The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (28 page)

“I’m gone,” I said, snatching a dripping honeycomb from the flat behind him.

“Hey!”

“See you later.” Off I ran, down the ridge trail, through the woods on a shortcut of my own, and through the potato patches to the Mariani herb garden. They were all out on the grass between the ovens and the river: Steve, Kathryn, Kristen, Mrs. Mariani, Rebel, Mando, Rafael, and Carmen. Steve was reading, and the others barely glanced at me as I sat down, huffing like a dog. “He’s in Russia,” Mando whispered. “Well shit!” I said. “How’d he get there?” Steve never looked up from the page, but kept on reading, from about here as I recall:

“In the first year after the war they were very open with the U.N., to show they had nothing to do with the attack. They gave the U.N. a list of all the Americans in Russia, and after that the U.N. was adamant about knowing where we were and what was happening to us. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t be speaking English. They would have assimilated us. Or killed us.”

Johnson’s tone made me look more closely at the heavily clad, harmless-looking Russians who were crowded in with us. Some of them glanced at us furtively when they heard our foreign speech; most slumped in their seats and slept, or stared dully out the compartment window. The smell of tobacco smoke was powerful, masking to a certain extent other smells: sweat, cheese, the raw alcohol odor of the drink
vodka.
Outside the huge gray city of Vladivostok was replaced by rolling forest, mile after hilly mile of it. The train rolled along the tracks at a tremendous clip, and we crossed scores of miles every hour; still, Johnson assured me that our journey would take many days.

We had done little more than shake hands before walking under the eyes of the train guards, and playing our parts. Now I asked him about himself; where he lived, what his history had been, what his occupation was.

“I’m a meteorologist,” he said. Seeing my look, he explained, “I study the weather. Or rather, I did study it. Now I watch a Doppler screen used to predict weather and give severe storm warnings. One of the last fruits of American science, the Doppler systems, as a matter of fact. But they’re old now, and it’s a minor position really.”

Naturally I was interested in this. I asked him if he could tell me why the weather had become so much colder on the California coast since the war. This was several hours into our trip, and the Russians around us filled the compartment with an air of utter boredom; at the prospect of talking about his specialty, Johnson’s face brightened somewhat.

“It’s a complicated question. It’s generally agreed that the war did alter the world’s weather, but how it effected the change is still debated. It’s estimated that three thousand neutron bombs exploded on the continental United States that day in 1984. Not too much long term radiation was released, luckily for you, but a lot of turbulence was generated in the stratosphere—the highest levels of air—and apparently the jet stream altered its course for good. You know about the jet stream?”

I indicated that I did not. “I have flown on a jet, however.”

He shook his head. “At the upper levels of the air the wind is constant, and strong. Big rivers of wind. In the northern hemisphere the jet stream circles around west to east, and zigzags up and down as it goes around the world, about four or five zigs and zags for every trip around.” He made a ball of his fist and traced the course of the jet stream with a finger of his other hand. “It varies a little every time, of course, but before the war there was one anchor point, which was your Rocky Mountains. The jet stream invariably curved north around the Rockies, and then back south across the United States, like this.” He pointed out the knuckle that had become the Rockies. “Since the war, that anchoring point has been gone. The jet stream has cut loose, and now it wanders—sometimes it’s sweeping straight down from Alaska to Mexico, which is why you in California get Arctic weather occasionally.”

“So that’s it,” I said.

“That’s part of it,” he corrected me. “Weather is such a complex organism, you can never point to any single thing and say, that’s it. The jet stream is on the loose, but tropical storm systems are changed as well—and which caused which? Or are they causally related? No one can say. The Pacific high, for instance—this would affect you in southern California—there was a high pressure system, very stable, that sat off the west coast of North America. In the summer it would shift north and sit off California, keeping the jet stream pushed north; in the winter it would descend to an area below Baja California. Now it doesn’t move north in the summer anymore, and so you aren’t protected by it. That’s another big factor: but again, cause or effect? And then there’s the dust thrown into the stratosphere by the bombs and the fires, dropping world temperatures by a couple of degrees—and the permanent snowpack that resulted in the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, generating glaciers that reflect the sunlight and cool things even more … and the shifting of Pacific currents … lots of changes.” Johnson’s expression was a curious mixture of gloom and fascination.

