Pacific Edge

9

Night in the dormitory, in the heat and the dark. Sounds of breathing, hacking cough, nightmare whimpers, insomniac fear. Smell of sweat, faint reek, that they could do this to us. There’s noise at the far end of the room, someone’s got a fever. One of the signs. Bleeding gums, vomiting, high fever, lassitude, disorientation. All signs. Trying to be quiet. They’re trying to talk him into calling the meds, going into the hospital. He doesn’t want to go of course, who would? They don’t come back. That there’s a place makes people want to stay here. Smell of fear. He’s really sick. They turn on the light in the bathroom to get a glow, and try to stay quiet and yet every man in the dorm is wide awake in his bed, listening. Meds are here. Kill all of them. Whispered conversation. Shifting him onto a stretcher, the sick man is crying, carried between beds and everyone is silent, no one knows what to say, then one shape rises up—“See you over there, Steve.” Several people say this, and he’s gone.

He took off into the hills. Up the faint track switchbacking up Rattlesnake Hill. Late sun pierced breaking clouds, pencil shafts of light fanned down over the treetopped plain. The eucalyptus grove on the lower south knob of the hill looked like a bedraggled park, the trees well-spaced, the ground beneath clear, as if goats were pastured there. Nothing but packed wet dirt and eucalyptus leaves. There were chemicals in those leaves that killed plants. Clever downunder trick. Stepping on soft green acorns and matted leaves. There are people like those trees, harmful to everything smaller around them, creating their own fine space. America. Alfredo. Tall, handsome, strong. But shallow roots. And fungicidal. Everything on this hill killed, so his space would be secure. So he would be a hundred. Where would he send his directable overhundred? Defense, no doubt. Create more business for his medtech. Business development, sure.

Everyone was a kind of tree. Ramona a cypress. Doris an orange tree, no a lemon tree. Old Tom a gnarled Sierra juniper, hanging on despite the dead branches. Oscar, one of the El Toro sycamores. Hank a manzanita, nature’s bonzai, a primal part of the hills. Kevin? A scrub oak. Strong limbed, always shedding, looks like it’s falling apart.

Up the wet root-rimmed trail to the real peak, feeling his quads. Onto the broad top. Sit for hours. Watch the sunset. Watch the dark seep out of the earth. Watch the dark leak into the sky.

Back down the hill, through the avocado trees. He was too restless to go inside the house. He got on his bike and started to ride. The cool air of the night, the foothill roads.

Thoughtlessly he coasted down into the roundabout where Foothill met Newport, circling into it to head up Newport to Crawford Canyon Road; and there was Alfredo, biking through in the other direction. Alfredo looked up, saw Kevin, looked down again. But as they zipped by each other Kevin caught a glimpse of the expression on his face, and it was a mix, so much in it, but the dominant emotion was—triumph. Triumph, pure and simple, suppressed and then he was past.

And at that moment Kevin hated Alfredo Blair more than he had hated anything in his life.

He was astounded at the virulence of the feeling, its power to dominate his thoughts. He rode and rode but he couldn’t think of anything else. If only he and Alfredo could get into another fight on the softball diamond, what he would do to him. It was an incredible stimulant, hatred—a poisonous amphetamine, sending him into long wrenching fantasies of justice, retribution, revenge. Revenge! Fierce fights, both verbal and physical, all complicated (even in fantasy) by Ramona’s presence, which meant that Kevin could never be the aggressor. Unless he were to catch him out one night, alone—like tonight—crash bikes, leap on him, strangle him, leave him dead—so much for his look of triumph!

Then again it wasn’t hard to imagine scenarios where he was defending himself, or Ramona, or the town, fighting to save them all from Alfredo’s malignant, arrogant drive to power. Punching him in the face hard—the idea made him hunch over, in little paroxysms of hatred. Oh to do it, to do it, to do it! It really was astonishing.

At last, much later, he returned home. His legs were tired. He walked through the garden to the house—

And there in the grove, movement. That shape! Instantly Kevin thought of the patch of kerosene east of Tom’s place—arsonist, voyeur, intruder in the night (maybe Alfredo, there to gloat, there to be killed)—“Hey!” he said sharply, and was off running, jumping over the tomatoes and into the grove, movement out there, black on black. Between the rows of misshapen avocado trees, fallen avos like ancient grenades black on the tilled dirt, movement, movement, nothing. A sound and he was off again, trying to pant silently as he followed the weak clicks of dry avo twigs breaking.

