The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (35 page)

“Now why are you laughing?” Steve stopped to demand of Doc, annoyed that his reading of Baum’s desperate last-chance flight into the Bosporus had been marred.

“Oh no reason, no reason,” Doc was quick to say. “It’s just his style. He’s so cool when he tells about it all, you know.”

But in the next chapter, “Sunken Venice,” Doc laughed again. Steve scowled and stopped reading.

“Now wait a minute,” Doc said, anticipating Steve’s censure. “He’s saying the water level is thirty feet higher there than it used to be. But anyone can see right out here that the water level is the same as ever. In fact it may be lower.”

“It’s the same,” Tom said, smiling at the exchange.

“Okay, but if so, it should be the same in Venice.”

“Maybe things are different there,” Mando said indignantly.

Doc cracked up again. “All the oceans are connected,” he told Mando. “It’s all one ocean, with one sea level.”

“You’re saying this Glen Baum is a liar,” Kathryn said with interest. She didn’t look at all displeased by the idea, and I knew why. “The whole book is made up!”

“It is not!” Steve cried angrily, and Mando echoed him.

Doc waved a hand. “I’m not saying that. I don’t know what all is true in there. Maybe a few stretchers, to liven things up, though.”

“He says Venice sank,” Steve said coldly, and read the passage again. “The islands sank, and they had to build shacks on the roofs to stay above the water. So the sea level didn’t have to rise.” He looked peevishly at Doc. “It sounds likely to me.”

“Could be, could be,” Doc said with a straight face. Steve’s jaw was tight, his face flushed.

“Let’s go on reading,” I said. “I want to know what happens.”

Steve read again, his voice harsh and rapid. Baum’s adventures picked up their pace. He was in as much danger as ever, but somehow it wasn’t the same. In the chapter called “Far Tortuga,” when he parachuted from a falling plane into the Caribbean, with several others who then inflated a raft, Doc left the hospital and went into the kitchen, his face averted to conceal a wide grin from Steve and Mando. The men on the inflatable raft, by the way, perished one by one, victims of thirst and giant turtle attacks, until only Baum was left to land on the jungle beach in Central America. It should have been pretty dramatic, and sad, but when Baum met up with a jungle headhunter Tom went “heee, heee, heee, heee,” from his bed, and we could hear Doc busting up in the kitchen, and Kathryn started laughing too, and Steve slammed the book shut and nearly stomped on Kathryn as he stood up.

“I ain’t reading for you folks any more,” he cried. “You’ve got no respect for literature!”

Which made Tom laugh so hard he started to cough again. So Doc came in and kicked us all out, and the reading session was done.

But we came back the next night, and Steve agreed sullenly to read again. Soon enough
An American Around the World
was done, which was probably just as well, and we went on to
Great Expectations,
and took the parts to read in
Much Ado About Nothing,
and tried some other books as well. It was all good fun. But Tom kept coughing, and he got quieter, and thinner, and paler. The days passed in a slow sameness, and I didn’t feel like joining in the joking on the boats, or memorizing my readings, or even reading them. Nothing seemed interesting or good to me, and Tom got sicker as day followed day, until on some evenings I couldn’t bear to look at him, lying on his back hardly aware of us, and each day I woke up with that knot over my stomach, afraid that it might be the last day he could hold on to this life.

17

Mornings I got up at dawn before the boats went out, and went up to check on him. Most mornings he was asleep. The nights were hard, Doc said. He got sicker and sicker, right up to the edge of death—I had to admit it—and there he hovered, refusing to pass on. One morning he was half awake and his bloodshot eyes stared at me defiantly. Don’t write me off yet, they said. He hadn’t slept that night, Mando told me. Now he didn’t feel up to talking. He just stared. I pressed his hand—his skin was damp, his hand limp and fleshless—and left, shaking my head at his tenacity. Living a hundred years wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to live forever. That look in his eyes told me, and I smiled a little, hoping he could do it. But the visit scared me. I hustled down the hill to the boats as if I was running from the Reaper himself.

