The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (49 page)

“But you told us two different things,” I said. “Two contradictory things. Onofre was primitive and degraded, but we weren’t to want for the old time to come back either, because it was evil. We didn’t have anything left that was ours, that we could be proud of. You confused us!”

Abruptly he looked past me to the sea. “All right,” he said. “Maybe I did. Maybe I made a mistake.” His voice grew querulous: “I ain’t some kind of great wise man, boy. I’m just another fool like you.”

Awkwardly I turned and paced around a bit more. He didn’t have any good reason for lying to us like he did. He had done it for fun. To make the stories sound better. To entertain himself.

I went over and plopped down beside him. We watched the sandbars plow a few more swells to mush. It looked like the ocean wanted to wash the whole valley away. Tom threw a few pebbles down at the beach. Gloomily he sighed.

“You know where I’d like to be when I die?” he said.

“No.”

“I’d like to be on top of Mount Whitney.”

“What?”

“Yeah. When I feel the end coming I’d like to hike inland and up three-ninety-five, and then up to the top of Mount Whitney. It’s just a walk to the top, but it’s the tallest mountain in the United States. The second tallest, excuse me. There’s a little stone hut up there, and I could stay in that and watch the world till the end. Like the old Indians did.”

“Ah,” I said. “Sounds like a nice way to go.” I didn’t know what else to say. I looked at him—really looked at him, I mean. It was funny, but now that I knew he was eighty and not a hundred and five, he looked older. Of course his illness had wasted him some. But I think it was mainly because living a hundred and five years was in the nature of a miracle, which could be extended indefinitely, while eighty was just old. He was an old man, a strange old man, that was all, and now I could see it. I was more impressed he had made it to eighty than I ever used to be that he had made it to one hundred and five. And that felt right.

So he was old, he would die soon. Or make his try for Whitney. One day I would go up the hill and the house would be empty. Maybe there would be a note on the table saying “Gone to Whitney,” more likely not. But I would know. I would have to imagine his progress from there. Would he even make it forty miles to the north, to his birthplace Orange?

“You can’t take off at this time of year,” I said. “There’ll be snow and ice and all. You’ll have to wait.”

“I’m not in any rush.”

We laughed, and the moment passed. I began thinking about our own disastrous trip into Orange County. “I can’t believe we did something that stupid,” I said, my voice shaking with anger and distress.

“It was stupid,” he agreed. “You kids had the excuse of youth and bad teaching, but the Mayor and his men, why they were damned fools.”

“But we can’t give up,” I said, pounding the sandstone, “we can’t just roll over and lie there like we’re dead.”

“That’s true.” He considered it. “And maybe securing the land from intrusion is the first step.”

I shook my head. “It can’t be done. Not with what they have and what we have.”

“Well? I thought you said we don’t want to play possum?”

“No, right.” I pulled my feet up from the cliffside so I could squat and rock back and forth. “I’m saying we’ve got to figure out some other way to resist, some way that will work. We either do something that works, or wait until we can. None of this shit in between. What I was thinking of was that all the towns that come to the swap meet, if they worked together, might be able to sail over and
surprise
Catalina. Take it over for a time.”

Tom whistled his weak, toothless whistle.

“For a while, I mean,” I said. The idea had come to me recently, and I was excited by it. “With the radio equipment there we could tell the whole world we’re here, and we don’t like being quarantined.”

“You think big.”

“But it’s not impossible. Not someday, anyway, when we know more about Catalina.”

“It might not make any difference, you know. Broadcasting to the world, I mean. The world might be one big Finland now, and if it is all they’re going to be able to do is say, we hear you brother. We’re in the same boat. And then the Russians would sweep down on us.”

“But it’s worth a try,” I insisted. “Like you say, we don’t really know what’s going on in the world. And we won’t until we try something like this.”

He shook his head, looked at me. “That would cost a lot of lives, you know. Lives like Mando’s—people who could have lived their full span to make things better in our new towns.”

“Their full spans,” I said scornfully. But he had jolted me, nevertheless. He had reminded me how grand military plans like mine translated into chaos and pain and meaningless death. So in an instant I was all uncertain again, and my bold idea struck me as stupidity compounded by size. Tom must have read this on my face, because he chuckled, and put his arm around my shoulders.