He turned and saw it again, fifteen trees down, dark shape, still and large. A tiny sound, giggle-chuckle, and his anger shifted, an electric quiver of fear ran up his spine; what was it? He ran for it and it slipped left, downhill. He turned at the tree, looked down an empty row.

No movement, no sound.

An empty still grove, black in the black. Kevin standing in it trembling, sweating, darting glances left and right.

One day he climbed the hill and there in the copse of trees were Tom and Nadezhda, sitting under the tallest sycamore.

They waved him over. “How’s it going?” Tom said.

“Okay. And you?”

“Fine. Nadezhda’s ship has gotten its cargo aboard, and they’re under way soon. I think I’m going to go along.”

“That’s good, Tom.” He smiled at them, feeling low. “I was hoping you’d do that.”

“I’ll just keep him one voyage,” Nadezhda said.

Kevin waved a hand, sat before them.

They talked about the hill for a while. “You know I’ve been getting calls from my friends,” Tom said. “About the information from Avending we sent them, and some other stuff. I think I know now why Alfredo has done all this.”

“Really!” Kevin exclaimed. “And?”

“Well—it’s a long story.” Tom picked up a handful of leaves, began dropping them on the ground. “Heartech makes cardiac aids, right? Cardiac aids, artificial blood, all that kind of thing. Alfredo and Ed Macey started the company eight years ago, when they were finishing grad school at UCI. It was a way of marketing an improved heart valve they had invented. To start, they got a loan from the American Association for Medical Technology, which is one of the information associations that sprang up to fill the gap left in the thirties when the venture capital laws changed. In the years since, unfortunately, the AAMT has become the refuge for a lot of the greediest elements in American medicine. Bits of the old AMA, people from the profit hospitals, they all found their way into this AAMT, and started building their power base again.” Tom laughed shortly. “There are people in this country, as soon as you set limits of any kind, their only goal in life becomes to break them. Being a hundred isn’t enough—for a lot of them, the thrill is to have more power than they should. More than allowed! They love that.

“But Alfredo isn’t like that, as far as I can judge. He wanted to build medical devices, that’s all. You remember how he used to talk about it when they were beginning. And they got their start, fine. But like a lot of small companies beginning, it got rough. It wasn’t clear at first that their valve was an improvement over the other models on the market, and they were struggling. It got to the point where it looked like they would go under—and that’s where the AAMT stepped in again.

“They offered Alfredo and Ed another loan. This one would be illegal under the new laws, but they said they believed in Heartech’s product, they wanted to help. The AAMT would start a black account for Heartech, and then they’d have a place ever afterward where they could go for help, deposit funds they didn’t want to report—a whole program, a whole black bank. And Alfredo and Ed—they could have tried to find some other way out, I guess, but they didn’t. They went for it.”

Kevin whistled. “How did your friends find out about this?”

“First by looking into the AAMT’s Hong Kong bank, which covers a lot of this action. And my friends have a mole in the AAMT who hears a lot, and from her the stories get to my friends.

“So.” Tom spread his hands. “That was the start of it. Heartech got through its hard year, began to prosper. Some excellent evaluations of the new valve came in, and it became the standard for certain conditions, and then they expanded into other products. You know that part of the story. But all along, they were getting more deeply involved with the black side of the AAMT, using funds, and after they hit the size limits for a company of their kind, banking funds as well. They’re iceberging, it’s called. Most of their overprofit is going to taxes, but they’re hiding a part of their operation in the AAMT in order to be able to do even more.”

“But why?” Nadezhda asked. “Why do that?”

Tom shrugged. “It’s the same impulse that got Alfredo started, if you ask me. He believes in this equipment, he knows it saves lives, he wants to do even more of it. Save more lives, make more money—the two are all mixed up in his business, and if you try to limit the latter in any way, it looks to him like you’re limiting the former.”

Kevin said, “But he could have started up an association of his own, and farmed some of the profit out to smaller companies, right? The procedures are there!”

