The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (40 page)

“Ah.” I started to describe the effect of the Santa Ana on the trees, that were so used to the onshore wind; but he knew about Santa Anas. I fell silent. We sat there a while. There was no rush to fill silences between us. All the hours we’d spent sitting together, talking or not talking, it didn’t matter. Thinking about all those hours made me sad. I thought, You can’t die yet, I’m not done learning from you. Who’s gonna tell me what to read?

This time Tom made an effort to rouse things. “Have you gotten started on filling that book I gave you?”

“Oh, Tom, I don’t know how to do such a thing. I haven’t even opened it.”

“I was serious about that,” he said, giving me the eye. Even in that wasted visage the eye had its old severity.

“I know you were. But what am I going to write? And I don’t even barely know how to spell.”

“Spelling,” he said scornfully. “Spelling doesn’t matter. The six signatures of Shakespeare we have are spelled four different ways. You remember that when you worry about spelling. And grammar doesn’t matter either. You just write it down like you would talk it. Understand?”

“But Tom—”

“Don’t but me, boy. I didn’t spend all that time teaching you to read and write for nothing.”

“I know. But I don’t have any stories to write, Tom. You’re the one with the stories. Like that one when you met yourself, remember?”

He looked confused.

“The one where you picked yourself up hitchhiking,” I prompted him.

“Oh yeah,” he said slowly, looking off through the wall.

“Did that really happen to you, Tom?”

The wind. Only his eyes moved, sliding over to look at me. “Yes.”

Again the wind, whistling its amazement,
whoooooo!
Tom was quiet for a long time; he started and blinked and I realized he had lost track of what we were saying.

“That was an awful long time ago for you to remember it all so clearly,” I said. “What you said and all. There’s no way I could do that. I can’t even remember what I said last week. That’s another reason I couldn’t write that book.”

“You write it,” he commanded me. “Everything comes back when you write it down. Press the memory.”

He fell silent, and we listened to the wind’s howls. A branch thumped the wall. He clutched at the sheet covering his legs, clutched and twisted it. It had a frayed edge.

“You hurting?” I asked.

“No.” Still he kneaded it, and looked at the wall across from me. He sighed a few times. “You think I’m pretty old, don’t you boy.” His voice was weak.

I stared at him. “You are pretty old.”

“Yes. Lived a full life in the old time, was forty-five on the day—that makes me a hundred and eight years old now, is that right?”

“Sure, that’s right. You know it best.”

“And I look that old too, God knows.” He took a deep breath, held it, let it go. I noticed that he hadn’t coughed since I had arrived, and thought that the dry wind might be a help to him. I was about to remark on that when he said,

“But what if I wasn’t?”

“What?”

“What if I wasn’t that old?”

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed, shifted around under the sheet. Closed his eyes for a time, so that I thought he might have fallen asleep. Opened them again.

“What I mean is … is that I’ve been stretching my age a bit.”

“But—how can that be?”

He shifted his gaze and stared at me, his brown eyes shiny and pleading. “I was eighteen when the bombs went off, Henry. I tell you true for the very first time. Got to while I have the chance. I was going to go to that ruined school on the cliffs that we saw down south. I went for a trip in the Sierra the summer before and that’s when it happened. When I was eighteen. So now I’m … now I’m…” He blinked several times in succession, shook his head.

“Eighty-one,” I said in a voice dry as the wind.

“Eighty-one,” he repeated dreamily. “Old enough, and that’s the truth! But I only grew up in the old time. None of that other stuff. I wanted to tell you that before I go.”

I stared at him, got up and walked around the room, and ended up at the foot of the bed where I stared at him some more. I couldn’t seem to get him in focus. He stopped meeting my eye and looked uncomfortably at his mottled hands.

“I just thought you should know what I’ve been doing,” he said apologetically.

“Which is what?” I asked, stupefied.

“You don’t know? No. Well … having someone around who lived in the old time, who knew it well, too—it’s important.”

“But if you weren’t really there!”

“Make it up. Oh, I was there. I lived in the old time. Not for long, and without understanding it at the time, but I was there. I’ve not been lying outright. Just stretching.”

I didn’t believe it. “But why?” I cried.

For the longest time he was silent, and the wind howled my distress for me.

