The Wild Shore

6

Out by the big eucalyptus Jennings and Lee stood waiting. “Let’s be off,” Lee said roughly.

We went to the freeway and headed south. Soon we passed the steep bank at the back of Concrete Bay, and were out of the valley and onto the Pendleton shore. The freeway was in pretty good shape; though the surface was cracked a bit, it was clear of trees and shrubs, except for an occasional line of them filling a big crack like a fence. But most of the way the road was a light slash through dark, overhanging forest. The level country it crossed was a narrow strip between steep hills and the sea cliff, cut often by deep ravines. Usually the freeway spanned these ravines, but twice it fell into them, and we were forced to descend their sides and cross the gurgling black creeks at their bottoms, on big blocks of concrete. Lee led the way over these breaks without a word. He was anxious to be in San Diego, it seemed.

A short distance beyond the second break in the freeway Lee stopped. I looked past him and saw a cluster of ruined buildings in the trees. Lee raised his hands to his mouth and made a passable imitation of a gull cry three times in a row, then three again, and from the buildings a shrill whistle replied. We approached the largest of the buildings, and were met halfway there by a group of men who greeted us loudly. They led us into the building, where a small fire gave off little light and lots of smoke. The men from San Diego—seven of them—surveyed Tom and me.

“You sure took a piece of time to get two specimens no better than these,” a short man with a large belly said. He pulled on his beard and barked a laugh, but his little reddened eyes didn’t look amused.

“Ain’t San Onofre serious about talking to the Mayor?” the man next to him said. It was the first time I had ever heard San put in front of Onofre.

“Now enough of that,” Jennings said. “This here is Tom Barnard, one of the oldest living Americans—”

“Granted,” said the short man.

“And one of Onofre’s leaders. And this boy here is his most able assistant.”

Tom didn’t even flinch during all this; he stared calmly at the short man, head tilted to the side like he was contemplating a new sort of bug. Lee hadn’t stopped to listen. He was gathering rope under one arm, and he only paused to look up and say, “Get that fire out and get on the cars. I want to be in San Diego by sunup.”

The men got their gear together and doused the fire, and we left the building and the freeway, striking out into the forest behind Lee, in the direction of the ocean. We had only walked twenty or thirty paces when Lee stopped and lit a lantern.

In the gleam of light I saw their train: a platform on metal wheels, with a long bar set on a block in the middle of it. The men started throwing their stuff on the train, and behind the first I saw a second one. Approaching it I stepped over the rails. They were just like the rails that crossed our valley—bumpy and corroded, with spongy beams set every few feet under them. Tom and I stood watching as sledgehammers and axes, bundles of rope and bags of clanking metal stakes were stowed on the two platforms.

Quickly everything was aboard, and we climbed on the front train behind Lee and Jennings. Two of the men stood at the ends of the crossbar; one pulled on the high end, assisted by Lee, and with a crunch we were rolling over the rusty rails. When that end of the crossbar was low, the short man with the belly hauled down with all his weight on the other end. The two men traded pulls, and away we went, followed by the other car.

We rolled out of the copse of trees that had hidden the trains, onto a brush-covered plain. Here the hills lifted a few miles inland, rather than directly from the coast, and what trees there were grew mostly in the ravines. The rails ran just to the sea side of the freeway, and I could see the ocean from time to time when we topped a rise, silvered gray under low clouds. We passed a headland that had taken Nicolin and me half a day to walk to; it was as far south as I had ever been. From there on I was in new territory.

The car’s wheels ground over the tracks with a sound like a rasp cutting metal, and we picked up speed until we were going faster than a man could run. Rolling down a slope we moved even faster, and a cold wind struck me; the rotten ties flashed under the car so fast I couldn’t make out any individual ties! Tom’s beard was blowing back over his shoulders like a flag, and he grinned at me. “The only way to travel, eh?” I nodded vigorously, too excited to speak. It felt like we were flying, no matter the crunch and rattle from below. “How f-fast are we going?” I stammered out.

Tom looked over the side, put his hand up to the wind. “About thirty miles an hour,” he said. “Maybe thirty-five. It’s been a good long while since I’ve gone this fast, I’ll tell you.”

“Thirty miles an hour!” I cried. “Yeee-ow!”

The men laughed at me, but I didn’t care. So far as I was concerned, they were the fools; we were going thirty miles an hour, and they sat there trying to avoid the wind!

“Want to pull?” Jennings said from the back end of the crossbar. At that the men laughed again.

“Do I!” I said. Jennings stepped aside and I took the T at the end of the pole on its upswing. When I pulled down on it I could feel the car surge forward, all out of proportion to the force I had exerted, and I whooped again. I pulled hard, and saw the white grin of the man pulling across from me. He pulled just as hard, and we made that car fly down Pendleton like we were in a dream. All of a sudden I knew what it had been like to live in the old time, I knew that power they had wielded. All Tom’s stories and all his books had told me of it, but now I felt it in my muscles and my skin, I could see it flying all by me, and it was exhilarating. We pumped that car down those tracks. Behind us the men on the following car hooted and hollered: “Hey up there! Who you got on the bar?” “We know it ain’t Jennings doing that!” The men on both cars laughed at that. “It is Jennings,” one of them said. “I didn’t know you missed your wife that much!” “What are you worried she’s up to?” “Better not waste all your pumping up here!” “Throw us a tow rope if you feel that good!”

“Slow it down some,” Lee said after a while. “We got a ways to go, don’t want to tire out those poor men back there.”

So we slowed a bit. Still, when one of the men took my place, I was sweating from the effort, and standing there I chilled fast. I sat down and huddled in my coat. The land got hillier. On the up slopes we all had to get up and help pump the bar; on the downs we rolled so fast I wouldn’t have stood up for silver.

We passed a bit of white cloth, hanging from a pole. Lee stood and pulled the brake lever, and we came to a halt blasting red sparks over the trackbed, with a screech that made me shudder, it hurt my ears so.

“Now comes the complicated part,” Jennings said, and jumped off the car. In the sudden silence I could hear running water ahead of us. Tom and I got off the train and followed the rest of the men down the tracks. There in a dip lay a considerable stream, about half the width of our valley’s river. Black posts stuck out of the surface in a double line, all the way across. Beams and planks connected some of the posts, and extended to the banks on either side, but there were big gaps as well, and all in all it was a wreck. Each post knocked up a little circle of foam from the river, showing it was a fast stream.

“That’s our bridge foundation,” Jennings said to Tom and me, while Lee directed the men on the bank. “The pilings are in pretty good shape. We leveled them, and brought up some beams that sit over the pilings sideways, like lintels. Then we set rail over the beams at the right gauge, and roll the cars over, and haul all the beams and rail to the other bank after us. It’s a lot of work, but with the material hidden no one can tell we’re crossing this bridge.”

“Very ingenious,” Tom said.

Three or four more lanterns had been lit, and their light was directed at the pilings by metal reflectors. The men hustled about in the dark, cursing at manzanita and brambleberry, and pulling the beams out of the brush down to the bank. They hooked these beams onto a thick length of rope that they had fished out of the shallows. This rope extended across the river under the water, was threaded through a large pulley, and came back under the stream to our side. The ten crossbeams, or ties, were hauled out into the river upstream from the pilings, and then the rope was slackened till the ties floated between the pilings. Men balancing on the pilings—they got out to them on narrow planks—would then fish the ties up and secure them atop the pilings.

A chorus of cursing came from the men on the bank. The rope was stuck, and wouldn’t move through the pulley. They argued over what to do, but Lee cut it short:

“Someone’s going to have to swim over and clear that pulley. We can’t mess with carrying the beams out; they’re too heavy to carry.”

The men were not cheered by this pronouncement. One of them, a man from the second car, kind of snickered and yanked a thumb in my direction. “Why not let young power-pull do it?”

There were snorts of amusement from the short fat guy, and Tom began to protest in my behalf, but I interrupted him. “Sure I’ll do it,” I said. “I’m probably the best swimmer here, anyway.”

“He’s right about that,” Tom admitted. “He and his friends go out swimming in surf higher than your head.”

“Good man,” Jennings said heartily. “You see, Henry, we’ve swum this river many times, but it’s not easy. You’re best off pulling yourself over with the rope; that way you won’t be carried downstream. Just get over there and clear that pulley, and we’ll have this bridge up in no time.”

So I stripped and plunged into the river. Holding on to the rope meant I couldn’t really swim, and the rope was so slick that I had to be very careful pulling myself hand over hand. And the swift current pulled my feet downstream so that kicking wasn’t very effective either. It took a lot longer than I would have guessed to cross, but eventually my knees rammed into soft mud, and I walked out onto the other bank. When I stood on firm mud I shouted back to the men that the swim had been no trouble, and followed the rope to the pulley.

A mass of water weed had grown on the rope, and when I pulled it free the rope ran cleanly and the system was working again. I was pleased with that, and the men on the other bank called out their congratulations. But watching their silhouetted forms walk delicately over bending planks to the pilings, I realized it would be a while before they were finished. Meanwhile I was standing wet and cold, with the river between me and a stitch of clothing. Jennings had probably known I would have to swim back across, but he kindly hadn’t made that clear. There was nothing for it but to get back in the water and pull to the other side. I cursed Jennings briefly, yelled my intentions to the men, squished through the mud until the water was up to my chest, and started pulling again.

What I hadn’t counted on were the ten ties, now pulled out into the river and floating downstream from the rope, exactly in my way. Around each beam I had to kick myself upstream, or dive under, all the while keeping a hold on the wet rope. Still, I would have been okay; but out of the gloom upstream rolled a full torrey pine tree, floating low in the water. It barged right over me, and then got hung up in the rope, and all of the sudden I was thrust well under the surface, caught in a thicket of twisted branches and poking needles. I was barely able to hold on to the rope, and I hadn’t had time to get a good breath; chill water shoved at my mouth and nose. The tree wouldn’t let me up. The rope bowed under the new pressure. Desperately I shoved my face up between two branches and got a quick mouthful of air. I shifted hands on the rope and seized the trunk of the tree in my left hand, pulled it over and the rope under. The tree flipped over; it was still caught on the rope, but now I could tread water beside it, still holding the rope. “Chinga!” I gasped. “Shit! Pinché buey!”

“Hey!” they were calling from the bank. “Anything wrong out there?” “Henry!” Tom was yelling.

“Nothing!” I yelled back. “I’m okay!” But now they were hauling the rope back in, pulling me across. That was fine by me. I realized why none of the men had been anxious to swim across. I took a couple hand-over-hand grabs, but they were pulling faster and soon I squished into mud. Two of the men waded knee deep to pull me out. On shore they wrapped me in a wool blanket, and after I had dried off with it they gave me another to sit in. I huddled over the lanterns and told them it had been no problem. They didn’t have much to say to that, and Tom gave me his suspicious eye.

While I warmed up they got the bridge assembled. The ties were placed on the pilings, the rails were slid over the ties, and spikes were driven through gaps in the rail flange, into already existing holes in the ties. The rails were closer together than the two rows of pilings, but not by much. Black figures crawled back and forth over the structure, silhouetted by the lantern light in a variety of precarious positions; once I saw a standing figure drop a plank he had been lowering onto an isolated beam, and fall to his hands and knees to avoid falling in. The plank swirled away. Shouts from Lee punctuated the sounds of hammering.

“The first time they did this it must have been a lot of trouble,” Tom said to me, crouched by my side with his hands around the lantern glass. “I guess it must hold those cars, but I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be the first to take one across.”

“They look like they know what they’re doing,” I said.

“Yeah. Tough work in the dark. Too bad they can’t just build a bridge and leave it there.”

“That’s what I was thinking. I can’t believe the…” I didn’t know what to call them. “That they’d actually bomb a little bridge like this one.”

“I know.” In the dim glow Tom’s expression was somber. “But I don’t think these folks are lying, or going to all this trouble for nothing. I guess whoever’s up there is keeping the existing communities separated, like Jennings said. But I wasn’t aware of it. It’s a bad sign.”

Jennings walked nonchalantly along one rail and jumped onto the bank to approach us. “Just about done,” he announced. “You men should walk across now. We take the cars over as empty as we can get them, although it’s just a precaution, you understand.”

“That we do,” said Tom. He helped me to my feet, and I put on my clothes. I wrapped the blankets around my shoulders, for I was still cold. We crossed the downstream rail very carefully. The ties felt solid when I walked on them, but they were a touch warped, and the rail didn’t lay directly on a few of them. I pointed this out to Jennings, who seemed very much at ease on the rail.

“It’s true. We can’t keep those ties perfectly flat. It makes for a little yaw when you cross, but nothing worse than that. At least not so far. We’ll see if Lee has to go for a swim like you did when he brings the first car over. I hope not—it’s still a fair walk to San Diego.”

On the south bank we gathered by the lanterns and the men holding them directed their light at the first car. Lee and another man cranked it slowly across. The rails squeaked and squealed as the car went over a tie; the rest of the time they were ominously silent. The car was an odd sight in the middle of the stream, hanging over both sides of the rails, a big black mass on two spindly strips, like a spider walking across its web strands. When they pumped it up the other bank the men said “All right,” and “That was a good one.”

They walked the equipment over, and pumped the second car across, and then pulled up the spikes and hauled the rails to the south side. Lee was a terror for keeping them arranged in order, so that it would be easy to set up the next time they came north. “Very ingenious,” said Tom. “Very clever, very dangerous, very well done.” “Looked simple enough to me,” I replied. Soon the rope was rigged through a pulley on the other shore, and the platforms of the two cars were stacked with equipment again. We got on the front one with the other men, and were off rolling. “The next one’s a lot easier,” Jennings told us as we pumped up the slope and away.

I volunteered to pump, because I was still cold. This time I pulled at the front end, and watched the hills course away from us with the wind at my back. Once again I felt exuberant at the speed of our grinding flight over the land, and I laughed aloud.

“This kid swims and pumps like a good resistance man,” Jennings said. I didn’t know what he meant, but the other men on the car agreed with him, those who bothered to speak, anyway.

But when I warmed up I was tired. I was quickly relieved by the short man with the belly, who gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder and sent me to the rear of the platform. I sat down under my blanket, and after a while I drowsed off, still half aware of the train, the wind, the men’s low voices.

I woke when the car stopped. “We at the next river?”

“No,” Tom said quietly. “Look there.” He pointed out to sea.

A completely hidden moon was making the clouds glow a little, and under them the ocean’s surface was a patchy gray. I saw immediately what Tom was pointing at: a dim red light in the middle of a black lump. A ship. A big ship—a huge ship, so big that for a second I thought it was just offshore, when actually it was halfway between the cliffs and the cloud-fuzzed horizon. It was so difficult to reconcile its distance from us and its immense size that I felt I could be dreaming.