“Yeah, yeah, he could have. But he didn’t. They took the easy way, and the upshot of it is, they’re in the AAMT’s pocket.”

“A Faustian bargain,” Nadezhda observed.

“That’s right.” Tom picked up more leaves. “And he should have known better, he really should have. He must have felt desperate, back there that first time. Or else he’s one of those smart people who is also fundamentally a little stupid. Or he’s simply drawn to the power.”

“But are you saying that the AAMT is responsible for this development idea?” Kevin asked.

Tom nodded. “They’ve been using the little companies they’ve got in their pocket as fronts, and funding developments like this all over the country. In one small town outside Albany, New York, they were getting resistance, and so they bought its whole city council—contributed illegally to the campaigns of several New Fed candidates for the council, and when they won, it was shoved right through. So they got that one built. They’ve done it all over the country. Once the developments are in place, the AAMT can use them. They’ve got a lot of control over them, and they can use them to build medical centers, or labs that generate profits that can be slipped into the AAMT and used to generate more, and so on. They no doubt would tell you they’re doing it for the good of the nation’s health care services. And maybe there’s some truth to that, but there’s a lot of raw power drive in it too. Putting the complexes in prominent, attractive places—that’s part of it too, and that’s mostly the drive for power, if you ask me. Pretty places.”

“So was this one their idea?”

“That’s what my friends have been told. In fact they were told that Alfredo tried to resist it, at first.”

“You’re kidding!”

Tom shook his head. “Alfredo told them it was a bad idea, and he didn’t want Heartech involved. But he’s in their pocket, see? They’ve got the goods on him, they can twist him like a dishrag.

“Still, he squirmed around trying to fight it. He said, listen, the hill’s protected, it’s zoned open land, and besides the town doesn’t have any water to spare. Tell you what—I’ll try the zoning and water issues and see what happens. If they don’t go, we can’t build anyway. Because he was pretty sure they wouldn’t go. That’s why he started all this backwards, you see? And indeed the water thing didn’t go. But he’s simply in no position to make a deal. They’ve got him, and they said, Hey—propose it directly, and see how that goes. And so that’s what he’s doing now.”

“How did your friends find that out?” Kevin said, amazed.

“Their mole in AAMT has seen this one up close, apparently. She knows for sure, I’m told.”

“Well—” Confused, Kevin didn’t know which of several things on his mind he wanted to say. “Well, hey—then we’ve got him, don’t we. I mean, when this story gets out…”

Tom frowned. “It’s a question of proving it. We’ll need something other than just the story, because the mole isn’t coming out for this particular case. So we’ll need some kind of documentation to back the charge, or they’ll deny it, and it’ll look like a smear campaign.”

“Will there be any documentation?”

“Not much. They don’t write these kinds of arrangements down, they don’t put them in computers. The black economy is a verbal game, by and large. But my friends are looking—following traces of the money, mostly. They seem confident they’ll come up with something on the Hong Kong end of things. But they haven’t yet.”

The three of them sat for a while.

“Wow,” Kevin said. “I just had no idea.”

“Me neither.”

Nadezhda said, “It makes sense, though. There wasn’t much motive to go for this hill in particular.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tom said. “I think maybe Alfredo likes the idea, now. Height equals power, after all, and he’s fond enough of power. But it’s true—now we’ve got more of the story, we can see he’s… hoist on his own petard, to an extent.”

“I had no idea.”

“People’s motives are mixed, Kevin.”

“I guess.” He sighed.

After a while he said, “In a way I wish you weren’t leaving.”

“I’m not going to stop working on it. Most of what I’m doing is by phone, and I’ll keep doing that from the ship.”

“Part of it’s your presence,” Kevin said.

Tom regarded him steadily. “If that’s so, it’s going to change. That part’s up to you, now.”

Kevin nodded.

“You’ll do fine.”

Kevin nodded again, feeling doubtful.

Time passed in silence.

Nadezhda asked him what was happening with Ramona.

Awkwardly, hesitantly, Kevin found himself telling the story. The whole story. The childhood stuff, the softball game, the ultraflight, the night in the hills, the birthday party, the following morning. The little that had happened since.

