The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (50 page)

“Look at the turbulance in the rivermouth,” I pointed out. “Even those broken waves must be ten or fifteen feet tall.”

“You’d be capsized and drowned by the first wave that hit you,” Tom said.

“Hmm,” said John reluctantly—with perhaps a gleam of humor in his eye. “You may be right.”

We meandered around our shelf again, talked about currents and the possibility of a mild winter. Out to sea shafts of light still speared the clouds to gild the lined ocean surface. Tom pointed out there. “What you
should
try doing is fishing the whales again. They’re due through soon.”

John and I groaned.

“No, really, you guys gave up on that one too fast. You either harpooned an extra tough one, or Rafael didn’t put the harpoon in a place that would do the beast much harm.”

John said, “Easy to say, but he’s never going to be able to place the harpoon right where he wants to.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying, it’s just that most of the time a harpoon will do them more damage, and they won’t be able to dive so deep.”

“If that’s true,” I said, “and if we added more rope to the end of the line—”

“There’s not room for it in our boats,” John told me.

But I was remembering the time Steve and I had discussed it. “We could tie the bottom end to line that runs over to a tub in another boat, and have twice as much.”

“That’s true,” John said, cocking his head.

“If we were to get into the whale business we could really make a killing at the swap meet,” said Tom. “We’d have oil to spare, and animal feed, and tons of meat.”

“If we could keep it from going bad,” John said. But he liked the idea; what was it but fishing, after all? “Could you really get the line set so that it went from boat to boat?”

“Easy!” Tom said. He knelt and picked up a pebble to draw in the dirt. He started to scratch a plan, and John crouched at his side. I looked out at the horizon, and this is what I saw: three sunbeams standing like thick white pillars, slanting each its own way, measuring the distance between the grey clouds and the gray sea.

Chapter the Last

As the year fell away to its death the storms came more frequently, until every week or so one barreled in over the whitecaps and thrashed us, leaving the valley tattered and the sea a foamy pale brown from all the dirt sluiced into it. When we did get the boats out the fishing was miserably cold, and we didn’t catch much. Most days I spent at the table under the window, where I read or wrote or watched black clouds bluster in. The clouds were the vanguard; after them a smack of the wind’s hand, and maybe a low rumble of thunder, announced the arrival of the storm’s main force. Raindrops slid down the windowpane in a thousand tributaries that met and divided again and again as they wandered down the glass. The roof ticked or tapped or drummed under the onslaught. Behind me Pa labored away on his new sewing machine, and its
rn, rn, rn rn rnnnn!
rebuked my idleness, sometimes so successfully that I buckled down and wrote a sentence or two. But it was hard going, and there were lots of hours when I was content to chew my pencils (writing epics on my teeth) and think about it, and watch it rain, lulled by wind, and roof patter, and the tea kettle’s whistle, and Pa’s
rn rn, snip snip.

The first storm of December, it snowed. It was a real pleasure to sit in our warm house and look out the window at the flakes drifting silently through the trees. Pa looked over my shoulder. “It’s going to be a hard winter.” I didn’t agree. We had enough food, even if it was fish, and more firewood was being dried in the bathhouse every day. After all the rain I was happy to see snow just for the way it looked, for the way it fell!—so slowly it didn’t seem real, at first. Then to run outside, and hop white drifts, and slap snowballs together to throw at neighbors.… I loved the snow. The day after, the sun came out under a high pale blue sky (fishbone clouds smack against the highest part of it), and the snow melted before midday. But the next storm brought more snow, and colder air, and a thicker tail of high clouds, and it was four days before the harsh sun came out and the white dusting melted and ran into the river. That got to be the pattern: valley first white-green under black skies, then black-green under white skies. Week by week it got colder.

Week by week my story got harder to write. I got lost in it—I stopped believing it—I wrote chapters and had to take a walk over the soggy leaf carpets in the woods, distressed and angry at myself. Still, I wrote it. The solstice passed, and Christmas passed, and New Year’s passed, and I went to all the parties and such, but it was like I was in fog, and afterwards I couldn’t remember who I had talked to or what I had said. The book was the only thing for me—and yet it was so hard! Sometimes I wore out pencils faster biting than writing.