“Kill the lanterns,” Lee said.

The lanterns were put out. No one spoke. The giant ship ghosted north and its movement was as wrong as its size and position. It was fast, very fast, and soon it slipped below a hill we had come over, and out of sight.

“They don’t come so close to the land in inhabited areas,” Jennings told us in a voice filled with bravado. “That was a rare sighting.”

Presently we started up again, and passing another white flag by the trackbed, we came to the banks of another river. This one was wider than the first, but the pilings extended right up both banks, and there was a platform across most of it. The San Diegans went to work laying track over the rickety old-time platform, and Tom and I stayed on the car by the lanterns. It had gotten colder through the night, and we were tucked under blankets and breathing little plumes of frost. Eventually we got up to help carry equipment over, just to stay warm. When the cars were across the river, and the bridge pulled apart, I got between two stacks of rope, out of the wind, and fell asleep.

Intermittently rough spots in the track jarred and woke me, and I cursed myself for missing part of my trip. I would poke my head up to look around, but it was still dark, and I was still tired, and I would fall asleep again. The last time I woke it was getting light, and all the men were up to help pump us over a steep rise. I forced myself to get up, resolved to stay awake, and helped pump when a spot opened.

We were among ruins. Not ruins like in Orange County, where tangles of wood and concrete marked crushed buildings in the forest—rather there were blank foundations among the trees, and restored houses or larger buildings here and there. Cleaned up ruins. The short man pointed out the area where he lived and we passed inland of it. The bluffs we were traveling over alternated with marshes that opened onto the beach, so our tracks rose and fell regularly. We crossed the marshes on giant causeways, with tunnels under them to let the marsh’s rivers reach the sea. But then we came on a marsh that didn’t have a causeway. Or if it had, once upon a time, it was long gone. We were separated from the bluff to the south by a wide river, snaking through a flat expanse of reeds. It broke through the beach dunes to the sea in three places.

The San Diegans stopped the cars to look. “San Elijo,” Jennings said to Tom and me. The sun was poking through clouds, and in the dawn air, thick with salt, hundreds of birds were flapping out of the dull green reeds and skimming the brassy pools and bands of the meandering river. Their cries floated lazily over the sound of the surf breaking, out on the fringe of the broad tawny beach.

Tom said, “How do you cross it? Pretty long bridge to build, wouldn’t you say?”

Jennings chuckled. “We go around it. We’ve set rails on the roads permanently. Down here they”—thrusting a thumb skyward—“don’t seem to mind.”

So we rode the tracks around the north side of the marsh, and crossed the river back in the hills where it was no more than a deep creek, on a permanent bridge like ours back home.

“Have you been able to determine how far away from San Diego you can build without disturbing them?” Tom asked as we crossed this bridge.

Lee opened his mouth to reply, but Jennings got there first, and Lee squeezed his lips together with annoyance. “Lee here has a theory that there are very strict and regular limits to what we can do before they intervene—a matter of isolating each of the old counties, to the extent they can. Isn’t that what you said, Lee?”

With a roll of his eyes Lee nodded, grinning at Jennings despite himself.

“Me, I’m not so sure I don’t agree more with the Mayor,” Jennings went on, oblivious to Lee’s amusement. “The Mayor says there is no rhyme nor reason to what they do; madmen watch us from space, he says, and control what we can and can’t do. He really gets upset. We’re like flies to the gods, he says.”

“ ‘Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,’ ” Tom corrected.

“Exactly. Madmen, looking down on us.”

Lee shook his head. “There’s more to it than that. It’s a question of how much they see. But their reaction is governed by rules. I imagine it’s a charter from the United Nations or some such thing, telling the Japs out there what to do. In fact—” But there he stopped himself, frowning as if he felt he had gone on too long.

“Oh, no question they’ve got cameras that can image a man,” Jennings disagreed complacently. “So it’s not a question of how much they can see. The question is, how much they will notice. Now, we’ve made changes on that rail line north that can’t be hid. The bridges are the same, but we’ve cleared some brush off the tracks, for instance. So hiding the bridge work may be a waste of time. We’re not invisible, like I told the Mayor, though I’m not sure he listened. We’re just unobtrusive. Now the watchers may pore over every photograph they take, or they may have machines scanning for major changes, we don’t know. This line north should be a good test of their attention, if you ask me.”

We were rolling through a thick forest of torrey pine. The sun split the shadows and sparked the dew. The air warmed and I felt drowsy again, despite my fascination with the new country we were passing through. Among the trees were groups of houses from the old time, many of them restored and occupied; smoke rose from many a chimney. When I saw this I nudged Tom, powerfully disturbed. These San Diegans were nothing else but scavengers! Tom saw what I meant, but he just shook his head briefly at me. It wasn’t the time to discuss it, that was sure. But it made me uneasy.

The tracks led to a village somewhat like ours, except there were more houses, and they were placed closer together, and many of them had been built in the old time. The screech of our brakes sent chickens cackling and dogs howling. Several men and women emerged from a big house across the clearing from the tracks. The San Diegans jumped off the cars and greeted the locals. In the light of day they looked filthy and red-eyed and whiskery, but no one seemed to mind.

“Welcome to San Diego!” Jennings said to us as he helped Tom off the car. “Or to University City, to be more exact. Care to join us for breakfast?”

We agreed heartily to that, and I realized I was as hungry as I was tired, or even more so. We were introduced to the group who had come from the big house to greet us, and we followed them into it.

Inside the front door was an entryway two stories tall, carpeted red, with red and gold wallpaper on the walls, and a glass candle holder hanging from the ceiling. The staircase against one wall was carpeted as well, and it had a bannister of carved and varnished oak. Wide-eyed, I said, “Is this the Mayor’s house?”

The San Diegans erupted with laughter. I felt my cheeks burn. Jennings put his arm around my shoulders with a whoop. “You’ve proved yourself tonight, Henry my boy. We aren’t laughing at you; it’s just… well, when you see the Mayor’s place, you’ll understand why. This here is my house. Come on in and clean up and meet the wife, and we’ll have a good meal to celebrate your arrival.”

7

After breakfast Tom and I slept for most of the day, on old couches in the Jennings’ front room. Late in the day Jennings bustled in and woke us, saying, “Quick now, quick. I’ve been to talk to the Mayor—he’s invited you to a dinner and a conference, and he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Shut up and let them get ready,” Jennings’ wife said as she looked over his shoulder at us. She looked remarkably like him, short, thick and cheerful. “When you’re ready I’ll show you to the bathroom.” Tom and I followed her to it, and relieved ourselves in a working water toilet. When we were done Jennings hustled us outside. Lee and the short man were already on one of the train cars. We joined them, and they pumped us south. Apparently in the light of day the tubby man felt more sociable, and he introduced himself as Abe Tonklin.

We rattled over tracks laid on the cracked concrete of another freeway, under a canopy of torrey pine and eucalyptus, redwood and oak. The car crunched swiftly through alternating shadows and slanted beams of sunlight, and now and then we passed a big clearing in the forest, packed with crops, usually corn. Once I waved at a man standing in one of these yellowy green expanses, and then realized he was a scarecrow.

Over the roar of wheel on rail Jennings shouted, “We’re almost there.” We topped a rise and below us was a narrow lake, stretching right to left in front of us. It was as if a marsh similar to the ones to the north had flooded. Scattered on the lake’s surface were towering buildings, skyscrapers, at least a dozen of them. One of them, to the left, was a giant circular wall. And in the middle of the lake stood a piece of freeway, up on concrete pilings above the water. A white house stood on this platform. Flying above this house I could make out a little American flag, snapping in the breeze. I looked at Tom, my mouth hanging open in amazement. Tom’s eyes were big. I took in the sight again. Flanked by forested hills, lit by the low sun, the long lake and its fantastic collection of drowned and ruined giants was the most impressive remnant of the old time I had ever laid eyes on. They were so big! Once again I had that feeling—like a hand squeezing my heart—that I knew what it had been like…

“Now that’s the Mayor’s house,” Jennings said.

“By God, it’s Mission Valley,” Tom said.

“That’s right,” Jennings replied, as proudly as if he’d made it all himself. Tom laughed. The tracks came to an end, and Lee braked the car with the usual nerve-jangling screech. We got off and followed the San Diegans down the freeway. It led right into the lake and disappeared. The piece of freeway standing on stilts in the lake’s center was on a line with it, and in a notch of the hills forming the opposite shore I saw the gray concrete rising out of the lake again. All at once I understood that the section of freeway on stilts in the lake was all that was left of a bridge that had spanned the whole valley. Rather than have their road dip into the valley and rise again, they had placed it on towers for well over a mile, from hillside to hillside—just to avoid a drop and rise for their cars! I was stunned; I stared at it; I couldn’t get a grasp on the sort of thinking that would even imagine such a bridge.

“You okay?” Lee asked me.

“Huh? Yeah, sure. Just looking at the lake.”

“Quite a sight. Maybe we can take a sail around it in the morning.” This was as friendly as Lee had been to me, and I saw that he appreciated my astonishment.

Where the road plunged into the lake a large floating dock moored a score of rowboats and small catboats. Lee and Abe led us to one of the larger rowboats. We got in, and Abe rowed us toward the freeway island. As we got closer Jennings answered Tom’s questions: “The rains washed mountains of dirt down to the rivermouth, which was bracketed by a pair of long jetties and crossed by several roads—just generally obstructed. So the dirt stuck there and formed a plug. A big dam. What? There’s still a channel through to the ocean, but it’s on top of the plug, so we got the lake back here. It’s well above sea level. Runs all the way to El Cajon.”

Tom laughed. “Ha! We always said a good rain would flood this valley, but this… What about the overpass out here?”

“The first floods were pretty violent, they say, and the sides of the hills got ripped away, so the towers holding the road fell. Only the center ones held. We blasted the wreckage hanging from the center section so it would look cleaner. More planned, you know.”

“Sure.”

As we rowed under it I could see the broken end of the freeway, yellow in the late sun. Rusted metal rods stuck out from the pocked concrete, twisting down at their ends. The platform was about fifteen feet thick, and its bottom was twenty feet or so above the sunbeaten lake surface. The platform had been part of an intersection, and narrow ramps branched from the main north-south fragment to descend to the valley floor. Now these curving side roads served as convenient boat ramps for us. We glided to the eastern ramp, and were moored by a few men who were there to greet us. We stepped from the front of the boat onto the concrete ramp. The red sun gleamed between two towers, and the breeze ruffled our hair. From the dwellings above we heard laughter and voices, and a tinkling of crockery.

“We’re late,” Lee said. “Let’s go.” As we ascended the ramp I noticed that it tilted side to side, as well as up. Tom told me, when I mentioned it, that this had been done to keep the cars coming down the ramp at high speed from skidding off the side. I looked over the edge at the water below and thought that the old Americans must have been fools.

Up on the wide and level north-south platform we could see the houses built on it. The big house stood at the north end, and the cluster of smaller buildings, each about the size of my home, were arranged in a horseshoe at the south end. Half of the big house was only one story tall, and on the roof of this part, facing us, was a porch with a blue railing. Over the railing leaned several men, watching us. Jennings waved to them as we approached. I walked next to Tom, suddenly nervous.

Lee and Jennings led Tom and me into the big house. Once inside Jennings took a comb from a pocket and ran it through his hair. Lee grinned sardonically at this grooming, and pushed past Jennings to lead us up a broad staircase. On the upper floor we walked down a dim hallway to a room containing a lot of chairs and a piano. Large glass doors in the south wall of this room opened onto the roof porch, and we walked through them.

The Mayor stood in a group of men by the railing, watching us approach. He was a big man, tall, wide-shouldered and deep-chested. His forearms were thick with muscle, and under his plaid wool pants I could see his thighs were the same. One of his men helped him to shrug into a plain blue coat. His head looked too small for his body. “Jennings, who are these men?” he said in a high, scratchy voice. Underneath his black moustache was a small mouth, a weak chin. But as he adjusted his collar he looked us over with sharply intelligent, pale blue eyes.

Jennings introduced Tom and me.

“Timothy Danforth,” the Mayor said in reply. “Mayor of this fine town.” There was a little American flag in the lapel of his jacket. He shook hands with each of us; when I shook I squeezed as hard as I could, but I might as well have been squeezing rock. He could have squashed my hand like bread dough. As Tom said later, his handshake alone could have made him mayor. He said to Tom, “I am told you are not the elected leader of San Onofre?”

“Onofre doesn’t have an elected leader,” Tom said.

“But you hold some sort of authority?” the Mayor suggested.

Tom shrugged and walked past him to the porch rail. “Nice view you’ve got here,” he said, looking west, where the sun had been halved by the darkening hills. I was shocked at Tom’s rudeness; I wanted to speak up and tell the Mayor that Tom had as much authority as anyone in Onofre. But I kept my mouth shut. Tom kept looking at the sunset. The Mayor watched him out of narrowed eyes.

“Always good to meet another neighbor,” the Mayor said, in a hearty voice. “We’ll celebrate with a meal out here, if you like. It should be a warm enough evening.” He smiled and his moustache waggled. “Tell me, are you one who lived in the old time?” His tone seemed to say, are you one of those who used to live in Paradise?

“How did you guess?” Tom said.

The dozen men on the porch laughed, but Danforth just stared at Tom. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. There aren’t many of you left, especially in such good health. You’re an inspiration to all of us.”

Tom lifted his bushy eyebrows. “Really?”

“An inspiration,” the Mayor repeated firmly. “A monument, so to speak. A reminder of what we’re striving for in these most difficult of times. I find that old timers like you understand better what we’re striving for.”

“Which is?” said Tom.

Luckily, or perhaps deliberately, the Mayor didn’t hear Tom’s question. “Well, come sit down,” he said, as if we had been refusing to. There were several round tables on the porch, among small trees in big buckets. As we sat around one next to the rail Danforth’s little eyes peered at Tom. Tom innocently stared at the flag, which ruffled limply from a pole sticking out of the roof.

