Pacific Edge

4

“Light cracks on the black gloss of the canal, and a gondola oar squeaks under us. Standing on the moonlit bridge, laughing together, listening to the campanile strike midnight, I decide to change Kid Death’s hair from black to red—”

Something like that. Ah yes—the vibrant author’s journal in The Einstein Intersection, young mind speaking to young mind, brilliant flashes of light in the head. No doubt my image of Europe owes much to it. But what I’ve found… could half a century have changed that much? History, change—rate constants, sure. It feels so much as if things are accelerating. A wind blows through the fabric of time, things change faster than we can imagine. Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium. Hey, Mr. Delany, here I am in Europe writing a book too! But yesterday I spent the morning at the Fremdenkontrolle, arguing in my atrocious German which always makes me feel brain-damaged, getting nowhere. They really are going to kick me out. And in the afternoon I did laundry, running around the building in the rain to the laundry room, Liddy howling upstairs at a banged knee. Last load dry and piled in the red basket, jogging round the front I caught my toe on a board covering the sidewalk next to some street work, fell and spilled clothes all over the mud of the torn-up street. I sat on the curb and almost cried. What happened, Mr. Delany? How come instead of wandering the night canals I’m dumping my laundry in the street? How come when I consider revisions it’s not “change Kid Death’s hair from black to red” but “throw out the first draft and start the whole thing over”?

And only two weeks before Liddy and I leave.

What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some fresh start, an island, a new continent, dispossess them, give them a new planet sure! So they don’t have to deal with our history. Ever since More they’ve been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start.

So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? They don’t speak to us trapped in this world as we are, we look at them in the same way we look at the pretty inside of a paperweight, snow drifting down, so what? It may be nice but we’re stuck here and no one’s going to give us a fresh start, we have to deal with history as it stands, no freer than a wedge in a crack.

Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.

One Saturday morning before dawn, Kevin, Doris, and Oscar biked down to the Newport Freeway, shivering in chill wet air. They checked out a car from a sleepy state worker and took off.

The freeway was dead at that hour, in all lanes. Quickly they hummed up to the car’s maximum speed, in this case about sixty miles an hour. “Another piece of shit,” Doris said. Kevin yawned; traveling in cars always made him sleepy. Doris complained about the smell, opening the windows and cursing the previous users.

“Spoken like a solid citizen,” Oscar said.

She gave him an ugly look and stared out the window.

Hum of the motor, whirr of the tires, whoosh of the cool air. Finally Doris rolled the windows up. Kevin fell asleep.

They took the Riverside Freeway up the Santa Ana Canyon, passing under huge live oak trees on the big canyon floor. In Riverside they switched to highway 395 and headed north, up California’s back side.

The sun rose as they traveled over the high desert north of Riverside. Long shadows striped the bare harsh land. Here and there in the distance they spotted knots of date palms and cottonwoods. These oases marked the sites of new villages, scattered in rings around the towns of Hisperia, Lancaster, Victorville. None of these villages were big, but taken together they accounted for a percentage of the diaspora out of the LA basin. You could say that “Greater Los Angeles” now extended out across the Mojave, making possible a much reduced density—even some open land—in the heart of the old monster itself.

Kevin woke up. “How do you know this Sally Tallhawk?” he asked Oscar.

“She was one of my teachers in law school.”

“So you haven’t seen her for a while?”

“Actually we get together pretty frequently. We have a good time.”

“Uh huh. And she’s on the state water board?”

“She was. She just left it. But she knows everyone on it, and she knows everything we might need to know about California water law. And it’s the state laws that determine what the towns can or cannot do, when it comes to water usage.”

“You aren’t kidding—I hear that all the time when I try to get building permits.”

“Well, you can see why it has to be that way—water is a regional concern. When towns had control over water there were some horrible local fights.”

“Still are, as far as I can tell.”

The country they were crossing got higher, wilder. To their left the Sierra Nevada’s eastern escarpment jumped ten thousand feet into the sky. To their right lower ranges, the Slate and the Panamint, and then the White Mountains, rose burnt and bare. They passed Owens Lake, a sky-colored expanse with a crusty white border, and were in Owens Valley.

High and narrow, tucked between two of the tallest ranges on the continent, Owens Valley was a riot of spring color. Orchards made a patchwork of the valley floor (apples, almonds, cherries, pears), and many of the trees were in bloom, each branch thick with blossoms, every tree a hallucinatory burst of white or pink. Behind them stood wild slopes of granite and evergreen.

They passed Lone Pine, the largest town in the valley at almost a hundred thousand people. Beyond Lone Pine they tracked through the strange tortured shapes of the Alabama Hills, some of the oldest rock in North America. After Independence, another big town, they came to Bishop, the cultural center of the valley.

The main street of Bishop, which was simply highway 395 itself, formed the town’s “historic district.” Kevin laughed to see it: an old Western drive-thru town, composed of motels, Greyhound bus stations, drive-in food stops, steak restaurants, auto parts shops, hardware stores, pharmacies, the rest of the usual selection. Bishop clearly treasured it.

Away from Main Street the town had been transformed: sixty thousand people lived in some of the most elegant examples of the new architecture Kevin had ever seen, as well as some of the most bizarre. In the northwest quarter of town sprawled the University of California campus. After they dropped off their car at the depot, the three travelers walked over to it.

