanks,” Tom said. After a moment’s hesitation he put the two volumes in his shoulder bag.

“Shall we have lunch out on their lawn?” Jennings asked, holding aloft a long loaf of bread.

“I must return to my class,” Wentworth said. “But feel free to enjoy the courtyard.” And to Tom, as he led us to the door: “Remember what I said about that memoir, sir.”

“I will. You’re doing great work here.”

“Thank you. Keep teaching people to read, or it will all go to naught. Now I must get back. Goodbye, thank you for visiting, goodbye.” He turned and went into the front room, where his students were still kneading the paper pulp.

After lunch in the sun-filled salt air of the courtyard, we hiked back over Mount Soledad to the tracks, and pumped the car northward up and down steep hills. A few miles up the tracks Tom had Lee apply the brakes. “Mind if we go out to the cliffs for a look around?”

Jennings looked doubtful, and I said, “Tom, we can look off cliffs when we get home.”

“Not like these.” Tom looked at Jennings. “I want to show him.”

“Sure,” Jennings said. “I told the wife we’d be back for supper, but she won’t have that ready till after dark anyway.”

So we got off the car again, and made our way westward to the coast, through a dense forest of torrey pine and brambleberry. Pretty soon we came upon an outcropping of tall stone crags. When we got in among them I saw they were concrete. They were buildings. The walls that remained—some of them as high as our beach cliff—were surrounded by piles of concrete rubble. Blocks as big as my house rose out of the ferns and brambleberries. Jennings was talking a streak about the place, and Tom held me by the arm and told the two San Diegans to go on ahead of us to the cliff. “He’s got it all wrong,” he said sourly when Jennings was out of earshot.

After they were gone I wandered in the ruins. A bomb had gone off nearby, I reckoned; the north side of every standing wall was black, and as soft and crumbly as sandstone. In the rubble and weeds I saw shards of glass, angled bits of metal both rusty and shiny, strips of plastic, a ribcage from a skeleton, melted glass tubes, metal boxes, slate boards.… Rafael would have loved it. But after a time I felt oppressed, like I had in San Clemente. This was no different from that: the ruins of the old time, the signs of a giant past that was now shattered bits of rock covered by weeds, a past so big that not all our efforts would ever get us back to it, or to anything like it. Ruins like these told us how little our lives were, and I hated them.

I saw Tom in the outbreak of concrete crags to the north, wandering aimlessly from ruin to ruin, tripping over blocks and then staring down at them like they’d jumped into his path. He was tugging on his beard as if he wanted to pull it out. Unaware of my presence, he was talking to himself, uttering short violent phrases that all ended with a sharp tug on the beard. As I got closer I saw that all the thousand lines in his face drooped down. I’d never seen him look so desolate.

“What was this place, Tom?”

I thought he wouldn’t answer. He looked away, pulled his beard. “It was a school. My school.”

One time a couple of summers before, we had all gathered under the torrey pine in Tom’s junkyard, Steve and Kathryn, Gabby and Mando and Kristen, Del and little Teddy Nicolin, all talking at once under sunny skies, we were, and fighting over who got to read
Tom Sawyer
next, and plotting to tickle Kristen till she cried, and the old man sitting with his back against the treetrunk, laughing and laughing. “All right, shut up you kids, shut up now, school’s in session.”

I let Tom be and walked west across the faint remains of a road, into trees where little tangles of rotted beams marked the sites of old buildings. Buildings you could believe people had once put up, had once inhabited. I sat at the edge of a canyon that dropped to the sea. I could tell that the cliffs were going to be big ones, because I was still far above the water, and the canyon was short. The sun got lower. I wished I was home.

Tom walked through the trees a distance away, looking for me. I stood and called out, walked over to him. “Let’s go out to the cliff and find those guys,” he said. He still looked low, and I fell in beside him without a word. “Here, around this way,” he said, and led me to the south rim of the canyon.