Twenty-five or thirty tables were set up on the freeway below, and more boats were arriving in the gloom of the early evening. The hills to the south were a brilliant green at their very tops, but that was the last of the light. From somewhere in the house a generator started to hum, and electric lights snapped on all over the island. The little buildings at the south end, the freeway railings, the rooms of the house behind us: all blazed with a white light. Girls my age or younger moved around the porch, bringing plates and silverware out from inside. One of the girls set my plate before me and gave me a smile. Her hair shone gold under the glare of the lights, and I smiled back. Men and women appeared at the top of the east ramp, dressed like scavengers in bright coats and colorful dresses, but I didn’t care. In San Diego things were obviously not the same. Down here they combined the best of scavenger and newtowner, I thought. One of the brighter lights shone on the flag, and everyone on the island stood at attention as the limp folds of red, white, and blue were lowered. Tom and I stood with them, and I felt a peculiar glow flushing my face and the chinks of my spine…

Around our table were Tom and me, Jennings, Lee, the Mayor, and three of his men, who were quickly introduced to us. Ben was the only name I remembered. Jennings told the Mayor about their trip north, describing the two bridges and all the major breaks in the track. He made the repair work sound difficult, and I guessed that they had come home behind schedule. Or maybe Jennings just exaggerated out of habit. He certainly did when telling them about my swim across the creek, and I blushed, pleased that the blond serving girl was hovering between our table and the next to hear the tale. Jennings made it a tall tale indeed, and as the San Diegans congratulated me Tom nudged me under the table. “It was nothing,” I told them. “I was anxious to get down here and see this town.” The Mayor nodded his approval of the sentiment, sinking his chin into his neck until it looked like there was nothing but folds of skin between his Adam’s apple and his mouth.

“What’s the shortest time it would take you to train up to Onofre?” the Mayor asked Lee. Tom and I nudged each other again: he knew which of his men to ask when he wanted a straight answer. Of course if he couldn’t figure out Lee and Jennings he’d scarcely be able to mayor a doghouse. But it was a sign.

Lee cleared his throat. “Last night it took about eight hours, from our stopping point up there to University City. That’s about as fast as it could be done, unless we left the bridges up.”

“We can’t do that.” Danforth’s mobile face was grim.

“I guess not. Anyway, another fifteen minutes to Onofre. The track’s in good shape to there.”

“And beyond as well,” Jennings added, which made Tom look up. The Mayor scowled.

“Let’s talk about that after dinner,” he said.

After the girls had set the tables, with plates and glasses and cloth napkins and silverware that looked like real silver, they brought out big glass bowls filled with salads made of lettuce and shrimp. Tom examined the shrimp with interest, forking one to get it closer to his eyes. “Where do you get these?” he inquired.

The Mayor laughed. “Wait till after the grace, and Ben here will tell you.”

All the serving girls came out and stood still, and the Mayor stood and walked to the rail, so he could be seen from below. He had a limp, I noticed; his left foot wouldn’t bend. We all bowed our heads. The Mayor declaimed the prayer: “Dear Lord, we eat this food you have provided us in order to make us strong in the service of you and of the United States of America. Amen.” Everyone joined in on the amen, which covered the little sounds Tom was making beside me. I ribbed him hard.

We started in on the salad. From below voices chimed with the sounds of clinking dishes. Between bites Ben said to Tom, “We get the shrimp from the south.”

“I thought the border was closed.”

“Oh, it is. Definitely. Not the old border, though. Tijuana is no more than a battleground for rats and cats. About five miles south of that is the new border. It’s made of barbed wire fences, and a bulldozed strip on each side of it three hundred yards wide. And guard towers, and lights at night. I’ve never heard of a single person that got over it.” As he took a bite the other men at the table nodded their agreement with this. “There’s a jetty where the fence hits the beach, too, and beyond that guard boats. But they’re Mexican guard boats, see. The Japanese have the coast right down to the border, but beyond that the Mexicans take over. They don’t do too good a job.”

“Neither do the Japs,” Danforth said.

“True. Anyway, the Mexican guard boats are there, but it’s easy to get past them, and once past them the fishing boats will sell you anything they have or can get. We’re just another customer as far as they’re concerned. Except they know they have us over a barrel, so they squeeze us every trade. But we get what we want.”

“Which is shrimp?” said Tom, surprised. His salad was gone.

“Sure. Don’t you like it?”

“What do the Mexicans want?”

“Gun parts, mostly. Souvenirs. Junk.”

“Mexicans love junk,” Danforth said, and his men laughed. “But we’ll sell them something different someday. Put them back where they belong, like it used to be.” He had been watching Tom wolf his food; now that Tom was done, he said, “Did you live around here in the old time?”

“Up in Orange County, mostly. I came down here to school.”

“Changed, hasn’t it?”

“Sure.” Tom was looking around for the next course. “Everything’s changed.” He was still being rude, apparently on purpose; I couldn’t figure out what he was up to.

“I imagine Orange County was pretty built up in the old time.”

“About like San Diego. Or a little more so.”

The Mayor breathed a whistle, looking impressed.

When everyone had finished the salads the bowls were taken away, and replaced with pots of soup, plates of meat, stacks of bread, dishes of vegetables, pyramids of fruit. The plates just kept on coming, giving me chance after chance to smile at the blond girl: chicken and rabbit, pork pie and frog legs, lamb and turkey, fish and beef, abalone in big slabs—plate after plate after plate was set down, and the covered ones were opened for our inspection. By the time the girls were done, there was a feast on those tables that made Mrs. Nicolin’s dinner look like the ones Pa and me ate every night. Nearly overwhelmed, I tried to decide where to start. It was hard. I had a little clam chowder while I thought it over.

“You know,” said Danforth after we were well into it, “the Japanese are landing up there in your old home territory, these days.”

“That so?” Tom said, shoveling abalone onto his plate. The amount of food on the table didn’t seem to have impressed him. I knew he was interested in this stuff about the Japanese, but he refused to show it.

“You haven’t seen any of them in Onofre? Or any signs?”

Tom appeared reluctant to take his attention from his food, and he did no more than shake his head as he chewed, and then give the Mayor a quick glance.

“They’re interested in looking at the ruins of old America,” the Mayor said.

“They?” Tom mumbled, his mouth full.

“Mostly Japanese, although there are other nationalities too. But the Japanese, who were given the charter to guard our west coast, make up most of them.”

“Who guards the other coasts?” Tom said, as if testing how much they claimed to know.

“Canada was assigned the east coast, the Mexicans the Gulf Coast.”

“They’re supposed to be neutral powers,” Ben added. “Although in the world today the very idea of a neutral power is a joke.”

The Mayor went on: “Japanese own the offshore islands here, and Hawaii. It’s easiest for the rich Japanese to get to Hawaii, and then here, but we’re told tourists of all nationalities want to try it.”

“How do you know all this?” Tom said, barely able to disguise his interest.

Proudly Danforth said, “We’ve sent men to Catalina to spy it out.”

Tom couldn’t help himself, no matter how much he ate: “So what happened? Have we been quarantined?”

With a disgusted stab of his fork the Mayor said, “The Russians did it. So we’ve been told. Of course it’s obvious. Who else was going to come up with two thousand neutron bombs? Most countries couldn’t even afford the vans those things were hidden in when they went off.”

Tom squinted, and I thought I knew why; this was the same explanation he had given us in his story Johnny Pinecone, which I was pretty sure he had made up. It was odd.

“That was how they got us,” the Mayor said. “Didn’t you know? They hid the bombs in Chevy vans, drove the vans into the centers of the two thousand largest cities, and parked them there. Then the bombs all went off at once. No warning. You know, no missiles coming or anything.”

Tom nodded, as if a mystery had finally been cleared for him.

“After the day,” Ben went on, as it seemed the Mayor was too upset to go on, “the U.N. reconvened in Geneva. Everyone was terrified of Russia, especially the nations with nuclear weapons, naturally. Russia suggested we be made off limits for a century, to avoid any conflict over us. A world preserve, they said. Clearly punitive, but who was going to argue? So here we are.”

“Interesting,” Tom said. “But I’ve heard a lot of speculation in the last fifty years.” He started forking again. “Seems to me we’re like the Japanese themselves were after Hiroshima. They didn’t even know what hit them, did you know that? They thought maybe we had dropped manganese on the electric train tracks, and started a fire. Pitiful. And we’re no better.”

“What’s Hiroshima?” the Mayor asked.

Tom didn’t reply. Ben shook his head at Tom’s doubts. “We’ve had men on Catalina for months at a time. And—well, I’ll send you over to Wentworth’s tomorrow. He’ll tell you. We know what happened, more or less.”

“Enough history,” said the Mayor. “What’s important is the here and now. The Japanese in Avalon are getting corrupt. Rich Japanese want to visit America and do some sight-seeing. It’s the latest adventure. They come to Avalon and contact people who will take them to the mainland. Those people, some of them Americans, sail them in past the coastal patrol at night, into Newport Beach or Dana Point. We’ve heard there are hundreds of them in Hawaii waiting to do it.”

“That’s what you said.” Tom shrugged.

An exasperated scowl appeared on the Mayor’s face and was gone. As dishes were cleared from the tables he stood up and leaned over the rail. “Tell the band to play!” he called down. The people below shouted to him, and he limped past us into the house. Over the railing I saw the big white-clothed tables below, piled with food and crockery. From above the San Diegans looked wonderfully groomed, their hair neatly cut and combed, their shirts and dresses bright and clean. Again I saw them as scavengers. From down the freeway a bit a small brass band started to play some stodgy polkas, and the Mayor appeared, moving from table to table. He knew everyone down there. As the people below finished their meals they got up and walked in front of the band to dance. All around us the water and the shores of the lake were dark: we were an island of light, propped up over the gloom. Below they were having a good time, but with the Mayor gone, the group on the porch looked bored.

Then Danforth reappeared between the tall glass doors, and laughed at the sight of us. “All done stuffing yourselves? Why don’t you get down there and dance? This is a celebration! Get down there and mingle with the folks, and Ben and I will talk further with our guests from the north.”

Happily the men and women seated around our tables stood and filed into the house. Jennings and Lee went with them, and only Ben stayed upstairs with the Mayor to talk with us.

“I have an excellent bottle of tequila in my study,” Danforth said to us. “Let’s go in there and give some a try.”

We followed him in, down a hall to a wood-paneled room that was dominated by a large desk. Drapes covered a window, and bookcases covered the wall behind the desk. We sat in plush armchairs that were arranged in a half-circle facing the desk, and Tom tilted his head to the side in an attempt to read the book titles. Danforth got a long slim bottle from a shelf jammed with bottles, and poured us each a glass of tequila. Nervously he paced behind the desk, back and forth, back and forth, looking down at the carpet. He switched on a lamp that glared off the surface of the desk, lighting his face from below. It was quiet, no sound from the party outside. Solemnly he proposed a toast: “To the friendship of our two communities.”

Tom lifted his glass and drank.

I tried a few sips of the tequila. It was harsh. My stomach felt like I’d put an iron ball in it, I’d eaten so much. I balanced the glass on the arm of my chair and sat back, ready to watch Tom and the Mayor go at it again—though what kind of contest it was, I couldn’t figure.

The Mayor had a thoughtful, brooding expression. He continued to slowly pace back and forth. He lifted his glass and looked through it at Tom. “So what do you think?”

“Of what?” Tom said.

“Of the world situation?”

Tom shrugged. “I just heard about it. You folks know a lot more than we did. If it’s all true. We know there are Orientals out there on Catalina. Their bodies wash up on our beach occasionally. Beyond that, all we’ve heard is swap meet talk, and that changes every month.”

“You’ve had Japanese bodies washing up?” Danforth asked.

“We call them Chinese.”

The Mayor shook his head. “Japanese.”

“So that coast guard is shooting up some of the illegal landing parties?” Tom ventured.

Again the Mayor shook his head. “The coast guard is paid off. It wasn’t them.” He took a sip from his glass. “It was us.”

“How’s that?”

“It was us!” the Mayor said, suddenly loud. He limped to the window, fiddled with the drapes. “We sail up off Newport and Dana Point, on foggy nights or nights when we’ve been tipped off that they’re coming, and we ambush them. Kill as many as we can.”

Tom looked at the glass in his hand. “Why?” he said finally.

“Why?” The Mayor’s chin melted into his neck. “You’re an old timer—you ask me why?”

“Sure.”

“Because we aren’t a zoo here, that’s why!” He began to pace again, bobbing around behind his desk, around and behind our chairs, behind the desk again. Without warning he slammed his right palm onto the desktop, smack! I jumped in my chair. “They blew our country to pieces,” he said in a strangled, furious high voice, completely unlike the one he had been using just a moment before. “They killed it.” He cleared his throat. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. But they can’t come sight-seeing in the ruins. No. Not while there are Americans left alive. We aren’t animals in a cage to be looked at. We’ll make them learn that if they set foot on our soil, they’re dead.” He took up the tequila bottle in a trembling hand and refilled his glass. “No stepping into the cages in this zoo. When word gets around that no one ever comes back from a visit to America, they’ll stop coming. There won’t be any more customers for that scum north of you.” He drank hastily. “Did you know there are scavengers in Orange County arranging to give guided tours to the Japs?”

“I’m not surprised,” Tom said.

“Well I am. Those people are scum. They are traitors to the United States.” He said it like a death sentence. “If every American joined the resistance, no one could land on our soil. We’d be left alone, and the rebuilding could get on. But we all have to be part of the resistance.”

“I didn’t know there was a resistance,” Tom said mildly.

Bang! The Mayor’s hand hit the desk again. He leaned over it and cried, “That’s what we brought you here to tell you about!” He straightened up, sat down in his chair, held his forehead in his hand. Suddenly it seemed hushed and quiet again. “Tell him, Ben.”

Ben leaned forward in his chair enthusiastically. “When we got to the Salton Sea we learned about it. The American resistance. Although usually they just called it the resistance. The headquarters are in Salt Lake City, and there are military centers in the old Strategic Air Command quarters under Cheyenne, Wyoming, and under Mount Rushmore.”

“Under Mount Rushmore?” Tom said.

Head still cradled in one hand, face shadowed, the Mayor peered at him. “That’s right. That’s where the secret military headquarters of the United States always was.”

“I didn’t know,” Tom said, eyebrows gently arched.

Ben went on. “There are organizations all across the country, but it’s all one group really, and the goal is the same. To rebuild America.” He rolled the phrase over his tongue.

“To rebuild America,” breathed the Mayor. I felt that flush in my face and spine begin again. By God, they were in contact with the east coast! New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, England… The Mayor reached for his glass and sipped; Ben jerked down two swallows as if it were a toast, and Tom and I likewise drank. For a moment there seemed a shared feeling in the room. I could feel the alcohol going to my head, along with the news of the resistance, this dream of Nicolin’s and mine come to life. It made a heady mixture. Danforth stood again and looked at the framed map on the side wall of the study. Passionately he said, “To make America great again, to make it what it was before the war, the best nation on Earth. That’s our goal.” He pointed a finger through the shadows at Tom. “We’d be back to that already if we had retaliated against the Russians. If President Eliot—traitor, coward!—hadn’t refused to defend us. But we’ll still do it. We’ll work hard, we’ll pray hard, we’ll hide our weapons from the satellites. They’re inventing new ones in Salt Lake and Cheyenne, we’re told. And one day… one day we’ll spring out on the world again like a tiger. A tiger from the depths of the pit…” His voice shifted up to a scratchy strangled mutter that I couldn’t make out. He was half turned away from us, and he went on like that for a while, talking to himself in a voice that moaned and sighed. The lamp on his desk flickered, flickered again. Ben jerked out of his chair and went to a corner to get a kerosene lamp.