“It sounds as if California’s weather has changed most of all,” I said.

“Oh, no,” Johnson said. “Not at all. California has been strongly affected, no doubt about it—like moving fifteen degrees of latitude north—but a few other parts of the world have been just as strongly affected, or even more so. Lots of rain in northern Chile!—and my, is that washing all that sand off the Andes into the sea. Tropical heat in Europe during the summer, drought during the monsoon—oh, I could go on and on. It has caused more human misery than you can imagine.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Ah. Yes. Well, it isn’t only the Russians’ gray empire that has made the world such a sad place since the war; the weather has had a large part in it. Happily Russia itself has not gone unaffected.”

“How so?”

He shook his head, and wouldn’t elaborate.

Two days later—still in Siberia, despite our speed—I saw what he meant.

We spent the morning out in the corridor of our car, exhibiting our travelling papers to a trio of suspicious conductors. The fact that I spoke not a word of Russian was a real stumbling block to their acceptance of us, and I chattered at them in Japanese and fake Japanese in a nervous attempt to assure them I was from Tokyo as my papers declared me to be, hoping they would not know how unlikely that was. Luckily our papers were authentic, and they left satisfied.

When they were gone Johnson was too upset to return to our compartment. “It’s those stupid busybodies in there who got the conductors on us. They heard us speaking a foreign language and that was enough. That’s the Russians for you all over. Let’s stay out here for a while. I can’t stand the stink in there anymore anyway.”

We were still out in the corridor, leaning against the windows, when the train came to a halt, out in the middle of the endless Siberian forest, with not a sign of civilization in sight. Tree-covered hills extended away in every direction for as far as the eye could see; we crossed a rolling green plane, under a low blue hemisphere filled with even lower clouds. I stopped my description of California, which Johnson could not get enough of, and we leaned out the window looking toward the front of the train. To the west the clouds, which had been low and dark, were now a solid black line. When Johnson saw this he leaned far out of the window, saying, “Hold my legs. Hold me in by the legs.” When he slid back in there was a fierce grin on his usually dour face. Leaning close to me he whispered, “Tornado.”

Within a few minutes conductors arrived in our car and instructed everyone to get off.

“Won’t do a bit of good,” Johnson declared. “In fact, I’d rather be on the train.” Nevertheless we joined the crowd before the door.

“Why do they do it, then?” I asked, trying to keep an eye on the clouds to the west.

“Oh, once a whole train got picked up and flung all over the countryside. Killed everyone on it. But if you’d been standing right next to it you’d have been just as dead.”

This was not very reassuring to me. “These tornadoes are common, then?”

Johnson nodded with grim satisfaction. “That’s the weather change in Russia I mentioned. Warmer midcontinent, but they get tornadoes now. Before the war ninety-five percent of the world’s tornadoes occurred in the United States.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s true. They were the result of a combination of local weather conditions, and the specific geography of the Rockies, the Great Plains, and the Gulf of Mexico—or so they deduced, tornadoes being another meteorological mystery. But now they’re common in Siberia.” Our fellow travellers were staring at us, and Johnson waited to continue until we were off the train. “And they’re big. Big like Siberia is big. Several towns have been torn off the map by them.”

The conductors herded us to a clearing beside the track, at the very end of the train. Black clouds covered the sky, and a cold wind made a ripping sound in the trees. The wind grew stronger in a matter of minutes; leaves and small branches fell almost horizontally through the air above us, and by drawing just a few feet apart from the rest of the passengers, we could talk without being overheard; indeed, we could barely hear ourselves.

“Karymskoye is just ahead, I think,” Johnson said. “Hopefully the tornado will hit it.”

“You hope it will?” I said in surprise, thinking I had misunderstood, for to tell the truth Johnson’s English was accented somewhat.

“Yes,” he hissed, his face close to mine. In the muted green light he suddenly looked wild, fanatical. “It’s retribution, don’t you see? It’s the Earth’s revenge on Russia.”