It felt good to tell it, in a way. Because it was his story, his and his alone, nobody else’s. And in telling it he gained a sort of control over it, a control he had never had when it happened. That was the value of telling one’s story, a value exactly the reverse of the value of the experience itself. What was valuable in the experience was that he had been out of control, living moment to moment with no plan, at the mercy of other people. What was valuable in the telling of the story was that he was in control, shaping the experience, deciding what it meant, putting other people in their proper place. The two values were complementary, they added up to something more than each alone could, something that… completed things.

So he told them his story, and they listened.

When he was done he sat crouched on the balls of his feet, feeling pensive.

Tom looked at him with his unblinking birdlike look. “Well, it ain’t the worst thing that could happen.”

“I know.” But this is bad enough for me! he thought.

He recalled Tom’s long years of silence, his retreat to the hills after Grandma died. Years and years. Sure, worse things could happen. But at least Tom had had his great love, had gotten to live it to its natural end, to live it out! Kevin’s throat was tight.

“There is not much worse,” Nadezhda said to Tom, rebuking him. Then to Kevin: “Time will make a difference. When enough time is passing—”

“I won’t forget!” Kevin said.

“No. You never forget. But you change. You change even if you try not to.”

Tom laughed, tugged at the white hair over one ear. “It’s true. Time changes us in more ways than we can ever imagine. What happens in time… you become somebody else, do you understand?” His voice shook. “You don’t forget, but how you feel about what you remember… that changes.”

He stood up suddenly, walked to Kevin and slapped him on the shoulder. “But it could be worse! You could forget! And that would be worse.”

He stood by Kevin’s side. Nadezhda sat on the ground beyond them. For a long time the three of them rested there, silent, watching sunlight tumble down through clouds.

That night while they were making dinner Kevin said, “One thing that really bothers me is the way everyone in town seems to know about it. I hate people talking about me like that, about my private affairs.”

“Hell, you can’t ever escape that,” Tom said. “People are talking about me and Nadezhda too, no doubt.”

Donna and Cindy and Yoshi came into the kitchen. “The bad thing,” Kevin said, “is that now when I fight Alfredo over the hill it looks like it’s just because of Ramona.”

“No it doesn’t. Everyone knows you’re against that development, and the Greens are too. This thing is only likely to get you sympathy votes. And you can use all the votes you can get.”

As they ate Kevin brooded over Tom’s departure. Mexico, Central America, across the Pacific to Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Working the winds and currents as so many ships had before. Well, it sounded great. Good for Tom. But with Jill in Asia, his parents in space…

Hank would still be there. Gabby. The team. Yoshi, Cindy, Donna, the kids, the rest of the household. Doris would still be there. Doris.

Two days later Kevin was the only one who went down to Newport with Tom and Nadezhda to see them off. Everyone else was too busy, and said their good-byes that morning at the house, or over the phone. “Seem’s like half the town is overseas,” Jerry Geiger complained. “Don’t stay away long.”

They took a car to Balboa, and Kevin helped them get their baggage aboard. The ship seemed huge. Overhead the dense network of rigging looked like a cat’s cradle in the sky. Gulls flashed across the sun in screeching clouds, mistaking them for a fishing trip. The pavilion behind the dock was crowded.

Eventually Ganesh was ready. Kevin hugged Nadezhda and Tom, and they said things, but in the confusion of shouts and horns he didn’t really hear. Then he was on the dock with the other well-wishers, waving. Above him Tom and Nadezhda waved back. Ganesh swung away from the dock, then three topsails unfurled simultaneously, on the foremast, the second mast, and the mizzenmast. Slowly, as if drifting, the ship moved downchannel.

Feeling dissatisfied with this departure, Kevin jogged down the peninsula to the harbor entrance. He walked over the boulders of the Wedge’s jetty, looking back to see if the ship had appeared.

Then it was there, among the palms at the channel turn. The wind was from the north, so they could sail out on a single reach. With only the topsails set its movement was slow and majestic. Kevin had time to get to the end of the jetty and sit on the flat rocks. He couldn’t help recalling the last time he had been out there, with Ramona, watching the ships race in. Don’t think of it. Don’t think.

The topsails were set nearly fore-and-aft, emphasizing the elegant transfer of force that propelled the ship across the wind. Always beautiful to see a square-rigged ship set so. People on both jetties stood watching it pass.