The land at the university had been donated partly by the city of Los Angeles, partly by the Bishop reservation of the Paiute and Shoshone Indians. The buildings imitated the local landscape: two rows of tall concrete buildings stood like mountain ranges, over low wooden structures tucked among a great number of pines. They found a map of the campus along one walkway, located Kroeber College and walked to it, passing groups of students sitting on the grass, eating lunch.

Before some low wooden offices Oscar stopped them and pointed to a woman sitting in the sun, eyes closed. “That’s Sally Tallhawk.”

She was in fact tall, but not particularly hawkish—she had the broad face of the Paiutes, with thick black eyebrows. She wore a long-sleeved shirt (sleeves rolled up onto big biceps), jeans, and running shoes. A small pair of gold-rimmed bifocals made her seem quite professorial.

She heard their approach, rose to greet them. “Hey, Rhino,” she said to Oscar easily, and they shook hands left-handed. Oscar introduced Kevin and Doris, and she welcomed them to Bishop. Her voice was low and rapid. “Look here,” she said, “I’m off to the mountains, I was just about to leave.”

“But we came all this way to talk to you!” Oscar exclaimed. “And we have the festival games tomorrow night.”

“It’s just an overnighter I have in mind,” she said. “I want to check snow levels in Dusy Basin. I can get you folks all the equipment you need from the department, and you can come along.” Imperiously she quelled Oscar’s protest: “I’m going up into the mountains, I say! If you want to talk to me you’ll have to come along!”

So they did. An hour later they were at the trailhead at South Lake, putting packs on their backs. And then they were hiking, up onto the wild sides of California’s great backbone. Kevin and Doris glanced at Oscar, then at each other. How would Oscar handle the hard work of hiking?

As it turned out he toiled upward without complaint, sweating, heaving for breath, rolling his eyes behind Tallhawk’s back; but listening intently to her when she spoke. Occasionally he looked at Kevin and Doris, to make sure they could hear, to make sure they were enjoying themselves. They had never seen him so solicitous. The work itself didn’t seem to bother him much at all. And yet Sally Tallhawk was leading them at a rapid pace.

After two or three hours they rose out of the pine forest, into a mixed zone where patches of dark green lodgepole pine stood here and there, among humps of bare dark red granite. They came to the shores of a long island-filled lake, and hiked around it. Snow patches dotted the north faces of the peaks that towered around them, and white reflections shimmered in the dark blue water.

“You see how much water pours down into Owens Valley,” Tallhawk said, waving a wide hand, wiping sweat from one eye. “And yet under the old laws, all of it could be piped away to Los Angeles.”

As they hiked she told the old story, of how the LA Department of Water and Power had obtained the water rights for all the streams falling out of the east side of the Sierra into Owens Valley—in effect draining the yearly snowfall of the watershed off to LA.

“Criminals,” Doris said, disgusted. “Where were their values?”

“In growth,” Oscar murmured.

There had been a man working for the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, Sally said, making a survey of the valley’s water resources. At the same time he was being paid as a consultant by LA, and he passed along everything he learned to LA, so that they knew which streams to gain the rights to. And so Owens Valley was sucked dry, its farms and orchards destroyed. The farmers went out of business and LA bought up their land. Owens Lake dried up completely, and Mono Lake came close, and the groundwater level fell and fell, until even the desert plants began to die.

“I can’t believe they could get away with it!” Doris said.

Tallhawk only laughed. “They ended up with the peculiar situation of a city in one county being the major landowner in another county. This was so disturbing that laws were passed in Sacramento to make any repetition of that kind of ownership impossible. But it was too late for Owens Valley.”

Telling this story took a while. By the time Tallhawk was done they were above Long Lake, into wild, rocky territory, where the ponds were small, and bluer than seemed possible. Shadows were cast far to the left, toward a jagged skyline Sally identified as the Inconsolable Range. Oscar huffed and puffed, showing a surprising endurance. They were all in a rhythm, walking in a little line—a little line of tiny figures, hiking across a landscape of blasted stone, dwarfed by the huge bare mountains that now surrounded them on three sides.

The trail wound over a knob called Saddlerock, then turned left, up a monstrous trench in the Inconsolable Range. They were in shadow now, and the scattered junipers with their gnarled cinnamon branches and dusky green needles seemed like sentient things, huddled together to watch them pass.

They started up an endless series of switchbacks that ascended the right wall of the enormous trench, stomping through snow more and more often as they got higher. Tallhawk pounded up the trail at a steady pace, and they rose so quickly they could pop their ears. Eventually the trail was completely filled with snow, tromped down by previous hikers. At times they looked back down at the route they had taken, at a long string of lakes in late afternoon shadow; then the trail would switch back, and they stared directly across at the sharktooth edge of the Inconsolable Range, rising to the massive pyramid of Mount Agassiz. They were far above treeline now, it was nothing but rock and snow.

Finally they topped the right wall of the great trench, and the trail ran over the saddle of Bishop Pass. At the high point of the broad pass they walked by the King’s Canyon park boundary sign, and into the Dusy Basin.