With a tap of the knuckles on the desk the Mayor raised his voice again, sounding relaxed and reasonable. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Barnard. The largest resistance group on this coast is centered around Santa Barbara, we’ve heard. We met some of them out at the Salton Sea. We need to connect with them, and present a unified opposition to the Japanese on Catalina and the Santa Barbara islands. The first part of that task is to rid Orange County and Los Angeles of all Japanese tourists, and the traitors who guide them. So we need you. We need Onofre to join the resistance.”

“I can’t speak for them,” Tom said. I bit my lip and stayed silent. Tom was right; it would have to be voted. Tom waved a hand. “It sounds… well, I don’t know if we’ll want in or not.”

“You’ve got to want in,” the Mayor said fiercely, fist held over the desk. “This is more important than what you want. You tell them they can make this country what it used to be. They can help. But we all have to work together. The day will come. Another Pax Americana, cars and airplanes, rockets to the moon, telephones. A unified country.” Suddenly, without anger or whispery passion, he said, “You go back up there and tell your valley that they join the resistance or they oppose it.”

“Not a very neighborly way of putting it,” Tom observed, his eyes narrowed.

“Put it any way you please! Just tell them.”

“I’ll tell them. But they’ll want to know just exactly what you want of them. And I can’t guarantee what they’ll say to it.”

“No one’s asking you to guarantee anything. They’ll know what’s right.” The Mayor took a long look at Tom, his little eyes bright. “I would have thought an old timer like you would be hopping with joy to hear of the resistance.”

“I don’t hop much these days,” Tom said. “Bad knees.”

The Mayor circled the desk and bent over Tom’s chair, looked at Tom. With both hands he trapped one of Tom’s. “Don’t lose your feel for America, old man,” he said hoarsely. “It’s the best part of you. It’s what kept you alive for so long, whether you know it or not. You’ve got to fight to keep that feeling, or you’re doomed.”

Tom pulled his hand away. The Mayor straightened up and limped back around the desk. “Well, Ben! These gentlemen deserve to enjoy a little of the partying outside before they retire, don’t you agree?” Ben nodded and smiled at us. “I know you men had a hard night last night,” Danforth said, “but I hope you’ll have enough energy to join the folks outside for at least a short while.”

We agreed that we did.

“Before we go back out, then, let me show you a little secret.” We stood and followed him out of the room. He bobbed down the hallway to another door, and pulled a key from his vest. “In here is the key to a whole new world.” He unlocked the door, and we followed him into the room, which contained nothing but machine parts, scattered over three tables. On the biggest table was a metal box as big as a boat locker, covered with knobs and dials and gauges, with wires trailing out of it from two openings.

“Short wave radio?” Tom said.

“Exactly,” said Ben, beaming with approval at Tom’s good guess.

“We’ve got a man coming from the Salton Sea to fix this thing,” the Mayor whispered. “And when we do that, we’ll be in touch with the whole country. Every part of the resistance. It will be the start of a new age.”

So we stood there and stared at it for a while, and then tiptoed out of the room. When the Mayor was done locking the door we went outside onto the freeway, where the band was still playing. Instantly the Mayor was surrounded by young women who wanted a dance with him. Tom wandered off toward the west railing, and I went for the drink table. The man behind the table recognized me; he had helped dock our boat when we arrived at the island. “Drink’s on the house,” he declared, and poured me a cup of tequila punch. I took it and walked in circles around the dance floor. The women dancing with the Mayor held close to him and danced in slow circles. I was feeling the drink. The music, the electric lights glaring off the concrete, the bright rugs thrown here and there, the cool breeze, the night sky, the eerie ruined skyscrapers rising blackly from the murk around us—the incredible news of the American resistance—it all combined to put me in a blaze of excitement. I was on the edge of a new world, truly. I twisted through the crowd to Tom, who was leaning against the fat railing, looking down at the water. “Tom, isn’t it grand? Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Let me think, boy,” he said quietly.

So I walked back over to the band, subdued for a moment. But it didn’t last. The girl dancing with the Mayor was the blond who had served our table at the feast. When she gave way to another girl I hurried out among the dancers and swept her into a hug.

“Dance with me too,” I asked her. “I’m from the north.”

“I know,” she said, and laughed. “You sure aren’t one of the boys from around here, and that’s a fact.”

“From the icy north,” I said as I awkwardly swept her into the polka. It made me a little dizzy. “From over glaciers and crevasses and great expanses of snow have I come to your fair civilized town.”

“What?”

“Here from the barbarous north, to see your Mayor, the prophet of a new age.”

“He is like a prophet, isn’t he? Just like from church. My father says he’s made San Diego what it is.”

“I believe it. Did he make a lot of changes when he took office?”

“Oh, he’s been mayor since before I can remember. Since I was two, I think Daddy said.”

“Long time ago.”

“Fourteen years…”

I kissed her briefly, and we danced three or four songs, until my dizziness returned and I had trouble with my bearings. She accompanied me to the tables, and we sat and talked. I chattered on like the most extravagant liar in California; Nicolin himself couldn’t have beat me that night, and the girl laughed and laughed. Later on Jennings and Tom came by, and I was sorry to see them. Jennings said he was taking us to our night’s lodgings on the other end of the platform. Reluctantly I said goodnight to the girl, and followed them drunkenly down the freeway south, singing to myself, “Oomp-pah-pah,” and greeting most of the people we passed. Jennings installed us in one of the bungalows at the south end of the platform, and I chattered at the silent Tom for two or three minutes before I passed out. “A new age, Tom, I’m telling you. A new world.”

8

Shotgun blasts woke us up the next morning. Jumping up to look out the door of our little bungalow, we discovered that the Mayor and several of his men were taking target practice, shooting at plates that one of them was throwing out over the lake. The man threw—the plate arched out—the shooter aimed—bam!—a flat sound like two wet planks slapping together. About one in every three plates burst into white splinters. The rest clipped the sparkling surface of the lake and disappeared. Tom shook his head disdainfully as he regarded this exercise. “They must have found a lot of ammunition somewhere,” he said. Jennings saw us in our doorway and came over and led us to one of the tables set outside the big house. There in the tangy clouds of gunpowder smoke we had a breakfast of bread and milk. Between the bangs of the gun I could hear the American flag snapping smartly in the fresh morning breeze. Every time a plate exploded the men hooted and talked it over. The Mayor was a good shot; he seldom missed, which may have been the result of taking his turn often. The rest of his men might as well have been dumping those plates into the lake by the boxful.

When we were done eating the Mayor gave his shotgun to one of the men around him, and clumped over to us. He looked a bit smaller in the sunlight than he had under the lanterns and electric lights.

“I’m going to send you back to Jennings’ house by way of La Jolla, so you can talk to Wentworth.”

“Who’s he?” Tom asked, without any pretense of politeness.

“He’s our bookmaker. He can tell you more about the situation Ben and I described to you last night. After you’ve talked to him, Jennings and Lee and their crew will take you back north on the train.” He sat down across from us and leaned his thick forearms on the table. “When you get there, you tell your folk just what I said last night.”

“Let me understand you clearly,” Tom said. “You want us to join this resistance effort you’ve heard of.”

“That we’re part of. That’s right.”

“Which means what, in actual terms?”

Danforth stared steadily at Tom’s face. “Every town in the resistance has to do its share. That’s the only way we’ll achieve victory. Of course we’ve got a much larger population down here, and we’ll be providing most of the manpower on this coast, I’m sure. But we need to get through your valley on the tracks, for one thing. And you folks could make raids up the coast a lot easier than we can, living where you do. Or we could base our raids in your river, depending on how we decide to work it. See, there is no set way, you should understand that. But we need you to sign up.”

“What if we don’t want to?”

The Mayor’s jaw tightened. He let Tom’s question hang in the air for a while, and the men around us (target practice being over for the moment) grew silent. “I can’t figure you, old man,” Danforth complained. “You just take my message to the people in your valley.”

“I’ll tell them what you’ve told me, and we’ll let you know our decision.”

“Good enough. I’ll be seeing you again.” He pushed back his chair, stood up and limped into the gleaming white house.

“I think he’s done talking to you,” Jennings said after another long silence. “We can be off.” He led us back to our bungalow, and when Tom had gotten his shoulder bag we walked down the tilted ramp to the boats. Lee and Abe were waiting on the floating dock, and we all got in a boat and cut over the blue water to the lake’s north shore. It was a fine day, sky free of clouds and not much wind. We climbed up to a different train than the one we had arrived on, set on different tracks, ones that took us west along the shore of the lake. “Quite a terminal you have there,” Tom remarked, breaking his silence. Jennings began to describe every mile of the rail system, but since none of the names he mentioned meant anything to me I stopped listening and kept a lookout for the sea. We came to a big marsh just when I expected to spot it, and turned north to skirt the marsh’s edge. A heavily forested hill marked the northern end of the marsh, and we clattered along on a freeway that snaked through a crease to the east of the hill. Lee braked the car—I had learned to stick my fingers in my ears when he did that. “We have to walk to La Jolla,” Jennings said. “No tracks from here.”

“Nor roads neither,” Lee added.

We slid off the side of the handcar, and started up a trail that was the only passage through thick forest. It was more like what Tom called a jungle: ferns and creepers and vines wove the densely set trees together, and every lichen-stained branch was locked in a struggle for sunlight with ten other branches. Knots of torrey pine competed with trees I’d never seen the likes of before. There was a damp smell to the spongy trail, and fungus or bright green ferns grew on every log that had fallen across our path. Behind me Tom muttered as he walked, thumping his shoulder bag against his side. “Mount Soledad just another wet north face now. All the houses washed down. All fall down, all fall down.” Lee, striding ahead of me, turned and gave Tom a funny look. I knew just what the look meant: it was hard to believe Tom had been alive when these ruins had stood whole. Tom cursed as he kicked a root and mumbled on, unaware of Lee’s glance. “Flood and mud, rain and pain, lightning blast and fire burn, all fall down. And all that terrible construction. Ah ha, there’s a foundation. Was that one Tudor? Chinese? Hacienda? California ranch?” “What’s that?” Jennings called back, thinking he had heard a question. But Tom talked on: “This town was everything but itself. Nothing but money. Paper houses; this hill sure looks better with all that shit washed away. I wish they could see it now, hee hee hee.”

On the ocean side of the hill it was a different story. Where the hillside leveled off, forming a point that thrust out from the coast on either side, all the trees had been cleared away. In this clearing a few old buildings were surrounded by small wooden houses. The concrete walls of the old buildings had been repaired with redwood, and the new houses had been put together with fragments of the old, so that some had massive roof beams, others wide chimneys, others orange tile roofs. Most of the houses had been painted white, and the old concrete had been painted pale shades of blue or yellow or orange. As we descended the west side of the hill we caught sight of the clearing through the leaves, and the little village in it shone against the backdrop of the dark blue ocean. We came out of the overhanging branches of the forest, and the trail widened into a straight street paved with thick grass.

“Paint,” Tom observed. “What a good idea. But all the paint I’ve seen lately has been hard as rock.”

“Wentworth has a way to liquefy it,” Jennings said. “Same way he liquefies old ink, he tells me.”

“Who is this Wentworth?” I said.

“Come and find out,” said Jennings in reply.

At the far end of the street of grass, just above a small cove, was a low building made of tan blocks of stone. A wall made of the same sort of blocks surrounded the place, and torrey pines stood against the wall on both sides. We walked through a big wooden gate that had a tiger carved into it, a green tiger with black stripes. Inside the wall, grass alternated with patches of flowers. Jennings looked in the open door of the building, and waved us in after him.

The first room had big glass windows in one wall, and with its door open it was as sunny as the courtyard. A half dozen kids and three or four adults were at work on low tables, kneading a pure white dough that by its smell could not be bread. A man with black-rimmed spectacles and a salt-and-pepper beard looked up from a table where he was giving instructions to the workers, and walked over to us.

“Jennings, Lee,” he said, wiping his hands dry on a cloth tied around his waist. “What brings you out here today?”

“Douglas, this here is Tom Barnard, a… an elder of Onofre Valley, up the coast. We brought him down on the new tracks. Tom, this is Douglas Wentworth, San Diego’s bookmaker.”

“Bookmaker,” Tom repeated. He shook Wentworth’s hand. “I’m happy to meet a bookmaker, sir.”

“You take an interest in books?”

“I surely do. I was a lawyer once, and had to read the worst kind of books. Now I’m free to read what I like, when I can find it.”

“You have an extensive collection?” Wentworth asked, knocking his glasses up his nose with a finger to see Tom better.

“No sir. Fifty volumes or so, but I keep trading them with our neighbors for others.”

“Ah. And you, young man—do you read?” His eyes were the size of eggs behind his spectacles, and they held my gaze with ease.

“Yes, sir. Tom taught me how, and now that I can I enjoy it more than almost anything.”

Mr. Wentworth smiled briefly. “It’s refreshing to hear that San Onofre is a literate community. Perhaps you’d like to take a tour of our establishment? I can take a few moments from the work here, and we do have a modest printing arrangement that might be of interest.”

“We’d be delighted,” Tom said.

“Lee and I will go get some lunch,” Jennings said. “Back shortly.”

“We’ll wait for you,” Tom said. “Thanks for bringing us here.”

“Thank the Mayor.”

“Keep kneading until you get a perfect consistency,” Wentworth was saying to his students, “then begin to roll out the water. I’ll be back before the pressing.”

He led us to another room with good windows, one filled with small metal boxes set on tables. A woman was turning a handle on the side of one of these machines, rotating a drum on which a piece of print-covered paper was clamped. More pages covered by print were ejected from the bottom of the box.

“Mimeograph!” Tom cried.

The woman working the machine jerked at Tom’s shout, and glared at him.

“Indeed,” said Wentworth. “We are a modest operation, as I said. Mimeographing is our principal form of printing here. Not the most elegant method, or the most long lasting, but the machines are reliable, and besides, they’re about all we’ve got.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” Tom said, taking up a page to read it.

“It suffices.”

“Pretty color ink, too,” I put in; the ink was a bluish purple, and the page was thick with it.

