The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (45 page)

We stood there for a long time. Steve took in a deep breath and let it out. “So, I reckon I got to leave.”

“What do you mean?”

“… Come give me some help.” My night vision was coming in and with the exhausted sound of his voice I could suddenly see his face, dirty, scratched, desperate. “Please.”

“How?”

He took off toward the river.

We went to the Marianis’, stood by the ovens. Steve made his owl call. We waited a long time. Steve tapped his fist against the side of the oven. Even I, with nothing at stake, felt nervous. That led me back to all that had happened the night before.

The door opened and Kathryn slipped out, in the same pants she had worn the night before, but a different sweatshirt. Steve’s fingernails scraped the brick. She knew where he would be, and walked straight to us.

“So you came back.” She stared at him, head cocked to one side.

Steve shook his head. “Just to say goodbye.” He cleared his throat. “I—I killed some scavengers up there. They’ll be out to get back at us. If you tell them at the swap meet that I did it and took off, that it was all my doing, maybe it will all stop there.”

Kathryn stared at him.

“I can’t stay after what’s happened,” Steve said.

“You could.”

“I can’t.”

The way he said that, I knew he was leaving. Kathryn knew it too. She folded her arms over her chest and hugged herself as if she were cold. She looked over at me and I looked down. “Let us talk awhile, Henry.”

I nodded and wandered to the river. The water clicked over snags like black glass. I wondered what he was saying to her, what she was saying to him. Would she try to change his mind when she knew he wouldn’t?

I was glad I didn’t know. It hurt to think of it. I saw Doc’s face as he watched his son, the living part of his wife, lowered into the ground beside her. Helpless to stop myself I thought what if the old man dies tonight, right up there at Doc’s place? What about Doc then?… What about Tom?

I sat and held my head but it didn’t stop me thinking. Sometimes it would be such a blessing to turn all the thinking off. I stood and tossed rocks in the water. I sat down again when the rocks were gone, and wished I could throw away thoughts as easily, or the deeds of the past.

Steve appeared and stood looking over the river. I stood up.

“Let’s get going,” he said thickly. He walked down the river path toward the sea, cut into the forest. There was no talk between us, just the silent walking together, side by side, and briefly I recalled how it had felt for so long, for all our lives, when we had hiked together silently in the woods at night like brothers.

He went down the cliff path without looking at it, going from foothold to foothold with careless mastery. There was a slice of moon, nearly on the water. I descended the obscure cliff more slowly. Once on the sand I followed him to the boats. We broke the sand’s water crust, left big footprints in the loose sand below.

A couple of the fishing boats had sockets on the keel, where you could step a small mast and spread a sail. Nicolin went to one of those. Without a word we took bow and stern and skewed the boat from side to side in the sand. Normally four or five men push a boat into the water, but that’s just for convenience; Steve and I got it moving pretty easily. When it was across the tide flat and in the shallows we stopped. Nicolin climbed in to step the mast, and I held the hull steady on the sand bottom.

I said, “You’re going to sail to Catalina, like the guy who wrote that book.”

“That’s right.”

“You know that book is a bunch of lies.”

He never stopped unfurling the sail. “I don’t care. If the book is a lie then I’ll make it true.”

“They aren’t the kind of lies you can make true.”

“How do you know?”

I did know, but I couldn’t say. The mast was stepped and he started jamming the cotter pin through the socket. I didn’t want to just come out and ask him to stay. “I thought you were going to spend your life fighting for America.”

He stopped working. “Don’t you think I’m not,” he said bitterly. “You saw what happened when we tried to fight here. There’s not a thing we can do. The place where something can be done is Catalina. I bet there’s a lot of Americans already there who think the same, too.”

I could see he would have an answer to everything. I shifted the boat’s stern, got ready to push.

“I’m positive the resistance is strongest over there,” he said. “Most effective. Don’t you think so? I mean—aren’t you coming with me?”

“No.”

“But you should. You’ll regret it if you don’t. This is a little out of the way valley here. That’s the
world
out there, Henry!” He waved a hand westward.

“No.” I leaned over the stern. “Now come on, do you want help with this boat or not?”

He pursed his lips, shrugged. His shoulders drooped when the shrug was done, and I saw how tired he was. It would be a long sail. But I wasn’t going to go, and I wasn’t going to explain. He hadn’t expected me to say yes anyway, had he?

