The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (18 page)

For a moment the setting sun poked through the black wall of cloud, and sent a pencil of light up the marsh, brightening the gloom of the dusk. In the muted green light I saw a couple of men working on a big sloop moored at the downstream end of the dock. The sloop was a long one, nearly thirty feet I reckoned, wide-beamed and shallow-keeled, with canvas decking before the mast, and open plank seats aft of it. As we walked onto the dock a whiff of fish in the general salt smell reminded me of home. The clouds came together again, and we were back in the murk.

“Looks like we’ll be sailing in a storm,” I observed, for the wind was picking up, and the clouds clearly held rain.

“That’s the way we want it,” said Jennings.

“Too much of a storm and we’d be in trouble.”

“Maybe. But we’ve got anchorages up the coast, and Thompson has done this a thousand times. In fact it should be easier than usual, with no Jap landing parties to intercept. You’ll be home almost as fast as if we’d gone by train.”

“Let’s be under way,” a man hallooed from the sloop. “Tide’s turning!”

Jennings introduced us to the speaker, who turned out to be Thompson, and to his two sailors, Handy and Gilmour. We stepped down into the sloop. Tom and I sat on the plank just aft of the mast, and leaned back against struts. Jennings and Lee sat down on the plank aft of ours. The men on the dock unmoored us and pushed us into the stream. The sailors rowed lazily, keeping us pointed downstream and letting the current do the work. A dinghy tied to the stern of the sloop weaved behind us, pushed this way and that by the stream. We looped through the marsh; grass grew half as tall as the mast on either bank, and scores of bobbing ducks paddled into the reeds as we passed. The river poured over a shallow break in the beach, beside the bluff on the north side of the marsh. We spilled over this bar and the rowers pulled like madmen to get us through the violent soup, and over some big waves. When we were outside the break they shipped the oars, and pulled up the two sails. Thompson trimmed the sails from his seat at the tiller, and we heeled over and sailed up the coast, paralleling the swells so that we rolled heavily. The wind was from the southwest, so we clipped along at a very good speed.

We stayed about a mile offshore, and before darkness fell we had a fine view of the beach cliffs, and the forested hills rising behind them. But soon the sun must have set, for the murk turned to night darkness, and the black bulk of the land was scarcely visible under the edge of the clouds. Over the hissing of our wake and the creaks of the boom rubbing the mast, Jennings told Thompson and Handy and Gilmour the story of how we had seen the bombing of the railroad tracks. Tom and I sat against the mast, huddled in every stitch of clothing we had. The swells riding under us smoked a little, and the clouds got lower and lower, till we sailed through a narrow layer of clear windy air, sandwiched between thick slices of water and cloud. Tom dozed from time to time, head lolling on the foredeck.

After a couple hours I stretched out on a pile of rope between two planks, and tried to imitate Tom and get some sleep. But I couldn’t. I lay on my back and watched the gray sail, almost the color of the clouds above it, suck and fill in an unpredictable way. I listened to the voices of Jennings and the others in the stern, without making out half of what they said. I shut my eyes, and thought about things we had seen on our journey south: the Mayor pounding Jennings’ table till the salt shaker bounced, the dial and gauge-filled front of the broken radio in the Mayor’s house, the face of the pretty girl I had danced with. We were in a new world now, I thought. We were in a world where Americans could freely pursue their destiny, or fight for it when they were opposed … a world altogether different from our little valley’s world, with its ignorance of anything beyond the swap meets. Nicolin would be ecstatic to hear of it, and to read the book Wentworth had given us—to learn how an American had traveled all over the world … to join the resistance with the rest of the valley, and fight our hidden enemies on Catalina.… Oh, I’d have news for the gang, all right, and tales to tell that would make their eyes bug out like frogs’. How would I describe the Mayor’s island house, so unlike anything known in Onofre?… All those electric lights, reflected in that black lake with all its ruined towers …

I must have succeeded in falling asleep for a while, because when I opened my eyes again we were sailing in fog. Not a complete white out, but the sort of fog that is dense in patches and clear in others. Sometimes there was clear air for a man’s height above the water, and then a solid white ceiling of cloud; other times the cloud came right down and mixed with the smoking surface of the water. I stuck my hand over the side, and found that the water was considerably warmer than the air. I burrowed my cold feet into the pile of rope I’d been lying on. Tom still sat beside me, awake now.