“I don’t know how to put it,” he said wearily. “To hold on to the part of our past that’s of value, maybe? To keep our spirits up. Like that book does. Can’t be sure if he did it or not. Could be a Glen Baum that did go around the world. Could be Wentworth wrote it right there in his workshop. Doesn’t matter—it’s happened now because of the book. An American around the world. We needed it even if it was a lie, understand?”

I shook my head, unable to speak. He sighed, looked away, bonged his head lightly on the oil drum. A million thoughts jammed in my mind, and yet I said something I hadn’t thought, in a voice thick with disappointment. “So you didn’t meet your double after all.”

“No. Made it up. Made a lot of things up.”

“But why, Tom?
Why?
” I started walking around the room again so he wouldn’t see me cry.

He didn’t answer me. I thought of all the times that Steve had called him a liar, and how often I had defended him. Ever since he had shown us the picture of the Earth taken from the moon, I had believed him, believed all his stories. I had decided he was telling the truth.

In a voice I could barely make out he said, “Sit down, boy. Sit down here.” I sat in my chair. “Now listen. I came down and saw it, see? See? I was in the mountains, like I said. That part of the story was true. All the lies were true. In the mountains on a hike to myself. I didn’t even know the bombs went off, can you believe it?” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it yet. And suddenly I realized he was telling me what he had never told anybody. “It was a fine day, I hiked over Pinchot Pass, but that night smoke blotted the stars. No stars. I didn’t know but I knew. And I came down and saw it. Every person in Owens Valley was crazy, and the first one I met told me why, and that moment—oh, Hank, thank God you won’t ever have to live that moment. I went crazy like the rest of them. I was just older than you and all of them were dead, everyone I knew. I was mad with grief and my heart broke and sometimes I think it never did get mended.…”

He swallowed hard. “Now I see why I don’t talk about it.” He bonged the oil drum with his head, blinked to clear his eyes. In a fierce whisper he said, “But I got to, I got to, I got to,” banging his head lightly, bong, bong, bong.

“Stop it, Tom.” I put my hand behind his head, against the resonant metal drum. His scalp was damp. “You don’t have to.”

“Got to,” he whispered. I leaned forward to hear him. “At first I didn’t believe it. But the greyhound wasn’t running and I knew. It took me a work of walking and hitching rides with madmen to get home, but when I came down five it was still burning pillars of smoke everywhere, the whole city. I knew it was true then and I was afraid of the radiation so I didn’t go on to see my home. Up into the mountains looting and scavenging for food. How long I don’t know, lost my mind and only really remember flashes like flames through smoke. Killing. I came to in a cabin in the mountains and knew I would have to see it to believe they were all dead. My family, see? I didn’t care about the radiation anymore, don’t think I even remembered it. So I went back to Orange County, and there, oh, oh,” he exclaimed; his hand was clutching at the sheet over and over, and I held it. It was feverish.

“I can’t tell that,” he whispered. “It was … evil. I ran and came here. Empty hills, I was sure the whole world was destroyed, world of insects and people dying on the beaches. When I hoped, I thought it might be just us and Russia, Europe and China. That the other countries would get help to us eventually, ha ha.” He nearly choked, and held onto my hand hard. “But no one knew. No one knew anything beyond what they could see. I saw empty hills. That was all I knew. Marines had kept them clear. I saw I could live in these hills without going mad, if I could avoid getting killed by someone or starving. It could be done. See up to that point I didn’t know if it could be done. But here was the valley and I knew it could be done. And I never set foot in Orange County again.”

I squeezed his hand; I knew that he had been up there since.

As if to contradict me he said, “Never, not to this day.” He tugged my hand and whispered rapidly, “It’s evil, evil. You’ve seen them at the swap meets, scavengers, there’s something wrong with them, wall-eyed or something burst inside—there’s something wrong in their eyes, you can see it’s driven them crazy to live in those ruins. Insanity’s horse. And no surprise either. You got to stay out of that place, Henry. I know you’ve been up there at night. But listen to me, now, don’t go up there, it’s bad,
bad.
” He was leaning off the pillow toward me, both hands on my side of the bed to prop himself up, his face intense and sweaty. “Promise me you won’t go up there, boy.”

“Ah, Tom—”

“You can’t go up there,” he said desperately. “Tell me you won’t, not ever.”

