The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (29 page)

“Well, so much for reading,” Steve said in his joking tone, or close to it. “But how about that tornado, eh?”

“I got to get home to supper anyway,” Mando said. “But I sure want to hear what happens next.”

“We’ll make sure you’re at the next reading,” Kathryn said, when it became clear that Steve wasn’t going to respond. Mando said goodbye to Kristen and scampered off toward the bridge. Kathryn stood up. “I’d best see to the tortillas,” she said. She bent over to kiss Steve’s head. “Don’t look so glum, everybody’s got to work sometime.”

Steve gave her a bitter glance and didn’t reply. The others wandered off with Kathryn, and I stood up. “I’m off too, I guess.”

“Yeah. Listen Hank, you’re still seeing Melissa, aren’t you?”

“Now and then.”

He eyed me. “But you make good use of the time, I bet.”

I shrugged and nodded.

“The thing is,” he went on, “if we offer to guide these San Diegans into Orange County, we’ve got to know more than how to follow the freeway north. Anyone can figure that out. They might not want to have anything to do with us if that’s all we can offer them. But if we knew where the Japanese were going to land, and when, they’d be bound to take us along, don’t you see.”

“Maybe.”

“Sure they would! What do you mean maybe?”

“Okay, but so what?”

“Well, since you’re friends with Melissa, why don’t you ask Addison if he could help us out like that?”

“
What?
Oh, man—I barely know Add. And his business in Orange County is his own, no one ever asks him anything about that.”

“Well,” Steve said, looking at the ground despondently, “it sure would help us out.”

I winced to hear him sound like that. We looked at the ground for a while. Steve thwacked the book against his thigh. “Wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?” he pleaded. “If he doesn’t want to tell us something like that, he can just say so.”

“Yeah,” I said doubtfully.

“Give it a try, okay?” He still wasn’t looking me in the eye. “I really want to do something up north—fight ’em, you know?”

I wondered who he really wanted to fight, the Japanese or his pa. There he stood, looking down, frowning, hangdog, still smarting from his pa’s lording it. I hated to see him look that way.

“I’ll ask Add and see what he says,” I said, letting my reluctance sound clear in my voice.

He ignored my tone. “All right!” He gave me a brief smile. “If he tells us something, we’ll be guiding the San Diegans for sure.”

It felt odd to receive gratitude from Steve. I hadn’t seen it very often. Before, what we had done for each other was part of being friends—brothers. Before … oh, it was all changed now, changed past repair. Before when I disagreed with him, it was no big deal; we argued it out, and whatever the result, it was no challenge to his leadership of the gang. But now if I argued with him in front of the group, he wouldn’t abide it, he’d get furious. Now questioning him was questioning his leadership, and all because I had been to San Diego and he hadn’t. I was beginning to wish I’d never taken that stupid trip.

And now, to add to the mess, I was the one who was friendly with Melissa and Addison Shanks, so just when he least wanted to, Steve had to ask me to act, while he stood on the sidelines again and watched; and he had to be grateful in the bargain! And me—I couldn’t argue with him without endangering our friendship; I had to go along with his every plan, even the ones I didn’t like; and now I had to go at his request and do something he would have loved to do himself, that I had
no
taste for. Things were … out of my control. (Or so it felt. We lie to ourselves a lot with that one.)

All of this occurred to me in a single snap of understanding—one of those moments when a lot of things I’d seen but not comprehended came together, as bits in the pattern of someone else’s behavior, which now made sense. It was something that had happened to me more and more often that summer, but it still took me aback. I blinked and glanced at Steve again in a quick evaluation. “You’d better get down there and help your pa,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, pissed again. “Back to the pit. All right, see you soon, okay buddy?”

“See you,” I replied, and walked up to the river path. When I got home I realized I hadn’t seen a thing along my way.

14

I was out in Pa’s garden one clear evening, enjoying the still sky and its arched range of blues, when I saw the fire on the ridge. A bonfire at Tom’s place, blinking bright yellow in the dusk. I stuck my head in the door—“Off to Tom’s,” I said to Pa—and was gone. In the forest birds squeaked as I navigated my shortcut. It wasn’t really visible at night, but I knew it by the feel of the ground and the shapes of the shadows, and even without the voices of the trees to guide me I almost ran. Through certain openings in the branches the bonfire winked at me, urging me along.

