The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (46 page)

*   *   *

I took to spending a lot of time on the beach. I couldn’t abide being with people. One day I tried to rejoin the fishing, but that was no good; they were too hard. Another time I wandered by the ovens, but I left; poor Kristen had a look that pierced me. Even eating with Pa made me feel bad. Everyone’s eyes questioned me, or condemned me, or watched me when they didn’t think I was going to notice: they tried to console me, or to act like nothing was different, which was a lie. I didn’t want any part of them. The beach was a good place to get away. Our beach is so wide from cliff to water, and so long from the coarse sand at the rivermouth to the jumbled white boulders of Concrete Bay, that you can wander on it for days without crossing your path, hardly. Long furrows from old high tides, filled with brackish water; tangled driftwood, including old logs with their octopus roots sticking up; sandflea-infested seaweed, like mounds of black compost; shells whole and broken; sand crabs and the telltale bubbles they leave in the wet sand; the little round white sandpipers with their backwards knees, charging up and down the shingle together to avoid the soup; all of these were worth investigating for hours and days. So I wandered up and down the beach and investigated them, and was miserable, or empty.

See, I could have not told them. Of course I
could
have refused to have anything to do with the whole plan right from the start. That is what I should have done. But even after I went along with it, I could have kept to myself what I had found out about the landing, and none of it would ever have happened. I had even considered it, and came close to doing just that. But I hadn’t. I had made my decision, and everything that had happened—Mando’s death, Steve’s flight—all followed from that. So it was my fault. I was to blame for one friend’s running away, another’s death. And for who knows how many other deaths that had come that night, of people who were strangers to me, but who no doubt had families and friends grieving for them like we grieved for Mando. All of it came from my thinking; from my decision. I would have given anything to change that decision. But there’s nothing as unchangeable as the past. Striding up the river path to home I recalled what the old man had said there, about how we were wedged in a crack by history so our choices were squeezed down; but now I knew that compared to the way the past is wedged in there, the present is as free as the open air. In the present you have choices, but in the past you only did one thing; regret it with all your power, it won’t change.

If I had been smarter, Mando wouldn’t have died. Not only smarter—more honest. I had lied to and betrayed Kathryn, Tom, Pa—the whole valley, because of the vote. Everybody but Steve, and he was on Catalina. What a fool I had been! Here I thought I had been so clever, getting the time and place out of Add, leading the San Diegans up to the ambush.

But it was us who had been ambushed. As soon as I thought of it that way it was obvious. Those folks hadn’t just been defending themselves on the spur of the moment—they were ready for us. And who else would have warned them but Addison Shanks? He knew we knew about the landing, and all he had had to do was tell the scavengers we knew, and they could prepare for us. Ambush us.

Well once I thought of it, it was as obvious as the sun in the sky, but it really hadn’t occurred to me until then, walking up the river path and brooding over it. They had ambushed the ambushers.

And the San Diegans had set us farther north than them so that if anything went wrong, we would be the last over the bridge and would take up the attention of the enemy while the San Diegans escaped. Thrown in the road to trip them.

We had been twice betrayed. And I had been an incredible fool.

And my foolishness had cost Mando his life. I wished fiercely (now that the funeral was well past) that I had died and not him. But I knew that wishing was like throwing rocks at the moon (so I was safe).

*   *   *

Wandering the beach and thinking about it a couple days later, I got curious and went up Basilone to the Shankses’. I didn’t have anything in mind to say to them, but I wanted to see them. If I saw their faces I would know if I was right or not about Add warning the scavengers, and then I could be shut of them for good.

Their house was burned down. Nobody was around. I stepped across the charred boards that were all that was left of the south wall, and kicked around in the piles of charcoal for a bit. Dust and ash puffed away from my boot. They were long gone. I stood in the middle of what had been their storage room, and looked at the black lumps on the ground. Nothing metal. It looked like they had emptied the place of valuables before they fired it. They must have had help moving north. After what I had caught Add doing, as soon as they heard of my survival they must have decided to move north and join the scavengers completely. And of course Addison wouldn’t leave us such a house.