Another morning I noticed it was aging Doc to care for him. Doc was over seventy himself; in most towns he would have been the oldest one. Pretty soon he might be ours. One morning after a hard night I sat with Mando and Doc at the kitchen table. They’d been up through the small hours trying to ease Tom’s coughing, which had lost power but was more constant. All Doc’s wrinkles were red and deep, and there were rings under his eyes. Mando let his head rest on the table, mouth open like a fish’s. I got up and stoked their fire, got some water on, made them some tea and hot cereal. “You’re going to miss the boat,” Doc said, but smiled his thanks with one corner of his mouth. His hand trembled his tea mug. Mando roused at the smell of corn and scraped his face off the table. We laughed at him and ate. I trudged down the hill with the knot over my stomach.

*   *   *

That was Saturday. Sunday I went to church. There were people there who (like me) hardly ever went to church: Rafael, Gabby, Kathryn, and hiding at the back, Steve. Carmen knew why we were there, and at the end of her final prayer she said, “And Lord, please return our Tom to health.” Her voice had such power and calmness, to hear it was like being touched, being held. Her voice knew everything would be right. The amens were loud, and we walked out of the church like one big family.

That was Sunday morning, though. The rest of the week the tension made folks irritable. Mando lost sleep, and took the short end of Doc’s temper; he didn’t much care what books I read from, or even whether we read at all. “Armando!” I said. “You of all people have
got
to want to read.” “Just leave me be,” he said blearily. Around the ovens the women talked in quiet voices. No boisterous tattling, no shrieks of laughter tearing the air. No old man jokes on the boats. I went out to help the Mendezes gather wood, and Gabby and I nearly got in a fight trying to decide how to carry a fallen eucalyptus tree to the two-man saw. Later that day I passed Mrs. Mariani and Mrs. Nicolin, arguing heatedly at the latrine door. No one would have believed me if I had told them about that. I hurried down the path unhappily.

*   *   *

One day at the rivermouth it got worse. They were pulling the boats onto the flat when I arrived—I was spending a week helping the Mendezes, and only came down to help clean up. I joined those moving fish from the boats to the cleaning tables. Steve was over with Marvin, pulling the nets out of the boats and washing them in the shallows, then rolling them up. Usually Marvin did this by himself; John saw Steve and called, “Steve, get over and help Henry!”

Steve didn’t even look up. On his knees on the hard sand of the flat, he tugged at the stiff wire rope at the top of the net. Answer him! I thought. John walked over and looked down at him.

“Go over and help get the fish out,” he ordered.

“I’m folding this net,” Steve said without looking up.

“Stop it, and get over to the fish.”

“And just leave the net here, eh?” Steve said sarcastically. “Just let me be.”

John grabbed him just under the armpit and yanked him to his feet. With a stifled cry Steve twisted and jerked out of John’s grasp, staggering back into the shallows. He pulled up and charged John, who walked straight at him and shoved him back into the shallows again. Steve stood and pulled back a fist, and was about to swing when Marvin jumped between them. “For God’s sake!” Marvin cried, shouldering John back a step. “Stop this, will you?”

Steve didn’t appear to hear him. He was rounding Marvin when I seized his right wrist in both hands and dragged him away, falling in the shallows to duck a left cross. If Rafael hadn’t wrapped Steve in a bearhug he would have pounded me and gone after John again; his eyes were wild, they didn’t recognize any of us. Rafael carried him down the beach a few steps and let him loose with a shove.

Every man and woman on the beach had stopped what they were doing. They watched now with faces grim, or expressionless, or secretly pleased, or openly amused. Slowly I stood up.

“You two are making it hard to work in peace around here,” Rafael scolded. “Why don’t you keep your family matters to yourself.”

“Shut up,” John snapped. He surveyed us and with a chopping motion of his hand said, “Get back to work.”

“Come on,” I said to Steve, pulling him up the flat and away from the boats. He shrugged free of me impatiently. We stumbled over the net where it had all started. “Come on, Steve, let’s get out of here.” He allowed me to pull him away. John didn’t look at us. I decided against the cliff path, worrying that Steve might throw rocks down on his pa, and led him up the riverbank. I was shaken, and glad that Marvin had had the wit to jump between them. If he hadn’t been so quick … well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Steve was still breathing heavily, as if he had just bodysurfed every wave of a big set. Between his clenched teeth he was cursing, repeating the words in an incoherent string. We took the river path to the broken end of the freeway, and sat under a torrey pine that hung over the whitish boulders and the river below. Going for cover, like coyotes after a scrap with a badger.