Wentworth let out a short, sharp laugh. “Ha! Do you think so? I would prefer black, myself, but we must work with what we have. Now over here is our true pride. A hand letter press.” He gestured at a contraption of bars holding a big screw, which took up most of the far wall.

“Is that what that is,” Tom said. “I’ve never seen one.”

“This is what we do our fine work on. But there isn’t enough paper, and none of us knew, at first, how to set type. So it goes very slowly. We have had some successes, however. Following Gutenburg, here is our first one.” He hauled a big leather-bound book off the shelf beside the machine. “King James version, of course, although if I could have found a Jerusalem, it would have been a difficult choice.”

“Wonderful!” Tom said, taking the book. “I mean—” He shook his head, and I laughed to see him at a loss for words at last—it took a pile of words to do it. “That’s a lot of typesetting.”

“Ha!” Wentworth took the book back from Tom. “Indeed. And all for the sake of a book we already have. That’s not really the point, is it.”

“You print new books?”

“That occupies at least half our time, and is the part I’m most interested in, I confess. We publish instruction manuals, almanacs, travel journals, reminiscences…” He looked at Tom, his eyeballs swimming in the glass of his spectacles. “As a matter of fact, we invite all survivors of the war to write their story down and submit it to us. We’re almost certain to print it up. As our contribution to historical record.”

Tom raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

“You ought to do it,” I urged him. “You’d be perfect for it, all those stories you’ve got about the old time.”

“Ah, a storyteller?” said Wentworth. “Then indeed you should. My feeling is, the more accounts we have of that period, the better.”

“No thank you,” Tom said, looking uncomfortable.

I shook my head, perplexed once again that such a talky old man would so stubbornly refuse to discuss his own life story—which is all some people can be gotten to talk about.

“Consider it further,” Wentworth said. “I think I could guarantee the readership of most of the San Diego residents. The literate residents, I mean to say. And since the Salton Sea people have contacted us—”

“They contacted you?” Tom interrupted.

“Yes. Two years ago a party arrived, and since then your guides Lee and Jennings, very industrious men, have supervised the reconstruction of a rail line out there. We’ve shipped books to them, and they tell us they’ve sent them even farther east. So distribution of your work, though uncertain, could very well span the continent.”

“You agree that communication extends that far?”

Wentworth shrugged. “We see through a glass darkly, as you know. I have in my possession a book printed in Boston, rather well done. Beyond that, I cannot say. I have no reason to disbelieve their claims. In any case, a book by you might just as easily reach Boston as that book reached me.”

“I’ll think about it,” Tom said, but in a tone that I knew meant he was just killing the subject.

“Do it, Tom,” I objected.

He just looked at the big press.

“Come see what we have printed so far,” Wentworth added by way of encouragement, and led us out of the printing room to a corner room, again a chamber bright with sun, its windows overlooking the point break below. This was the library: tall bookcases alternated with tall windows, and held books old and new.

“Our library,” said Wentworth. “Not a lending library, unfortunately,” he added, interpreting perfectly the greedy smacking of Tom’s lips. “This case contains the works printed here.” Tom began to examine the shelves of the bookcase Wentworth indicated. Most of the books on them were big folders, filled with mimeographed pages; one shelf held leather-bound books the size of the old ones.

Wentworth and I watched Tom pull out book after book. “Practical Uses of the Timing Device From Westinghouse Washer-Dryers, by Bill Dangerfield,” Tom read aloud, and laughed.

“It looks like your friend might take a while,” Wentworth said to me. “Would you like to see our gallery of illustrations?”

What I really wanted to do was look at the books along with Tom, but I saw Wentworth was being polite so I said yes sir. We went back into the hall. Before a long window made of several large panes of glass the hall widened, and against the wall opposite the window were pictures of all sorts of animals, drawn in bold strokes of black ink.

“These are the originals of illustrations for a book describing all the animals seen in the back country of San Diego.” I must have looked surprised, for the pictures included some animals I had seen only in Tom’s tatty encyclopedia: monkeys, antelopes, elephants… “There were very extensive zoos in San Diego before the war. We assume that all the animals in the main zoo were killed in the downtown blast, but there was an annex to the zoo in the hills, and those animals escaped, or were freed. Those who survived the subsequent climatic changes have prospered. I myself have seen bears and wildebeest, baboons and reindeer.”

“I like the tiger here,” I said.

“I did that one myself, thanks. That was quite an encounter. Shall I tell you about it?”

“Sure.”

We sat down in wicker chairs placed before the windows.

“We were on a trek beyond Mount Laguna. Do you know Mount Laguna? It is a considerable peak twenty miles inland, and the snowpack lies heavy on it nearly all the year round. In the spring the streams in the surrounding hills gush with the melt, and in their steeper sections they can be quite impassable.

“Our expedition to Julian was dogged by bad luck every step of the way. The radio equipment we had been told of was demolished. The library of Western literature I had hoped to relocate was nowhere to be found. One of the members of our expedition broke an ankle in the ruins of the town. Lastly, worst of all, on our return we were discovered by the Cuyamuca Indians. These Indians are exceedingly jealous of their territory, and parties traveling in the area have reported fierce attacks at night, when the Indians are least afraid of firearms. All in all, it was a bad day’s march, our injured friend between us in a sling, and Cuyamucans on horseback observing us from every open hilltop.

“As nightfall approached I struck out ahead of my party, to scout possible camps, for our slow progress meant we would be spending the night in Indian territory. I found nothing very suitable for night defense, and as it was getting near sundown I retraced my path. When I got to the small clearing where I had left my friends, however, they were not there. Their tracks were confusing, but seemed to lead north, and over the sounds of the rushing streams in the area I imagined I heard gunfire in that direction as well.

“While I was pursuing my friends the sun went down, and as you know the forest begins immediately upon that departure to get very dark. I came to a steep creek; I had no idea where my party had gotten to; I looked at the creek, momentarily at a loss. Staring through the dusk at the tumbling water I became aware of the presence of another pair of eyes, across the creek from me. They were huge eyes, the color of topazes.”

“What are topazes?” I asked.

“Yellow diamonds, I should have said. As I met the gaze of those unblinking eyes, the tiger who owned them stalked out of a clump of torrey pine to the bank of the stream directly across from me.”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed.

“No. He was a fully grown Bengal tiger, at least eight feet long, and four feet high at the shoulders. In the dim light of that glade his winter fur seemed green to me, a dull green banded by dark stripes.

“He appeared from the clump so suddenly that at first I was merely appalled at the catastrophic proportions my bad luck had reached. I was sure I was living out the last moments of my existence, and yet I could not move, or even take my eyes from the unblinking gaze of that beautiful but most deadly beast. I have no notion of exactly how long we stood there staring at each other. I know it was one of the central minutes of my life.

“Then the tiger stepped over the creek with a fluid little jump, as easy as you would step over that crack in the floor. I braced myself as he approached—he lifted a paw as wide as my thigh, and pressed it down on my left shoulder—right here. He sniffed me, so close I could see the crystalline coloring of his irises, and smell blood on his muzzle. Then he took his paw from me and with a nudge of his massive head pushed me to my right, upstream. I stumbled, caught my balance. The tiger padded past me, turned to look, as if to see if I were following. I heard a rasp from its chest—if it was a purr, it was to a cat’s purr as thunder is to a doorslam. I followed it. My astonishment had gone outside itself, and prevented all other thought. I kept my hand on the tiger’s shoulder, where I could feel the big muscles bunch and give as it walked, and I stayed at its side as it wound between trees on a path of its own. Every minute or two it would turn its head to look into my eyes, and each time I was mesmerized anew by its calm gaze.

“Much later the moon rose, and still we walked through the forest together. Then I heard gunshots ahead, and the beast’s purring stopped, its shoulder muscles tensed. In a clearing illumined by moonlight I made out several horses, and around them men—Indians, I guessed, for my party had no horses with it. More gunshots sounded from trees on the other side of the clearing, and I surmised that my friends were there, for just as we had no horses, the Cuyamuca Indians had no guns. The tiger shrugged off my hand with a twitch of his fur, a twitch that no doubt usually removed flies, and strode ahead of me, down toward the clearing.”

“Hey!” Tom cried, hurrying around the corner of the hallway. He held one of the books printed on the hand letter press firmly before him, and gestured with it at Wentworth.

“Which one have you found?” Wentworth inquired. He didn’t seem disturbed by the interruption of his story, but I was squirming.

“An American Around the World,” Tom read. “Being an Account of a Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 2030 to 2039. By Glen Baum.”

Wentworth uttered his sharp, spontaneous laugh. “Very good. You have found the masterpiece of our line, I believe. Besides being an intrepid adventurer, Glen can tell a tale.”

“But is it true? An American went around the world and returned just eight years ago?” Put that way, I understood why Tom was so flabbergasted—I had been stuck with the tiger in the back country—and I got out of my chair to have a look at this book. Sure enough, there it was: An American Around the World, right there on the cover.

Wentworth was smiling at Tom. “Glen sailed to Catalina in 2030, that is certain. And he reappeared in San Diego one night in the fall of 2039.” His egg eyes flickered and something passed between the two men that I didn’t catch, for Tom laughed out loud. “The rest you have between those covers.”

“I had no idea this kind of stuff was still being written,” Tom said. “How wonderful.”

“It is, isn’t it.”

“Where is this Glen Baum now?”

“He took off for the Salton Sea last fall. Before he left he told me the title of his next book: Overland to Boston. I expect it will be as interesting as the one you hold.” He stood up. Down the hall I could hear Jennings, joking with the woman in the mimeograph room. Wentworth led us back into the library.

“So what happened to you and the tiger?” I asked.

But he was rooting in a box on the bottom shelf of one case. “We have a lot of copies of that book. Take one with you back to San Onofre, courtesy of the New Green Tiger Press.” He offered one of the leather-bound books to Tom.

Tom said, “Thank you sir. This means a lot to me.”

“Always glad to get new readers, I assure you.”

“I’ll make all my students read it,” said Tom, grinning as if he’d just been handed a block of silver.

“You won’t have to make us,” I said. “But what about the tiger that time—”

Jennings and Lee entered the room. “Lunch time,” Jennings cried. Apparently it was the habit in San Diego to eat a meal in the middle of the day. “Have a good tour?” Tom and I told him that we had, and showed him our book.

“Another thing,” Wentworth said, groping in a different box. “Here is a blank book, in case you decide to write that memoir.” He riffled the pages of a bound book, showing them to be blank. “Give it back to us full, and we will set about the task of reproducing it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Tom. “You’ve given us enough already.”

“Please, take it.” Wentworth held it out to him. “We have plenty of these. No obligation to write—but if you decide to, then the materials will be at hand.”

“Well, thanks,” Tom said. After a moment’s hesitation he put the two volumes in his shoulder bag.

“Shall we have lunch out on their lawn?” Jennings asked, holding aloft a long loaf of bread.

“I must return to my class,” Wentworth said. “But feel free to enjoy the courtyard.” And to Tom, as he led us to the door: “Remember what I said about that memoir, sir.”

“I will. You’re doing great work here.”

“Thank you. Keep teaching people to read, or it will all go to naught. Now I must get back. Goodbye, thank you for visiting, goodbye.” He turned and went into the front room, where his students were still kneading the paper pulp.

After lunch in the sun-filled salt air of the courtyard, we hiked back over Mount Soledad to the tracks, and pumped the car northward up and down steep hills. A few miles up the tracks Tom had Lee apply the brakes. “Mind if we go out to the cliffs for a look around?”

Jennings looked doubtful, and I said, “Tom, we can look off cliffs when we get home.”

“Not like these.” Tom looked at Jennings. “I want to show him.”

“Sure,” Jennings said. “I told the wife we’d be back for supper, but she won’t have that ready till after dark anyway.”

So we got off the car again, and made our way westward to the coast, through a dense forest of torrey pine and brambleberry. Pretty soon we came upon an outcropping of tall stone crags. When we got in among them I saw they were concrete. They were buildings. The walls that remained—some of them as high as our beach cliff—were surrounded by piles of concrete rubble. Blocks as big as my house rose out of the ferns and brambleberries. Jennings was talking a streak about the place, and Tom held me by the arm and told the two San Diegans to go on ahead of us to the cliff. “He’s got it all wrong,” he said sourly when Jennings was out of earshot.

After they were gone I wandered in the ruins. A bomb had gone off nearby, I reckoned; the north side of every standing wall was black, and as soft and crumbly as sandstone. In the rubble and weeds I saw shards of glass, angled bits of metal both rusty and shiny, strips of plastic, a ribcage from a skeleton, melted glass tubes, metal boxes, slate boards… Rafael would have loved it. But after a time I felt oppressed, like I had in San Clemente. This was no different from that: the ruins of the old time, the signs of a giant past that was now shattered bits of rock covered by weeds, a past so big that not all our efforts would ever get us back to it, or to anything like it. Ruins like these told us how little our lives were, and I hated them.

I saw Tom in the outbreak of concrete crags to the north, wandering aimlessly from ruin to ruin, tripping over blocks and then staring down at them like they’d jumped into his path. He was tugging on his beard as if he wanted to pull it out. Unaware of my presence, he was talking to himself, uttering short violent phrases that all ended with a sharp tug on the beard. As I got closer I saw that all the thousand lines in his face drooped down. I’d never seen him look so desolate.

“What was this place, Tom?”

I thought he wouldn’t answer. He looked away, pulled his beard. “It was a school. My school.”

One time a couple of summers before, we had all gathered under the torrey pine in Tom’s junkyard, Steve and Kathryn, Gabby and Mando and Kristen, Del and little Teddy Nicolin, all talking at once under sunny skies, we were, and fighting over who got to read Tom Sawyer next, and plotting to tickle Kristen till she cried, and the old man sitting with his back against the treetrunk, laughing and laughing. “All right, shut up you kids, shut up now, school’s in session.”

I let Tom be and walked west across the faint remains of a road, into trees where little tangles of rotted beams marked the sites of old buildings. Buildings you could believe people had once put up, had once inhabited. I sat at the edge of a canyon that dropped to the sea. I could tell that the cliffs were going to be big ones, because I was still far above the water, and the canyon was short. The sun got lower. I wished I was home.

Tom walked through the trees a distance away, looking for me. I stood and called out, walked over to him. “Let’s go out to the cliff and find those guys,” he said. He still looked low, and I fell in beside him without a word. “Here, around this way,” he said, and led me to the south rim of the canyon.

The trees gave way to shrubs, then to knee high weeds, and then we were on the cliff’s edge. Far below lay the ocean, flat and silvery. The horizon was really out there—it must have been a hundred miles away. So much water! A stiff wind hit me in the face as I looked down the pocked tan cliff, which fell down and down and down in nearly vertical ravines, to a very broad beach, strewn with seaweed. Jennings and Lee were a few hundred yards along the cliff edge, just tiny figures on top of that cliff, throwing rocks down at the beach, though they hit the middle of the cliff instead. Looking at the rocks fall I suddenly knew what the gulls saw, and I felt I was soaring in the sky, high above the world.

