The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (41 page)

“
Please,
Tom!”

“But I survived! I survived. Ran from evil I don’t know where or how, came to in the valley like I said. I ran all the way and learned what I had to survive. Didn’t learn a damned thing in the old time. Schoolbook rubbish, nothing more. Idiot America. Roger’s the model of reason next to it, I nearly died learning what I had to know, nearly died twenty times and more, Jesus I was lucky to live, he fell in the torrent and maybe I could have—or the time they took her, no Troy for us … harsh, harsh, harsh. Tiger justice, we’re Greek now boy, it’s as hard for us as it was for them, and if we can make something beautiful out of it it’ll be like what they made, that fine carved line pure and simple just to describe it the way it is. And Death’s fine curve sitting there always, skull under flesh in the sun, no wonder the tragedies, the harshness, verse rituals the vase, the curved line, they were just a way of talking about what’s real then and now, real as hunger, sometimes I can’t bear to think of it. We were the last of those plays, great pride a great flaw, the two the same and they killed us for it, blasted us to desolation struggling in the dirt to scratch out thirty years and die like Greeks, oh, Henry, can you see why I did it, why I lied to you, it was to keep you knowing it, to make us Greek ghosts on the land and make that something pure and simple so we can say we’re still people, Henry,
Henry
—”

“
Yes,
Tom.
Tom!
Calm down,
please.
” I was standing, holding him by the shoulders, leaning over him, shaking at his delirium. Twisting he started to speak again and I put my hand over his mouth, clamped it there. He struggled to breathe and I let my hand off him. “You’re not making any sense,” I told him. The lamp sputtered, our shadows wavered against the black circles of the wall, the wind shrieked around the corner. “You’re working yourself up too much, talking wild. Listen to me now, lie down here. Please. Doc would be furious at us if he came in. You haven’t got the strength for such carrying on.”

“Do too,” he whispered.

“Good, good. Simmer down some though, simmer down, simmer down.”

He seemed to hear me, finally. He leaned back. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and sat down again. I felt like I had been running for miles. “Jesus, Tom.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep it down. But you got to know.”

“I know you survived. Now we’re past that and that’s all I need to know. I don’t want to know any more,” I said, and I meant it.

He shook his head. “You got to.” He relaxed back into the pillow.
Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

“Stop that, Tom.”

He stopped. The wind picked up again, filling the silence.
Whoooo, whooooo, whooooooooooo.

“Aye, I’ll be quiet,” he said softly, the strain gone from his voice. “Wouldn’t want Doc mad at me.”

“No you wouldn’t,” I said seriously. I was still scared; my heart still pumped hard. “Besides, you’ve got to save what energy you’ve got.”

He shook his head. “I’m tired.” The wind howled like it wanted to pick us up and knock us down. The old man eyed me. “You won’t go up there, will you? You promised.”

“Ah, Tom,” I said. “Some time I may have to, you know that.”

He slumped down onto the pillow, stared at the ceiling. After a time he spoke, very calmly. “When you learn things important enough that you feel like teaching them, it always seems possible. Everything’s so clear given what you’ve gone through—the images are there, even sometimes the words to convey them with. But it doesn’t work. You can’t teach what the world has taught you. All the tricks of rhetoric, the force of personality, the false authority of being teacher, or pretending to be immensely old … none of that’s enough to bridge the gap. And nothing else would be either.

“So I’ve failed. What I did end up teaching you was no doubt exactly backwards to my purpose. But there’s no help for it. I was trying to do the impossible, and so I got … confused.”

He slid down the pillow until he was flat on his back. Snuggled under the sheet, so that it looked like he would fall asleep right then, for his eyes were closed and he was breathing deep, in the way of an exhausted man. But then one brown eye opened and stared at me, pierced me. “You’ll be taught by something strong as this wind, boy, picking you up and blowing you into the sea.”

PART FOUR

Orange County

19

Outside it was dark, and the wind howled. I stood at the log bench in the garden and watched wind tear at the potato tops, felt it tear at me. To the west Cuchillo poked into the last blue before night’s black. It all looked different, as if I had walked out of the drum house into another time. Wind tore my breath from me, shoved it back in. I tried to collect myself.

“Ready?” Steve said sharply, and I jumped. He and Mando and Gabby were behind me. Impossible in the wind to hear anybody come up on you.

