The Gold Coast

73

So Jim gets to his parents’ home not long after Dennis does.

Dennis is out under their little carport, working on the motor of his car. “Hi, Dad.” No answer. Jim’s feeling too low for this sort of thing, and he goes into their portion of the house without another word.

Lucy asks about Tom.

“He’s had a cold. He’s not so well.”

Hiss of breath, indrawn. Then she says, “Go out and talk to your father. He needs something to take his mind off work.”

“I just said hello and he didn’t say a thing.”

“Get out there and talk to him!” Fiercely: “He needs to talk to you!”

“All right, all right.” Jim sighs, feeling aggrieved, and goes back outside.

His father stands crouched over the motor compartment, head down under the hood, steadfastly ignoring Jim. Ignoring Jim and everything else, Jim thinks. A retreat into his own private world.

Jim approaches him. “What are you working on?”

“The car.”

“I know that,” Jim snaps.

Dennis glances up briefly at him, turns back to his task.

“Want some help?”

“No.”

Jim grits his teeth. Too much has happened; he’s lost all tolerance for this sort of treatment. “So what are you working on?” he insists, an edge in his voice.

Dennis doesn’t look up this time. “Cleaning the switcher points.”

Jim looks into the motor compartment, at Dennis’s methodically working hands. “They’re already clean.”

Dennis doesn’t reply.

“You’re wasting your time.”

Dennis looks at him balefully. “Maybe I ought to work on your car. I don’t suppose that would be wasting my time.”

“My car doesn’t need work.”

“Have you done any maintenance on it since I last looked at it?”

“No. I’ve been too busy.”

“Too busy.”

“That’s right! I’ve been busy! It isn’t just in the defense industry that people get busy, you know.”

Dennis purses his mouth. “A lot of night classes, I suppose.”

“That’s right!” Angrily Jim walks up to the side of the car, so that only the motor compartment and the hood separate him from Dennis. “I’ve been busy going to the funerals of people we know, and trying to help my friends, and working in a real estate office, and teaching a night class. Teaching, that’s right! It’s the best thing I do—I teach people what they need to know to get by in the world! It’s good work!”

Dennis’s swift, smoldering glance shows he understands very clearly the implication of Jim’s words. He looks back down at the motor, at his hands and their intensely controlled maneuvers. A minute passes as he finishes cleaning the points.

“So you don’t think I do good work, is that it?” he says slowly.

“Dad, people are starving! Half the world is starving!” Jim is almost shaking now, the words burst out of him: “We don’t need more bombs!”

Dennis picks up the point casing, places it over the points, takes up a wrench and begins to tighten one of the nuts that holds it to the sidewall.

“Is that all you think I do?” he asks quietly. “Make bombs?”

“Isn’t that what you do?”

“No, it isn’t. Mostly I make guidance systems.”

“It’s the same thing!”

“No. It isn’t.”

“Oh come on, Dad. It’s all part of the same thing. Defense! Weapons systems!”

Dennis’s jaw is bunched hard. He threads the second nut, begins to tighten it, all very methodically.

“You think we don’t need such systems?”

“No, we don’t!” Jim has lost all composure, all restraint. “We don’t have the slightest need for them!”

“Do you watch the news?”

“Of course I watch the news. We’re in several wars, there’s a body count every day. And we provide the weapons for those wars. And for a lot of others too.”

“So we need some weapons systems.”

“To make wars!” Jim cries furiously.

“We don’t start the wars by ourselves. We don’t make all the weapons, and we don’t start all the wars.”

“I’m not so sure of that—it’s great business!”

“Do you really think that’s it?” Surely that nut is tight by now. “That there are people that cynical?”

“I suppose I do, yes. There are a lot of people who only really care about money, about profits.”

Abruptly Dennis pulls the wrench off the nut.

“It’s not that simple,” he says down at the motor, almost as if to himself. “You want it to be that simple, but it isn’t. A lot of the world would love to see this country go up in smoke. They work every day to make weapons better than ours. If we stopped—”

“If we stopped they would stop! But what would happen to profits then? The economy would be in terrible trouble. And so it goes on, new weapon after new weapon, for a hundred years!”

“A hundred years without another world war.”

“All the little wars add up to a world war. And if they go nuclear it’s the end, we’ll all be killed! And you’re a part of that!”

“Wrong!” Bang the wrench hits the underside of the hood as Dennis swings it up, points it at Jim. Behind the wrench Dennis’s face is red with anger, he’s leaning over the motor compartment, staring at Jim, his face an inch from the hood; and the wrench is shaking. “You listen to what I do, boy. I help to make systems for use in precision electronic warfare. And don’t you look at me like they’re all the same! If you can’t tell the difference between electronic war and the mass nuclear destruction of the world, then you’re too stupid to talk to!” Bang he hits the underside of the hood with the wrench. There’s a hoarse edge in his voice that Jim has never heard before, and it cuts into Jim so sharply that he takes a step back.

