The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (36 page)

Steve said, “Everybody in this valley is telling me what to do.”

“Everybody?”

“Yes!… you know what I mean. Jesus, you’re getting to be just like everybody else.”

“Everybody?”

Just that one word and I knew Kathryn was mad.

“Everybody,” Steve repeated, more sad than angry. “Steve, get down there and catch fish. Steve, don’t go into Orange County. Don’t go north, don’t go south, don’t go east, don’t row too far out to sea. Don’t leave Onofre, and don’t do anything.”

“
I
was just saying you shouldn’t deal with those San Diegans behind the backs of the people here. Who knows what those folks really want.” After a pause she added, “Henry’s trying to tell you the same thing.”

“Henry, shit. He gets to go south, and when he comes back he’s Henry Big Man, telling me what to do like everyone else.”

“He is not telling you what to do. He’s telling you what he thinks. Since when can’t he do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know.… It ain’t Henry.”

I scrunched down behind my tree uncomfortably. It was a bad sign, them talking of me; they’d sense me by the way my name sounded to them, and search around and see me, and I’d look like I was spying when I had only been trying to get some peace. I didn’t want to hear all this, I didn’t want to know about it. Well … that wasn’t strictly true. Anyway I didn’t move away.

“What is it, then?” Kathryn asked, resigned and a little fearful.

“It’s … it’s living this little life in this little valley. Under Pa’s thumb, stuck forever. I can’t abide it.”

“I didn’t know life here was that bad for you.”

“Ah come on, Kath. It isn’t you.”

“No?”

“No! You’re the best part of my life here, I keep telling you that. But don’t you see, I can’t be trapped here all my life, working for my dad. That wouldn’t be a life at all. The whole world is out there! And who’s keeping me from it? The Japanese are. And here we have folks who want to fight the Japanese, and we’re not helping them. It makes me sick. So I’ve got to do it, I’ve got to help them, can’t you see that? Maybe it’ll take all my life to make us free again, maybe it’ll take longer, but at least I’ll be doing something more with my life than gathering the food for my face.”

A scrub jay flashed blue as it landed in the branch above me, and informed Steve and Kathryn of my presence. They weren’t listening.

“Is that all the life here is to you?” Kathryn asked.

“No, shit, aren’t you listening?” Annoyance laced his voice.

“Yes. I’m listening. And I hear that life in this valley doesn’t satisfy you. That includes me.”

“I
told
you that isn’t true.”

“You can’t
tell
something away, Steve Nicolin. You can’t act one way for months and months and then say, no it isn’t that way, and make the months and what you did in them go away. It doesn’t work like that.”

I’d never heard her voice sound like it did. Mad—I’d heard it mad more times than I’d care to count. Now that angry tone was all beaten down flat. I hated to hear her voice sound that way. I didn’t want to hear it—any of it—and suddenly that overcame my curiosity, and my feeling that it was my place. I started crawling away through the trees, feeling like a fool. What if they saw me now, lifting over a fallen branch to avoid making a sound? I swore in my thoughts over and over. When I got out of the sound of their voices (still arguing) I stood and walked away, discouragement dogging every step. Steve and Kathryn fighting—what else could go wrong?

Beyond the neck at the end of the valley, the river widens and meanders a bit, knocking through meadows in big loops. It’s easier to travel in this back canyon by canoe, and after walking a ways I sat down again and watched the river pour into a pool and then out again. Fish tucked under the overhanging bank. The wind still soughed in the trees, but I couldn’t get back my peace no matter how hard I listened. The knot in my stomach was back. Sometimes the harder you try the less it will go away. After a while I decided to check the snares that the Simpsons had set up on the edge of the one oxbow meadow, to give me something to do.

One of the snares had a weasel caught in it. It had been going after a rabbit, dead in the same snare, and now its long wiry body was all tangled in the laces. It tugged at them one last time as I approached; squeaked, and baring its teeth in a fierce grin, glared at me murderously, hatefully—even after I broke its neck with a quick step. Or so it seemed. I freed the two little beasts and set the snare again, and set off home with them both in one hand, held by the tails. I couldn’t shake that weasel’s last look.

Back in the neck I walked along the river, remembering a time when the old man had tried to detach a wild beehive from a short eucalyptus tree up against the south hillside. He had gotten stung and dropped the shirt wrapping the hive, and the furious bees had chased us right into the river. “It’s all your fault,” he had sputtered as we swam to the other side.