For a while we just sat. I swept pine needles into stacks, and then scraped through the dirt to concrete. Steve’s breathing slowed to normal.

“He’s trying to make me fight him,” he said in a voice straining for calmness. “I know he is.”

I doubted it, but I said, “I don’t know. If he is, you shouldn’t rise to it.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” he demanded.

“Well, I don’t know. Just avoid him, and do what he says—”

“Oh sure,” he cried, twisting to his feet. He leaned over and bawled at me, “Just keep on crawling around on my belly eating shit! That’s a real help! Don’t you try to tell me what to do with my life, Mister Henry Big Man. You’re just like all the rest! And don’t you get in my way again when I go after him, or I’ll bust your face instead of his!” He stalked down the freeway, cut into the potato patch and disappeared.

I let out a deep breath, relieved that he hadn’t hit me right then and there. That was my best feeling; other than that I was pretty low.

Kathryn had said that Steve listened to me more than to anybody else. Maybe that meant he didn’t listen to anybody anymore. Or maybe Kathryn was wrong. Or maybe I had said the wrong thing—or said it in the wrong way. I didn’t know.

It took me a long time to get up the spirit to stand and walk away from that place.

*   *   *

One day I took off up the river path, past the gardens and the ovens and the women washing clothes at the bridge bend, on up to where the hills closed together and the forest grew right down into the water on both banks. Here the path disappeared and everyone had to make their own way. I moved back into the trees and sat down, leaned back against the trunk of a big pine.

Wandering into the forest, to sit and be with it, was something I had done for a long time. I started when my mother died, and I imagined I could hear her voice in the trees outside our house. That was dumb, and soon I stopped. But now it was a habit again. With Tom sick there was no one I could talk to, no one who didn’t want something from me. It made me lonely. So when I felt that way I went out into the woods and sat. Nothing could touch me there, and eventually the knot would leave my stomach.

This was a particularly good spot. Around me trees clustered, big torrey pines surrounded by littler daughter trees. The ground was padded with needles, the trunk bowed at just the right angle for a backrest, and the curly branches above blocked most of the sun, but not all of it. Patches of light swam over my patched blue jeans, and shadow needles fenced with the brown needles under me. A pinecone jabbed me. I scrunched against the flaky bark of my backrest. Rolling on it, I turned and picked some of the dried crumbly gum out of a deep crack. Pressed it between my fingers until the still-liquid center burst out of the crust. Pine sap. Now my fingers would be sticky and pick up all sorts of dirt, so that dark marks would appear on my hands and fingers. But the smell of it was so piney. That smell and the smells of sea salt, and dirt, and wood smoke, and fish, made up the odor of the valley. Wind raked through the needles and a few of them dropped on me, each fivesome of needles wrapped together by a little bark nub at their bottoms. They pulled apart with a click.

Ants crawled over me and I brushed them away. I closed my eyes and the wind touched my cheek, it breathed through all the needles on all the branches of all the trees, and said
oh, mmmmmmm.
Have you heard the sound of wind in pine trees—I mean really listened to it, as to the voice of a friend? There’s nothing so soothing. It put me in a trance more like sleep than anything else, though I still heard. Each buffet or slacking shifted the hum or whoosh or roar of it; sometimes it was like the sound of a big waterfall around the bend, other times like the waves on the beach—still again, like a thousand folk in the far distance, singing
oh
as deep and wild as they could. Occasional bird calls tweeted through the sound, but mostly it was all that could be heard. The wind, the wind,
oh.
It was enough to fill the ear forever. I didn’t want to hear any other voice.

But voices I heard—human voices, coming through the trees by the river. Annoyed, I rolled on my side to see if I could see who was talking. They weren’t visible. I considered calling out, but I didn’t feel obliged to them; they were invading my spot, after all. I couldn’t blame them too much, it was a small valley and there weren’t that many places to go if you wanted to get away from folks. But it was my bad luck that they’d come to this one. I laid back against my tree and hoped they would go away. They didn’t. Branches snapped off to my left, and then the voices took up again, close enough so that I could make out the words—just a few trees over, in fact. That was Steve talking, and then Kathryn answered him. I sat up frowning.