The trees gave way to shrubs, then to knee high weeds, and then we were on the cliff’s edge. Far below lay the ocean, flat and silvery. The horizon was really out there—it must have been a hundred miles away. So much water! A stiff wind hit me in the face as I looked down the pocked tan cliff, which fell down and down and down in nearly vertical ravines, to a very broad beach, strewn with seaweed. Jennings and Lee were a few hundred yards along the cliff edge, just tiny figures on top of that cliff, throwing rocks down at the beach, though they hit the middle of the cliff instead. Looking at the rocks fall I suddenly knew what the gulls saw, and I felt I was soaring in the sky, high above the world.

To the left Mount Soledad and La Jolla stuck out into the sea, blocking the view farther south. To the north the cliff curved away, until in the distance little cliffs alternated with blank bluish spots, which were marshes. The tiny cliffs and marshes extended in a curve all the way up to the green hills of Pendleton, and up there where the hills met the sea and sky was our valley, our home. It was hard to believe I could see that far. The waves below broke in long curves, leaving their white tracery on the water with just a whisper, a faint
kkkkkkkkkkk, kkkkkkkkkkk.
Tom was sitting down, his feet swinging over the edge. “The beach is at least twice as wide,” he said in a strangled voice. Talking to himself. “They shouldn’t let the world change so much in one life. It’s too hard.” I moved to get out of earshot, so he could talk without being overheard. But he looked up at me; he was talking to me: “I spent hours down there when time could have stopped, and I wouldn’t have minded.” He tugged his beard. “These cliffs are all different now.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. The setting sun lit the cliffs, so that they threw off an orange light that filled the air. Our shadows stretched far across the field behind us, and the wind was cold. The world seemed a big place, a big, windy, dusky place. Uneasily I paced up and down the cliff edge. The old man stayed where he sat, a little bump on the cliff. The sun sank into the water, drowning bit by bit, paring away until only the emerald wink of the green flash was left. The wind picked up. Jennings and Lee came along the cliff toward us, tiny figures waving their arms.

“Better be getting back,” Jennings called when they got closer. “Elma will be having dinner on the table.”

“Give the old man a minute more,” I said.

“She’ll be mad if dinner has to wait too long,” Jennings said more quietly. But Lee said “Let him be,” and Jennings stood quietly, looking down at the tapestry left by broken waves.

Eventually Tom stirred, walked down to us as if he’d just woken up. The evening star glowed like a lantern in the ocean sky.

“Thanks for bringing us out here,” Tom said.

“Our pleasure,” Jennings replied. “But we’d better head back now. It’s going to be a hell of a walk through those ruins in the dark.”

“We’ll skirt them to the south,” Lee said, “down that road that…” He sucked in his breath hard.

“What’s wrong?” Jennings exclaimed.

Lee pointed north, toward Pendleton.

We all looked, saw nothing but the dark curve of the coast, the first faint stars above—

A white streak fell out of the sky, plunged into the hills far to the north and disappeared.

“Oh, no,” Jennings whispered.

Another streak from the sky. It fell just like a shooting star, except it didn’t slow down or break into pieces; it fell in a straight line, like lightning set against a straightedge, taking no more than three blinks of the eye from the time it appeared high above to the time it silently disappeared into the coastline.

“Pendleton,” Lee said. “They’re busting up our track.” He began to curse in a heavy, furious low voice.

“Shit!” Jennings shouted. “
Shit!
God damn those people, God
damn
them. Why can’t they leave us alone—”

Three more streaks fell from the sky, one after another, landing farther and farther north, defining the curve of the coast. I closed my eyes and red bars swam around in the black. I opened them to see another streak burst into the world up there among the stars, plummeting down instantly onto the land.

“Where are they coming from?” I asked, and was surprised to hear my voice shake. I was afraid, I think, that they would be bombs like those that had fallen on the day.

“Airplane,” Jennings said grimly. “Or satellite, or Catalina, or halfway around the world. How the fuck would we know?”

“They’re hitting all over Pendleton,” Lee said in a bitter voice.

“They’ve stopped,” Tom pointed out. In the dark I couldn’t read his expression, and after Lee’s and Jennings’ shouts his voice was calm. We watched the sky for another one. Nothing.