To their left the broad ridge curved up to the multiple peak of Agassiz, a wild broken wall of variegated granite. Here Mesozoic volcanic sediments had metamorphosed under the pressure of rising granitic masses called plutons, and all of that had folded together, light and dark rock mixing like the batter in a marble cake. They trod over shattered fields of dark Lamarck granodiorite, and then over bands of the lighter alaskite, which zigzagged up and striped the great wall of Agassiz, and provided the thunderbolts in Thunderbolt Peak. And as they hiked Tallhawk’s voice babbled like the sound of a distant low brook, enumerating every stone, every alpine flower tucked in the granite cracks.

Not too long after they started down the other side of the pass, they came to the highest lake in Dusy Basin, which was unnamed. Its shores were fiercely rocky, but there was one tiny grassy spot suitable for a campsite, and they threw down their packs there. Sally and Doris began to put up the tents; Oscar flopped flat on his back, looking like a beached whale; Kevin got out the gas stove and cooking utensils, quick with hunger. They chattered as they worked, looking around them all the while. Oscar complained about Sally’s idea of a pretty campsite and they all laughed, even him; the place was spectacular.

In the evening light the wild peaks glowed. Mount Agassiz, Thunderbolt Peak, Isosceles Peak, Columbine Peak, The Black Giant—each a complete masterpiece of form alone, each a perfect complement to the others. Huge boulders stood scattered on the undulating rock floor of Dusy Basin, and down at its bottom there was a narrow string of ponds and trees, still half-buried in snow. The sun lay just over the peaks to the west. The sky behind the mountains was twilight blue, and all the snow on the peaks was tinted a deep pink. Chaos generating order, order generating chaos; who could say which was which in such alpenglow?

As they made camp the conversation kept returning to water. Sally Tallhawk, it was clear, was obsessed with water. Specifically, with the water situation in California, a Gordian knot of law and practice that no one could ever cut apart. To learn the system, manipulate it, explain it—this was her passion.

In California water flows uphill toward money, she told them. This had been the primary truth of the system for decades. Most states used riparian water law, where landowners have the right to water on their land. That went back to English common law, and a landscape with lots of streams in it. But California and the other Hispanic states used parts of appropriative water law, which came from dry Mexico and Spain, and which recognized the rights of those who first made a beneficial, consumptive use of water—it didn’t matter where their land was in relation to it. In this system, later owners of land couldn’t build anything to impede the free passage of water to the original user. And so money—particularly old money—had its advantage.

“So that’s how LA could take water from Owens Valley,” Doris said.

The tents were up, sleeping bags out. They gathered around Kevin and the stove with the materials for dinner.

“Well, it’s more complex than that. But essentially that’s right.”

But in the end, Tallhawk told them, the water loss did Owens Valley a kind of good. LA tried to compensate for its appropriation by making the valley into something like a nature preserve. And so the valley missed all the glories of twentieth century southern California civilization. Then, when water loss threatened the native desert plants of the valley, Inyo County sued LA, and the courts decided in Inyo’s favor. This led to new laws being passed in Sacramento, laws that gave control of Inyo’s water back to it. But by this time feelings about growth and development had changed, and the valley towns went about rebuilding according to their own sense of value. “The dry years saved us from a lot of crap.”

Oscar said to Kevin and Doris, “You’ll have to remember that if we lose this case.”

Doris shook her head irritably. “It’s not the same. We won’t be able to go back from a situation like ours.”

Tallhawk said, “You can never be sure of that. We’re working now on the final arrangements for the removal of the Hetch Hetchy dam, for instance. That was the biggest defeat ever for the environmental movement in California, right back at its start—a valley described as a second Yosemite, drowned so San Francisco could have a convenient water supply. John Muir himself couldn’t stop that one. But now we’re making them store the water in a couple of catchments downstream, and when that’s done they’ll drain Hetch Hetchy and bring that valley back out into the light of day, after a century and a half. The ecologists say the valley floor will recover in fifty to a hundred years, faster if they truck some of the mud out into the San Joaquin as fertilizer. So you see—some disasters can be reversed.”

“It would be better to avoid disaster in the first place,” Kevin said.

“Undoubtedly,” Tallhawk said. “I was just reminding you that there’s not too many things that are irrevocable, when you’re talking about the waterscape. Water flows forever, so there is a resilience there we can rely on.”

“Glen Canyon next, eh?” Oscar said.

“My God, yes!” Tallhawk cried, and laughed.

The sun disappeared. It got cold fast. The sky turned a dark velvet blue that seemed to crackle where it met the glowing white snow ridges. Steam rose from the pot on the stove, and they could smell the stew.

“But in El Modena…” Kevin said.

“In El Modena, I don’t know.”

Then the stew bubbled over, and it was declared ready. They spooned it into cups and ate. Tallhawk had brought a bottle of red wine along, and they drank it gratefully.

“Can’t we use water to stop Alfredo’s plan?” Kevin asked as he finished eating.

“Maybe.”

It was strange but true, she told them: Orange County had a lot of water. It was one of the best water districts in the state, in terms of groundwater conservation.

“What does that mean, exactly?” Kevin asked.

“Well, do you understand what groundwater is?”

“Water under the ground?”

“Yes, yes. But not in pools.”

She stood, waved her arms at the scene, talking as she pulled her down jacket from her pack. Walked in circles around them, looking at the peaks.