Then it was even with him, and Kevin could make out figures on the deck. Suddenly he spotted Tom and Nadezhda, standing by the bowsprit. He stood and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Tom! TOM!” He wasn’t sure they would be able to hear him; the ocean’s ground bass ate all other sound. But Nadezhda spotted him and pointed. All three of them waved.

Ganesh swung to the south, the yards shifting in time with the movement, so that the topsails were square to what was now a following wind. And then all the sails on the ship unfurled at once, mainsails, topgallants, skysails, moonsails, stunsails, royals, jibs. It was as if some strange creature had just spread immense wings. Immediately it leaped forward in the water, crashing across the incoming swells and shooting broad fans of spray out to starboard. Kevin waved. The ship drew away from him and grew smaller, the centerpoint of a wide V of startling white wake. Maybe that was Tom and Nadezhda in the stern, waving. Maybe not. He waved back until he couldn’t see the figures any more.

Back in El Modena Kevin went to work campaigning against the Rattlesnake Hill development, just as Tom had suggested. He and Doris went down to the town’s TV studio and made a spot to put on the town affairs show, going over their arguments one by one. They walked around an alternative model of the hill with the development on it, one that showed the roads necessary, and had the landscaping changed so the extent of the buildings was more visible. Oscar directed the spot, and added points to their argument, including a long section he had written himself on the water requirements of the new structure. Doris pointed at graphs of the costs involved and the expected returns, the possible population increase, the rise in the cost of housing in the town when people poured in. “We set the town’s general policy over a long period of years, and it’s been a consensus agreement about El Modena’s character, its basic nature. If we approved this construction all that would change.” Every graph made a different point, and Doris walked from each to each, leading the watchers through to her inescapable conclusion. Then Kevin showed videos he had made on the hill, at dawn, in a rain shower, looking down at the plain on the clear day, in the grove on the top, down among the sage and cacti, with the lizards and ants. Bird song at dawn accompanied these images, along with Kevin’s laconic commentary, and an occasional cut shot of South Coast Plaza or other malls, with their crowds and concrete and the bright waxy greenery that looked plastic whether it was real or not.

It was a good spot, and the response to it was positive. Alfredo and Matt did a rebuttal show which concentrated on their economic arguments, but still it seemed to Kevin that they had won the first TV round, surely one of the crucial ones. Tom saw a tape on Ganesh, and in one of their frequent phone conversations nodded happily. “That will get you votes.”

Then, at Tom’s urging, Kevin went out door to door, stopping at all the big houses and talking to whoever was there for as long as their patience allowed. Four nights a week he made himself go out and do this, for two hours at a time. It was wearing work. When he got tired of it he thought of the hill at dawn, or of the expression on Alfredo’s face that night on the bikes. Some people were friendly and expressed a lot of support for what he was doing; occasionally they even joined him for the rounds in their neighborhood. Then again other households couldn’t be bothered. People told him right to his face that they thought he was being selfish, protecting his backyard while the town shares languished. Once someone accused him of going renegade against the Green party line. He denied it vehemently, but it left him thinking. Here was where the party organization could help—there should be lots of people out doing these visits, or making calls. He decided to go up and see Jean about it.

“Ah good,” Jean said, looking up from the phone. “I’d been meaning to get you up here.”

Kevin settled into the seat across from her.

She cut off the speaker on the phone: “Let me get back to you, Hyung, I’ve got someone here I need to talk to.” She tapped the console and swung her chair around to face him.

“Listen, Kevin, I think it’s time to slack off on this idea of Alfredo’s. It’s medical technology he wants to bring into town, not a weapons factory. It makes us look bad to oppose it.”

“I don’t care what it is,” Kevin said, surprised. “The hill is wilderness and was slated to be made part of Saddleback Park, you know that.”

“Right now it’s zoned open space. Nothing ever happened with that park proposal.”

“That’s not my fault,” Kevin said. “I wasn’t on the council then.”

“And I was, is that what you’re saying?”

Kevin remained silent.

Jean swiveled in her chair, stood, walked to her window. “I think you should stop campaigning against this development, Kevin. You and Doris both.”

“Why?” Kevin said, stunned.