To the left Mount Soledad and La Jolla stuck out into the sea, blocking the view farther south. To the north the cliff curved away, until in the distance little cliffs alternated with blank bluish spots, which were marshes. The tiny cliffs and marshes extended in a curve all the way up to the green hills of Pendleton, and up there where the hills met the sea and sky was our valley, our home. It was hard to believe I could see that far. The waves below broke in long curves, leaving their white tracery on the water with just a whisper, a faint kkkkkkkkkkk, kkkkkkkkkkk. Tom was sitting down, his feet swinging over the edge. “The beach is at least twice as wide,” he said in a strangled voice. Talking to himself. “They shouldn’t let the world change so much in one life. It’s too hard.” I moved to get out of earshot, so he could talk without being overheard. But he looked up at me; he was talking to me: “I spent hours down there when time could have stopped, and I wouldn’t have minded.” He tugged his beard. “These cliffs are all different now.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. The setting sun lit the cliffs, so that they threw off an orange light that filled the air. Our shadows stretched far across the field behind us, and the wind was cold. The world seemed a big place, a big, windy, dusky place. Uneasily I paced up and down the cliff edge. The old man stayed where he sat, a little bump on the cliff. The sun sank into the water, drowning bit by bit, paring away until only the emerald wink of the green flash was left. The wind picked up. Jennings and Lee came along the cliff toward us, tiny figures waving their arms.

“Better be getting back,” Jennings called when they got closer. “Elma will be having dinner on the table.”

“Give the old man a minute more,” I said.

“She’ll be mad if dinner has to wait too long,” Jennings said more quietly. But Lee said “Let him be,” and Jennings stood quietly, looking down at the tapestry left by broken waves.

Eventually Tom stirred, walked down to us as if he’d just woken up. The evening star glowed like a lantern in the ocean sky.

“Thanks for bringing us out here,” Tom said.

“Our pleasure,” Jennings replied. “But we’d better head back now. It’s going to be a hell of a walk through those ruins in the dark.”

“We’ll skirt them to the south,” Lee said, “down that road that…” He sucked in his breath hard.

“What’s wrong?” Jennings exclaimed.

Lee pointed north, toward Pendleton.

We all looked, saw nothing but the dark curve of the coast, the first faint stars above—

A white streak fell out of the sky, plunged into the hills far to the north and disappeared.

“Oh, no,” Jennings whispered.

Another streak from the sky. It fell just like a shooting star, except it didn’t slow down or break into pieces; it fell in a straight line, like lightning set against a straightedge, taking no more than three blinks of the eye from the time it appeared high above to the time it silently disappeared into the coastline.

“Pendleton,” Lee said. “They’re busting up our track.” He began to curse in a heavy, furious low voice.

“Shit!” Jennings shouted. “Shit! God damn those people, God damn them. Why can’t they leave us alone—”

Three more streaks fell from the sky, one after another, landing farther and farther north, defining the curve of the coast. I closed my eyes and red bars swam around in the black. I opened them to see another streak burst into the world up there among the stars, plummeting down instantly onto the land.

“Where are they coming from?” I asked, and was surprised to hear my voice shake. I was afraid, I think, that they would be bombs like those that had fallen on the day.

“Airplane,” Jennings said grimly. “Or satellite, or Catalina, or halfway around the world. How the fuck would we know?”

“They’re hitting all over Pendleton,” Lee said in a bitter voice.

“They’ve stopped,” Tom pointed out. In the dark I couldn’t read his expression, and after Lee’s and Jennings’ shouts his voice was calm. We watched the sky for another one. Nothing.

“Let’s go,” Lee finally croaked. Slowly we crossed the weed field on the edge of the cliff in single file. Then into the forest. Halfway back to the train Jennings, walking ahead of me, said, “The Mayor ain’t going to like this one little bit.”

9

Jennings was right. The Mayor didn’t like it. He went north himself to inspect the damage, and when he returned to Jennings’ home leading his little crew of assistants, he told us how much he didn’t like it. “I’ve been to look, and the rails where those bombs hit are melted,” he shouted, stretching the seams of a tight blue coat to pound on the dining table. Limping around the room, pausing to shout in the impassive faces of Lee and Jennings, waving his fists overhead as he cursed the Japanese… oh, he was in a state all right. I stayed behind Tom and took care to keep quiet. “Puddles of iron! And the dirt around it like black brick. Trees burnt to a crisp.” He stumped over to Lee and waved a finger in Lee’s face. “You men must have left some sign that you were working on those tracks, something that could be seen in the satellite pictures. I hold you responsible for that.”

Lee stood with his mouth clamped tight, staring angrily past the Mayor. Behind that I noticed that a couple of the Mayor’s men (Ben for one) looked pleased at Lee’s chastisement, and gave each other sneering glances. Jennings, bold in his own home, stepped up to protest.

“Most of that line goes through forest, Mayor, and it’s under trees so it can’t be seen from above. You saw that. In the open patches we didn’t touch a thing, even if we had to work the cars through brush. And the bridges look exactly like they did before. Not a thing had been changed except the track, and we had to change that to make it passable. There was nothing that could be seen from above, I swear.”

Jennings went on spouting lies and contradictions like that for a while, and when he had convinced the Mayor of his point, the Mayor got even angrier. “Spies,” he hissed. “Someone in Onofre must have told the scavengers in Orange County, and they told the Japs.” He tested the strength of Jennings’ table again, wham. “We can’t have that. That sort of thing has to be stopped.”

“How do you know the spies aren’t here in San Diego?” Tom asked.

Danforth and Ben and the rest of the Mayor’s men glared at Tom. Even Jennings and Lee looked shocked.

“There are no spies in San Diego,” Danforth said, his chin tucked into his neck. His voice made me feel like I did when the brake was pulled on the train. “Jennings, you get hold of Thompson and have him sail you and Lee and these two up the coast. Get off at Onofre with them, and hike back down the tracks and survey the damage. I want to know how long it’s going to take to get that route open again.”

“Melted track will be hard,” Jennings replied. “We’ll have to replace it like we did on the Salton Sea line, and it’ll be impossible to do without leaving signs. Maybe we could follow three ninety-five up to Riverside, then turn back to the coast—”

Wham. “I want the coastal tracks working. You get Thompson and do as I tell you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon after that the Mayor and his men left the house, without any kind of farewell to Tom and me. Jennings sighed, and made an apologetic face at his wife, who was in the entrance to the kitchen looking discouraged. “Lee, I wish you’d talk back to him sometimes. He just gets madder when you don’t answer like that.” But Lee was still angry, and he said no more to Jennings than he had to Danforth. Tom jerked his head and I followed him out of the room. “Looks like it’s back by sea,” he said with a shrug.

The next day a heavy wall of clouds moved onshore, so quickly we got our bags filled and said goodbye to Mrs. Jennings. We pumped our handcar over steep hills back to the coast, and north to the Del Mar River. From the south side of the marsh we could see the hundred wandering streams that the river made through the grass and cattails, iron streams through solid green. The main channel of the river snaked back on itself in big S’s, and there against the bank, curving with it, was a long wooden dock. We began to roll faster down the tracks, which led us all the way to the sea beach before making a half-circle and coming back to the dock. Even so the incline was steep, and we flew down the rails and made the turn above the beach with a wicked screech, like we were strangling a thousand gulls at once. Then it was down a gentler incline to the dockside.

For a moment the setting sun poked through the black wall of cloud, and sent a pencil of light up the marsh, brightening the gloom of the dusk. In the muted green light I saw a couple of men working on a big sloop moored at the downstream end of the dock. The sloop was a long one, nearly thirty feet I reckoned, wide-beamed and shallow-keeled, with canvas decking before the mast, and open plank seats aft of it. As we walked onto the dock a whiff of fish in the general salt smell reminded me of home. The clouds came together again, and we were back in the murk.

“Looks like we’ll be sailing in a storm,” I observed, for the wind was picking up, and the clouds clearly held rain.

“That’s the way we want it,” said Jennings.

“Too much of a storm and we’d be in trouble.”

“Maybe. But we’ve got anchorages up the coast, and Thompson has done this a thousand times. In fact it should be easier than usual, with no Jap landing parties to intercept. You’ll be home almost as fast as if we’d gone by train.”

“Let’s be under way,” a man hallooed from the sloop. “Tide’s turning!”

Jennings introduced us to the speaker, who turned out to be Thompson, and to his two sailors, Handy and Gilmour. We stepped down into the sloop. Tom and I sat on the plank just aft of the mast, and leaned back against struts. Jennings and Lee sat down on the plank aft of ours. The men on the dock unmoored us and pushed us into the stream. The sailors rowed lazily, keeping us pointed downstream and letting the current do the work. A dinghy tied to the stern of the sloop weaved behind us, pushed this way and that by the stream. We looped through the marsh; grass grew half as tall as the mast on either bank, and scores of bobbing ducks paddled into the reeds as we passed. The river poured over a shallow break in the beach, beside the bluff on the north side of the marsh. We spilled over this bar and the rowers pulled like madmen to get us through the violent soup, and over some big waves. When we were outside the break they shipped the oars, and pulled up the two sails. Thompson trimmed the sails from his seat at the tiller, and we heeled over and sailed up the coast, paralleling the swells so that we rolled heavily. The wind was from the southwest, so we clipped along at a very good speed.

We stayed about a mile offshore, and before darkness fell we had a fine view of the beach cliffs, and the forested hills rising behind them. But soon the sun must have set, for the murk turned to night darkness, and the black bulk of the land was scarcely visible under the edge of the clouds. Over the hissing of our wake and the creaks of the boom rubbing the mast, Jennings told Thompson and Handy and Gilmour the story of how we had seen the bombing of the railroad tracks. Tom and I sat against the mast, huddled in every stitch of clothing we had. The swells riding under us smoked a little, and the clouds got lower and lower, till we sailed through a narrow layer of clear windy air, sandwiched between thick slices of water and cloud. Tom dozed from time to time, head lolling on the foredeck.

After a couple hours I stretched out on a pile of rope between two planks, and tried to imitate Tom and get some sleep. But I couldn’t. I lay on my back and watched the gray sail, almost the color of the clouds above it, suck and fill in an unpredictable way. I listened to the voices of Jennings and the others in the stern, without making out half of what they said. I shut my eyes, and thought about things we had seen on our journey south: the Mayor pounding Jennings’ table till the salt shaker bounced, the dial and gauge-filled front of the broken radio in the Mayor’s house, the face of the pretty girl I had danced with. We were in a new world now, I thought. We were in a world where Americans could freely pursue their destiny, or fight for it when they were opposed… a world altogether different from our little valley’s world, with its ignorance of anything beyond the swap meets. Nicolin would be ecstatic to hear of it, and to read the book Wentworth had given us—to learn how an American had traveled all over the world… to join the resistance with the rest of the valley, and fight our hidden enemies on Catalina… Oh, I’d have news for the gang, all right, and tales to tell that would make their eyes bug out like frogs’. How would I describe the Mayor’s island house, so unlike anything known in Onofre?… All those electric lights, reflected in that black lake with all its ruined towers…

I must have succeeded in falling asleep for a while, because when I opened my eyes again we were sailing in fog. Not a complete white out, but the sort of fog that is dense in patches and clear in others. Sometimes there was clear air for a man’s height above the water, and then a solid white ceiling of cloud; other times the cloud came right down and mixed with the smoking surface of the water. I stuck my hand over the side, and found that the water was considerably warmer than the air. I burrowed my cold feet into the pile of rope I’d been lying on. Tom still sat beside me, awake now.

“How do they know where we are?” I asked, sucking salt off my chilled fingers.

“Jennings says that Thompson stays close enough to shore to hear the waves break.” I cocked an ear landward and heard a faint crack and rumble.

“Big swell.”

“Yeah. He says the sound changes when we pass a rivermouth, and Thompson knows which rivermouth is which.”

“He must come up this way a lot to be able to do that.”

“True.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t lose track and run us onto the Pulgas River delta.”

“We’re past that, he says. I believe we’re ten or fifteen miles down from Onofre.”

So I had slept a long time, which was a blessing, as it meant I had missed a few hours of being cold. The men aft were still talking quietly among themselves, all of them awake and leaning back against the gunwales, their coats buttoned up and their necks wrapped in wool scarves. We sailed into a white patch, and Thompson, alert at the tiller, steered us seaward so that we slapped over the swells as we gained leeway. I couldn’t fall asleep again, and for a long time everything remained the same: the fog, the hiss of the swells sliding under the boat, the creaking of the boom, the cold. The wind blew in fits and starts, and I could hear Thompson and Lee discussing the possibility of running in to one of the rivermouths and spending the coming day there. “Hard to do,” Thompson said in an unconcerned way. “Damned hard to do with this fog, and the wind dying down. And the swell is picking up, whoah, see what I mean? These’ll make pretty damn big waves, I’d say.” The mast creaked as if in agreement, and the way the steep and smoking swells lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped, without us ever being able to properly see them, made them seem especially big. Swell after swell lifted the boat and slid away from it, and the rhythm of it almost had me asleep again, when Tom sat up suddenly.

“What’s that noise?” he said sharply.

I didn’t hear anything unusual, but Thompson nodded. “Japanese cruiser. Getting closer.”

Long moments passed while the rest of us heard the low muffled grumble of an engine. Thompson put the tiller over—

A curling white wave washed over the bow and stopped us dead. The mainsail flapped and then backed. Foaming water dripped over the canvas decking into my lap; Tom snatched up his shoulder bag to keep it from getting soaked. A cone of white light appeared in the fog. Our boat rocked at the bottom of this blinding cone, and one edge of the lit fog revealed the bulk of a tall ship, a black shape rumbling beside us, hardly seeming to move with the swell. My heart raced as I took all this in; I braced myself against Tom, looking at him fearfully. We were caught!

“Radar,” Tom whispered.

“Put down your sail,” a voice shouted. “Everyone stand with hands on head.” The voice was mechanically amplified (as I learned later) and it had a metallic ring to it that made me cringe with fear. “You are under arrest.”

I looked aft. Lee, all glare and black shadow in the searchlight’s powerful whiteness, was aiming a rifle at the top of the cone. Crack! The light above us burst and went dark in a tinkling of glass. Immediately the stern of our boat was spitting fire, for every man back there was shooting up at the Japanese ship. Tom pulled me down, the gunfire was a continuous banging, overwhelmed by a great BOOM, and suddenly the front of the sloop was gone. Broken planks and cold seawater poured up the boat over us. “Help!” I cried, freeing my feet from the tangle of rope. I was making my way over the canted gunwale when the mast fell on me.