Soil is permeable, she said, and the rock below soil is also permeable, right down to solid bedrock, which forms the bottom of groundwater basins. Water fills all the available space in permeable rock, percolating everywhere it can go. And it flows downhill as it does on the surface, not as quickly, but just as definitely. “Imagine Owens Valley is a big trench between the ranges, which it is. Filled almost halfway up with rock and soil eroded out of the mountains. The San Joaquin Valley is the same way, only much bigger. These are immense reservoirs of water, then, only the water level lies below the soil level, at least in most places. Geologists and hydrologists have charted these groundwater basins everywhere, and there are some huge ones in California.

“Now some are self-contained, they don’t flow downstream. There’s enormous amounts of water in these, but they’re only replenished by rainfall, which is scarce out here. If you pump water you empty basins like those. The Ogdalilla basin under Oklahoma was one of those, and it was pumped dry like an oil field, which is why they’re so desperate for the Columbia’s water now.

“Anyway, you have to imagine this underground saturation, this underground movement.” She stretched her arms forward and reached with her fingers, in a sort of unconscious groundwater dance. “The shapes of the basin bottoms sometimes bring the water closer to the surface—if there’s an underground ridge of impermeable bedrock, and the groundwater is flowing downhill over this ridge, water gets pushed to the surface, in the very top of a giant slow-motion waterfall. That’s how you get artesian wells.”

Silence as she walked around the camp. Now it seemed they could hear the subterranean flow, murmuring beneath them, a deep bass to the wind’s tremolo.

“And El Modena?” Kevin said.

“Well, when a groundwater basin drains into the sea, there’s a strange situation; the water doesn’t really drain very much, because there’s water pressure on both sides. Fresh water forces itself out if there’s flow coming in from upstream, but if not… well, the only thing that keeps sea water from reversing the flow and pushing into the ground under the land is the pressure of the fresh water, pouring down.

“Now Orange County’s basin doesn’t have a whole lot of water coming into it any more. Riverside takes a lot before it reaches Orange County, as do all the other cities upstream. And agriculture in Orange County itself took a lot of water from the very start of settlement. They pumped more than was replenished, which was easy to do. But the pressure balance at the coastline was altered, and sea water began to leach inland. Wells near the coast turned salty. There’s no way to stop that kind of intrusion except to keep the basin full, so that the pressure outward is maintained. So the Orange County Water District was formed, and their job was to keep the groundwater basin healthy, so all their wells wouldn’t turn to salt. This was back in the 1920s. They were given the taxing and allocation powers necessary to do the job, and the right to sue cities upstream. And they went at it with a kind of religious fervor. They did it as well as any water district in California, despite all the stupidity going on above ground in that area. And so you have a healthy basin under you.”

They had finished eating. They cleaned up the cups and the pot; their hands got wet, and quickly they got cold. They scrambled to get into the down jackets and bunting pants that Tallhawk’s department had provided. Then they sat on their groundpads, sleeping bags bunched around them, making a circle around the stove, which served as their campfire. The great arc of peaks still glowed with some last remnant of light, under a dark sky. Sally pulled out a small bottle of brandy and passed it around, continued:

“It means that you live on an enormous pool of water, renewed all the time by OCWD. They buy water from us and from LA, and pour most of it right into the ground. Store it there. They keep the pressure regulated so very little of it is lost to the sea; there’s a balance of pressures at the coastline. So the artesian wells that gave Fountain Valley its name will never come back, and no one there would want them to! But you have the water you need. It’s strange, because it’s a desert coastline with hardly any rainfall. But the OCWD planned for a population increase that other forces balked—the population increase never occurred, and so there’s water to spare now. Strange but true.”

“So water won’t help us stop them?” Kevin said, disappointed.

“Not a pure scarcity. But Oscar says you have a resolution banning the further purchase of water from LA. You could try to stand on that.”

“Like Santa Barbara?”

“Santa Barbara slowed development by turning off the tap, yes. But they’re in a different situation—they stayed out of the California Water Project, and they don’t buy water from LA, and they don’t have much of a groundwater basin. So they’re really limited, and they’ve made a conscious decision not to change that. It works well if you have those initial conditions. But Orange County doesn’t. There’s a lot of water that was brought into the area before these issues were raised, and that water is still available.”

Kevin and Doris looked at each other glumly.

They listened to the wind, and watched the stars pop into existence in a rich blue sky. On such a fine night it was a shame to get into the tents, so they only shifted into their sleeping bags, and lay on the groundpads watching the sky. The snow patches scattered among the rocks shone as if lit from within. It seemed possible to feel them melt, then rush into the ground beneath them, to fall down the slope into Le Conte Canyon and seep a slow path to the sea, in invisible underground Columbias. Kevin felt a stirring in him, the full-lunged breathlessness that marked his love for El Modena’s hills, extending outward to these great peaks. Interpenetration with the rock. He was melting like the snow, seeping into it. In every particulate jot of matter, spirit, dancing…

“So what do you suggest, Sally?” Doris finally said.

“We’d like our town to end up as nice as Bishop,” Kevin added. “But with people like Alfredo running things…”

“But he’s not really running things, right?”

“No, but he is powerful.”

“You’ve got to expect a lot of resistance to what you’re trying to do. Saving the land for its own sake goes against the grain of white American thought, and so it’s a fight that’ll never end. Why not grow if we can, why not change things completely? A lot of people will never understand the answer to that question, because to them a good life only means more things. They have no feeling for the land. We have an aesthetic of wilderness now, but it takes a certain kind of sensibility to feel it.”