Sun going down. Another day passed, nothing changed. I followed a bend to the narrows where the river breaks over a couple knee-high falls, and came upon Kathryn sitting alone on the bank, tossing twigs on the water and watching them swirl downstream.

“Kath!” I called.

She looked up. “Hank,” she said. “What are you doing here?” She glanced downstream, perhaps looking for Steve.

“I was just hiking up canyon,” I said. I held up the two dead animals. “Checking a couple of the Simpsons’ snares for them. What about you?”

“Nothing. Just sitting.”

I approached her. “You look kind of down.”

She looked surprised. “Do I?”

I felt disgusted with myself for pretending I could read her that well. “A little.”

“Well. I guess that’s right.” She tossed another stick in.

I sat down beside her. “You’re sitting in a wet spot,” I said indignantly.

“Yeah.”

“No big deal, I guess.”

She was looking down, or out at the river, but I saw that her eyes were red. “So what’s wrong?” I asked. Once again I felt sick at my duplicity. Where had I learned this sort of thing, what book of Tom’s had taught me?

A few sticks rode over the falls and out of sight before she answered. “Same old thing,” she said. “Me and Steve, Steve and me.” Suddenly she faced me. “Oh,” she said, her voice wild, “you’ve got to get Steve to stop with that plan to help the San Diegans. He’s doing it to cross John, and the way they’re getting along, when John finds out about it there’ll be hell to pay. He’ll never forgive him.… I don’t know what will happen.”

“All right,” I said, my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll try. I’ll do my best. Don’t cry.” It scared me to see her cry. Like an idiot I had thought it impossible. Desperately I said, “Look, Kathryn. You know there isn’t much I can do, the way he is these days. He almost hit me for grabbing him when he went after his dad the other day.”

“I know.” She shifted onto her hands and knees, leaned out over the water and ducked her head in it. The wet spot on the wide seat of her pants stuck into the air. After a good long time she came up blowing and huffing, and shook her head like a dog, spraying water over me and the river.

“Hey!” I cried. While she was under I had wanted to say, look, I can’t help you, I’m with Steve on this one … but looking at her face to face, I didn’t. I couldn’t. The truth was, I couldn’t do anything: no matter what I chose to do, I would be betraying someone.

“Let’s go to my house,” she said. “I’m hungry, and Mom made a berry pie.”

“Okay,” said I, wiping my face off. “You don’t have to ask me twice when it comes to berry pie.”

“I never noticed,” she said, and ducked the scoop of water I sent her way.

We stood. Walked down the riverbank until the trail appeared—first as a trampled-down line in the weeds and shrubs, then as scuffed dirt and displaced rocks, then as trenches through the loam that became little creeks after a rain. New paths appeared beside these as they became too wet or deep or rocky. It reminded me of something Tom had said before we went to San Diego, about how we were all wedges stuck in cracks. But it wasn’t like that, I saw; we weren’t that tightly bound. It was more like being on trails, on a network of trails like the one crossing the bog beside the river here.… “Choosing your way is easy when you’re on established trails,” I said, more to myself than to Kathryn.

She cocked her head. “Doing what people have done before, you mean.”

“Yes, exactly. A lot of people have gone that way, and they establish the best route. But out in the woods…”

She nodded. “We’re all in the woods now.” A kingfisher flashed over a snag. “I don’t know why.” Shadows from the trees across the river stretched over the rippled water and striped our bank. In the still of a side pool a trout broke the surface, and ripples grew away in perfect circles from the spot—why couldn’t the heart grow as fast? I wanted to know … I wanted to know what I was doing.

The more I feel the more I see. That evening I saw everything with a crispness that startled me; leaves all had knife edges, colors were as rich as a scavenger’s swap meet outfit.… But I only felt fuzzy things, oceans of clouds in my chest, the knot in my stomach. Too mixed to sort out and name. The river at dusk; the long stride of this woman my friend; the prospect of berry pie, making my mouth water; against these, the idea of a free land. Nicolin’s plots. The old man, across the shadowed stream in a bed. I couldn’t find the words to name all that, and I walked beside Kathryn without saying a thing, all the way downriver to her family’s home.