“But I thought it was South Africa that set the bombs.”

“South Africa,” he said angrily, and grabbed me by the arm. “How could you be so naive? Where did they
get
the bombs? Three thousand neutron bombs? South Africa, Argentina, Vietnam, Iran—it doesn’t matter who actually put them in the United States and set them off, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure—perhaps they all did—but it was
Russia
that made them, Russia that arranged for their use, Russia that profited most from them. The whole world knows it, and notes how these monstrous tornadoes plague them. It’s
retribution,
I tell you. Look at their faces! They all know it, every single one of them, it’s the Earth’s punishment.
Look! There it is.
”

I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw that the black cloud to the west now sank to the earth at a certain point, in a broad, swirling black funnel of cloud. The wind howled around us, tearing at my hair, and yet I could still hear a low grinding noise, a vibration in the ground, as if a train many times larger than ours was speeding along distant tracks.

“It’s coming this way,” Johnson shouted in my ear. “Look how thick it is!” On his bearded, craggy face was an expression of religious rapture.

The tornado now slimmed to a black column, spinning furiously on itself. At its base I could make out whole trees flying away from it, scores of them. The bass roar of it grew; some of the Russians in the clearing fell to the ground, others knelt and prayed, raising twisted faces to the black sky; Johnson waved a fist at them, shouting soundlessly in the roar, his face contorted. The twister must have struck Karymskoye, because the flying trees were replaced by debris, pieces of a city reduced to rubble in an instant. Johnson danced a little tilted jig, leaning into the wind.

I myself kept an eye on the unearthly storm. It was moving from left to right ahead of us, approaching at an angle. The condensed spinning column was so solidly black that it might have been a tower of whirling coal. The bottom of this tower bounced off the ground from time to time; it touched down on a hill past the stricken town, blasted trees away from it, bounced into the air almost up to the black cloud above it, extended and touched down again, moved on. To my considerable relief it appeared that it would pass to the north of us by three or four miles. When I was sure of that, some of Johnson’s strange elation spilled into me. I had just seen a town destroyed. But the Soviet Union was responsible for my country’s destruction—thousands of towns—so Johnson had said, and I believed him. That made this storm retribution, even revenge. I shouted at the top of my lungs, felt the sound get torn away and carried off. I screamed again. I had not known how much I would welcome a blow struck against the murderers of my country—how much I needed it. Johnson pounded my shoulder and wiped tears from his eyes, we staggered against the wind across the clearing and into some trees, where we could scream and point and laugh, and cry and shout curses too terrible to be heard, lamentations too awful to be thought. Our country was dead, and this poor exile my guide felt it as powerfully as I did. I put my arm around him and felt that I held up a countryman, a brother. “Yes,” he hissed again and again. “Yes, yes, yes.” Within twenty minutes the tornado bounced back up into the cloud for good, and we were left in a stiff cold wind to compose ourselves. Johnson wiped his eyes. “I hope it didn’t tear up much track,” he said in his slightly guttural accent, “or we’ll be here a week.”

A shadow fell across the book, and Steve stopped reading. We all looked up. John Nicolin stood there, hands on hips.

“I need your help replacing that bad keel,” he said to Steve.

Steve was still in the forests of Siberia, I could tell by the distant focus of his eyes. He said, “I can’t, I’m reading—”

John snatched the book from him and closed it,
thud.
Steve jerked up, then stopped himself. They glared at each other. Steve’s face got redder and redder. I held my breath, disoriented by the abrupt removal from the story.

John dropped the book on the grass. “You can waste your time any way you want when I don’t need your help. But when I need it, you give it, understand?”

“Yes,” said Steve. He was looking down at the book now. He stretched to pick it back up, and John walked away. Steve kept inspecting the book for grass stains, avoiding our gazes. I wished I wasn’t there to see it. I knew how Steve felt about having such scenes observed. And here were Kathryn, Mando, Kathryn’s mother and sister and the others.… I watched John’s wide back disappear down the river path and cursed him in my thoughts. There was no call for that sort of showing it over Steve. That was pure meanness—no past could excuse it. I was glad he wasn’t my father.