Up on the ridge I ran into Rafael, Addison and Melissa, the Basilone neighbors, standing in the trail and drinking a jar of wine. Tom’s bonfires drew people. Steve and Emilia and Teddy Nicolin were already in the yard, tossing pitchy wood on the blaze. Tom led Mando and Recovery out of his house, coughing and laughing. The Simpson kids were popping around the junk in the yard, trying to scare each other. “Rebel! Deliverance! Charity! Get your asses out of there!” Recovery shouted. I grinned. It was a welcome sight, Tom’s bonfire on the hill in the evening. We greeted each other and arranged the stumps and chairs a comfortable distance from the fire, and cheered a little when John and Mrs. Nicolin showed up with a bottle of rum and a big chunk of butter wrapped in paper. By the time Carmen and Nat and the Marianis showed up the party was in full swing. No one referred to the meeting, of course, but looking around I couldn’t help thinking of it. This party was the antidote, so to speak. The idea of the gang bucking the vote made me uneasy, and I tried to forget it, but Steve kept jerking his head in Melissa’s direction, already impatient for me to work on the Shankses.

Melissa was gulling with the Mariani girls, so I took my cup of hot buttered rum and sucked on it cautiously before the fire. Watched the flame spurt out of the beads of pitch. Mando was trying to make tripods of branches over the hottest part of the fire, playing with it (he learned that from me). Fire dazzles the mind into a curious sort of peace. It commands the eye’s attention like no other sight. Yellow transparent banners, flicking up from wood and vanishing: what is that stuff, anyway? I asked Tom, but it was about the lamest of his explanations, and that’s saying a lot. What it came down to was, if things got hot enough they burned; and burning was the transformation of wood to smoke and ash by way of flame. Rafael nearly strangled on his rum laughing when Tom finished.

“Very enlightening,” I hooted, and dodged Tom’s blows. “That’s the lamest—hooo, heee—the lamest explanation you’ve ever made!”

“Wha—what about lightning?” Raphael cackled.

“What about why dolphins are warm-blooded?” Steve nodded. Tom waved us off like mosquitoes and went for more rum, and we settled down to giggling.

But Tom knew why fire so captured the eye and mind, or so it seemed to me. One time I had ventured that fire made a good image of the mind—thoughts flickering like flames, eventually exhausting the wood of our flesh. Tom had nodded but said no, it was the other way around. The mind, he said, was a good image of fire—at least in this respect: for millions of years, humans had lived even more humbly than we did. Right on the edge of existence, for literally millions of years. He swore to that length of time, and made me try to imagine that many generations, which of course I couldn’t. I mean, think about it. Anyway, back at the beginning fire only appeared to humans as lightning and forest infernos, and they scorched a path from the eye to the brain. “Then when Prometheus gave us control of fire—” Tom said.

“Who’s this Prometheus?”

“Prometheus is the name for the part of our brains that contains the knowledge of fire. The brain has growths like tubers, or boles on a tree, where knowledge of certain subjects accumulate. As the sight of fire caused this particular bole to evolve it got bigger, until it was named Prometheus and the human animal was in control of fire.” So, he went on, for generation after generation to a number beyond counting men had sat around fires and watched them. To these ice-bitten ancestors fire meant warmth; to them, who bolted the flesh of smaller creatures every third day or so, it meant food. Between the eye and Prometheus grew a path of nerves like a freeway, and fire became a sight to turn the head and make one rapt. In the last century of the old time, civilized humanity had lost its dependence on simple fires, but that was no more than a blink of the eye in the span of human time; and now the blink was over, and we stared at fires hypnotized again.

“Let’s have a story,” Rebel Simpson said.

“Yes, tell us one, Tom,” Mando said.

“Tell us Johnny Pinecone,” Rebel pleaded. “I want to hear Johnny Pinecone.”