After that, I don’t remember much. Searchlights breaking inside my eyelids. Choking on brine. Confused shouts, rough hands pulling me and hurting my armpits. Being hauled up metal steps and bumping my knees painfully. Choking and gasping, vomiting water. A metal deck, a coarse dry blanket.

I was on the Japanese ship.

When I realized this—it was the first thought I had, as I regained consciousness and saw the studded gray metal decking under my nose—I struggled to escape the hands holding me. Nothing doing. Hands restrained me, voices spoke nonsense at me: mishi kawa tonatu ka, and the like, on and on. “Help!” I cried. But my head was clearing, and I knew there was no help for me there. The suddenness of it all kept me from feeling it properly. I shivered and choked as if I’d been walloped in the stomach, but the real extent of the disaster was just sinking in as the Japanese sailors began to strip my wet clothes from me and wrap me in blankets. One was pulling my shirt sleeve down my arm; I twisted my hand out of it and fisted him in the nose. He squawked with surprise. I took a good swing and caught another one on the side of the head, and then started kicking wildly. I got some of them pretty good. They ganged up on me and carried me through a doorway into a glass-walled room at the back of the bow deck. Put me down on a bench that followed the curve of the hull.

Up in the bow I could see sailors still searching the water, shining a new searchlight this way and that, and shouting into an amplifying box. Two of them stood behind a giant gun on a thick stand—no doubt the gun that had demolished our sloop. The ship vibrated with the hum of engines, but we drifted over the swells, going nowhere. At our height above the water the fog was impenetrable. They had little motor dinghies down there searching, puttering about in the murk, but I could tell by their voices that they weren’t finding anything.

They had killed my old friend Tom. The thought made me cry, and once I started I sobbed and sobbed. All those years he had survived everything, every danger imaginable—only to get drowned by a miserable shore patrol. And all so fast.

After what seemed a long time, the men searching the water were ready to quit. I had pretty well recovered my wits, and some of my warmth, for the blankets were thick. I felt cold inside, though, cold in my heart. I was going to make these men pay for killing Tom. Tom hadn’t seemed too sure about the American resistance, but I was definitely part of it now, I thought to myself—starting right then and there, and for the rest of my life. In my cold heart I made a vow.

A door in the back wall of the glassed in room opened, and through it walked the captain of the ship. Maybe he was the captain and maybe he wasn’t, but there were gold tags on the shoulders of his new brown coat, and the coat had gold buttons. His face and hands were a shade darker than the coat, and his face looked like the faces of the bodies that washed up on our beach. Japanese, I had learned to call him. Two more officers, wearing brown suits without the gold shoulder tags or the buttons, stood behind him, their faces like masks.

Murderers, all of them. I stared fiercely at the captain, and he looked back, his eyes expressionless behind hanging upper eyelids. The room pitched gently, and fog pressed against the dripping salt-encrusted windows, fog that looked red because of the little red light set over the door.

“How do you feel?” the captain said in English that was clear, but lilting in a way I’d never heard before.

I stared at him.

“Have you recovered from the blow to your head?”

I stared at him some more.

After a time he nodded. I’ve seen his face more than once since then, in dreams: his eyes dark brown, almost black; deep lines in his skin, extending from the outside corners of his eyes in fans around the side of his head; black hair cut so close to his scalp that it had the texture of a brush. His lips were thin and brown, and now they were turned down with displeasure. He looked devilish, taken all together, and I struggled to look unconcerned as I stared at him, because he scared me.

“You appear to have recovered.” One of his officers gave him a thin board, to which sheets of paper were clipped. He took a pencil from the clip. “Tell me, young sir, what is your name?”

“Henry. Henry Aaron Fletcher.”

“Where do you come from?”

“America,” I said, and glared at each of them in turn. “The United States of America.”

The captain glanced at his officers. “Good show,” he said to me.

A gang of regular sailors in blue coats came in from the bow and jabbered at him. He sent them back to the bow, and turned to me again.

“Do you come from San Diego? San Clemente? Newport Beach?” I didn’t answer, and he continued: “San Pedro? Santa Barbara?”

“That’s way north,” I said scornfully. Shouldn’t have spoken, I thought. But I wanted to tear into him so bad I was shaking—shaking with fright, too—and I couldn’t help talking.

“So it is. But there is no habitation directly onshore, so you must come from north or south.”

“How do you know there isn’t a habitation onshore?”

He smiled just like we do, though the results were ugly. “We have observed your coastline.”

“Spies,” I said. “Sneaking spies. You should be ashamed. You’re a sailor, mister. Don’t you feel ashamed for attacking unarmed sailors on a foggy night and killing them all—sailors who weren’t doing you any harm?”

The captain pursed his lips as if he’d bitten into something sour. “You were hardly unarmed. We took quite a few shots from you, and one of our men was hurt.”

“Good.”

“Not good.” He shook his head. “Besides—I suspect your companions may have swimmed to shore. Otherwise we would have found them.”

I remembered the dinghy we had been pulling, and thought a prayer.

“I must have an answer, please. You come from San Diego?”

I shook my head. “Newport Beach.”

“Ah.” He wrote on his paper. “But you were returning from San Diego?”

As long as I lied, it was okay to tell him things. “We were on our way to San Clemente and missed it in the fog.”

“Missed San Clemente? Come now, we are several miles south of that town.”

“I told you, we missed it.”

“But you had been headed north for some time.”

“We knew we had gone too far, and we were headed back. It’s hard to tell where you are in the fog.”

“In that case, why were you at sea?”

“Why do you think?”

“Ah—to avoid our patrols, you mean. Yet we don’t interfere with coastal traffic. What was your business in San Clemente?”

I thought fast, looking down so the captain wouldn’t see me doing it. “Well… we were taking some Japanese down there to hike in and look at the old mission.”

“Japanese don’t land on the mainland,” the captain said sharply.

So I had startled him! “Of course they do,” I said. “You say that because it’s your job to see that they don’t. But they do it all the time, and you know it.”

He stared at me, then conferred with his officers in Japanese. For the first time I took notice of that fact that I was hearing someone talk in a foreign tongue. It was peculiar. It sounded like they were repeating four or five sounds over and over again, too fast to actually be saying anything. But obviously they were, for the officers gestured and nodded agreement, the captain gave orders, all in a rapid gibberish. More than their skin or their eyelids, their meaningless speech brought it to me that I was dealing with men from the other side of the world—men a lot different from me than the San Diegans had been. When the captain turned and spoke to me in English it sounded unreal, as if he were just making sounds he didn’t understand.

Scribbling on the page clipped to the board, he said, “How old are you?”

“I don’t know. My pa can’t remember.”

“Your mother can’t remember?”

“My father.”

This struck him as odd, I could see. “No one else knows?”

“Tom guesses I’m sixteen or seventeen.” Tom…

“How many people were on your boat?”

“Ten.”

“How many people live in your community?”

“Sixty.”

“Sixty people in Newport Beach?” he said, surprised.

“Hundred and sixty, I mean.”

“How many people live in your house or dwelling?”

“Ten.”

His nose wrinkled, and he lowered the board. “Can you describe the Japanese you met in Newport Beach?”

“They looked just like you,” I said truculently.

He pursed his lips. “And they were with you tonight on the boat we sank?”

“That’s right. And they came over here on a ship as big as this one, so why didn’t you stop them? Isn’t that your job?”

He waved a hand impatiently. “Not all landings can be stopped.”

“Especially when you’re paid not to try, eh?”

He pursed his lips again into that bad-taste look.

Shaking more and more, I cried, “You say you’re here to guard the coast, but all you really do is bomb our tracks and kill us when we’re just sailing—when we’re just sailing home—” and all of a sudden I was crying again, bawling and crying. I couldn’t help it. I was cold, and Tom was dead, and my head hurt something fierce, and I couldn’t stand up to this stranger and his questions any longer.

“Your head is still painful?” I was holding my head between my arms. “Here, stretch out on this bench and rest. We need to get you to hospital.” His hands took me by the shoulders, and helped me lie out against the curving metal of the ship’s tall gunwale. The officers lifted my legs up and wrapped them in the blankets, moving the clipboard from where the captain had put it down. I was too dispirited to kick them. The captain’s hands were small and strong; they reminded me of Carmen Eggloff’s hands, strangely enough, and I was about to burst into sobs again, when I noticed the ring on the captain’s left ring finger. It was a big darkened gold ring that held a cut red jewel in the top of it. Letters were carved into the gold around the jewel, curving around the stone so they were hard to read. But the hand wearing the ring stilled for a moment right before my nose, and I could make out the words. Anaheim High School 1976.

I jerked back and bumped my head against the gunwale. “Be peaceful, young sir. Don’t agitate yourself. We’ll talk further of these things in Avalon.”

He was wearing an American ring. A class ring, like those the scavengers wore during the evenings at the swap meets, to show which of the ruins they came from. I quivered in the scratchy blankets as I thought about what that meant. If the captain of the ship assigned to keep foreigners from coming to our coast was himself visiting Orange County—visiting it regularly, and wearing a ring that a scavenger must have given him—then no one was guarding the coast in earnest. It was all a sham, this quarantine—a sham that had gotten Tom killed. Tears pooled in my eyes, and I squeezed them back, furious at the injustice, the corruption of it—furious and confused. It seemed just moments ago I had been dozing, eyes shut, in the San Diegans’ sloop. And now—what had he said?—“We’ll talk further of these things in Avalon.”

I sat up. They were taking me to Catalina to be questioned. Tortured, maybe. Thrown in prison, or made a slave—kept away from Onofre for the rest of my life. The more I thought of it the more frightened I became. Up to that point I hadn’t stopped to think what they were going to do with me—I was confused, and that’s a fact—but now it was obvious I should have; they weren’t going to take me up the Onofre river and drop me off. They were going to take me with them. The idea made my heart thump so hard I thought my ribs would bust. My breathing was so quick and choppy I thought I might faint. Catalina! I would never see home again! Though it was selfish of me, I felt worse about that than I had about Tom’s death.

The captain and his officers stood under the little red light over the door in the back wall. Salt crusts marred the dim red reflections of them in the big windows. The reflection of the captain’s face was looking at me, which meant, I decided, he was watching my reflection. He was keeping an eye on me.

Out on the bow deck a couple of sailors still stood by the searchlight. It looked like they were fixing it. Otherwise, the deck was empty. Fog swept over us, cold and white. The ship vibrated ever so slightly, but we still hadn’t gone anywhere.

They had taken every stitch of clothing off of me, to get me dry. All the better.

The captain walked back to me. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yes. I’m getting sleepy, though.”

“Ah. We will take you into one of the berths.”

“No! Not yet. I’d be sick if I had to move. I just want to rest here a minute more.” I slumped down and did my best to look exhausted.

The captain watched me. “You said something about tracks being bombed?”

“Who, me? I never said anything about tracks.”

He nodded doubtfully.

“Why do you do it?” I asked despite myself. “Why do you come halfway around the world to patrol here?”

“We have been given the responsibility by the United Nations. I don’t believe you would understand all the details of the matter.”

So it was true, what they had told us in San Diego. Part of it, anyway. “I know about the United Nations,” I said. “But there isn’t a person from America there to tell our side. Everything they do is illegal.” I spoke drowsily, to put him off his guard. I shouldn’t have spoken at all, but my curiosity got the better of me.

“They’re all we’ve got, young sir. Without them, perhaps war and devastation would come to us all.”

“So you hurt us to help yourselves.”

“Perhaps.” He stared at me, as if surprised I could argue at all. “But it may be that it is the best policy for you as well.”

“It isn’t. I live there. I know. You are holding us back.”

He nodded briefly. “But from what? That is the part that you have not experienced, my brave young friend.”

I feigned sleep, and he walked back to his officers under the red light. He said something to them and they laughed.

Up and down the room pitched, up and down, up and down, smooth and gentle. I jumped out of the blankets and ran toward the open doorway to the bow. The captain had been watching for me to make such a move: “Ha!” He yelled, leaping after me. But he had miscalculated. I just caught the astonished look on his face as I flashed out the door ahead of him—I was too fast for him. Once outside I raced for the gunwale, and dove past the startled sailors into the fog.

10

After a long fall my arms and face smacked the sea, and my body walloped them home. When I felt the water’s chill I thought Oh, no. The air had been knocked out of me, and ten feet under I had to breathe something awful. When I popped back to the surface to suck in air a swelltop rolled over me and I breathed water instead. I was certain my hacking and gasping would give me away to the Japanese, who shouted after me. Undoubtedly they were lowering boats to search for me. The water was freezing, it made my whole body cry out for air.

I struck out swimming away from the shouts and the dim glow of the searchlight, and was rammed by an approaching swell. Damned if I hadn’t jumped off the seaward side of the ship. I would have to swim around it. And I had been sure I was leaping off the landward side. How had I gotten so turned around? My confidence in my sense of direction disappeared, and for a minute I panicked, afraid I wouldn’t be able to find my way to shore. I sure wasn’t going to see it. But the swell was a reliable guide, as I quickly realized when it shoved me time after time in the same direction. It was coming a bit out of the south, I had noted in the sloop, and I only had to swim in with it, maybe angling a bit to the right as it propelled me, and I would be on the straightest course to shore.

So that was all right. But the cold shocked me. The water might still have been from that warm current we had enjoyed the previous week, but now, with the storm wind whipping across the surface and chilling my head and arms, it didn’t feel warm in any way. I almost shouted to the Japanese to come to my rescue. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t want to face the captain again. I could imagine his face as I explained, yes, sir, I did want to escape, but, you see, the water was too cold. It wouldn’t do. If they were to haul me out, that was fine—part of me hoped they would, and soon, too. But if they didn’t, I was stuck with it.

To combat the cold I swam as hard as I could, trusting that I was around the bow of the ship and putting distance between us. It would be a nasty shock to clang into its hull unexpectedly, and it still seemed possible, because in the fog I couldn’t see ten feet. As swell after swell passed under me, however, it became less likely. Too bad, part of me thought. You’re in for it now. The rest of me got down to the business of getting to shore, the sooner the better. I settled into a rhythm and began working.

Only once did I see or hear the ship again, and it was soon after I had made the final decision to swim for it. Usually the fog does not convey sound better than the open air, no matter what some folks will have you believe. It tends to dampen sound as it limits sight, though not as drastically. But it is funny stuff, and sometimes, caught fishing by a fog bank, Steve and I have heard the voices of other fishermen talking in low tones and sounding as if they were about to collide with us, when they were half a mile away. Tom could never explain it, nor Rafael neither.

