The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (42 page)

From the south side of the marsh we could see Dana Point clearly. It was a curve of bluffs, not tall like the cliffs down in San Diego, but tall for our part of the coast, and the curve stuck out from the generally straight line of the land. Now it was a dark mass against the stars, not a light on it anywhere. Underneath the sheer part of the bluff was a tangle of marsh and island, trees and ruins, bounded by a rock jetty that protected a narrow strip of water. Once or twice when fishing to the north we had taken refuge there in storms. The jetty was invisible from where we stood, but Steve described it in as much detail as he could to the Mayor.

“So they’ll probably land there,” the Mayor concluded.

“Yes sir.”

“What about this marsh here? It looks like a good-sized river. Is there a place where we can cross?”

“The beach road has held,” Steve said. “It’s a high bridge over the rivermouth, so it drains right and none of it’s ever been washed out.” He said this as proudly as if he were the bridge builder. “I’ve been across it.”

“Excellent, excellent. Let’s get over it, then.”

The road leading from the freeway to the bridge was gone, however, and we were forced to descend a ravine, cross the creek at its bottom, and climb the other side. My pistol was getting to be quite an irritation in all this climbing, and I could see Mando felt the same. Danforth’s exhortations kept us hurrying. Once on the beach road we hurried over the thick sand that covered it, to the mouth of the estuary. As Steve had said, the bridge was still there, in good shape. In a low voice Gabby asked me, “How does he know all this?” but all I could do was shrug and shake my head. Nicolin had made night treks on his own, I knew that—and now I knew that he had come all the way up here, on his own, and had never told me of it.

Out on the bridge we caught the full brunt of the wind for the first time since we had entered San Clemente. It peeled over the bridge with a force that made us stagger, and it shoved the water of the river in choppy waves against the pilings. The waves burst into foam and rebounded into the channel, to be carried out to sea gurgling and sucking and hissing. We didn’t tarry there, and were quickly over the bridge and under the bluffs of Dana Point, out of the wind’s full power.

Tucked under the bluffs was the marshy flat that had once been the harbor. Only the channel directly behind the rock jetty was free of the sand and scrub that had drifted in and covered the rest of the little bay. We struggled through nettles and man-high brush to the beach facing the jetty, less than a stone’s throw away from it. Swells broke over submerged sections of the line of rocks, giving it a white edging and making it visible in the starlight. Weak remnants of the swell washed up the pebbly beach. The jetty ended almost directly across from us; we stood at the entrance of what remained of the harbor.

“If they land here they’ll have to get through this marsh,” Jennings said to the Mayor.

“You think they’ll sail in there, then?” the Mayor said, pointing up the channel to where it ended against the curve of the bluff.

“Maybe, but when the swell is small like it is tonight, I don’t see why they wouldn’t avoid all this and sail over to the beach back there.” Jennings pointed back the way we had come, at the wide beach stretching from the harbor south to the bridge.

“But what if we go there and they land here?” said Ben.

“Even if they do land somewhere in here,” Jennings said, “they’ll have to go by us over there if they’re going to go up the valley to see the mission like we think they are.”

“Like you think they are,” Danforth said.

“Don’t you agree?”

“Maybe.”

Jennings said, “Well either way, if we’re over there we’ll have them. They’ll come by us wherever they land—they won’t be going up those cliffs.” He waved at the north end of the channel. “If we stay here and they land on that beach, they’ll be able to run inland. We want to trap them against water.”

“That’s true,” Ben said.

Danforth nodded. “Let’s get back there, then.” Everyone heard him, of course, and we tramped back through the thick shrubs cursing and struggling. Back on the road that led to the bridge, the Mayor called us together.

“We’ve got to be well hidden, because the scavengers might come to greet this landing, and they’ll be coming from behind us. So I want us all in buildings or thick trees, or some such shelter as that. We’re assuming they’re going to land at this beach here, but it’s a good long stretch, so we may have to move after we sight them. If there’s a group on the beach to greet them, we’ll be able to adjust sooner, but we’ll have to be very quiet about it.” He led us from the road onto the beach. “Don’t walk where fresh tracks will show! Now. Main force, over here behind this wall.” Several men followed his pointing finger, and walked over to a low tumbled-down wall of broken brick. “Get tucked in there good.” He walked south down the beach. “Another group in that clump of trees. That will make a good crossfire. And you Onofre men…” He came back north, passed the first wall, came to a pile of cement blocks. “In here. See, this was a latrine. Clear some of these out and hunker down in here. If they try slipping around into that harbor swamp, you’ll be here to stop them.”