“Because it’s divisive. When you take an extreme position against a development like that, then it makes the whole Green party look like extremists, and we can’t act on real issues.”

“This is a real issue,” he said sharply. She eyed him from the window. “I thought this was what the Green party was about—slowing growth, fighting for the land and for the way of life we’ve got here. It’s the Green party that made this town the way it is!”

“Exactly.” She looked out the window at the town. “But times are changing, Kevin, and having established the town’s style, we have to see what we can do to maintain it. That means taking a central position in affairs—if we do that, all subsequent decisions will be made by us, see? You can’t do that when you’re at one extreme of community opinion.”

“But this is exactly what we stand for!”

“I know that, Kevin. We still defend the land. But I think that land can be put to use, and it will actually be good for other land around the town.”

She wouldn’t say anything more. Finally Kevin left, frustrated to the point of fury.

“I just don’t understand her!” he exclaimed when he described the meeting to Oscar. “What the hell does she mean, good for other land? She’s just caving in!”

“No, she’s not. I think she and Alfredo are working out a deal. I’ve been hearing rumors of it in the town offices. The work we’ve been doing has put pressure on Alfredo, and I think Jean feels it’s a good time to get him to make concessions. The Greens lay off on Rattlesnake Hill, and in return Alfredo puts all the rest of the Green program through the council.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“Well why didn’t she tell me that?”

“She probably figured you wouldn’t go along with it.”

“Well she’s right, God damn it!”

He went back up to see Jean again. “What’s this I hear about you making a deal with Alfredo?” he said angrily, the moment he walked into her office.

She stared at him coldly. “Sit down, Kevin. Calm down.”

She went to the window again. She talked about the Greens’ gradual loss of influence in the town. “Politics is the art of the possible,” she said again at one point.

“The thing is”—finally getting to it—“we’ve taken a bunch of polls in town about this issue, and they show that if it comes to a town referendum, we’re going to lose. Simple as that.

“Now that may change, but it’s my judgment that it won’t. Alfredo, though—he can’t be as sure. It’s a volatile situation.”

And Alfredo knows things you don’t, Kevin thought suddenly.

“So he’s nervous, he’s feeling vulnerable, and he’s ready to deal. Right now. It’s a matter of timing—we can get him to agree to do things now that he simply won’t have to agree to later on. Now, this development could be good for the town, and it can be done in a way that won’t harm the hill. At the same time, we can get Alfredo to agree to the back country plan and the big garden strip down by the freeway, and the road and path plan, and a population cap. He’s willing to go along with all that. Do you see what I mean?”

Kevin stared at her. “I see that you’re giving up,” he said absently. His stomach was contracting to its little knot of wood again. Nothing but scattered images, phrases. He stood up, feeling detached. “We don’t have to concede anything to him,” he said. “We can fight every one of those issues on their own merits.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I do!” Anger began to flood through him, gushing with every hard knock of his heart.

Jean gave him a cold stare. “Listen, Kevin, I head the party here, and I’ve talked with all the rest of the leadership—”

“I don’t give a shit who you’ve talked to! I’m not giving Rattlesnake Hill away!”

“It’s not giving it away,” she snapped.

“I’m not trading it, either.”

“You were elected to fill a Green slot, Kevin. You’re a Green member of this council.”

“Not any more I’m not.”

He walked out.

He went to see Oscar and told him what had happened. Was it legal for him to quit the Greens while he was holding a Green slot on the council?

Oscar thought about it. “I think so. The thing is, while you’re the Green on the council, your policy is the Green policy. See what I mean? You don’t really have to quit the party. You can just say, this is what Green policy is. People may disagree, you may get in trouble with the party, and not get picked to run again. But there’s no legal problem.”

“Good. I’m not running for re-election anyway.”

But after that, the nightly house-to-house campaigning got more difficult. A lot of people didn’t want to talk to him. A lot of those who did wanted to argue with him. Many made it clear they thought he was waging a personal war with Alfredo, and implied that they knew why.

One night after a particularly tough walk around he came home and the downstairs was empty, and he went up to his room. Ramona was with Alfredo and Tom was on his ship and Jill was in Bangladesh and his parents were in space, and thinking about it he began to quiver, and then to tremble, and then to shake hard.