The north wall was still there, black planks eaten through and ready to fall; the rest of the wood was ash, or ends and lumps scattered about. The old metal poles of the electric tower were visible again, rising up soot-black to the metal platform that had once held the wires up. I felt as empty as always. It had been a good house. They weren’t good people, but it had been a good house. And somehow, standing in the charred ruins of it, I couldn’t bring up any feeling against Add and Melissa, although I could have easily moments before. It couldn’t have been any fun to fire a good home like this and flee. And were they really that bad? Working with scavengers, so what. We all traded with them some way or other. Even helping the Japanese to land, was that surely so bad? Glen Baum had done it in that book of his (if he had done any of it), and no one called him traitor. Add and Melissa just wanted something different than I did. In ways they were better than I was. At least they kept their promises; they had their loyalties intact.

I dogged back into the valley, lower than ever. Stopped at Doc’s: Tom sick, asleep and looking like death; Doc hollow-eyed at the kitchen table, alone, staring at the wall. I hustled down to the river, crossed the bridge, stopped at the bathhouse latrine to relieve myself. I walked out as John Nicolin walked in. He glared at me, brushed by me without a word.

*   *   *

So I went to the beach. And the next day I went back. I was getting to know the troops of little sandpipers: the one with one leg, the black one, the broken-beaked one. The tide moved in, drowning the flies’ dining table. It moved back out, exposing the wet seaweed again. Gulls wheeled and shrieked. Once a pelican landed on the wet strand and stood there looking about aloofly. The shorebreak was big that day, however, and he was slow to get out from under a thick rushing lip; it thumped down on him and he tumbled, long wings and beak and neck and legs thrashing around in a tangled somersault. I laughed as he struggled up, all wet and bedraggled and huffy; but he walked funny as he ran to take off and glide down the beach, and when I was done laughing I cried.

The clouds came back. A gray wall sat on the horizon, and pieces of it broke loose and were carried onshore by the wind. The wind had backed at last. The Santa Ana had held the clouds out to sea for over a week, and now they were coming back to claim their territory. At first there were just a few of them, loose-knit and transparent except at their centers. Clouds beget clouds, though, and through the afternoon they came in darker and lower, until the whole wall picked up and advanced from the horizon, turning dark blue and covering the sky like a blanket. The air got cold, the gulls disappeared, the onshore wind picked up. The clouds grew top heavy, spat lightning onto the sea and then the land, sizzling waves and shattering trees on the ridges. I sat on a worn grey log and watched the first raindrops pock the sand. The iron surface of the ocean lost its sheen as the rain hit it. I pulled my coat around me and stubbornly sat there. The rain turned to hail. Hail fell until there was a layer of clear grains on top of the tawny ones: a beach of sand overlaid by a beach of glass.

I walked down the beach, climbed the cliff path. The hail turned back to rain. Hands in pockets I strode the river path, and let the rain strike me in the face. It ran down inside my coat, and I didn’t care. I stayed out and walked through clearings and treeless patches on purpose, and it gave me pleasure because it was such a stupid thing to do.

I kept on up the valley until I stood at the edge of the little clearing occupied by the graveyard. Rain poured on it from low clouds just overhead, and in the dim light trees dripped and the ground splashed. I crossed the little section near the river where all the Japanese who had washed ashore had been buried. Their wooden crosses said
Unknown Chinese, Died 2045,
or whatever the date happened to be. Nat did a nice job carving letters and numbers.

Out in the clearing proper were our people. I squished from grave to grave, contemplating the names. Vincent Mariani, 1992–2038. A cancer got him. I remembered him playing hide and seek with Kathryn and Steve and me, when Kristen was a baby. Arnold Kalinski, 1970–2026. He had come to the valley with a disease, Tom said; Doc had been afraid we all would catch it, but we didn’t. Jane Howard Fletcher, 2002–2030. My mother, right there. Pneumonia. I pulled out some weeds from around the base of the cross, moved on. John Manley Morris, 1975–2029; Eveline Morris, 1989–2033. Cancer for him; she died of an infected cut in the palm of her hand. John Nicolin, Junior, 2016–2022. Fell in the river. Matthew Hamish, 2034. Malformed. Mark Hamish, 2036. Luke Hamish, 2039. Both malformed. Francesca Hamish, 2044. Same. And Jo pregnant again. Geoffrey Jones, 1995–2040; Ann Jones, died 2040. They both died when their house burned. Endeavor Simpson, 2039. Malformed. Defiance Simpson, 2043. Malformed. Elizabeth Costa, 2000–2035. Some disease, Doc never figured out what. Armando Thomas Costa, 2033–2047.