“I can’t do a thing about nuclear war, it’s out of my hands. Hopefully one will never be fought. But conventional wars will be. And some of those wars could kick off a nuclear one. Easily! So it comes to this—if you can make conventional wars too difficult to fight, just on technical grounds alone, then by God you put an end to them! And that lessens the nuclear threat, the main way that we might fall into a nuclear war, in a really significant way!”

“But that’s what they’ve always said, Dad!” Appalled by this argument, Jim’s face twists: “Generation after generation—machine guns, tanks, planes, atomic bombs, now this—they were all supposed to make war impossible, but they don’t! They just keep the cycle going!”

“Not impossible. You can’t make war impossible, I didn’t say that. Nothing can do that. But you can make it damned impractical. We’re getting to the point where any invasion force can be electronically detected and electronically opposed, so quickly and accurately that the chances of a successful invasion are nil. Nil! So why ever try? Can’t you see? It could come to a point where no one would try!”

“Maybe they’ll just try with nuclear weapons, then! Be sure of it!”

Dennis waves the wrench dismissively, looks at it as if surprised at its presence, puts it down carefully on the top of the sidewall. “That would be crazy. It may happen, sure, but it would be crazy. Nuclear weapons are crazy, I don’t have anything to do with them. The only work I do in that regard is to try and stop them. I wish they were gone, and maybe someday they will be, who knows. But to get rid of them we’re going to have to have some other sort of deterrent, a less dangerous one. And that’s what I work at—making the precise electronic weapons that are the only replacement for the nuclear deterrent. They’re our only way out of that.”

“There’s no way out,” Jim says, despair filling him.

“Maybe not. But I do what I can.”

He looks away from Jim, down at the concrete of the driveway.

“But I can only do what I can,” he says hoarsely. The corners of his mouth tighten bitterly. “I can’t change the way the world is, and neither can you.”

“But we can try! If everyone tried—”

“If pigs had wings, they’d fly. Be realistic.”

“I am being realistic. It’s a business, it’s using up an immense amount of resources to no purpose. It’s corrupt!”

Dennis looks down into the motor compartment, picks up the wrench, turns it over. Inspects it closely. His jaw muscles are bunching rhythmically, he looks like he’s having trouble swallowing. Something Jim has said…

“Don’t you try to tell me about corruption,” he says in a low voice. “I know more than you’ll ever imagine about that. But that’s not the system.”

“It is the system, precisely the system!”

Dennis only shakes his head, still staring at the wrench. “The system is there to be used for good or bad. And it’s not all that bad. Not by itself.”

“But it is!” Jim has the sinking feeling you get when you are losing an argument, the feeling that your opponent is using rational arguments while you are relying on the force of emotion; and as people usually do in that situation, Jim ups the emotional gain, goes right to the heart of his case: “Dad, the world is starving.”

“I know that,” Dennis says very slowly, very patiently. “The world is on the brink of a catastrophic breakdown. You think I haven’t noticed?”

He sighs, looks at the motor. “But I’ve become convinced… I think, now, that one of the strongest deterrents to that breakdown is the power of the United States. We can scare a lot of wars away. But up till now most of our scare power has been nuclear, see, and using it would end us all. So little wars keep breaking out because the people who start them know that we won’t destroy the whole world to stop them. So if… if we could make the deterrent more precise, see—a kind of unstoppable surgical strike that could focus all its destructiveness on invading armies, and only on them—then we could dismantle the nuclear threat. We wouldn’t need it because we’d have the deterrent in another form, a safer form.

“So”—he looks up at Jim, looks him right in the eye—“so as far as I’m concerned, I’m doing the work that is most likely to free people from the threat of nuclear war. Now what”—voice straining—“what better work could there be?”

He looks away.

“It was a good program.”

Jim doesn’t know what to say to that. He can see the logic of the argument. And that fearful strain in his father’s voice… His anger drains out of him, and he’s amazed, even frightened, at what he has been saying. They’ve gone so far beyond the boundaries of their ordinary discourse, there doesn’t seem any way back.

And suddenly he recalls his plans for the night: rendezvous with Arthur, assault on Laguna Space Research. He can’t stand across from Dennis with that in his mind, it makes him sick with trembling.

Dennis leans against the car, face down, the averted expression as still as stone. He’s lost in his own thoughts. His hands are methodically working with the wrench, loosening a nut on the next point casing. Jim tries to say something, and the words catch in his throat. What was it? He can’t remember. The silence stretches out, and really there’s nothing he can say. Nothing he can say.