Tomas appeared in his doorway. “Home late, I see.”

“Tomas! What are you doing?”

“I’m taking a break.”

“You’re taking a break?”

“Yeah, sure. Come on, everyone’s got to take a break sometime.”

“I wish I had this on videotape, Tomas, we could use it to pry you away from your screen more often.”

“Well I’m busy, you know that. But I’ve been finding I get a twitch in the corner of my right eye when I look at the screen for too long. Anyway, let’s go down to the kitchen and see if Donna and Cindy have left any beers in the fridge.”

“Sure.” So they went down to the kitchen and talked, about Yoshi and Bob, Rafael and Andrea, Sylvia and Sam. About themselves. At one point Kevin thought, I’m catching up on the life of the guy who lives in the room right next to mine. Still, he appreciated it.

Another time after an evening of campaign drudgery he went to the town hall restaurant to have dinner, thinking some chile rellenos and cervecas were just what he needed. Late summer sunset dappled the trees and walls of the courtyard, and it was quiet. The food was good.

He had finished, and Delia had cleared away his plate and was bringing him a last cerveca, when Alfredo walked out of the city chambers across the yard. He was at the wrought iron gate when he saw Kevin. Kevin dropped his gaze to the table, but still saw Alfredo hesitate, gate in hand—then turn and walk over to him. Kevin’s heart pounded.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Uh,” Kevin said, unsure. Alfredo looked uncertain as well, and for an awkward moment they froze, both looking acutely uncomfortable. Finally Kevin jerked, shrugged, waved a hand, muttered, “Sure.”

Alfredo pulled back one of the white plastic chairs and sat, looking relieved. Delia came out with Kevin’s beer, and Alfredo ordered a margarita. Even in his distraction Kevin could see Delia struggling to keep surprise off her face. They really were the talk of the town.

When she was gone, Alfredo shifted onto the edge of his chair and put his elbows on the table. Staring down at his hands he said, “Listen, Kevin. I’m… real sorry about what’s happened. With Ramona, you know.” He swallowed. “The truth of the matter is…” He looked up to meet Kevin’s gaze. “I love her.”

“Well,” Kevin said, looking away, intensely ill at ease. He heard himself say, “I believe it.”

Alfredo sat back in his seat, looking relieved again. Delia brought his margarita and he drank half of it, looked down again. “I lost sight of it myself,” he said in a low voice. “I’m sorry. I guess that’s why all this happened, and, you know.” He didn’t seem to be able to finish the thought. “I’m sorry.”

“There was more to it than that,” Kevin said, and drank his beer. He didn’t want to go any further into it. Talk about love between American men was a rare and uneasy event, even when they weren’t talking about the same woman. As it was Kevin felt impelled to order a pitcher of margaritas, to cover the awkwardness.

“I know,” Alfredo said, forging onward. “Believe me, I’m not trying to take anything away from you—from what happened, I mean. Ramona is really unhappy about what… well, about what us getting back together has meant for… you and her.”

“Uhn,” Kevin said, hating the babble the subject of love always seemed to generate.

“And I’m sorry too, I mean I never would’ve tried to do anything like what’s happened. I was just…”

The margarita pitcher arrived, and they both set about busily filling and drinking the glasses, lapping up salt, their eyes not meeting.

“I was just a fool!” Alfredo said. “An arrogant stupid fool.”

Again, as from a distance of several feet, Kevin heard himself say, “We all lose track of what’s important sometimes.” Thinking of Doris. “You do what you feel.”

“I just wish it hadn’t worked out this way.”

Kevin shrugged. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

Had he said that? But it was as if he was taking something from Alfredo to say that, and he wanted to. He was by no means sure he believed any of the things he heard himself saying; yet out they came. He began to feel drunk.

Alfredo drank down his glass, refilled, drank more. “Hey, I’m sorry about that collision at third, too.”

Kevin waved it away. “I was in the baseline.”

“I shoulda slid, but I wasn’t planning to when I came in, and I couldn’t get down in time when I saw you were gonna stay there.”

“That’s softball.”

They drank in silence.

“What—”

They laughed awkwardly.