“So in our case…” Kevin prompted, feeling anxious.

“Well.” Tallhawk stood up, reached for the nearly empty brandy bottle. “You could try endangered species. If there is any kind of endangered species inhabiting your hill, that would be enough. The Endangered Species Act is tough.”

“I don’t think Rattlesnake Hill is like to have any,” Doris said. “It’s pretty ordinary.”

“Well, look into it. They stopped a freeway down near your area because of a very ordinary-looking lizard that happens to be rare.

“Then the California Environmental Quality Act is a good chance. Under the terms of the act, environmental impact reports come early in the process, and once you have one, you can use it.”

“But if it’s not particularly favorable to us?” Oscar asked, sounding sleepy.

“You could consider going to the National Trust for Land, or the Nature Conservancy—they lend assistance to movements like yours, and they have the money to fight large developers. You could maybe convince them to bid against the development if it comes to that.”

“The town itself owns all the land,” Doris said.

“Sure. But these groups can help you with lobbying and campaigning when the issue comes to a vote, and they could even pay to lease it.”

“That would be good.”

“But there’s nothing we could use to stop them before a referendum?” Kevin asked. “I’m just scared Alfredo would win. He’s good at that.”

“Well, the environmental stuff I mentioned. Or you could see if the hill has some unique water properties, like a spring.”

“It doesn’t,” Kevin said.

“You could try drilling a spring on the sly.”

She laughed at the long silence.

“Well it’s a thought, right? Here, have some brandy. One swallow left each. You’ll think of something. If not, let me know and we’ll come down and threaten this guy. Maybe we can offer you a discount on Owens Valley water if you leave the hilltop alone. Inyo County influencing southern Californian politics, I like that!” She laughed. “Or find a sacred ancient Indian burial mound or the like. Except I don’t think the Gabrielinos were into that kind of thing. Or if they were, we don’t know about it.”

Kevin shook his head. “The hillside is basically empty. I’ve been all over it. I’ve hung out on that hill ever since I was a kid, I’ve crawled all over it.”

“Might be fossils,” Oscar said.

“You’d have to make a world-class find,” Tallhawk said. “El Modena tar pits. I’d try to rely on something a bit more solid if I were you.”

They thought about it, listening to wind over rock, over snow. Listening to water seep into the ground.

“Ready for tomorrow’s match?” Tallhawk asked Oscar.

Oscar was a Falstaffian mound, he looked like one of the boulders surrounding them. “I’ve never been readier,” he muttered.

“Match?” Kevin said. “What’s this? Going to be in a chess match, Oscar?”

Tallhawk laughed.

“It is like chess,” Oscar murmured, “only more intricate.”

“Didn’t you know the redneck festival starts tomorrow?” Tallhawk asked Kevin and Doris.

“No.”

“Tomorrow is opening day for hunting season; in fact, we’ll have to haul ass out of here to avoid getting shot by some fool. Bishop celebrates opening day with age-old customs. Jacked-up pick-up trucks painted in metallic colors, with gun racks in their back windows—fifty cases of whiskey, shipped in from Kentucky—tomorrow night’ll be wild. That’s one reason I wanted to come up here tonight. Get a last taste of quiet.”

They lay stretched out in their bags.

Kevin listened to the wind, and looked around at the dark peaks poking into the night sky. Suddenly it was clear to him that Sally had had a reason to bring them up here to have this talk; that this place itself was part of the discourse, part of what she wanted to say. The university of the wilderness. The spine of California, the hidden source of the south’s wealth. This hard wild place…

Around them the wind, spirit of the mountains, breathed. Water, the soul of the mountains, seeped downward. Rock, the body of the mountains, stood fast.

Held in a bowl like God’s linked hands, they slept.

The next day they hiked back over the pass and down the trail, and drove a little gas car down to Tallhawk’s house in Bishop to clean up.

As dusk fell they walked downtown, and found that Bishop had filled with people. It seemed like the entire population of eastern California must have been there, dressed in blue jeans, pendletons, cowboy boots, cowboy hats, camouflaged flak jackets, bright orange hunter’s vests, square dancing dresses, rodeo chaps, bordello robes, cavalry uniforms, animal furs, southern belle ball gowns, Indian outfits—if it had ever been seen in the American West before, it was there now. Main Street was packed with pickup trucks, all track-free, running on grain alcohol and making a terrific noise and stink. Their drivers revved engines constantly to protest the long periods of gridlock. “A traffic-jam parade,” Oscar said.

They ate at a coffee shop called Huk Finns, then walked in a stream of people toward the Paiute reservation. Over the screech of pick-ups burning rubber they heard occasional gunshots, and the dark streets were illuminated by the glare of skyrockets bursting overhead. Oscar sang loudly: “Oh the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air—”

“Where are we going?” Doris shouted at him.

“Bishop High School gymnasium,” he replied.

Which was filling rapidly, with a rowdy, even crazed audience. Oscar led Kevin and Doris to a row of benches in the front of the upper deck. The basketball court below was filled with a large boxing ring. “Not boxing!” Doris said.

