The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (27 page)

“Are you saying you aren’t going to go along with the rest of us?” John asked.

Rafael gave him an angry look. “You know me better than that, John. I go with the vote. Not that I could do much by myself anyway. But I think it’s wrong. We can’t hide in this valley like weasels forever, not sitting right across from Catalina like we do.” He took in a big breath and let it out. “Well, shit. I don’t guess we can vote it away anyway.” He threaded his way through the folks still sitting, and left the bathhouse.

The meeting was done. I crossed the bathhouse with Steve and Gabby. Steve was doing his best to avoid his pa. In all the milling around we saw Del gesture at us, and with a nod to Mando and Kathryn we followed them out.

Without a word we trailed up the river path, following someone else’s lanterns. Then over the bridge, to the big boulders at the bottom of the barley field. In the blustery dark my companions were no more than shapes. Across the river lanterns blinked through the trees, stitching the trails that our neighbors were taking home.

“Could you believe all that talk?” Gabby said scornfully.

“Rafael was right,” Nicolin said bitterly. “What will they think of us in San Diego, and across the country, when they hear about this?”

“It’s over now,” said Kathryn, trying to soothe him.

“Over for you,” Steve said. “It turned out the way you wanted. But for us—”

“For everyone,” Kathryn insisted. “It’s over for everyone.”

But Steve wouldn’t have it. “You’d like that to be true, but it isn’t. It won’t ever be over.”

“What do you mean?” Kathryn said. “The vote was taken.”

“And you were mighty happy with the results, weren’t you,” Steve accused her.

“I’ve had enough of this for one night,” Kathryn said. “I’m going home.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and do that,” Nicolin said angrily. Kathryn glared at him. I was glad I wasn’t Steve at that moment. Without a word she was off toward the bridge. “You don’t run this valley!” Steve shouted after her, his voice hoarse with tension. “Nor me neither! You never will!” He paced into the barley field. I could just make out Kathryn as she crossed the bridge.

“I don’t know why she was being such a bitch tonight,” Steve whined.

After a long silence, Mando said, “We should have voted yes.”

Del ha-ha’d. “We did. There weren’t enough of us.”

“I meant everybody.”

“We should have joined,” Nicolin shouted from the barley.

“So?” Gabby said—ready as always to egg Steve on. “What are you going to do about it?”

Across the river dogs yapped. I saw the moon for a wisp of time, above the scudding clouds. Behind me barely rustled, and I shivered in the cold wind. Something in the shifting shadows made me remember my miserable, desperate hike up the ravine to find Tom and the San Diegans, and the fear came on me again, rustling through me like the wind. It’s so easy to forget what fear feels like. Steve was pacing around the boulders like a wolf caught in a snare. He said,

“We could join them ourselves.”

“What?” Gab said eagerly.

“Just us. You heard what Add said at the end there. Individuals are free to do as they like. And Tom agreed. We could approach them after Tom tells them no, and tell them we’d be willing to work with them. Just us.”

“But how?” Mando asked.

“What kind of help do they want from us, hey? No one in there could say, but I know. Guides into Orange County, that’s what. We can do better at that than anyone else in Onofre.”

“I don’t know about that,” Del said.

“We can do it as well as anybody!” Steve revised, for it was true that his pa and some others had spent a good bit of time up north in years past. “So why shouldn’t we if we want to?”

Fearfully I said, “Maybe we should just go along with the vote.”

“Fuck that!” Steve cried furiously. “What’s with you, Henry? Afraid to fight the Japanese, now? Shit, you go off to San Diego and now you tell us what to do, is that it?”

“No!” I protested.

“You scared of them now, now that you’ve had your great voyage and seen them up close?”

“No.” I was shocked by Nicolin’s anger, too confused to think how to defend myself. “I want to fight,” I said weakly. “That’s what I said in the meeting.”

“The meeting doesn’t mean shit. Are you with us or not?”

“I’m with you,” I said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t!”

“Well?”

“Well … we could ask Jennings if he wants some guides, I guess. I never thought of it.”