But the day came when the tale was on the page, pretty much. All the action done, Mando and Steve gone. I stopped then, and took one still day to read what I had said. It made me so mad I damn near burned the thing. Here all those things had
happened,
they had changed us for life, and yet the miserable string of words sitting on the table didn’t hold the half of it—the way it had looked, the thoughts it had engendered, the way I
felt
about it all. There was no more of last summer in that book than there is of the tree in an old scrap of driftwood. And the work I had put in on it—well, it was discouraging.

I went out for a walk to try and recover. A few tall white clouds sailed above like galleons, but mostly it was a sunny day, and dead still, though the air had a bite to it. Wet snow lay on everything. Cakes of it were balanced on every branch, dripping and sparking the various colors of the rainbow. On the ground the snow crumbled to big clear grains under the sun’s glare, and the grains turned to drops of water that beaded the white blanket. Suncones melted through to tufts of grass, and snowbridges over the streams filling the paths collapsed, leaving dirty chunks of ice in the mud, and snow hummocks to each side, black with pine needles. I walked between these hummocks and over the remaining bridges (the ones in shadow) to the cliffs, thumping my boots in puddles and knocking snowcakes on branches into much and spray.

Out on the point of the cliff overlooking the river I sat down. No swell whatsoever: tiny waves lapped the strand as if the whole ocean was shifting a hand’s breadth up and down. There wasn’t any snow left on the beach, but it was wet and bedraggled, with blue-and-white puddles dotting it everywhere. The scattered galleon clouds didn’t hinder the sun much, but gave its light a tint so that the long stretch of cliff was the color of ironwood bark. No swell, still air, the ocean like a plate of blue glass, the galleons hovering over it, holding their positions.

I noticed something I had never seen before. On the flat blue sea were perfect reflections of the tall clouds, clearly shaped so you could tell they were upside down. It looked like they were floating underwater, in a dark blue sky. “Will you look at that,” I said aloud, and stood. Ever so slowly the clouds drifted onshore over the valley, and their upside-down twins disappeared under the beach. I stayed and watched that all day, feeling like oceans of clouds were filling me. Later the afternoon onshore breeze ruffled the mirror clouds, and the sun got too low and glared off the water. But I went home satisfied.

*   *   *

In the winter the scavengers hole up in some of the big, shattered old houses—a dozen or more of them to a house, like dens of foxes. At night they use the neighboring houses for firewood, and light big bonfires in the front yards, and they drink and dance to old music, and fight and howl and throw jewelry at the stars and into the snow. A solitary man, gliding over the drifts on long snowshoes, can move amongst these bright noisy settlements without trouble. He can crouch out in the trees like a wolf, and watch them cavort in their colored down jackets for as long as he likes, undisturbed. Their summer haunts are open to his inspection. And there are books up there, yes, lots of books. The scavengers like the little fat one with the orange sun on the cover, but many more lie unattended in the ruins around them—whole libraries, sometimes. A man can load himself down till his snowshoes sink knee-deep, and then return, a scavenger of a different sort, to his own country, his own winter den.

*   *   *

At the end of January a particularly violent storm undermined the side of the Mendez’s garden shed (they called it a barn), and as soon as the rain stopped all the immediate neighbors—the Marianis, the Simpsons, and Pa and I, with Rafael called in for advice—got out to give them a hand in shoring up that wall. The Mendez garden was as cold and muddy as the ocean floor, and there wasn’t a patch of solid ground to set beams on, to prop up the wall while we worked under it. Eventually Rafael got us to tie the shed to the big oak on the other side of it. “I hope the framing was nailed together good,” Rafael joked when we were back under the sagging wall. Kathryn and I worked one side, Gabby and Del dug out the other, and we practically drowned in mud. By the time we got beams set crosswise under the wall for foundations, all four families were ready for the bathhouse. Rafael had gone before us, so when we got there the fire was blazing and the water steamed. We stripped and hopped in the dirt bath and hooted with glee.