“Of course not,” Oscar said, and walked off. Kevin and Doris stared at each other, nonplussed. They sat for nearly fifteen minutes, and nothing happened. Then into the ring stepped a woman wearing a tuxedo jacket over a black body suit and dark fishnet nylons, with high heels and a top hat. Tumultuous applause. Inexpert spotlights bounced to left and right, finally settling on her. She lifted an absurdly large microphone and said, “ARE YOU READY?”

The crowd was ready. Doris stuck her fingers in her ears. People standing were shouted down, and the aisles filled. There were perhaps ten thousand people jammed into the place. “OKAY THEN! FIRST MATCH: BRIDE OF GERONIMO VERSUS THE RHINOCEROS!”

“I’ll be damned,” Kevin said, his words completely drowned by the uproar. The spots swung around drunkenly as their operators searched for the entering contestants. By the time they found them, they were almost to the dark green mat of the ring: two large figures in long capes, one scarlet, the other incandescent blue. The crowd roared, the two contestants shook their fists over their heads: Oscar and Sally Tallhawk, no doubt about it.

Quickly the two contestants were in the ring and mugging it up, bouncing against each other chest to chest. The Mistress of Ceremonies—also the referee—tried to separate them, at the same time holding her mike where it would catch their dire threats. Tallhawk snarled as she detailed the ravages Oscar would suffer: “I’m using your scalp as a floormop! Your skin will make good window squeegees! And I need some new dingleberries to hang from my rear-view mirror!”

The crowd roared.

Oscar puffed out his cheeks, mumbled “Prediction is always dangerous, but the Rhino is reasonably confident the match will ultimately be decided in his favor.”

The crowd gave him an ovation.

The MC let them at it.

They circled each other, knocking hands aside and snarling. The Bride grabbed the Rhino’s wrist and pulled, and the Rhino flew through space and hit the ring ropes, which were very elastic. The Rhino fell deep into them, rebounded back and was kicked in the chest—he staggered, the Bride took a flying leap across the ring and landed on his shoulders, bearing him to the mat. She got a knee across his throat and pounded her elbow into his face. When she stood and threw her arms overhead the crowd screamed “GERONIMA!” and the MC announced, “THE BIG G SEEMS TO HAVE LEVELED THE RHINO WITH HER FAMOUS BLUBBERHAWK FROM SPACE MOVE.”

But the Rhino, twitching in agony on the mat, reached out a hand and jerked both of Geronima’s feet from under her, felling her like a tree, allowing him to stagger up and away.

It happened several times: Bride of Geronimo used Rhino for a punching bag, but when Rhino was prostrate and the Bride reaping the crowd’s approval, the Rhino would resuscitate, barely, and deliver a stinging riposte. Once he pulled the rope on one side and let it go, which caused the rope on the other side to snap Geronima in the back and bring her down. In revenge she grabbed a lightbulb from the top of one of the rope poles, broke it and ground it into the Rhino’s face, until the MC knocked her away with the mike. The Rhino kept both hands to his face, grunting in agony as Geronima chased him about the ring. Clearly he was blind. It was a prime opportunity; Mrs. G. raced around the ring, revving up for truly impressive leaps off the corner poles, attempting her Blubberhawk from Space kill—but each time as she dropped from the air the Rhino would trip, or stagger, or hear something above, and neatly sidestep away, looking absurdly light-footed for all his bulk—and Geronima would land flat on her face. Time after time this happened, until Geronima was raving with frustration, and the crowd was in a frenzy. Then Rhino reached into his back pocket and smeared something over his face. “AH HA!” said the MC. “LOOKS LIKE HE’S USING SOME OF THAT NEW PLASTIC SKIN TO REPAIR HIS FACE—YES—SEE HOW FAST IT’S HEALED—WHY—LOOK AT THAT!—HE’S OKAY!”

Rhino dodged another leap and muttered into the mike. “MY ALMANAC INDICATES THAT THE TIDE MAY HAVE TURNED, MISSUS GEE.” And then he was all over the ring, sidestepping, looking right and left in grossly exaggerated glances, then leaping forward to box the Bride’s ears or twist her to the mat. Finally he got behind her and began bouncing her off his knee. “UH OH!” the MC cried. “IT’S RHINO’S ATOMIC DROP! NO ONE CAN TAKE THAT FOR LONG!”

And indeed Geronima collapsed to the mat, flat out. Rhino nodded shyly to the roaring crowd. The MC gave him a kiss, which gave him an idea—he tiptoed after her and took a tug at her tux, which came apart at the seams. Now the crowd really loved him.

But the MC was incensed, and turned to stalk him. He stumbled backwards across the ring, tried to wake Geronima, but to no avail. The Bride was out. The Rhino began to fly about the ring, thrown by a voluptuous woman in a fishnet body stocking, who paused only to continue in her role of commentator: “NOW I’M FINISHING THIS NOSEY RHINO OFF WITH A TRIPLE-SPIN KIDNEY HAMMER.” Rhino tried desperately to escape the ring, grasping at spectators through the ropes with eyes bugged out; but he was pulled back in and pounded. The Bride even roused herself to join the final carnage, before collapsing again after a single chop from the MC, who wanted no help. In the end the MC stood alone over the two prone wrestlers, and when she had caught her breath and straightened her hair, and tried on the torn tux and tossed it away as a bad job, she calmly announced the next bout. “UGLY GEORGE VERSUS MISTER CHICKENSHIT, COMING UP AS SOON AS WE GET THE LARD OFF THE CANVAS.”

