The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (44 page)

“Where’s Nicolin?” Tom asked me.

I kept my eyes on the floor. Rafael answered from the kitchen:

“He stayed north to fire some rounds at the scavengers.”

Tom was shifting around against his back wall, and he coughed. “Quit moving,” Doc said. A flying branch knocked the house sharply. Mando’s breathing was rapid, harsh, shallow. Doc tilted his face to the side and wiped bright blood from his mouth. Doc’s own mouth was a tight lipless line. Bright blood on cloth. Under me the floor, the grainy smooth boards of the floor. Knots raised above the worn surface, cracks, splinters all shiny and distinct in the lamplight, scrubbing sand in the corners against the walls. The bedpost closest to me was shimmied. The sheets were so old that each thread of the fabric stood out; needlework in the patches. I stared at that floor and never raised my eyes. My breath hurt so it might have been me shot. But it wasn’t. Kathryn’s legs walked into the room, bending down the floorboards a bit. Gabby’s legs followed.

“I need help,” Doc said.

“I’m ready,” said Kathryn calmly.

“We need to get a tube between these ribs and drain the blood and air in the chest cavity. Get a clean jar from the kitchen and put a couple inches of water in it.” She left, came back. Their feet faced each other under Mando’s bed. “I’m afraid air’s getting in and not getting out. Tension pneumothorax. Here, put down the tube and tape, and hold him steady. I’m going to make the incision here.”

Muffled coughs from the old man. A quick glance up: Kathryn’s back, in sweatshirt and string-tie pants; the old man, watching them with an unflinching gaze. Down on the floor went the jar, clear plastic tube stuck in the water at the bottom of it. Suddenly the water bubbled. Blood ran down the sides of the tube and stained the water. More bubbles. The old man’s steady gaze: I wrapped my arms over my stomach and looked up. Kathryn’s broad back blocked my view of Mando. Shudders rattled me. Broad shoulders, broad butt, thick thighs, slim ankles. Elbows busy as she pulled tape from a roll and applied it to Mando, where I couldn’t see.

She looked at me over her shoulder. “Where’s Steve?”

“Up north.”

She grimaced, turned to the work at hand.

Tom coughed again, lightly but several times. Doc looked at him. “You lie back down,” he said harshly.

“I’m okay, Ernest. Don’t mind me.”

Doc was already back at it. He leaned over Mando with a desperate look in his eye, as if the skills his father had taught him so long ago were not enough for this one. “We need oxygen.” He tapped Mando’s chest and the sound was flat. Mando’s breathing was faster. “Got to stop the bleeding,” Doc said. The wind gusted till I couldn’t make out their voices over the house whistling. “Use the wound to put in another tube.…” Tom asked Gabby what had happened, and Gab explained in a sentence or two. Tom didn’t comment on it. The wind dropped again and I could hear the snip of Doc’s scissors. He wiped sweat from his forehead.

“Hold it. Okay, get the other end in the jar, and give me the tape quick.”

“Tape.”

Something in the way she said it made Doc wince, and look at Tom with a bitter smile. Tom smiled back but then he looked away, eyes filling with tears. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Rafael.

“Come on out to the kitchen like Gabby is now, Henry. You can’t do anything in here.”

I shook my head.

“Come on, Henry.”

I shrugged off his hand and buried my face in the crook of my arm. When Rafael was gone I looked up again. Tom was chewing on a curl of his hair, watching them intently. Kathryn put her head to Mando’s chest. “His heart sounds distant.”

Mando jerked on the bed. His feet were blue. “And his veins,” Doc said, voice dry as the wind. “Tamponade, ohhh…” He drew back, his fist clenched up by his neck. “I can’t help that. I haven’t got the needles.”

Mando stopped breathing. “No,” Doc said, and with Kathryn’s help he shifted Mando from his side to his back. “Hold the tubes,” he said, and put his mouth and hands to Mando’s mouth. He breathed in, holding Mando’s nostrils shut, then straightened up and pressed hard on Mando’s chest. Mando’s body spasmed. “Henry, come hold his legs,” Kathryn said sharply. I got up stiffly and held Mando by the shins, felt them twitch, struggle, tense up, slacken. Go slack. Doc breathed into him, breathed into him, pushed his chest till the pushes were nearly blows. Blood ran down the tubes. Doc stopped. We stared at him: eyes closed, mouth open. No breath. Kathryn held his wrist, feeling for a pulse. Gabby and Rafael were in the doorway. Finally Kathryn reached across Mando and put her hand on Doc’s arm; we had all been standing there a long time. Doc put his elbows on the bed, lowered his ear onto Mando’s chest. His head rolled till it was his forehead resting on Mando. “He’s dead,” he whispered. Mando’s calves were still in my hands, the very muscles that had just been twitching. I let go, scared to be touching him. But it was Mando, it was Armando Costa. His face was white; it looked like the pinched face of a sick brother of Mando’s.