“Very funny,” I said.

“Let’s go.”

Mando said, “I have to make sure Pa’s awake to look after Tom.”

“Tom’s up,” I said. “He can call your pa if he wants him. If you wake him up, what will you tell him you’re going to do?”

In the dark Mando’s blurred, uneasy face.

“Let’s go,” Steve insisted. “If you want to come along, that is.”

Without a word Mando took off down the trail, back into the valley. We followed him. In the woods the wind became no more than a gust here and there. Trees creaked, moaned, hummed. Over Basilone we hiked, steering clear of the Shankses’ house. Through overgrown foundations to the freeway, where we picked up the pace. Quickly enough we were in San Mateo Valley, and past the spot where I had confronted Add. Steve stopped, and we waited for him to decide what to do.

He said, “We’re supposed to meet them where the freeway crosses the river.”

“We’d best keep going, then,” Gabby said. “It’s ahead a bit.”

“I know, but … seems to me we shouldn’t walk right down there. That doesn’t seem like the right way to do it.”

“Let’s get down there,” I put in. “They might be waiting, and we’ve got a long way to go.”

“Okay.…”

We walked close together so we could hear each other in the wind. A ball of tumbleweed bounced across the freeway and Mando shied. Steve and Gabby laughed. Mando pressed on ahead. We followed him to the San Mateo River. Nobody was there.

“They’ll see us and let us know where they are,” I guessed. “They need us, and they know we’ll be on the freeway. They can hide.”

“That’s true,” said Steve. “Maybe we should cross—”

A bright light flashed on us from below the freeway’s shoulder, and a voice from the trees said “Don’t move!”

We squinted into the glare. It reminded me of the Japanese surprising us in the fog at sea, and my heart hammered like it wanted to bound off by itself.

“It’s us!” Steve called. Gabby snickered disgustedly. “From Onofre.”

The light went out, leaving me blind. Under the sound of the wind, some rustling.

“Good.” A shape loomed on the sea side of the freeway. “Get on down here.”

We felt our way down the slope, bumping together in a clump. There were a lot of men around us. When we got to the bottom of the slope we stood in bushes that came to our waists. A dozen or more men surrounded us. One of them bent over and opened the shade on a gas lantern; most of its light was caught in the lower branches of the brush, but standing in one dim beam in front of the lantern was Timothy Danforth, Mayor of San Diego. His trousers were muddy.

“Four of you, are there?” he said in his loud bray. His voice brought back every detail of my night at his house on the freeway island, and it was Nicolin who answered, “Yes, sir.”

More men joined us, dark shapes coming up through the brush from the river. “That’s all of you?” the Mayor said.

“Yes, sir,” Steve said.

“That’s all right. Jennings, get these men guns.”

One of the men, looking like Jennings now that he had been named, crouched over a large canvas bag on the ground.

“Is Lee here?” I asked.

“Lee doesn’t like this sort of thing,” Danforth said. “He’s no good at it, either. Why do you want to know?”

“He’s someone I know.”

“You know me, right? And Jennings here?”

“Sure. I was just wondering, that’s all.”

Jennings gave a pistol to each of us. Mine was big, and heavy. I crouched and looked at it in the lantern’s light, holding it in both hands. Black metal business end, black plastic handle. It was the first time I had held a gun outside a swap meet. Jennings handed me a leather pouch filled with bullets, and kneeled beside me. “Here’s the safety catch; you have to push it to here before it will shoot. Here’s how you reload.” He spun the cylinder to show me where the bullets fit in. The others were getting instructions around me. I straightened and blinked to help my night sight return, hefting the pistol in my hand. “You got a pocket it’ll fit in?”

“I don’t think so. Well—”

“All right, men!” If it weren’t for the wind, the Mayor’s voice would be heard all the way back in Onofre, it seemed. He limped over to me, and I had to look up at him. His hair danced over his shadowed face. “Tell us where they’re landing, and we’ll be off.”

Steve said, “We can’t tell you till we’re up there.”

“None of that!” said the Mayor. Steve looked at me. The Mayor went on: “We’ve got to know how far away they’re landing, so we can decide whether or not to take the boats.” So, I thought, they had boated up the coast to get past Onofre. “You men have got guns, and you’re part of the raid. I understand your caution, but we’re all on the same side here. I give you my word. So let’s have it.”