“Let’s go,” Lee finally croaked. Slowly we crossed the weed field on the edge of the cliff in single file. Then into the forest. Halfway back to the train Jennings, walking ahead of me, said, “The Mayor ain’t going to like this one little bit.”

9

Jennings was right. The Mayor didn’t like it. He went north himself to inspect the damage, and when he returned to Jennings’ home leading his little crew of assistants, he told us how much he didn’t like it. “I’ve been to look, and the rails where those bombs hit are melted,” he shouted, stretching the seams of a tight blue coat to pound on the dining table. Limping around the room, pausing to shout in the impassive faces of Lee and Jennings, waving his fists overhead as he cursed the Japanese … oh, he was in a state all right. I stayed behind Tom and took care to keep quiet. “Puddles of iron! And the dirt around it like black brick. Trees burnt to a crisp.” He stumped over to Lee and waved a finger in Lee’s face. “You men must have left some sign that you were working on those tracks, something that could be seen in the satellite pictures. I hold you responsible for that.”

Lee stood with his mouth clamped tight, staring angrily past the Mayor. Behind that I noticed that a couple of the Mayor’s men (Ben for one) looked pleased at Lee’s chastisement, and gave each other sneering glances. Jennings, bold in his own home, stepped up to protest.

“Most of that line goes through forest, Mayor, and it’s under trees so it can’t be seen from above. You saw that. In the open patches we didn’t touch a thing, even if we had to work the cars through brush. And the bridges look exactly like they did before. Not a thing had been changed except the track, and we
had
to change that to make it passable. There was nothing that could be seen from above, I swear.”

Jennings went on spouting lies and contradictions like that for a while, and when he had convinced the Mayor of his point, the Mayor got even angrier. “Spies,” he hissed. “Someone in Onofre must have told the scavengers in Orange County, and they told the Japs.” He tested the strength of Jennings’ table again,
wham.
“We can’t have that. That sort of thing
has to be stopped.
”

“How do you know the spies aren’t here in San Diego?” Tom asked.

Danforth and Ben and the rest of the Mayor’s men glared at Tom. Even Jennings and Lee looked shocked.

“There are no spies in San Diego,” Danforth said, his chin tucked into his neck. His voice made me feel like I did when the brake was pulled on the train. “Jennings, you get hold of Thompson and have him sail you and Lee and these two up the coast. Get off at Onofre with them, and hike back down the tracks and survey the damage. I want to know how long it’s going to take to get that route open again.”

“Melted track will be hard,” Jennings replied. “We’ll have to replace it like we did on the Salton Sea line, and it’ll be impossible to do without leaving signs. Maybe we could follow three ninety-five up to Riverside, then turn back to the coast—”

Wham.
“I want the coastal tracks working. You get Thompson and do as I tell you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon after that the Mayor and his men left the house, without any kind of farewell to Tom and me. Jennings sighed, and made an apologetic face at his wife, who was in the entrance to the kitchen looking discouraged. “Lee, I wish
you’d
talk back to him sometimes. He just gets madder when you don’t answer like that.” But Lee was still angry, and he said no more to Jennings than he had to Danforth. Tom jerked his head and I followed him out of the room. “Looks like it’s back by sea,” he said with a shrug.

*   *   *

The next day a heavy wall of clouds moved onshore, so quickly we got our bags filled and said goodbye to Mrs. Jennings. We pumped our handcar over steep hills back to the coast, and north to the Del Mar River. From the south side of the marsh we could see the hundred wandering streams that the river made through the grass and cattails, iron streams through solid green. The main channel of the river snaked back on itself in big S’s, and there against the bank, curving with it, was a long wooden dock. We began to roll faster down the tracks, which led us all the way to the sea beach before making a half-circle and coming back to the dock. Even so the incline was steep, and we flew down the rails and made the turn above the beach with a wicked screech, like we were strangling a thousand gulls at once. Then it was down a gentler incline to the dockside.