There were more, but I stopped my progress and stood at the foot of Mando’s grave, looking at the fresh carving on the cross. Even the Bible says something about men living their three score and ten, and that was ever so long ago. And here we were, cut short like frogs in a frost.

The dirt filling Mando’s grave had settled, and it was sinking more in the rain. I went to the broken-up pit at the back of the clearing and took the shovel that Nat always leaves there, and started carrying dirt over to the grave, shovelful by shovelful. Mud stuck to the shovel, it spread out badly, it wouldn’t tamp down right. Bad idea. I threw the shovel back at the pit and sat on the grass at the side of the grave, where I could hold the crossbar of the marker. Frogs in a frost. Rain thinned the mud, puddled on it. I looked around at our crop of crosses, all of them dripping in the gray afternoon light, and I thought, This isn’t right. It isn’t supposed to be like this. Mando was under me and yet he wasn’t; he was plain gone, vanished, no more. He wouldn’t come back. I took a handful of mud and squished it between my fingers.

22

But the old man lived.

The old man lived. I hardly believed it. I think everybody was surprised, even Tom. I know Doc was: “I couldn’t believe it,” he told me happily when I went up to see them on a cloudy morning. “I had to rub my eyes and pinch myself. I got up yesterday and there he was sitting at the kitchen table whining where’s my breakfast, where’s my breakfast. Of course his lungs had been clearing all week, but I wasn’t sure that was going to be enough, to tell you the truth. But there he was bitching at me.”

“In fact,” Tom called from the bedroom, “where’s the tea? Don’t you respect a poor patient’s requests anymore?”

“If you want it hot you’ll shut up and
be
patient,” Doc shouted back, grinning at me. “How about some bread with it?”

“Of course.”

I went into the hospital and there he was sitting up in his bed, blinking like a bird. Shyly I said, “How are you?”

“Hungry.”

“That’s a good sign,” Doc said from behind me. “Return of appetite, very good sign.”

“Unless you got a cook like I do,” said Tom.

Doc snorted. “Don’t let him fool you, he’s been bolting it in his usual style. Obviously he loves it. Pretty soon he’ll want to stay here just for the food.”

“When the eagle grins I will.”

“Oooh, so ungrateful!” Doc exclaimed. “And here I had to shove the food right down his face for the longest time. It got so I felt like a mama bird, I should have digested it all first for him I guess—”

“Oh that would have helped,” Tom crowed, “eating vomit, yuck! Take this away, I’ve lost my appetite for good.” He slurped the tea, cursed its heat.

“Well, it was hard to get him to eat, I’ll tell you. But now look at him go.” Doc watched with satisfaction as Tom tossed down chunks of bread in his old starvation manner. When he was done he smiled his gap-toothed smile. His poor gums had taken a beating in his illness, but his eyes watched me with their old clear brown gaze. I felt my face stretched into a grin.

“Ah yes,” Tom said. “There’s nothing like a mutated freak immune system, I’ll testify. I’m tough as a tiger. So tough! However, you’ll excuse me if I take a little nap.” He coughed once or twice, slid down under the covers and was out like one of his lighters snapping off.

So that was good. Tom stayed at Doc’s for another couple of weeks, mostly to keep Doc company, I believe, as he was getting stronger by the day, and he surely wasn’t fond of the hospital. And one day Rebel knocked on the door and asked me if I wanted to help move Tom and his stuff back to his house. I said sure, and we walked across the bridge talking and joking. The sun was playing hide and seek among tall clouds, and coming down the path from Doc’s were Kathryn and Gabby, Kristen and Del and Doc, laughing as Tom cavorted at the head of the parade. “Join the crowd,” Tom called to us. “The young and the old, a natural alliance for a party, you bet.” Kathryn gave me Tom’s books, heavy in a burlap sack, and I threatened to throw them off the bridge as we crossed. Tom swung at me with his walking stick. We made a fine promenade up the other slope of the valley. I had never allowed myself to imagine this day; but there it was, right in my hands where I could grab it.