Mando and I put down our guns, and we climbed into the blocks and weeds and tossed some blocks out to make more room for us.

“That’s good,” Danforth said. “We don’t want to make too much of a disturbance, they may have landed around here before, in which case we don’t want to change anything much. Get in that, let’s see how well hidden you are.” We climbed over the junk in the doorway and stood inside. Two of the walls didn’t meet anymore, and we had a good view through the crack of the beach and the water. “Good. One of you stay where you can see down the beach.”

“We can see through this break,” Steve said, looking through the crack.

“Okay. That might be a good slot for shooting through, too. Stay out of sight, remember. They’ll have night glasses, and they’ll have a good look around before they land.”

The rest of the San Diegans had disappeared in their various blinds. The Mayor looked around and saw they had dispersed; he checked the watch on his wrist and said, “Okay. It’s still a couple hours before midnight, but the scavengers may come earlier to greet them, and they may land early anyway. When you see them come in, stay down. Don’t even release the safeties of your guns until we fire on them, understand? That’s very important. When we fire is your signal to fire too. Don’t waste bullets. Lastly, if anything happens and we get separated in the fighting, we’ll all meet on the bridge we crossed, and go back through San Clemente together. You know where I mean?”

“Sure,” Steve said. “The big bridge.”

“Good men. I’m going to join the main group. Keep quiet, and keep one man looking hard.” He shook each of our hands in turn, leaning into the latrine to do it. Once again he crushed my hand. “One more thing—we’ll hold our fire until they’re all on the beach. Remember that. Okay? Okay, then”—clenching a fist and swinging it overhead—“now’s our chance to get them!” Then he was off, limping across the soft sand to the broken wall down the beach.

No one in sight. Steve stood at the big crack facing the water and said, “I’ll take the first lookout.”

We each slid into the best seat we could make, and began to wait. Gabby settled down on a pile of disintegrating cement blocks. Mando and I got as comfortable as we could, sitting on each side of him. There was nothing to do but listen to the wind batter the ruins. Once I stood and looked over Steve’s shoulder at the slice of the sea visible through the crack. Waves broke and sluiced up and down the beach; the offshore wind threw back a little spray, in white arcs barely lit by the starry sky. Whitecaps flecked the surface farther out to sea. Nothing else. I sat back down. Counted the bullets in my leather pouch. There were twelve of them. The gun was loaded, so theoretically I could kill eighteen Japanese. I wondered how many there would be. With my fingernails I could pluck the loaded bullets from their chambers and slip them back in, so I figured reloading wouldn’t be a problem. Mando saw me and began fiddling with his gun, too.

“Do you think these things shoot straight?” he said.

“If you’re close enough,” said Gabby.

We waited some more. Leaning back against the cement wall I even dozed a bit, but I had one of those waking dreams, a quick vision of a green bottle tumbling my way, and I jerked awake again, my heart pumping. Still, nothing was happening, and I almost drifted off again, thinking in a disconnected dreamy way about the bricks of the latrine. Who had made such once-perfect bricks?

“I wish they’d get here,” Mando said.

“Shh,” Steve said. “Don’t talk. It’s getting close to time.”

If they come at all, I thought. Overhead the stars flickered in the velvet black sky. I shifted to the other side of my butt. We waited. Off on the bluffs a pair of coyotes matched yowls. A lot of time passed, heartbeat by heartbeat, breath by breath. Nothing slower than time passing, sometimes.

Steve jerked and reached a hand back to snap in our faces. He leaned over, hissed “scavengers” in a whisper. We jumped to our feet and looked through the crack, peering around Steve.