He roused himself, got out of the boat to push. Quickly it floated clear of the sand. We stared at each other from across the boat, and he stuck out his hand. We shook. I couldn’t think of anything to say. He leaped in and got the oars out while I held the stern. I shoved it into the current and he started rowing. With the crescent moon behind him I couldn’t make out his features, and we didn’t say a word. He rowed over a swell coming upriver. Soon he’d be out where what was left of the Santa Ana would clear the cliff, and catch his sail.

“Good luck!” I cried.

He rowed on.

The next swell hid the boat from me for a moment. I walked out of the river, feeling chill. From the beach I watched him clear the rivermouth. The sail, a faint patch against the black, flapped and filled. Soon he was beyond the break. From there he wouldn’t hear me unless I shouted. “Do some good for us over there,” I said, but I was talking to myself.

I climbed the cliff path, water dripping from my pants. By the time I got to the top I was warmer. I walked along the cliff. It was a cloudless night again, and the setting moon shone across the water, marking the distance to the horizon. It was a night to make you see how vast the world was: the ocean, the spangled sky, the cliff, the valley and the hills behind, they were all so huge I might as well have been an ant. Out there under a pale handkerchief patch was another ant, in an ant’s boat.

On the horizon I could see it: dark mass of the sea below, dark sky above, and between them the black bulk of Catalina, bejeweled with white points of light both fixed and moving, and red lights to mark the highest peaks, and a few yellow and green lights here and there. It was like a bright constellation, the finest constellation, always on the verge of setting. For years I had considered it the prettiest sight I had ever seen. There was a cluster of light on the water at the south end that was invisible from the cliff—the foreigners’ port—it could be seen from the height of Tom’s house on a night like this, but I had no desire to go up there and see it. The dim patch of Nicolin’s sail moved out of the narrow path of moonlight on the water, and disappeared. He was one of the shadows among the few moony glitters on the black sea, but strain my eyes as I might I couldn’t tell which one he was. For all I could tell the ocean had swallowed him. But I knew it hadn’t. The little boat was still out there somewhere, sailing west to Avalon.

I stayed on the cliff looking out to sea for a long time. Then I couldn’t stand it, and took off into the forest. Leaves clacked and pine needles quivered as I trudged under the trees. The valley never seemed so big and empty as it did then. In a clearing I looked back; the lights of Catalina blinked and danced, but I turned and walked on. I didn’t give a damn if I never saw Catalina again.

21

The forest at night is a funny place. The trees get bigger, and they seem to come alive, as though during the day they were asleep or gone from their bodies, and only at night do they animate themselves and live, perhaps even pulling up their roots and walking the valley floors. If you’re out there you can sometimes almost catch them at it, just beyond the corner of your eye. Of course on a moonless night it only takes a little wind to imagine such things. Branches dip to tousle the hair, and the falling-water sounds of the leaves are like soft voices calling in the distance. Two holes make eyes, a trail blaze is a smiling mouth, branches are arms, leaves hands. Easy. Still I think it may be true that they are a type of nocturnal animal. They are alive, after all. We tend to forget that. In the spring they sprout joyously, in the summer they bask in the sun, in the winter they suffer bare and cold. Just like us. Except they sleep during the day and come awake at night. So if you want to have much to do with them, night is the time to be out among them.

The different trees wake up in different ways, and they treat you differently. Eucalyptus trees are friendly and talkative. Their branches tend to grow across each other, and in a wind they creak constantly. And their hanging leaves twirl and clack together, making the falling-water sound, a rising and falling voice. The eucalyptus has a great voice. But you wouldn’t want to touch one, or give it a hug, unless you could see it and avoid the gum. The bark is smooth and cool, fragrant like the rest of the tree with that sharp dusty smell, but it doesn’t grow as fast as the wood inside it, I guess, and there are a lot of breaks in it as a result, cracks that split it completely. These cracks leak gum like a dog slobbers, and in the dark you can’t keep from getting your hands and arms in it, and coming away all sticky.

Pine trees are more forbidding speakers. In a breeze their quiet
whoooos
are fey, and the wild
ohhhhhhhs
they utter when the wind is up can raise the hair on the back of your neck. But pines feel good to the touch, and you can look at their black silhouettes against the sky forever. Torrey pines have the longest needles, and their little branches are all curly. And the rough, brittle bark feels wonderful against the skin, it’s like a giant cat’s tongue. Redwood bark is even better, all split and hairy; you can put your fingers in cracks around the sides and hold on for dear life. It’s like hugging a bear, or holding on to your ma and crying into her hair. Good friends, pine trees, though you have to ignore their stern voice and touch them to find that out.