“How do they know where we are?” I asked, sucking salt off my chilled fingers.

“Jennings says that Thompson stays close enough to shore to hear the waves break.” I cocked an ear landward and heard a faint crack and rumble.

“Big swell.”

“Yeah. He says the sound changes when we pass a rivermouth, and Thompson knows which rivermouth is which.”

“He must come up this way a lot to be able to do that.”

“True.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t lose track and run us onto the Pulgas River delta.”

“We’re past that, he says. I believe we’re ten or fifteen miles down from Onofre.”

So I had slept a long time, which was a blessing, as it meant I had missed a few hours of being cold. The men aft were still talking quietly among themselves, all of them awake and leaning back against the gunwales, their coats buttoned up and their necks wrapped in wool scarves. We sailed into a white patch, and Thompson, alert at the tiller, steered us seaward so that we slapped over the swells as we gained leeway. I couldn’t fall asleep again, and for a long time everything remained the same: the fog, the hiss of the swells sliding under the boat, the creaking of the boom, the cold. The wind blew in fits and starts, and I could hear Thompson and Lee discussing the possibility of running in to one of the rivermouths and spending the coming day there. “Hard to do,” Thompson said in an unconcerned way. “Damned hard to do with this fog, and the wind dying down. And the swell is picking up, whoah, see what I mean? These’ll make pretty damn big waves, I’d say.” The mast creaked as if in agreement, and the way the steep and smoking swells lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped, without us ever being able to properly see them, made them seem especially big. Swell after swell lifted the boat and slid away from it, and the rhythm of it almost had me asleep again, when Tom sat up suddenly.

“What’s that noise?” he said sharply.

I didn’t hear anything unusual, but Thompson nodded. “Japanese cruiser. Getting closer.”

Long moments passed while the rest of us heard the low muffled grumble of an engine. Thompson put the tiller over—

A curling white wave washed over the bow and stopped us dead. The mainsail flapped and then backed. Foaming water dripped over the canvas decking into my lap; Tom snatched up his shoulder bag to keep it from getting soaked. A cone of white light appeared in the fog. Our boat rocked at the bottom of this blinding cone, and one edge of the lit fog revealed the bulk of a tall ship, a black shape rumbling beside us, hardly seeming to move with the swell. My heart raced as I took all this in; I braced myself against Tom, looking at him fearfully. We were caught!

“Radar,” Tom whispered.

“Put down your sail,”
a voice shouted.
“Everyone stand with hands on head.”
The voice was mechanically amplified (as I learned later) and it had a metallic ring to it that made me cringe with fear.
“You are under arrest.”

I looked aft. Lee, all glare and black shadow in the searchlight’s powerful whiteness, was aiming a rifle at the top of the cone.
Crack!
The light above us burst and went dark in a tinkling of glass. Immediately the stern of our boat was spitting fire, for every man back there was shooting up at the Japanese ship. Tom pulled me down, the gunfire was a continuous banging, overwhelmed by a great BOOM, and suddenly the front of the sloop was gone. Broken planks and cold seawater poured up the boat over us. “Help!” I cried, freeing my feet from the tangle of rope. I was making my way over the canted gunwale when the mast fell on me.

After that, I don’t remember much. Searchlights breaking inside my eyelids. Choking on brine. Confused shouts, rough hands pulling me and hurting my armpits. Being hauled up metal steps and bumping my knees painfully. Choking and gasping, vomiting water. A metal deck, a coarse dry blanket.

I was on the Japanese ship.

When I realized this—it was the first thought I had, as I regained consciousness and saw the studded gray metal decking under my nose—I struggled to escape the hands holding me. Nothing doing. Hands restrained me, voices spoke nonsense at me:
mishi kawa tonatu ka,
and the like, on and on. “Help!” I cried. But my head was clearing, and I knew there was no help for me there. The suddenness of it all kept me from feeling it properly. I shivered and choked as if I’d been walloped in the stomach, but the real extent of the disaster was just sinking in as the Japanese sailors began to strip my wet clothes from me and wrap me in blankets. One was pulling my shirt sleeve down my arm; I twisted my hand out of it and fisted him in the nose. He squawked with surprise. I took a good swing and caught another one on the side of the head, and then started kicking wildly. I got some of them pretty good. They ganged up on me and carried me through a doorway into a glass-walled room at the back of the bow deck. Put me down on a bench that followed the curve of the hull.