“I—I’ll go in and tell Mom you’re about ready to eat?”

Dennis nods.

Unsteadily Jim walks inside. Lucy is chopping vegetables for the salad, over by the sink, in front of the kitchen window that has the view of the carport. Jim walks over and stands next to her. Through the window he can see Dennis’s side and back.

Lucy sniffs, and Jim sees she is red-eyed. “So did he tell you what happened down at work?” she asks, chopping hard and erratically.

“No! What happened?”

“I saw you talking out there. You shouldn’t argue with him on a day like today!” She goes to blow her nose.

“Why, what happened?”

“You know they lost that big proposal Dad was working on.”

“Sort of, I guess. Weren’t they appealing it?”

“Yes. And they were doing pretty well with that, too, until today.” And Lucy tells him as much as she knows of it all, pieced together from Dennis’s curt, bitter remarks.

“No!” Jim says more than once during the story. “No!”

“Yes. That’s what he said.” She puts a fist to her mouth. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as down as this in my whole life.”

“But—but he just stood out there… he just stood out there and defended the whole thing! All of it!”

Lucy nods, sniffs, starts chopping vegetables.

Stunned, Jim stares out the window at his father, who is meticulously tightening a nut, as if tamping down the last pieces of a puzzle.

“Mom, I’ve gotta go.”

“What?”

He’s already to the front door. Got to get away.

“Jim!”

But he’s gone, out the door, almost running. For a moment he can’t find his car key. Then he’s found it, he’s off and away. Tracking away at full speed.

Dennis will think he’s left because of their argument. “No!” Jim can barely see the streets, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he just tracks for home. Halfway there he goes to manual and tracks to the Newport Freeway. Southbound, under the great concrete ramp of the northbound lanes, in the murky light of the groundlevel world, in the thickets of halogen light.… He punches the dashboard, gets off at Edinger to turn back north, then returns to the southbound lanes. Where to go? Where can he go? What can he do? Can he go back up there to dinner with his parents? Eat a meal and then go blow up his father’s company? For God’s sake!—how could he have gotten to this point?

On he drives. He knows the defense industry is a malignancy making money in the service of death, in the face of suffering, he knows it has to be opposed in every way possible, he knows he is right. And yet still, still, still, still, still. That look on Dennis’s face, as he stared down at the immaculate motor of his car. Lucy, looking out the window about to cut her thumb off. “It was a good program.” His voice.

Mindlessly Jim tracks north on the San Diego Freeway. But what in the world is there for him in L.A.? He could drive all night, escape.… No. He turns east on the Garden Grove Freeway, south on the Newport. Back in the loop, going in circles. Triangles, actually. Furious at that he tracks south into Newport Beach, past the Hungry Crab which makes him feel sick, physically sick. He has fucked up every single aspect of his life, and he’s still at it. Going for an utterly clean sweep.

At the very end of the Newport peninsula he gets out of his car, walks out to the jetty. The Wedge isn’t breaking tonight, the waves slosh up and down the sand as if the Pacific were a lake.

Someone’s got a fire going in a barbecue pit, and yellow light and shadows dance over the dark figures standing around it as the wind whips the flames here and there. It’s too dark to walk very far over the giant boulders of the jetty. A part of him wonders why he would want to, anyway. The jetty ends, he would have to return to the world eventually, face up to it.

He returns to his car. For a long time he just sits in it, head on the steering switch. Familiar smell, familiar sight of the dusty cracked dash… sometimes it feels like this car is his only home. He’s moved a dozen times in the last six years, trying to get more room, better sun, less rent, whatever. Only the car remains constant, and the hours spent in it each day. The real home, in autopia; so true. Too true.

Except for his parents’ home. Helplessly Jim thinks of it. They moved into the little duplex when Jim was seven. He and his dad played catch in the driveway. One time Jim missed an easy throw and caught it in the eye. They threw balls onto the carport roof and Jim caught them as they rolled off. Dad set up a backboard. He painted an old bike he bought for Jim, painted it red and white. They all went for a trip together, to see the historical museum and the last acres of real orange grove (part of Fairview Cemetery, yes).

The junk of the past, the memory’s strange detritus. Why should he remember what he does? And does any of it matter? In a world where the majority of all the people born will starve or be killed in wars, after living degraded lives in cardboard shacks, like animals, like rats struggling hour to hour, meal to meal—do his middle-class suburban Orange County memories matter at all? Should they matter?

It’s ten P.M.; Jim has an appointment soon. He clicks the car on, puts it on the track to Arthur Bastanchury’s ap.