The circle of men stood around us silently.

“They’re landing at Dana Point,” I said.

There it was. If they wanted to leave us now, there was nothing we could do about it. We stood watching the Mayor. No one spoke, and I could feel Nicolin’s accusing gaze, but I kept staring into the underlit face of the Mayor, who looked back at me without expression.

“Do you know what time they’re landing?”

“Midnight, I heard.”

“And who’d you hear from?”

“Scavengers who don’t like the Japanese.”

Another silence followed that. Danforth looked over at a man I recognized—Ben, his assistant.

“We’d better get going,” Danforth said after this silent conference. “We’ll go on foot.”

Steve said, “It’ll take a couple hours to walk to Dana Point.”

Danforth nodded. “Is the freeway the best route?”

“Up to the middle of San Clemente it is. After that there’s a coastal road that’s faster, and less exposed to scavengers.” Now that he was sure we were going, Steve’s voice was filled with excitement.

“We don’t have to worry about scavengers tonight,” Danforth said. “They wouldn’t attack a party this size.”

We climbed back up the shoulder into the hot dry blast of the wind. Like me, Mando carried a gun in his hand; Steve and Gab had room in their coat pockets for theirs. When we were all on the roadway the San Diegans started north, and we followed. A few men disappeared ahead and behind us. They had all sorts of guns with them: rifles, pistols as long as my forearm, little fat guns on tripods.

Trees swayed on each side of the road, and branches tumbled through the air like injured night birds. The stars winked brightly in the cloudless black sky, and by their light I could see a great deal: shapes in the forest, the whitish slash of the freeway stretching ahead through the trees, the occasional scout jogging back down the road to us, to report to the Mayor. The four of us kept right behind Danforth, and listened silently as he discussed things and gave orders in a voice calculated to warn every scavenger in Orange County. Walking down the middle of the road, we topped the rise where brick walls tumbled into the freeway, climbed over them and were in San Clemente itself.

“I expect the wind will slow them coming in,” Danforth remarked to Ben, unaware of the boundary we had crossed, the boundary I had promised Tom I would never cross. “I wonder how much they had to pay those patrols to let them through? What do you think the going price is for a trip to the mainland, eh? Do you think they tell them it could cost their lives?” Nicolin kept right on the Mayor’s heels, soaking in every word. I fell farther and farther back, but I could still hear him when the three men in the rearguard climbed out of the brick tangle and one said, “Either stay up there with them or get off the road with us.” I picked up my pace and rejoined the Mayor’s group.

Up and down, up and down, over the hills. Trees bounded in place under the wind’s hard hand, and the wires still in the air swung like jumpropes. Eventually we came to the road Nicolin had mentioned, that would lead us through San Clemente to Capistrano Beach and Dana Point. Once off the freeway and down in the rubble-filled streets I was obsessed by thoughts of ambush. Branches flew out from between broken walls, planks slapped each other, tumbleweed ran at us or away from us, and time after time I clicked over the safety of my pistol, ready to dive for cover and shoot. The Mayor highstepped over the junk in the middle of the street easy as you please. “That’s our point man,” he shouted to us, aiming with his pistol at a silhouette dodging through the street ahead. “There’s tails a block behind us, too.” He gave us the whole strategy of our positions in the street, which seemed like accidents of the moment. The men all had their rifles at the ready, and they were spread out well. “No wreckrats are going to give us trouble tonight, I don’t believe.” He kicked a brick in the road and stumbled. “
Damn
this road!” It was the third time he had nearly fallen. In all the rubbish it was necessary to watch every step, but he was above that sort of thing. “Doesn’t the freeway go right to Dana Point?” he asked Steve. “The maps showed that it did.”

“It turns inland about a mile from the harbor,” Steve said, his voice raised to carry over the clatter the wind was making.

He still sounded weak compared to the Mayor, who was talking in his everyday voice.

“That’s good enough,” Danforth declared. “I don’t like the footing in this junk.” He called to the forward scouts in a voice that made me wince. “Back to the freeway,” he told them. “We need to hurry more than we need to hide.” We turned up a street headed inland, and intersected the freeway after climbing over a fallen building. Once on the freeway we marched at good speed north, all the way through San Clemente to the big marsh that separates San Clemente from Dana Point.