“
I
thought of it,” Steve said. “And that’s what we’re going to do.”

“After they talk to Tom,” Gabby said, clearing things up, pushing Steve on.

“Right. After. Henry and I will do it. Right, Henry?”

“Sure,” I said, jumping at his voice’s prod. “Sure.”

“I’m for it,” Del said.

“Me too,” cried Mando. “I want to too. I’ve been in Orange County as much as any of you.”

“You’re in it too,” Steve assured him.

“And me,” Gabby said.

“And you, Henry?” Steve pressed. “You’re with us too?”

Around us nothing but shadows, windblown in the darkness. The moon slid into a cloud crease and I could see the pale blobs of my friends’ faces, like clumps of dough, watching me. We put our right hands together above the central boulder, and I could feel their calloused fingers tangle with mine.

“I’m with you,” I said.

13

The next time I saw the old man I gave him hell, because it was very possible that if he had come out on the side of the resistance the vote would have been different. And if the valley had voted to join the resistance, then Steve wouldn’t have come up with his plan to join the San Diegans secretly, and I wouldn’t have caved in and gone along with it. To avoid admitting to myself that I had caved in to Steve, I decided his plan was a good one. So in a way it was all the old man’s fault. It was too bad we had to sneak off to help the San Diegans, but we had to be part of the resistance. I remembered vividly how it felt to be staring at the metal deck of the Japanese ship, crying because I thought Tom and the others were dead, and vowing to fight the Japanese forever. And it was no thanks to them that Tom had survived, either. He just as well could have died, and so could have I. I told Tom as much as I stood berating him for his vote in the meeting. “And any time we go out there, the same thing could happen,” I concluded, shaking a finger under his nose.

“Any time we sail out on a foggy night and shoot guns at them, you mean,” he said, through a mouth jammed with honeycomb. We were out in his yard, sweltering under high filmy clouds, and he was scorching the slats of several boxlike supers from an unsuccessful hive. Hive stands and smokers and supers lay strewn about us on the weeds. “It may be that the jays ate every bee in this hive,” he mumbled. “This one scrub jay was popping down ten at a meal. I set one of Rafael’s mousetraps on top of the post he was landing on, and when he landed the trap knocked him about fifteen feet. Was he mad! He cursed me in every language known to jays.”

“Ah, shit,” I said, yanking some of his long white hair out of the corner of his mouth before he chewed it down. “All our lives you’ve been telling us about America. How great it was. Now we’ve got a chance to fight for it, and you vote against the idea. I don’t get it. It’s contrary to everything you’ve taught us.”

“Is not. America was great in the way that whales are great, see what I mean?”

“No.”

“You’ve gotten remarkably dense lately, you know that? I mean, America was huge, it was a giant. It swam through the seas eating up all the littler countries—drinking them up as it went along. We were eating up the world, boy, and that’s why the world rose up and put an end to us. So I’m not contradicting myself. America was great like a whale—it was giant and majestic, but it stank and was a killer. Lots of fish died to make it so big. Now haven’t I always taught you that?”

“No.”

“The hell I haven’t! What about all those arguments at the swap meet with Doc and Leonard and George?”

“There you’re different, but just to rile Doc and Leonard. Here at home you always make America sound like God’s own country. Besides, right in the here and now there’s no doubt we’re being held down, just like Rafe said. We have to fight them, Tom, you know that.”

He shook his head, and sucked in his cheek on the caved-in side of his mouth, so that from my angle it looked like he only had half a face. “Carmen hit the nail hardest, as usual. Did you listen to her? I didn’t think so. Her point was, murdering those dumb tourists doesn’t do a thing to change the structure of the situation. Catalina will still be Japanese, satellites will still be watching us, we’ll still be inside a quarantine. Even the tourists won’t stop coming. They’ll just be better armed, and more likely to hurt us.”

“If the Japanese are really trying to keep people away, we could kill all the visitors who sneak in.”

“Maybe so, but the structure remains.”