Dark. Then against the white gleam of the shorebreak I made out figures moving down the beach. They stopped for a while near the wall where the San Diegans were hidden, then moved north, until they were between us and the water. Their voices were almost loud enough to be understood. They clumped together and then moved south again, stopping before they had come even with the San Diegans. One of them leaned down and struck a lighter near the sand, and by its tiny flame several pants legs were illuminated. They were dressed in their finery: in the little circle of light were flashes of gold, ruby, sky-blue cloth. The man with the lighter lit five or six lanterns and left them on the sand with several dark bags and a couple of boxes. One of the lanterns had green glass. Another scavenger took that one and a clear one, went to the water and swung them overhead, crossing them once or twice. By the lanterns’ light we could make out parts of the whole crew, silver flashing from their ears and hands, wrists and waists. Several more appeared, carrying dry brush and some bigger branches, and with difficulty they started a fire. Once it was going the kindling burst into flame, and the bigger pieces crackled and spit burning pitch into the sand. Now in the bouncing light they were all clearly visible: fifteen of them, I counted, dressed in yellow and red and purple and blue and green, and weighted down with rings and necklaces of silver and copper.

“I don’t see any boat out there,” Steve whispered. “You’d think if they were signaling we could make out the boat.”

“Too dark,” Mando whispered. “And the fire cuts what we can see.”

“Shh,” Steve hissed.

“Look,” said Gabby in an urgent whisper. He pointed past Steve’s shoulder, but already I saw what he meant: there was a dark bulk rising out of the water, just off the end of the jetty. Waves rolled over this dark shape, defining it.

“It’s coming up from under the water!” Gabby said tightly. “It didn’t sail in at all.”

“Get down,” Steve said, and we crouched at his sides. “That’s a
submarine.
”

The man on the beach waved one lantern overhead now, the green one. Their fire gusted in the wind and the bright light bounced off yellow coats, emerald pants.

“So that’s how they get past the coast guard,” Gabby said.

“They go under them,” Steve agreed, awe in his voice.

“Do you think the San Diegans see it?” Mando said.

“Shh,” Steve hissed again.

One of the submarine’s lights came on, illuminating a narrow black deck. Figures came out of a hatch onto this deck, and in the water beside it they inflated big rafts. Others piled out of the submarine into the rafts. The scavengers’ firelight reflected off the oars as the rafts were rowed to the beach. Two scavengers welcomed the raft by wading into the water up to their waists, and pulling it up the beach beyond the white wavefoam. Several men jumped out of the raft, and a couple more of them lifted packages and wooden boxes out of it. Scavengers handed them jars of amber liquid that glistened in the firelight, and as the Japanese visitors drank we could just hear the scavengers’ greetings, raucous and jovial. The Japanese all looked very round, as if they were wearing two coats each. One of them looked just like my captain.

I pulled back from the crack. “We’ll be too far from them when the ambush starts,” I told Steve.

“No we won’t. Look, here’s another raft full of them.”

I said, “We should get out of this latrine and get in the trees behind. Once they figure out where the firing is coming from, we’ll be stuck here.”

“They won’t figure it out—how are they going to do that in the dark?”

“I don’t know. We should be out of here.”

One more raft was filled, rowed to shore, pulled up the beach. The thick Japanese men stepped out, looked around. The light on the submarine went out, but its dark bulk remained. Boxes were lifted out of the last raft, and some of the scavengers gathered around the boxes as they were pried open. One in a scarlet coat held up a rifle from a box for his fellows to see.

Crack! crack! crack!
The San Diegans opened fire. Shot after shot rang out. From my crouch, looking past Steve’s leg, I could see only the response of our victims on the beach: They fell to the sand, the lanterns were out in an instant, the fire knocked to sparks. From then on I couldn’t see much, but already spits of flame showed they were firing back. I aimed to fire, and at the same moment there was a flat
whoosh
-BOOM, and we were in a cloud of oily gas, coughing and choking, gasping, crying—my eyes burned so badly I couldn’t think of anything else—I feared the gas was eating them out of my head. As the wind swept the cloud out to sea there was another boom, and another, and the popping sound of our ambush was overwhelmed by tremendous long bursts of gunfire spraying off the beach. Through eyes burning with tears all I saw was the whitish flame spurting from the Japanese guns. I coughed and spit, feeling sick, raised my gun to shoot it for the first time (Steve was already shooting). I pulled the trigger and my gun went click, click, click.