“My suggestion is you leave that rope there,” Rafael said to old Mendez. “That way you’ll never have to find out if those beams will hold it up or not.” Mendez wasn’t amused.

I rolled over into the clean bath and floated with him and Mrs. Mariani and the others. Kathryn and I sat on one of the wood islands and talked. She asked me if I was still writing. I told her I was nearly done, but that I’d stopped because it was so bad.

“You’re no judge of that,” she said. “Finish it.”

“I suppose I will.”

We talked about the storms, the snow, the condition of the fields (they were under tarps or cover crops for the winter), the swells battering the beach, food. “I wonder how Doc is doing,” I said.

“Tom goes up there a lot. They’re getting to be like brothers.”

“Good.”

Kathryn shook her head. “Even so—Doc’s busted, you know.” She looked at me. “He won’t last long.”

“Ah.” I didn’t know what to say. After a long pause looking at the swirling water, I said, “Do you ever think about Steve?”

“Sure.” She eyed me. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah. But I have to, with this book.”

Under my reproachful gaze she shrugged, and her nipples bobbed on the bubbling surface. “You would book or not. If you’re like me. But it’s past, Henry. That’s all it is—the past.”

I told her about the day when the sea had been so glassy that it mirrored the clouds, and she sat back and laughed. “It sounds wonderful.”

“I don’t know when I’ve ever seen anything so pretty.”

She reached over the wood island, and ran a finger down the crease between the muscles of the backside of my arm. I arched my eyebrows, and with a grin slipped off the seat to float around and tussle with her. She caught me by the hair.
“Henry,”
she laughed, and held my head under, giving me more immediate matters to think about, like choking on water and drowning. I came up spluttering. She laughed again and gestured at the friends around us. “Well?” I said, and went under for a submerged approach, but she stood and sloshed away, leading me to the wall seats where the others were. After that we talked with Gabby and Kristen, and later old Mendez, who thanked us for our help with his barn.

But when Rafael declared the day’s allotment of wood was burned, and we got out of the baths and dried off, and dressed, I looked around the room, and there was Kathryn looking at me from the door. I followed her out. The evening air chilled my head and hands instantly. There was Kathryn, on the path between two trees. I caught up with her and took her in a hug. We kissed. There are kisses that have a whole future in them; I learned that then. When we were done her mother and sisters were chattering out the bathhouse door. I let her go. She looked surprised, thoughtful, pleased. If it had been summer—but it was winter, there was snow everywhere. And summer was coming. She smiled at me, and with a touch walked off to join them, looking back once to meet my gaze. When she was out of sight I walked home through the dusk (white snow, black trees) with a whole new idea in mind.

*   *   *

Some afternoons I just sat before the window and looked at the book—left it closed, in the middle of the table, and stared at it. One of these times the snowflakes were drifting down through the trees as slowly as tufts of dandelion, and every branch and needle was tipped with new white. Into this vision tramped a figure on snowshoes, wearing furs. He had a pole in each hand to help his balance, and as he brushed between trees he sent little avalanches onto his head and down his back. The old man, out trapping, I thought. But he hiked right up to the window and waved.

I slipped on my shoes and went outside. It was cold. “Henry!” Tom called.

“What’s up?” I said as I rounded our house.

“I was out checking my traps, and I ran into Neville Cranston, an old friend of mine. He summers in San Diego and winters in Hemet, and he was on his way over to Hemet, because he got a late start this year.”

“That’s too bad,” I said politely.

“No, listen! He just left San Diego, didn’t you hear me? And you know what he told me? He told me that the new mayor down there is Frederick Lee!”

“Say what?”

The new mayor of San Diego is
Lee.
Neville said that Lee was always in trouble with that Danforth, because he wouldn’t go along with any of Danforth’s war plans, you know.”

“So that’s why we stopped seeing him.”

“Exactly. Well, apparently there were a lot of people down there who were behind Lee, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it while Danforth and his men had all the guns. Neville said this whole fall has been a dog fight down there, but a couple months ago Lee’s supporters forced an election, and Lee won.”

“Well, what do you know.” We stared at each other, and I found myself grinning. “That’s good news, isn’t it.”