Up in the bow I could see sailors still searching the water, shining a new searchlight this way and that, and shouting into an amplifying box. Two of them stood behind a giant gun on a thick stand—no doubt the gun that had demolished our sloop. The ship vibrated with the hum of engines, but we drifted over the swells, going nowhere. At our height above the water the fog was impenetrable. They had little motor dinghies down there searching, puttering about in the murk, but I could tell by their voices that they weren’t finding anything.

They had killed my old friend Tom. The thought made me cry, and once I started I sobbed and sobbed. All those years he had survived everything, every danger imaginable—only to get drowned by a miserable shore patrol. And all so fast.

*   *   *

After what seemed a long time, the men searching the water were ready to quit. I had pretty well recovered my wits, and some of my warmth, for the blankets were thick. I felt cold inside, though, cold in my heart. I was going to make these men pay for killing Tom. Tom hadn’t seemed too sure about the American resistance, but I was definitely part of it now, I thought to myself—starting right then and there, and for the rest of my life. In my cold heart I made a vow.

A door in the back wall of the glassed in room opened, and through it walked the captain of the ship. Maybe he was the captain and maybe he wasn’t, but there were gold tags on the shoulders of his new brown coat, and the coat had gold buttons. His face and hands were a shade darker than the coat, and his face looked like the faces of the bodies that washed up on our beach. Japanese, I had learned to call him. Two more officers, wearing brown suits without the gold shoulder tags or the buttons, stood behind him, their faces like masks.

Murderers, all of them. I stared fiercely at the captain, and he looked back, his eyes expressionless behind hanging upper eyelids. The room pitched gently, and fog pressed against the dripping salt-encrusted windows, fog that looked red because of the little red light set over the door.

“How do you feel?” the captain said in English that was clear, but lilting in a way I’d never heard before.

I stared at him.

“Have you recovered from the blow to your head?”

I stared at him some more.

After a time he nodded. I’ve seen his face more than once since then, in dreams: his eyes dark brown, almost black; deep lines in his skin, extending from the outside corners of his eyes in fans around the side of his head; black hair cut so close to his scalp that it had the texture of a brush. His lips were thin and brown, and now they were turned down with displeasure. He looked devilish, taken all together, and I struggled to look unconcerned as I stared at him, because he scared me.

“You appear to have recovered.” One of his officers gave him a thin board, to which sheets of paper were clipped. He took a pencil from the clip. “Tell me, young sir, what is your name?”

“Henry. Henry Aaron Fletcher.”

“Where do you come from?”

“America,” I said, and glared at each of them in turn. “The United States of America.”

The captain glanced at his officers. “Good show,” he said to me.

A gang of regular sailors in blue coats came in from the bow and jabbered at him. He sent them back to the bow, and turned to me again.

“Do you come from San Diego? San Clemente? Newport Beach?” I didn’t answer, and he continued: “San Pedro? Santa Barbara?”

“That’s way north,” I said scornfully. Shouldn’t have spoken, I thought. But I wanted to tear into him so bad I was shaking—shaking with fright, too—and I couldn’t help talking.

“So it is. But there is no habitation directly onshore, so you must come from north or south.”

“How do you know there isn’t a habitation onshore?”

He smiled just like we do, though the results were ugly. “We have observed your coastline.”

“Spies,” I said. “Sneaking spies. You should be ashamed. You’re a sailor, mister. Don’t you feel ashamed for attacking unarmed sailors on a foggy night and killing them all—sailors who weren’t doing you any harm?”

The captain pursed his lips as if he’d bitten into something sour. “You were hardly unarmed. We took quite a few shots from you, and one of our men was hurt.”

“Good.”

“Not good.” He shook his head. “Besides—I suspect your companions may have swimmed to shore. Otherwise we would have found them.”