Of course there are real living things in the forest at night, mobile things I mean, animals like us. A whole bunch of them, in fact: coyotes and weasels and skunks and raccoons and deer, and cats and rabbits and possums and bears and who knows what all. But damned if you’d know it by just walking around. Even a lone human sitting in the forest for hours might not catch sight of a single creature—much less a human who is crashing around hugging trees and such. Someone like that isn’t going to see a single animal, or even hear one except for frogs. Frogs don’t scare easily, they’ve got the river to hop in and they don’t care. You have to come close to stepping on them before they’ll shut up, much less move. All the others, though, they hear you coming or smell you way off, and they get out of the way and you never know they’ve been there, except if you chance to hear a rustle off in the distance. Of course a big cat might decide to eat you, but you hope they’d be wary enough to stay out of the valley. Generally they avoid crowds, and in the fall they’re not very hungry. So … if you walk about you don’t see a creature anywhere, which is funny because you know they’re around you, getting a drink, chomping on sprouts or dead prey, hunting for or hiding from each other.

But I forgot about the birds. Occasionally you’ll see the quick black shape of an owl, flying without a sound. It’s uncanny how complete their silence is. Or higher, geese or herons migrating, their heads poked ahead on those long necks, flying in V’s that flow in and out of shape.

That night I saw a flock of geese, flying south. Two pairs of wide V’s, passing over the valley in the hour before dawn, when the sky was blueing and I could see them quite clearly. Slow, steady wing strokes, and quite a conversation going on up there in that honk and squawk language.…

Of course they aren’t part of the forest proper, but you can see them while in the forest. And I did see them that night. I slept earlier against a redwood, and then for a while curled between two gnarly roots. Mostly, though, I walked around. I had spent a lot of time in the forest, day and night, without paying the least attention to it. But this night I studied tree after tree, hung out with them and really got to know them well, touched them, climbed a couple.

Where the creek from Swing Canyon meets the river is a little meadow that always has a lot of animal tracks in it. I wandered that way when I woke up and saw the geese overhead, in hope of seeing some furry brothers taking a drink. Sure enough, after I lay in the ferns behind a fungus-riddled log for a while, watching a spider weave her morning web, a family of deer came down and drank. Buck, doe, fawn. The buck looked around and sniffed; he knew I was there, but he didn’t care about it, which showed good judgment. When they were done drinking they pushed off, across the meadow and out of sight.

I clambered up stiffly, went down to the creek and drank myself. My pants were still damp and my legs were cold, and I was stiff, and dirty, and cut up, and hungry, and dog tired, but mainly I felt all right. I walked down the west riverbank empty as an empty bowl. I wasn’t going to start crying again, no matter whether I thought of Mando and Steve or not. I could think of them and not feel much of anything. It was done, and I was empty.

But then I rounded the bend above the bridge, and caught sight of a figure downriver on the same bank, at the foot of the cornfields. This was still early morning, when the whole world was nothing but shades of gray—a thousand shades of gray, but not a hint of color. Dew soaked every gray leaf and sprig and fern on the ground, a sign that the Santa Ana was ending.

The figure downstream was a woman. (If a person is visible we know their sex, no matter how distant they are—I’m not sure how we tell sometimes, but it’s so.) And the dark gray shade of this woman’s hair would be brown in the sun, brown with a bit of red in it. Already in this world of grays I could see that touch of red. Kathryn it was, standing at the foot of her fields. From the knee down her pants were darker—wet, then, which meant she had been out walking for a while. Maybe she had been out all night too, I thought, yet another animal in the night forest that I had not seen. Her back was to me. I would have gone to her, but something held me. There are times when a back a hundred yards away is as expressive as ever our faces are. She started and began walking downstream, toward the bridge. At the end of the field she suddenly swung to her right and gave a fearsome kick to the last cornstalk. She wears big boots and the stalk shuddered and stayed tilted over. That didn’t satisfy her. She got set and kicked it again and again, till it was flattened. The scene blurred before me and I stumbled away through the woods, all our catastrophes made real to me again.