“Tom, I mean sometime I’m gonna have to—”

“No! What for? You get what you need out of there from scavengers, that’s what they’re for,
please,
Henry, promise me. There’s evil up there so bad it can’t be spoken of please
I’m asking you not to go up there
—”

“All right!” I said. “I won’t go up there. I promise.” I had to say it to calm him down, you see. But the knot tightened across my stomach until I had to hold my left arm over my ribs, and I knew I had done wrong. Done wrong again.

He collapsed back against the pillow,
bong.
“Good. Save you from that. But not me.”

I felt so awful I tried to change the subject. “But I guess it didn’t harm you, not in the long run. Here you are all these years later.”

“Neutron bombs. Short term radiation. So I guess, but I don’t know. Something like that, though. The earth will revenge us, but it’s no solace. Revenge is no solace. Their suffering won’t pay off ours, nothing will ever, we were
murdered.
” He squeezed my hand so hard my knuckles hurt. He sucked in air. “The ones of us left were so hungry, so hungry, we fought each other and finished the murder off for them, ah, that was the worst of it. So crazy. In the year after more people died than had been killed by the bombs, I’m sure, and more and more until it looked like every last one of us would die. Stupid Americans so far from the earth by then that we couldn’t figure out how to live off it, or those who could were swamped by those who couldn’t. It got so’s a friend you could trust was worth more than the world to you. Until there were so few left there was no need to fight anymore, no one to fight. All dead. I saw Death walking down the road more times than you’d care to imagine. Old man in a black coat, axe over his shoulder. Got so I waved to him and walked on by. Then out of the sky the storms, weather turned bad and the storms came. There was a winter that lasted ten years, good limerick. But the suffering was too much to bear. I live to show what a person can bear and die not, good poem, remember it? Did I give you that one? It got so when you saw a living human face that wasn’t insane you wanted to hug the person right then and there. So that when we settled here … it was a start. New. Weren’t more than a dozen of us. Every day a struggle. Food, we’re slaves to it, boy, I learned that: Grew up and didn’t learn a thing about it, not really. In that America was evil. The world was starving and we ate like pigs, people died of hunger and we ate their dead bodies and licked our chops. It’s true what I say to Ernest and George, we were a monster and we were eating up the world and they had reasons to do it to us, but still, still we didn’t deserve it.
We were a good country.
”

“Please, Tom. You’re going to hurt your voice going on so, you can’t!” He was sweating and his voice was so strained and torn up I really did think he would hurt it. I was scared, trembling. But now he was wound up; he took a few deep breaths, and went on again, squeezing my hand and ordering me with his eyes to let him talk, to let him speak at last:

“We were free then. Not perfectly so, you understand, but it was the best we could do, we were trying, it was the best so far. Nobody else had ever done it better, we … it was the best country in history,” he whispered, like he had to convince me or die. “I tell you true now, no baiting George or babbling, with all the flaws and stupidities we were still the leader, the focus of the world, and they killed us for it. Killed the best country the earth ever had, it was genocide boy do you know that word? Genocide, the murder of a whole people. Oh it had happened before, we did it ourselves to the Indians. Maybe that’s why this happened to us. I keep coming on reasons but they’re not enough. We were wrong in a million ways and had flaws big as our strengths but
we didn’t deserve this.
”

“Calm down, Tom,
please
calm down.”

“They’ll suffer for it,” he whispered. “Tornadoes, yes, and earthquakes and floods and droughts and fires, and murder for no good reason. See I went back to see. I had to see. And it was all smoking and blasted flat. Home. And just a few blocks away it still stood, blasted flat all around it but not it, ground zero is that still spot. It really was the magic kingdom when I was a child.” Now his whispering got so rapid and desperate I could barely hear him, and what he said made no sense, and I held his forearm with both hands as he went on. “Main Street was all full of trash, dead people here and there, ruins, the smell of death. Around the corner the steamboat used to come, one time when I was a little boy my folks took me and as the steamboat rounded the corner we could hear that horn cutting across the water like Gabriel’s last call and the whole crowd knew it was him in an instant, Satchmo it was, Henry, Satchmo playing louder than the steamboat whistle, but now the lake was chock with corpses. I went to talk with Abraham Lincoln, leaned my head in his lap looked in his sad eyes and told him they killed his country like they killed him but he knew already and I cried on his shoulder. Went through the castle to the giant teacups, big blowsy woman and two men in the dead silence laughing drunk and trying to get the teacups to spin, she let a big green bottle go smash it went over the concrete and that instant I knew it was all true, and the man—the man he took his knife, oh—oh—”