I nodded at that. It was one of my favorite things, to hear how in the last seconds of the old time Johnny had stumbled on one of the hidden atom bombs in the back of a Chevy van, and had thrown himself on it like a Marine on a grenade, to use Tom’s expression, hoping to protect his fellow citizens from the blast—how he had survived in the bubble of still air at ground zero, but been blown miles high and rearranged by cosmic rays, so that when he floated down like a eucalyptus leaf he was loony as Roger, and immortal as well. And how he had hiked up into the San Bernadino Mountains and up San Gorgonio, and gathered pinecones and taken them back to the coastal plains, planting them on every new riverbank “to put a cloak of green over our poor land’s blasted nakedness”—back and forth, back and forth for year after year after year, until the trees sprang up and blanketed the countryside, and Johnny sat down under a redwood growing like Jack’s beanstalk and fell asleep, where he snores to this day, waiting for the time when he’s needed again.

It was a fine story. But others objected that Tom had told it last season. “Don’t you know more than three stories, Tom?” Steve ragged him. “Why don’t you ever tell us a new one? Why don’t you ever tell us a story about the old time?”

Tom gave him his mock glare and hacked. Rafael and Cov chimed in with Steve. “Give us one about you in the old time.” I sucked rum and watched him closely. Would he do it this time? He looked a touch worn and out of sorts. He glanced at me, and I think he recalled our argument after the meeting, when I told him how great he always made America seem to us.

“Okay,” he decided. “I’ll give you a story of the old time. But I warn you, nothing fancy. This is just something that happened.”

We settled back on out stumps and in our rain-warped chairs, satisfied.

*   *   *

“Well,” he said, “back in the old time I owned a car. God’s truth. And at the time of this story I was driving that car from New York to Flagstaff. A drive like that would take about a week, if you hurried. I was near the end of the trip, on Highway Forty in New Mexico. It was about sunset, and a storm was coming. Big black clouds looked like a wave rolling off the Pacific, and the land below was desert floor littered with mesas. Nothing on it but shrubs and the two lines of the road. Ghost country.

“First thing I noticed was two sunbeams breaking over the top of the cloud front. You’ve seen that happen, but these two were like beacons, fanning out to left and right of me, like signs of some sort.

“Second thing that happened, the old Volvo puffed over a big rise, and a sign on top said
Continental Divide.
I should have known. Before the downslope there was a hitchhiker by the side of the road.

“Now at the time I was a lawyer, and I valued my solitude. For a whole week I didn’t have to talk, and I liked that. Even though I owned a car I had hitchhiked in my time, and I had known the hitchhiker’s despair, made of a whole bunch of little disappointments in humanity, slowly adding up. And it was about to rain, too. But I still didn’t want to pick this guy up, so as I drove by I was kind of looking off to the left so I wouldn’t have to meet his eye. But that would have been cowardice. So at the last second I looked at him. And believe me the moment I recognized him I put the car on the shoulder and skidded over the gravel to a halt.

“That hitchhiker was me. He was me myself.”

“Oh you liar,” Rebel said.

“I’m not lying! That’s what it was like in the old time. I mean to tell you, stranger things than that happened every day. So let me get on with it.

“Anyway. We both knew it, this guy and me. We weren’t just lookalikes, like the ones friends tell you about and then you meet them and they don’t look anything like you. This guy was the one I saw in the mirror every morning when I shaved. He was even wearing an old windbreaker of mine.

“I got out of the car, and we stared at each other. ‘So who are you?’ he said, in a voice I recognized from tape recordings of myself.

“‘Tom Barnard,’ I said.

“‘Me too,’ says he.

“We
stared
at each other.

“Now as I said, at this time I was a lawyer, working winters in New York City. So I was a pretty slight little guy, with a bit of a gut. The other Tom Barnard had been doing physical work, I could tell; he was bigger, tough and fit, with a beard starting and a dark weathered color to his skin.

“‘Well, do you want a ride?’ I said. What else could I say? He nodded a bit hesitantly, picked up his backpack and walked to my car. ‘So the Volvo is still hanging in there,’ he said. We got in. And the two of us sitting there, side by side in the car, made me feel so strange I could hardly start the engine. Why, he had a scar on his arm where I once fell out of a tree! It was too uncanny. But I took off down the road anyway.

“Well, sitting there silent gave us both the willies, and we started to talk. Sure enough, we were the same Tom Barnard. Born in the same year to the same parents. By comparing pasts all through the years we quickly found the time we had separated or broken in two or whatever. One September five years before, I had gone back to New York City, and he had gone to Alaska.