Kathryn got out a sheet from the cupboard against the wall and spread it over him, pushing Doc gently away so she could do it. Her sweatshirt was sweaty, bloodstained. She covered Mando’s face. I recalled the expression his face had had when I was carrying him through San Clemente. Even that was preferable to this. Kathryn rounded the bed and pulled Doc to the door.

“Let’s get him buried,” Doc said intently. “Let’s do it now, come on.” Kathryn and Rafael tried to calm him but he was insistent. “I want it over with. Get the stretcher and let’s get him down to the graveyard. I want it over with.”

Tom coughed harshly. “Please, Ernest. Wait until morning at least, man. You’ve got to wait until daylight. Got to get Carmen, and dig the grave—”

“We can do that tonight!” Doc cried petulantly. “I want it over with.”

“Sure we can. But it’s late. By the time we’re done it will be day. Then we can carry him over and bury him with people there. Wait for the day, please.”

Doc rubbed his face in both hands. “All right. Let’s go dig the grave.”

Rafael held him back. “Gabby and I will do that,” he said. “Why don’t you stay here.”

Doc shook his head. “I want to do it. I got to, Rafe.”

Rafael looked to Tom, then said, “All right. Come on with us, then.”

He and Gabby got Doc into his coat and shoes, and bumped through the doorway after him. I offered to go but they saw I was useless and told me to stay. From the front door I watched them walk down the path to the river. Predawn twilight, Gabby and Rafael on each side of Doc, holding him. Three little figures under the trees. When they were out of sight I turned around. Kathryn was at the kitchen table, crying. I went outside and sat in the garden.

The wind was dying down a bit with the coming of day. It only hit hard in gusts. The light grew; I could make out gray branches waving. Under the pale sky all distances seemed equal. Leaves fluttered and hung still, fluttered again, in waves that swelled across the treetops out to sea. The dome of the sky grew lighter and taller, lighter and taller. Grays took on color, and then the sun, leaf green and blinding, cracked the horizon. Wind gusted.

I sat in the dirt. My knee, elbow, and hands throbbed where I had cut them falling. It was impossible that Mando was dead, and that reassured me for long stretches of time. Then my hands felt his calves got slack. Or I heard Kathryn inside, clearing up—and I knew that impossible or not, it was real. But it wasn’t a thought I could grasp for long.

The sun was more than a hand’s breadth over the hills when Doc and Gabby came back up the path, Marvin and Nat Eggloff behind them. Rafael was down the river path, pounding on doors and waking folks up. Gabby fairly staggered up the last part of the path. His eyes were ringed red, and he was dirty, as were Doc and Nat. Doc looked up from the path at his house, stopped and waited. Marvin nodded to me and they went inside. I heard them talking with Kathryn. Then she started yelling at the old man. “Lie down! Don’t be a fool! We got enough burials today!” Tom must have said his goodbyes to Mando inside. They came out with Mando on Rafael’s stretcher, wrapped in the sheet. Unsteadily I stood. Everyone took a stretcher pole in hand, three on a side. We carried him down to the river, across the bridge. Sun brutal off the water. We took the river path through the trees. People given the news by Rafael caught up with us, family by family, looked shocked, or tearful, or withdrawn. Once looking back I saw John Nicolin leading all the rest of the Nicolins bar Marie and the babies, his face puffy with displeasure. My pa came to my side and put his arm around my shoulder. When he saw my face he squeezed my shoulders hard. For once he didn’t look stupid to me. Oh he still had that vague look of someone who doesn’t quite get it. But he knew. Suffering you don’t have to be smart to understand. With the knowledge in his eyes was mild reproach, and I couldn’t look at him.