“Don’t fret about it, Henry. We’re Americans; it ain’t been clear what we’re supposed to do for a long, long time.”

One more white sea cliff smashed to spray and charged toward us. One more plan crumbled and swept away. “I guess not,” I said morosely. “Not since Shakespeare’s time, eh?”

“Harumph-
hmm!
” He cleared his throat two or three more times, let his arm fall, shuffled down the cliff away from me a bit. “Um, by the way,” he said, looking anxiously at me, “while we’re on the subject of history lessons, and, um, lies, I should make a correction. Well! Um … Shakespeare wasn’t an American.”

“Oh, no,” I breathed. “You’re kidding.”

“No. Um—”

“But what about England?”

“Well, it wasn’t the leader of the first thirteen states.”

“But you showed me on a map!”

“That was Martha’s Vineyard, I’m afraid.”

I felt my mouth hanging open, and I snapped it shut. Tom was kicking his heels uncomfortably. He looked about as unhappy as I had ever seen him, and he wouldn’t meet my eye. Gazing beyond me he gestured, with an expression of relief.

“Looks like John, doesn’t it?”

I looked. Along the cliff edge above Concrete Bay I spotted a squat figure striding, hands in pockets. It was John Nicolin all right. He walked fast in our direction, looking out to sea. On the days when we were kept from going out, when he wasn’t working on the boats he was on the cliffs, most of the time, and never more than when the weather was good and we were kept in by the swell. Then he seemed particularly affronted, and he paced the cliff grimly watching the waves, acting irritable with anyone unfortunate enough to have business with him. The swell was going to keep us off the water for two days at least, maybe four, but he stared at the steaming white walls as if searching for a seam or a riptide that might offer a way outside. As he approached us his pantlegs flapped and his salt-and-pepper locks blew back over his shoulder like a mane. When he looked our way and noticed us he hesitated, then kept coming at his usual pace. Tom raised a hand and waved, so he was obliged to acknowledge us.

When he stopped several feet away, hands still in pockets, we all nodded and mumbled hellos. He came a few steps closer. “Glad to see you’re doing better,” he said to Tom in an offhand way.

“Thanks. I’m feeling fine. Good to be up and around.” Tom seemed as uncomfortable as John. “Magnificent day, ain’t it?”

John shrugged. “I don’t like the swell.”

A long pause. John shuffled one foot, as if he might be about to walk on. “I haven’t seen you in the last couple days,” Tom said. “I went by your house to say hello, and Mrs. N. said you were gone.”

“That’s right,” John said. He crouched beside us, elbow on knee. “I wanted to talk to you about that. Henry, you too. I went down to take a look at those railroad tracks the San Diegans have been using.”

Tom’s scraggly eyebrows climbed his forehead. “How come?”

“Well, from what Gabby Mendez says, it appears they used our boys as a cover for their retreat after the ambush. And now it turns out that mayor got killed. I went and asked some of my Pendleton friends about it, and they say it’s true. They say there’s a real fight going on right now down there, between three or four groups who want the power that the mayor had. That in itself sounds bad, and if the wrong group ends up on top, we could be in trouble. So Rafe and I were thinking that the railroad tracks should be wrecked for good. I went down to look at that first river crossing, and it’s pretty clear Rafe could destroy the pilings with the explosives he’s got. And he says he can blast the track every hundred yards or so, easy.”

“Wow,” said Tom.

John nodded. “It’s drastic, but I think it’s the right move. If you ask me, those folks down there are
crazy.
Anyway, I wanted to know what you thought of the idea. I was going to just get Rafe and go do it, but…”

Tom cleared his throat, said, “You don’t want to call a meeting about it?”

“I guess. But first I want to know what some of you think.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Tom said. “If they think we were in on the ambush, and if that super-patriot crowd gets control … yeah, it’s a good idea.”

John nodded, looking satisfied. “And you, Henry?”

That took me aback. “I guess. We might want that track working for us someday. But we’ve got to worry about keeping them at a distance first. So I’m for it.”