There were several more bouts scheduled, but Kevin and Doris left their seats and struggled through the crowd to an exit, then made their way down to the locker room doors on the ground floor. Oscar was just emerging, freshly showered and back in street clothes, blinking in a kind of Clark Kentish way. After signing autographs for a gang of youngsters he joined Kevin and Doris.

“That was great!” Kevin said, grinning at Oscar’s owlish innocence.

Doris said, “Where’s Sally?”

“Thank you,” Oscar said to Kevin. “Sally has another match later in the evening. Would you care to join me for something to drink? I find I am thirsty—I could even use another dinner, to tell the truth. I have to eat lightly before a match.”

“I believe it.”

So they went back to Main Street and Huk Finns. Oscar ordered corned beef and hash, and poured whiskey over the hash, to Doris’s horror. But she joined in as they drank most of a bottle.

Kevin couldn’t stop grinning. “So Oscar, how’d you get into professional wrestling?”

“Just fell into it.”

“No, really!”

“I liked the money. Sally was already doing it, and she thought I had the necessary… talent.”

“Do you ever get hurt?” Doris asked.

“Certainly. We make mistakes all the time. Once I missed on the Atomic Drop and caught Sally on the tailbone, and a couple minutes later she popped me right on the nose. Bled all over. We both got miffed, and it turned into a serious fight for a while. But those look dull compared to the tandem stuff.”

“You really ought to join our softball team,” Kevin said. “Your footwork is great, you’d do fine!”

Oscar shook his head, mouth full.

They left a bit unsteady on their feet, but in high spirits. Main Street was not quite as crowded as before, but there were still hundreds of people wandering about. They were passing a loud group when a tall man stopped them. “Hey, ain’t you the Rhino? Hey!” he bellowed to his companions. “This here’s the Rhino, the guy who wrestles the Bride of Geronimo!”

“Fame,” Doris said.

“Hey Rhino, let’s try a takedown right here, whaddya say? I used to wrestle in high school, here, try some real wrestling moves.”

He grabbed for Oscar’s wrist, but Oscar’s wrist had moved.

“What’s a matter, Rhino? Chicken?”

“Drunk,” Oscar said.

For answer the man drove his shoulder at Oscar’s chest, and missed; turned with a roar and charged again. Oscar shuffled to one side, avoiding him in the dark. The man cannoned into Kevin.

“Hey, fuck you,” Kevin said, and punched the man in the nose.

Immediately they were in a free-for-all, swinging away amid shrieks and curses. Chaos in the dark. People came running to watch or to join the melee, and it only stopped when a whole gang of police drove up and strode among them, blowing their whistles and poking with nightsticks anyone who continued to fight. Soon the fighters were lined up and wristbanded.

“Anyone with a wristband stopped again will go to jail,” the officer in charge told them. “The bands will come off in a couple days. Now go home and sober up.”

Oscar and Kevin and Doris started toward Tallhawk’s house. “That was stupid,” Doris told Kevin.

“I know.”

She glanced around. “Those guys are following us.”

“Let’s lose them now,” Oscar suggested, and took off running.

Their belligerents followed in noisy but fairly efficient pursuit. It took them several blocks of twisting, turning, and flat-out running to shake them.

When they were free of pursuit they stood on a street corner, gasping. “This sure is fun,” Doris said acidly.

Oscar nodded. “I know. But now I’m lost.” He shrugged. “Oh well.”

It took them another hour to find Tallhawk’s house, and by that time Oscar was dragging. “This is far more exercise than I like,” he said as he opened the door of the darkened house. He entered a study with a long couch, collapsed on it. “It always happens like this when I visit Sally. She’s a maniac, essentially. The guest room is down the hall.”

Kevin went to the bathroom. When he returned to the guest room, he found that it had only one bed, and a rather narrow one at that.

Doris was undressing beside it. “It’s okay,” she said unsteadily. “We can both fit.”

Kevin swayed for a moment. “Um,” he said. “I don’t know—there’s another couch out there, I think—”

Then she pressed against him, hugging him. “Come on,” she said in a muffled voice. “We’ve done this before.”

Which was true. He had looked down onto that head of black hair, in embraces just like this. Although…. And besides, he…. Drunkenly he kissed the part, and the familiar scent of her hair filled him. He hugged back, too drunk to think past the moment. He gave in to it. They fell onto the bed.

The trip back was long, and hung over. Kevin was tired, bored with the endless Mojave Desert, awkward and tongue-tied with his old friend Doris. Oscar slumped in his seat, a portrait of the sleeping Buddha. Doris sat looking out her window, thinking unreadable thoughts.