Inside it was warm (Rafael had put pipes underneath their place to convey heat from the bread ovens), lamps were lit, the pies were on the table steaming. The women chattered. I ate my piece of pie and forgot everything else. Purple berries, sweet summer taste. When I left, Kathryn said, “You’ll help?”

“I’ll try.” In the dark she couldn’t see my face. So she didn’t know that on the way home, at the same time I was thinking of arguments to get Steve to abandon his plan, I was also trying to figure out a way to get the landing date out of Add. Maybe I could spy on him every night until I heard him say it.…

*   *   *

I kept thinking about it, but no good trick to fool the date from Addison came to me. The next time I fished with Steve, it got to be a problem I couldn’t sidestep.

“They’re down at the station ruins,” Steve said as we rowed out of earshot of the other boats. “I went down there and they were setting up what looked like a permanent camp in the ruins. Jennings was in charge.”

“So they’re here, eh? How many of them?”

“Fifteen or twenty. Jennings asked where you were. And he wanted to know when the Japanese were landing. When and where. I told him we knew where, and would find out when real soon.”

“Why’d you tell him that?” I demanded. “I mean, first of all, the Japanese may not be landing soon at all.”

“But you said you heard those scavengers say they would!”

“I know, but who’s to say they were right?”

“Well, shit,” he said, and tossed his lure into the channel. I stared at the steep back wall of Concrete Bay unhappily. “If you go at it that way, we can never really be sure of anything, can we. But if these scavengers told Add that much, it means Add is in on it, so he’ll know when they’re going to land. I told Jennings what we told him before, that we’d find that out for him.”

“What
you
told him before,” I corrected.

“You were in on it too,” he said crossly. “Don’t try and pretend you weren’t.”

I slung my lure out the opposite side from Steve’s, and let the line run out. I said, “I was in on it, but that doesn’t mean I’m sure it’s a good idea. Look, Steve, if we get caught helping these folks after the vote went against it, what are people going to say? How are we going to justify it?”

“I don’t care what people say.” A fish took his lure, and he hauled the thing up viciously. “That’s if they do find out. They can’t keep us from doing what we want, especially when we’re fighting for their lives, the cowards.” He gaffed the bonita like it was one of the cowards he had in mind, pulled it into the boat and whacked it on the head. It flopped weakly and gave up the ghost. “What is this, are you backing out on me now? Now that we got the San Diegans up here waiting for us?”

“No. I’m not backing out. I just don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.”

“We
are
doing the right thing, and you know it. Remember all those things you said at the meeting! You were the best one there—what you said was right, every bit of it. And you know it. Let’s get back to the matter at hand, here. We’ve got to get that date out of Add, and you’re the one who knows the Shankses. You’ve got to go up there and get to Melissa somehow, that’s all there is to it.”

“Umph.” Now it was getting to be very inconvenient that I hadn’t told Steve the whole truth about how much Melissa and Add had fooled me.… I felt a bite, but I pulled too hard and the fish didn’t take. “I guess.” I couldn’t admit that I’d lied to make myself look good.

“You’ve
got
to.”

“All right all right!” I exclaimed. “Let me be, will you? I don’t notice you suggesting any smart schemes for getting him to tell us if he don’t feel like it. Just lay off!”

So we fished in silence, and looked after our lines. Onshore bobbed the green hillsides.

Steve changed the subject. “I hope we try whaling again this winter, I think we could make a go of it if we harpooned a small whale. From more than one boat, maybe.”

“You can leave me out of that one, thanks,” I said shortly.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s got into you, Hanker. Ever since you got back—”

“Nothing’s gotten into me.” Bitterly I added, “I could say the same about you.”

“How come? Because I think we should try whaling again?”

“No, for God’s sake.” The only time we had tried to kill one of the gray whales in their migration down the coast, we had gone out in the fishing boats and harpooned one. It was an excellent throw by Rafael, using a harpoon of his own manufacture. Then we stood in the boats and watched all of the line attached to the diving whale fly out of the boat, until it was gone. Our mistake was tying the end of the line to an eye in the bow; that whale pulled the boat right down from under us. The bow was yanked under the surface and
slurp
it was gone. We ended up fishing men out of that cold water rather than whale. And the line had torn across Manuel’s forearm, so that he almost bled to death. John had declared that whales were too big for our boats, and as I had been in the boat next to the one that went under, I was inclined to agree with him.