“Good,” said John. “We should probably try to talk with them at the swap meet, if we get a chance. And warn the others about them, too.”

“Wait a bit, here,” Tom said. “You still have to get a meeting together, and get the vote. If we start deciding things like the boys here did, we’ll end up like the San Diegans.”

“True,” John said.

I felt myself blushing. John glanced at me and said, “I’m not blaming you.”

I scratched the sandstone with a pebble. “You should. I’m as much to blame as anyone.”

“No.” He straightened up, chewed his lower lip. “That was Steve’s plan; I can see his mark on it everywhere.” His voice tensed, pitched higher. “That boy wanted everything his way right from the start. Right out of his ma. How he cried if we didn’t jump to his wishes!” He shrugged it off, looked at me sullenly. “I suppose you think I’m to blame. That I drove him off.”

I shook my head, though part of me had been thinking that. And it was true, in a way. But not entirely. I couldn’t make it clear, even to myself.

John shifted his gaze to Tom, but Tom only shrugged. “I don’t know, John, I really don’t. People are what they are, eh? Who made Henry here want to read books so bad? None of us. And who made Kathryn want to grow corn and make bread from it? None of us. And who made Steve want to see the world out there? No one. They were born with it.”

“Mm,” John said, mouth tight. He wasn’t convinced, even if it absolved him, even if he had been saying the same thing a second ago. John was always going to believe his own actions had effects. And with his own son, who’d spent a lifetime in his care … I could read his face thinking of that as clear as you can read the face of a babe. A wave of pain crossed his features, and he shook himself, and with a somber click of tongue against teeth reminded himself that we were here. He closed up. “Well, it’s past,” he said. “I’m not much of a one for philosophy, you know that.”

So the matter was closed. I thought about how this conversation would have taken place at the ovens among the women: the chewing over every detail of event and motivation, the arguing it out, the yelling and crying and all; and I almost laughed. We men were a pretty tight-lipped crowd when it came to important things. John was walking in a circle like I had earlier, and quickly his nervous striding got to us, so that Tom and I stood to stretch out. Pretty soon the three of us were meandering in place like gulls, hands in pockets, observing the swells and pointing out to each other any particularly big ones.

Looking back at the valley, now filled with trees yellow among the evergreens, I stopped pacing and said, “What we need is a radio. Like the one we saw in San Diego. A working radio. Those things can hear other radios from hundreds of miles away, right?”

Tom said, “Some of them can, yes.” He and John stopped walking to listen to me.

“If we had one of them we could listen to the Japanese ships. Even if we didn’t understand them we’d know where they were. And we could listen to Catalina, maybe, and maybe other parts of the country, other towns.”

“The big radios will receive and transmit halfway around the world,” Tom commented.

“Or a long way, anyway,” I corrected him. He grinned. “It would give us ears, don’t you see, and after that we could begin to figure out what’s going on out there.”

“I would love to have something like that,” John admitted. “I don’t know how we’d get one, though,” he added dubiously.

“I talked to Rafael about it,” I said. “He told me that the scavengers have radios and radio parts at the swap meets all the time. He doesn’t know anything about radios right now, but he does think he can generate the power to run one.”

“He does?” Tom said.

“Yeah. He’s been working on batteries a lot. I told him we’d get him a radio manual and help him read it, and give him stuff to trade for radio parts at the swap meets this summer, and he was all excited by the idea.”

John and Tom looked at each other, sharing something I couldn’t read. John nodded. “We should do that. We can’t trade fish for this kind of stuff, of course, but we can find something—shellfish, maybe, or those baskets.”

Another huge set rolled in, washing all the way to the base of the cliff, and our attention was forced back to the waves. “Those must be thirty-five feet high at least,” Tom repeated.

“You think so?” said John. “I thought this cliff was only forty feet.”

“Forty feet above the beach, but those wave troughs are lower. And the crests are nearly as high as we are!” It was true.

John mentioned that he wanted to get the boats out on days like this.

“So you
were
thinking about that when you walked down here,” I said.

“Sure. See, follow the river current at high tide—”

“No way!” Tom cried.