Images of Sally Tallhawk jumped Kevin as if out of ambush: striding around their campsite with the evening sun flush on her broad face, arms spread out as she talked in a low chant of water sluicing into the underworld, pooling, drawn inward, making its secret way to the sea. The ragged ridge of Thunderbolt Peak against a sky the color of the ocean, stripes of white rock like marble crisscrossing the dark basalt, hypnagogic visions of her dancing by the lakeshore with its black wavelets, throwing Oscar out onto it where he skated as if on ice—

Jerking back awake. Trying to nod off again. The car’s monotonous hum. Off to their right, the weird illuminated black surface of one of the microwave catchments, receivers like immense stereo speakers flat on their backs, soaking rays, the photon space music, the lased power sent down from the solar panels soaring in their orbits. They were almost done setting out that array of orbiting panels, his parents’ work would be finished. What would they do then? Space junkies, would they ever come down? Visit El Modena? He missed them, needed to talk to them. Couldn’t they give him advice, tell him what to do, make it all as simple as it once had been?

No. But he should give them a call anyway. And his sister Jill as well.

Then, home at the house—having said a very awkward “good night” to Doris, pretending that there was no reason he should not go to his own room just as he always did—the TV was blinking.

It was a message from Jill.

“All right!” he said as he saw her face. That sort of coincidence was always cropping up between them. He would think of her, she would call.

She looked like him, but only in a way; all his hayseed homeliness had been transformed into broad, wild good looks, in that peculiar way that happens in family resemblances, where minute shifts in feature can make all the difference between plainness and beauty: big mobile mouth, upturned nose, freckles, wide blue eyes with light eyelashes and eyebrows, and auburn hair turning burnt gold under the Asian sun.

Now her little image said in the familiar hoarse voice, “Well, I’ve been trying to get you for the last couple of days because I’m moving out of Dakka to learn some tropical disease technique at a hospital in Atgaon, up in the northeast near the Indian border—in fact I’ve already moved out there, I’m just back to pick up the last of my things and slog through the bureaucracy. You wouldn’t believe what a mess that is, it makes California seem like a really regulation-free place. I hate doing these recordings, I wish I could get hold of you. Anyway, Atgaon’s about as far away from Dakka as you can get and still be in Bangladesh, it takes all day to get there, on a new train built on a big causeway to keep it above the floodplain. It must go over a hundred bridges, it’s a really wet country.

“Atgaon is a market town on the Tista River, which comes down from Sikkim. The hospital is the most important thing in town, it’s associated with the Institute for the Study of Tropical Diseases, and getting to be one of the leaders in the area—like, this is the place they developed the once-a-year malaria pill. The whole thing was started by the Rajhasan Landless Cooperative Society, one of the land reform groups, which is pretty neat. They do tons of clinical work, and they have a bunch of good research projects. I’m going to work on one concerning hepatitis-B-two. Meanwhile I’m helping out in the emergency room and in clinic visits, so it’s mostly busy, but I like it—the people are nice and I’m learning a lot.

“I’m living in a little bungalow of my own on the hospital grounds. It’s pretty nice, but there are some surprises. Like my first day there I turned on the light and tossed my bag on the bed, and a gigantic centipede came clattering out at me! I took a broom and smacked the thing with the handle and cut it in half, and both sides started to crawl away in different directions. Can you believe it? I was freaked and put a bed post on one half of the thing in place, while I pulverized the other half with the broom handle. Then I did the same to the half under the post. What a mess. Later they told me to check out bedsheets and clothes before using them—I told them hey, I know!”

She grinned her sister grin, and Kevin laughed. “Oh, Jill—” he said. He wanted to talk, he needed to talk!

He stopped the tape, tried to put a call through to Bangladesh. It wouldn’t go; she wasn’t there in Dakka to answer.

Feeling odd, he started the tape again.

“… Happy to know that there’s a woman’s softball league out here, can you believe it? Apparently there was an exchange program, nurses here went to Guam, and some from Guam came here, and the ones here started softball games, and when the nurses visiting Guam came back they were hooked on it too, so they kept it going. Now it’s grown, they’ve got some fields and a five-village league and everything. I haven’t seen Atgaon’s field yet, but they say it’s a good one. They’re proud of having a woman’s league, women in the rural areas are just getting out from under Islamic law, and now they’re doing all kinds of work, and involved in the land reform, and infiltrating the bureaucracy too, which means in a few years they’ll have taken over! And playing sports like this together, it’s new for them and they love it. Team spirit and all that. The big sport around here is cricket, of course, and women are doing that too, but there’s also this little softball league.

“Anyway, they figured since I was American I must play softball, and they got me out to play catch with them, and now I’m not only on a team but have been appointed head umpire for the season, because they were having trouble with their umpires taking sides. It’s the last thing I would have expected when I came. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I mean you can go to the El Toro mela every summer, so why not softball over here? Everything everywhere, that’s what it’s coming to.

“Well, I’m going to get off, this is costing me fun times in Dakka. There aren’t any phones like this in Atgaon—the hospital has a recorder but no transmitter, so I’ll try to make some letters there, and send them when I can. Meanwhile you can send letters like this to me in Dakka, and I’ll get to play them eventually. I hope you will, it’s not as good as really talking but it’s better than nothing. Say hi to everyone there, I love you.”

The image flickered out.

Kevin sat in his dark room, staring at static on the screen. He could hear Tomas in the next room, tapping away at his computer’s keyboard. He could go and talk to Tomas, who would take a break for something like that. Or he could go down to the kitchen, Donna and Cindy would be down there soaking it up and talking to people on TV. Or Sylvia and Sam. Friends were the real family, after all. Family were not actually family until they were friends too. And yet, and yet… his sister. Jill Claiborne. He wanted to talk to his sister.