Back in the neck of the valley we were in the shade. Carmen met us outside her home and led us to the graveyard. She was wearing her preaching robe and carrying the Bible. In the graveyard was a new hole in the ground, a mound of fresh earth on one side of it, Mando’s mother Elizabeth’s grave on the other. We laid the stretcher on her grave and all the people trailing us circled around. Most of the valley’s people were there. Nat and Rafael lifted Mando’s body and the sheet into a coffin twice Mando’s size. Nat held the lid in place while Rafael nailed it down. Whap, whap, whap, whap. Sunbeams filtered through the branches. Doc watched the nails being driven home with a desolate look. Both his wife and Mando had been so much younger than him, their years didn’t add up to half his.

When the coffin was nailed shut John stepped forward and helped them arrange the ropes under the coffin. He and Rafael and Nat and my pa picked up the ropes and lifted the coffin over the hole. They lowered it to John’s curt, quiet instructions. When it was settled in the hole they pulled the ropes up. John gathered them and gave them to Nat, his jaw muscles so tight it looked like he had pebbles in his mouth.

Carmen stepped to the edge of the grave. She read some from the Bible. I watched a sunbeam twisting through the trees. She told us to pray, and in the prayer she said something about Mando, about how good he had been. I opened my eyes and Gabby was staring at me from across the grave, accusing, terrified. I squeezed my eyes shut again. “Into Thy hands we commend his spirit.” She took a clod of dirt and held it over the grave; held a tiny silver cross over it with the other hand. She dropped them both in. Rafael and John shoveled the damp earth into the hole, it made the hollow sound. Mando was still down there and I almost cried out for them to stop it, to get him out. Then I thought, it could have been me in that grave, and an awful terror filled me. The bullet that struck Mando had been one of swarms of them; that one or any of the others could have hit me, could have killed me. It was the most frightening thought I had ever had in my life—the terror filled me entirely. Gabby kneeled beside Rafael and pushed dirt in with his two hands. Doc twisted away, and Kathryn and Mrs. Nicolin led him back toward the Eggloffs’. But all I did was stand and watch; I watched and watched; and it fills me with shame to write it, but I became glad. I was glad it wasn’t me down there. I was so glad to be there alive and seeing it all, I thought thank God it wasn’t me! Thank God it was Mando got killed, and
not me.
Thank God! Thank God!

*   *   *

Sometimes after a funeral quite a wake would develop at the Eggloffs’, but not this morning. This morning everyone went home. Pa led me down the river path. I was so tired my feet didn’t make it over bumps. Without Pa I would have fallen more than once. “What happened?” Pa asked, reproachful again. “Why’d you go up there?” There were people strung along the trail, shaking their heads, talking, looking back at us.

When we got home I tried to explain to Pa what had happened, but I couldn’t do it. The look in his eye stopped me. I lay down on my bed and slept. I would say I slept like a dead man, but it isn’t so.

*   *   *

Sleep doesn’t knit the raveled sleeve of care, no matter what Macbeth said (or hoped). He was wrong that time as he was so often. Sleep is just time out. You can do all the knitting you like in dreams, but when you call time in it unravels in an instant and you’re back where you started. No sleep or dream was going to knit back the last day for me; it was unraveled for good.

Nevertheless, I slept all through that day and evening, and when Pa’s voice, or his sewing machine, or a dog’s bark pulled me halfway out of slumber, I knew I didn’t want to wake even though I didn’t quite remember why, and I worked at returning to sleep until I slid back down the slope to dreams again. I slept through most of the evening, struggling harder and harder to hold onto it as the hours passed.

But you can’t sleep forever. What broke my last hold on an uneasy half-sleep was the
w-whoo, w-whoo
of the canyon owl—Nicolin’s signal, repeated insistently. Nicolin was out there, under the eucalyptus no doubt, calling me. I sat up, looked out the door; saw him, a shadow against the treetrunk. Pa was sewing. I got my shoes on. “I’m going out.” Pa looked at me, hurt me once again with the puzzled reproach in his eyes, the slight hint of condemnation. I was still wearing the torn clothes I had had on the night before. They stank with fear. I was ravenous, and paused to break off half a loaf of bread on my way out. I approached Steve chewing a big lump. We stood together silently under the tree. He had a full bag over his shoulder.

When the bread was done I said, “Where you been?”

“I was in Clemente till late this afternoon. God what a day! I found the scavengers that had been chasing us, and sniped at them till they didn’t know
who
was after them. Got some too—they thought a whole gang was after them. Then I went back up to Dana Point, but by that time they had all gotten away. So—”

“Mando’s dead.”

“… I know.”

“Who told you?”

“My sister. I snuck in to get some of my stuff, and she caught me just as I was leaving. She told me.”