“But it’s a start. Anything as big as this can’t be done all at once, and the start will always look small. Why, if you’d been around during the Revolution, you’d have been against ever starting it. ‘Killing a few redcoats won’t change the
structure,
’ you’d have said.”

“No I wouldn’t, because it wasn’t the same structure. We aren’t being occupied, we’re being quarantined. If we joined San Diego in this fight the only result would be that we’d be part of San Diego. Doc was right just like Carmen was.”

I thought I had him on the run, and I said, “The same objection could have been made in the Revolution. People from Pennsylvania or wherever could have said, if we join the fight we’ll become part of New York. But since they were part of the same country, they worked together.”

“Boy, it’s a false analogy, like historical analogies always are. Just ’cause I taught you your history don’t mean you understand it. In the Revolution the British had men and guns, and we had men and guns. Now we still have men and guns like in 1776, but the enemy has satellites, intercontinental missiles, ships that could shell us from Hawaii, laser beams and atom bombs and who knows what all. Think about it logically for a bit. A tiger and a titmouse would make a better fight.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I grumbled, feeling the weight of his argument. I wandered through the dismantled hives, the sundials and rain barrels and junk, to regroup. Below us the valley was a patchwork, the fields like gold handkerchiefs dropped on the forest, with gliding patches of sunlight making even larger fields of brilliant green. “I still say that every revolution starts small. If you had voted for the resistance, we could have thought of something. As it is, you’ve put me in a tough spot.”

“How so?” he asked, looking up from the supers.

I realized I’d said too much. “Oh, in talk, you know,” I floundered. Then I hit on something: “Since we aren’t going to help the resistance, I’ll be the only one of the gang who got to go to San Diego. Steve and Gabby and Del don’t like that much.”

“They’ll get there some day,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief to have him off the track. But I felt bad to keep something from him; I saw that I would be lying to him regularly, from then on. His arguments had a sense that couldn’t be denied, even though I was sure his conclusions were wrong. Because I wanted his conclusions to be wrong.

“You got your lesson ready?” he asked. “Other than the history of the United States?”

“Some of it.”

“You’re getting to be as bad as Nicolin.”

“I am not.”

“Let’s hear it then. ‘I know you. Where’s the king?’”

I called the page up before my mind’s eye, and against a fuzzy gray mental field appeared the yellow crumbly page, with the rounded black marks that meant so much. I spoke the lines as I saw them.

“‘Contending with the fretful elements;

Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,

Or swell the curled waters ’bove the main,

That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,

Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,

Catch in their fury and make nothing of;

Strives in his little world of man to outscorn

To to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain.

This night, wherein the cub-drawn bear would crouch,

The lion and the belly-pinched wolf

Keep their fur dry, unbonnetted he runs,

And bids what will take all.’”

“Very good!” Tom cried. “That was our night, all right. ‘All-shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity of the world, crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once that make ingrateful man.’”

“Wow, you memorized two whole lines,” I said.

“Oh hush. I’ll give you lines from
Lear.
You listen to this.

“‘The weight of this sad time we must obey;

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath borne most; we that are young,

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.’”

“
We
that are young?” I inquired.

“Hush! O sharper than a serpent’s tooth indeed. The oldest hath borne most, no lie.” He shook his head. “But listen, ungrateful wretch, I gave you those lines to help you to
remember
our trip back up here in that storm. The way you’ve been carrying on up here since then, it’s like you’ve already forgotten it—”

“No I haven’t.”

“—Or you haven’t been able to believe in it, or fit it into your life. But
it happened to you.
”

“I know that.”

Those liquid brown eyes looked at me hard. Quietly he said, “You know that it happened. Now you have to go on from there. You have to learn from it, or it might as well not have happened.”

I didn’t follow him, but all of the sudden he was scraping the super resting on his knees. And saying, “I hear they’re reading that book we brought back, down at the Marianis’—how come you’re not down there?”

“What?” I cried. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“They weren’t going to start until the bread was done. Besides, it was time for your lesson.”

“But they would have finished baking midafternoon!” I said.

“Isn’t that what time it is?” he asked, looking at the sky briefly.