“What I was going to say,” said Alfredo, “is that, okay, I’m sorry our personal lives have gotten tangled up, and for fucking up in that regard. And for the collision and all. But I still don’t get it why you are so opposed to the idea of a really first-rate technical center on Rattlesnake Hill.”

“I was gonna say the same thing in reverse,” Kevin said. “Why you are so determined to build it up there on the hill?”

A long pause. Kevin regarded him curiously. Interesting to see Alfredo in this new light, knowing what he now knew about Heartech and the AAMT. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, pressing harder. “If this center is all you say it is, then it could do well anywhere in town. But we only have one hill like that, still empty and left alone. It’s a miracle it’s still that way after all these years, and to take that away now! I just don’t get it.”

Alfredo leaned forward, drew incomprehensible diagrams in the condensation and salt and spilled liquor on the table. “It’s just a matter of trying for the best. I like to do that, that’s the way I am. I mean sure, the better the center does the better it’ll be for me. I’m not free of that kind of thinking, but I don’t see why I should be, either. It’s part of trying for the best you can.”

So interesting, to see him rationalize like that—to see the strain there, under the moustache, behind the eyes!

Kevin said, “Okay, I’d like to be a hundred myself, and I like to do good work too. But good work means doing it without wrecking the town you live in.”

“It wouldn’t be wrecking it! To have a center that combined high tech labs and offices with restaurants, an open deck with a view, a small amphitheater for concerts and parties and just looking at the view—man, that’s been the goal of city planners for years and years. More people would use the hill than ever do now.”

“More isn’t better, that’s the point. Orange County is perfect proof of that. After a certain point more is worse, and we passed that point long ago. It’s gonna take years to scale things back down to where this basin is at the right population for people and the land. You take all the scaling back for granted, but you value the results of it too. Now you’re getting complacent and saying it’s okay for major growth to start again, but it isn’t. That hill is open land, it’s wilderness even if it’s in our backyards. It’s one of the few tiny patches of it left around here, and so it’s worth much more as wilderness than it ever could be as any kind of business center.”

Kevin stopped to catch his breath. To see how Alfredo would rationalize it.

Alfredo was shaking his head. “We have the whole back country, from Peter’s Canyon Reservoir to Black Star Canyon, with Irvine Park too. Meanwhile, that hill is on the town side of things, facing the plain. Putting the center up there would make it the premiere small center in southern California, and that would do the town a lot of good!”

Suddenly Kevin could hear the echo in the argument. Surely this was exactly what the AAMT representatives had said to Alfredo when they were putting the arm on him.

Fascinating. Kevin only had to shake his head, and Alfredo was pounding the table, trying to get his point through, raising his voice: “It would, Kevin! It would put us on the map!”

“I don’t care,” Kevin said. “I don’t want to be on the map.”

“That’s crazy!” Alfredo cried. “You don’t care, exactly!”

“I don’t care for your ideas,” Kevin said. “They sound to me like ideas out of a business magazine. Ideas from somewhere else.”

Alfredo blew out a breath. His eyebrows drew together, and he stared closely at Kevin. Kevin merely looked back.

“Well, hell,” Alfredo said. “That’s where we differ. I want El Modena on the map. I want on the map myself. I want to do something like this.”

“I can see that.” And behind the dispassion, the somehow scientific interest of watching Alfredo justify himself, Kevin felt a surge of strangely mixed emotion: hatred, disgust, a weird kind of sympathy, or pity. I want to do something like this. What did it take to say that?

“I just don’t want to get personal about it,” Alfredo said. He leaned forward, and his voice took on a touch of pleading: “I’ve felt what it’s like when we take this kind of disagreement personally, and I don’t like it. I’d rather dispense with that, and just agree to disagree and get on with it, without any animosity. I… I don’t like being angry at you, Kevin. And I don’t like you being angry at me.”

Kevin stared at him. He took a deep breath, let it out. “That may be part of the price you pay. I don’t like your plan, and I don’t like the way you’re keeping at it despite arguments against it that seem obvious to me. So, we’ll just have to see what happens. We have to do what we have to do, right?”

Taken aback, Alfredo didn’t answer. So used to getting his way, Kevin thought. So used to having everybody like him.

Alfredo shrugged. “I guess so,” he said morosely, and drained his glass.