The Gold Coast

16

Inside the house Dennis hears Jim’s old car click over the street track and hum away. It almost makes him laugh. When he was a kid, sons angry at their fathers could rev a car up to seven thousand RPM and burn rubber in a roaring, screeching departure; now all they can do is go hum, hum.

“Is that Jim?” says Lucy. “He didn’t come in to say goodbye.”

Damn. Dennis goes to sit before the video wall without a word.

“I wish you two wouldn’t argue,” Lucy says in a small, determined voice. “There aren’t that many jobs to be had, you know. Half the kids Jim’s age are unemployed.”

“The hell they are.” Dennis is angrier than ever. Now the kid’s gotten Lucy upset too, and he doesn’t like arguing with his son and having him tear off with that look of hurt resentment on his face: who would? But what can you do? And after a day like he’s had… Remembering it just makes him feel worse. After a successful test like the one at White Sands, having the program jerked back out to the uncertainties of open competition… Lemon’s fierce tongue-lashing… hell. An awful day. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

After a while he gets up from his chair, turns off the video; he’s been blind to it, hasn’t seen a thing. He goes to the sliding glass door, stares through his reflection at the lights of the condos of Citrus Heights, the pulsing head- and taillights of the Foothill Freeway viaduct, standing above the flats of Tustin. People everywhere. He’d like to go outside, into the house’s little backyard, but it belongs to the Aurelianos who own the other side of the house. They wouldn’t mind, but Dennis does.

He thinks of their land, up on the northern California coast near Eureka. Beautiful windswept pines, on a rocky hillside falling down into a wild sea. Ten years ago they bought five acres as an investment, and Dennis had even thought to retire up there, and build a home on the land. “Sometimes I’d like to just throw it in, move up to our land and get to work up there,” he says aloud. To build something with your own hands, something physical that you could see taking shape, day by day… it’s work he could love, work in stark contrast to the abstract, piecemeal, and endlessly delayed tasks he performs for LSR.

“Uh-huh,” Lucy says carefully.

It’s the tone of voice she uses when she wants to humor him, but doesn’t agree with whatever point he’s making. As Dennis well knows, Lucy hates the idea of moving north; it would mean leaving all her friends, the church, her job… Dennis frowns. He knows it’s just a dream, anyway.

“Do you think the trees have grown back yet?” Lucy asks.

Just a year after they bought their land a forest fire burned over several hundred acres in the Eureka area, including everything they bought. They tracked up on vacation to have a look; the ground was black. It looked awful. But the locals told them it would all recover in just a few years.…

“I don’t know,” Dennis says, irritated. He suspects the fire did not bother Lucy all that much, as it made it impossible for them to move up there for a good long while. “I’ll bet it has, though. The new trees will be small, but they’ll be there. The land recovers fast from something like that—it’s part of the natural cycle.”

“Except they found out some kids set the fire, didn’t they?”

Dennis doesn’t reply to that. After a minute or two he sighs, answers what he takes to be Lucy’s real point: “Well, we can’t go up there anyway.”

His black mood condenses to a big lump in his stomach. That bastard Lemon. He feels bad; certainly he transferred some of his anger at Lemon onto his idiot son, who surely deserved it, but still… that look on his face…

What a day.

“Did Jim say he was looking for a job?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”