It happened again on this night. The voices were behind me, and far enough above me that I guessed they came from the ship. I groaned, thinking that I had been confused in my swimming, and that I was still in the vicinity of the ship; but then a cold swirl of wind caught their voices midsentence, and blew them away for good. It was just me and the fog and the ocean, and the cold.

I only know three ways to swim. Or call it four. Crawl, backstroke, sidestroke, and a frog kick. Crawl was the fastest by far, and did the most to keep me warm, so I put my face in the brine—which scared me somehow, but keeping my head up was too tiring—and swam for it. I could feel the swells pick me up feet first, give a welcome shove, and pass under, leaving me floundering in the trough. Other than that, all I felt was the wind cutting into my arms as I stroked. The cutting got so bad that I switched to the frog kick just to keep my arms under water. The water was still cold, but I had gotten used to it a little, and it was better than my wet arms in the wind. Working hard was the best solution, so after a few frog strokes I went back to the crawl and swam hard. When I got tired or my arms got too cold, I switched to frog kick or sidestroke, and let kicking and the swell carry me along. It was a matter of shifting the discomforts from spot to spot, and then bearing them for as long as I could.

The thing about swimming is it leaves you a lot of time to think. In fact there is little to do but think, unlike when hiking through the woods, for instance, when there are rocks to look out for, and the path of least effort to be found. In the sea all paths are the same, and at night in the fog there’s not much to look at. This is what I could see: the black swells rising and sinking under me; the white fog, which was becoming low clouds again as the wind unfortunately picked up; and my own body. And even these things were only visible when I had my head up and my eyes open, which wasn’t very often. So I had nothing to do but worry about my swimming. Mostly I swam with my head in the brine and my eyes closed, feeling my muscles tire and my joints ache with cold, and though my thoughts raced wildly they never got too far from this vital feeling, which determined the stroke I used from moment to moment.

Kicking hard on my back warmed my feet some, and they needed it. I could barely feel them. But kicking was slow, and effortful too. I sure wished I had a pair of Tom’s fins at that moment, the ones he lent us to body surf with. I loved those fins—old blue or green or black things that made us walk like ducks and swim like dolphins. What I wouldn’t have done for a pair of them right then and there! It almost made me cry to think of them. And once they occurred to me I couldn’t get them out of my mind. Now to my little assortment of thoughts was added, if only I had those fins. If only I had them.

I flopped back on my stomach and started the crawl again. The backs of my upper arms were getting stiff and sore. I wondered how long I had been at it, and how much longer I had to go. I tried to calculate the distance. Say the ship had been a mile offshore. That would be about half the length of our valley’s beach. If I had started swimming at Basilone Hill, then by this time I’d be about to… well, I couldn’t say. There was no way to tell. I was sure I had swum a good distance, though, from the way my arms hurt.

Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. Sometimes it was easy to blank the mind and just swim. I changed strokes at the count of a hundred; hundred after hundred slipped by. A lot of time passed. When I did the frog kick I noticed that the fog was lifting, becoming the low cloud bank that had rushed overhead when we were sailing north in the sloop. Perhaps that meant I was getting close to land. The clouds were very white against the black sea; probably the moon was now up. The surface of the water was a rolling obsidian plain. Swirling into it were little flurries of snow, flying forward over me as much as they were falling. When they hit the water they disappeared instantly, without a splash. The sight of them made me feel the cold more than ever, and again I almost started to cry, but couldn’t spare the effort. I was crying miserable, though. If only I had those fins.

I put my head down and doggedly crawled along, ordering myself to think of something besides the cold. All the times I had looked out over a peaceful warm sea, for instance. I recalled a time when Steve and Tom and I were lazing up at Tom’s place, looking for Catalina. “I wonder what it would look like if the water was gone,” Steve had said. Tom had jumped on the notion with glee. “Why, we’d think we were on a giant mountain. Offshore here would be a plain tilted away from us, cut by canyons so deep we wouldn’t be able to see the bottom of them. Then the plain would drop away so steeply we wouldn’t be able to see the lowlands beyond. That’s the continental shelf I’ve told you about. The lowland would rise again to foothills around Catalina and San Clemente islands, which would be big mountains like ours.” On he had rambled, pulling up imaginary hipboots to lead us on an exploration of the new land, through mud and muck that was covered with clumps of seaweed and surprised-looking fish, in search of wrecked ships and their open treasure chests…

It was the wrong time to remember that discussion. When I thought of how much water was underneath me, how far away the bottom was, I got scared and pulled my feet closer to the surface. All those fish, too—the ocean was teeming with fish, as I well knew, and some of them had sharp teeth and voracious appetites. And none of them went to bed at night. One of those ugly ones with its mouth crammed with teeth could swim up and bite me that very moment! Or I might blunder into a whole school of them, and feel their slick finny bodies colliding with mine—the sandy leather of a shark, or the spikes of a scorpion fish… But worse than the fish was just being out there at all, with all that water below, down and down and colder and darker, all the way to the slimy bottom so far below. I thrashed with panic for a while, terrified at the thought of where I was, of how deep the sea was.

But several rushes of panic passed, and I was still there floundering. There was nothing I could do to change things. And more and more as time passed the real danger, the cold, reasserted itself and made me forget my fears of the imagination. It couldn’t be escaped, I couldn’t swim hard enough now to ward it off, and the water felt icy, no longer any refuge from the snowy wind. The cold would kill me soon. I could feel that in my muscles. It was more frightening than the size of the sea by far.

My thoughts seemed to chill, becoming slothful and stupid. My arms hurt so I could barely move them. Backstroke was hard, crawl was hard, frog stroke was hard. Floating was hard. If only I had those fins. Such a long way to the bottom. My arms were as heavy as ironwood branches, and my stomach muscles wanted a rest. If they cramped I would drown. Yet I had no choice but to keep them tensed, and go on swimming. I put my numbed face in the water and plowed along in a painful crawl, trying to hurry.

There was a rhythm I could keep to if I could ignore the pain, and grimly I stuck to it. My sense of time left me. So did the notion of a destination. It was not so much a matter of getting somewhere, as it was avoiding death then and there. Left arm, right arm, breath; left arm, right arm, breath. And so on. Each motion a struggle against the cold. The few times I bothered to look up, nothing had changed: low white clouds, flakes of snow swirling ahead and disappearing into the sea with a faint ssss, ssss, ssss. I couldn’t feel my hands and feet, and the cold moved up my limbs and made them less and less obedient to my commands. I was getting too cold to swim.

The time came when it seemed I would have to give up. All my fine stories for the gang were going to go to waste, told only to myself in a last rush of thought on the way to the distant bottom. A waste, but there it was. I couldn’t swim any more. If only I had those fins. Still, each time I thought to myself, Hanker, this is it, time to sink—I found the energy to slap along a few strokes more. It felt like swimming in cold butter. I couldn’t go on. Again I decided to give up, and again I found a few more kicks in me. I imagine that most of the people who drown at sea never do decide to give up; their bodies stop obeying, and make the decision for them.

On my back I could frog kick, and flap my arms at my sides. It was the only way left to me, so I kept at it, anxious to postpone the moment of letting go, though I knew it wasn’t far away. The thought of it was terrifying, sickening. Like nothing else I’d ever felt. Being taken to Catalina was nothing compared to it, and now I knew for sure I had made a fatal mistake by jumping overboard. Swells swept up out of the dark, becoming visible as they lifted me. Maybe they could do the work for me, if I could stay afloat. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t willing to quit. But I was too cold, too weak. On my back like I was, I had to work to avoid swallowing water when the crests of the swells passed over me, for one mouthful would have sunk me as fast as a hundred pounds of iron. Only dimly, at first, did I notice that the swells were getting taller. That’s all I need, I thought. A bigger swell, how wonderful. Still—didn’t that mean something? I was too cold, I wasn’t thinking anymore in the way that we usually think, silently talking to ourselves. I had only the simplest sort of thoughts: sensations, a repeated refusal to sink, instructions to my feeble limbs.

Cold fingers brushed my back and legs, and I squealed.

Seaweed, slick and leafy. I struggled around the floating clump, granted a bit of strength by the scare. Then on top of a swell I heard it. p-KKkkkkkkkk… p-KKkkkkkkkkk. Waves breaking. I had made it.

Suddenly I had some energy. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard the sound of the waves before, it was so plain. At the crest of the next swell I looked landward, and sure enough there it was, a black mass big and solid under the clouds. “Yeah!” I said aloud. “Yeah!”

I ran into another clump of seaweed, but I didn’t care. Disentangling myself from it I crested another swell, and from there the clear sound of the breaking waves told me my troubles weren’t over. Even from behind, the long irregular crack of the waves falling was louder than the Mayor’s shotgun had been. And following the crack was a low roaring krrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrrkrr, that faded away just enough to make the next break noticeable. All the sounds joined together in a fierce trembling boom; it was hard to believe I hadn’t heard it earlier. Too tired.

I swam on, and now at the crests of the swells I could see the waves breaking ahead of me. As each wave broke water sucked over the back of it like it was the edge of the world; white water exploded into the fog, and the whole churning mass tumbled in to the beach. There was going to be a problem getting to shore.

The swells kept pushing me in until one larger than the rest picked me up and carried me along with it, getting steeper and steeper as it went along. I was caught under the crest, and slowly it dawned on me that it was going to pitch over and throw me with it. I took a deep breath and plunged into the wave, felt it pulling me up as I struggled through the thick lip and out the back side. Even so I was almost taken over the back of the break, and into the churning soup. The next swell was nearly as big, and I had to swim as fast as I could to get over it before it broke. I breasted its top while it stood vertical, and looked back down at the foam-streaked water some fifteen feet below. Had that black area down there been rock? Was there a reef under me?

Whimpering miserably I swam out a good distance, so I wouldn’t get caught inside by a wave bigger than the two that had almost drowned me. The idea of a reef was horrifying. I was too tired for such a thing, I wanted to swim straight in to the beach. It was so close. It was possible that what I had seen was a patch of black water in the foam, but I couldn’t be sure, and if I was wrong I would pay for it with my life. I treaded water for a time and studied the waves as they broke and sucked water over behind them. The place where they consistently broke first marked the shallowest water, and if there were rocks they probably were there. So I swam parallel to the beach a ways, to the spot where the waves consistently broke last. The cold was in my thoughts again, and my fear grew. I decided to start in.

I attended to the swells, because if a wave broke before it reached me, it would roll me under and never let me up. No, I needed to catch a wave and ride it in, just like we did for fun in the waves off Onofre. If I caught one right, I might take it all the way onto the sand. That was what I wanted. I needed a big wave—not too big, though: medium big. Waves usually came in sets of threes, a big one followed by two littler ones, but floating over them in the dark I couldn’t get any sense of that. Looking back and forth I accidentally swallowed a mouthful of water, and it almost sent me to the bottom. I saw I couldn’t afford to be picky, and I struck out backstroking, determined to catch the very next wave. If I ran into rocks that would be it, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to take the chance.

As a swell picked me up I suddenly didn’t feel tired at all, though I still couldn’t swim well. I turned on my stomach as the wave tilted my feet up, and swam for it. What I would have given for a pair of Tom’s fins, kicking as I was to match the growing speed of the wave! But I caught it anyway, just, and felt it pick me up and carry me along. I was high on the steep face as it pitched over, so that I dropped through the air and smacked my chest into the water. If it had been reef that would have been the end of me, but it wasn’t, and I skidded over the water at the front edge of the broken wave, my head alone out of the white water, barreling over the suds at a tremendous speed.

The wave petered out too soon, however, and left me gasping in the soup. I stood and felt for the bottom—no bottom—sank, and hit sand with my feet almost immediately. I pushed back to the surface and saw another wave steaming in. Rolling myself into a ball I let the wave tumble me shoreward—a standard body surfing trick, but one inappropriate to my weakness. I barely struggled back to the surface when my forward motion stopped. But now I could stand, heaving, on good smooth sand! Walking cramped my legs and I collapsed. All of the water that had been pushed onto the beach by the last few waves chose that moment to sluice back down, and I knelt and clawed the coarse flowing sand as the torrent rushed over me. Then it was past, and I hobbled out of the water.

As soon as I got up the steep wash and beyond the high water mark, I fell down. The beach was covered with a gritty layer of melting hail. My stomach muscles relaxed at last, and I started to throw up. I had swallowed more water than I knew, and it took a while to get it all out. I didn’t mind. It was the most triumphant retching I ever did.

I had made it. All well and good. But there was no chance to celebrate, because now there was a new set of problems. The snowing had stopped for a moment, but there was still a wind which cut me most distinctly. I crawled up the beach to the cliff backing it. Narrow beach, cliff three times my height—it could have been anywhere on the Pendleton shore. At the base of the cliff there was less wind, and I hunkered down behind a sandstone boulder, among other clumps of fallen cliff. I started wiping myself dry with my fingers, and while doing that looked around.

Out to sea moonlit clouds obscured the view. The beach stretched away in both directions, covered by black blobs of seaweed. I was beginning to shiver. One of the blobs of seaweed had a more regular shape than the rest. Standing up to look at it better I felt the onshore wind blow right through me. Still, that clump of weed—I stumbled around my boulder and walked toward it, being careful not to hurry and fall.

A break I had not noticed in the cliff was the mouth of a deep ravine, spilling its creek onto the beach to cut through the sand to the sea. I sat and slid down the sloping sand to the creek, stopping to drink some of its water—I was thirsty, strangely enough. When I stood again it was a struggle to make my way up the three foot embankment on the other side; I kept slipping, and finally, cursing and sniffling, I had to crawl up it and then stand.

Back on the plateau of the beach I could see the black blob clearly, and my suspicion was confirmed. It was a boat, pulled almost to the cliff. “Oh, yes,” I said. Careful not to hurry, I thought, you’ll fall. It was farther away than it looked, but at last I staggered to its side, and sat in the lee of it. Held the gunwale with my numb hands.

There were two oars in it and nothing else, so there was no way to be positive, but I was sure it was the dinghy we had been trailing behind our sloop. They had made it to shore! Tom was (most likely) alive!

I, on the other hand, was nearly dead. Presumably my companions were somewhere in the area—up the ravine was a good guess—but I couldn’t follow them. I was too weak and cold to stand. In fact my head banged the dinghy’s side while I was just sitting there. I knew I was in bad shape. I didn’t want to die after taking the trouble to swim all that way, so I got to my knees. Too bad they hadn’t left something in the boat besides the oars. Since they hadn’t… I considered it at a snail’s pace, as if very drunk. “Should get… out of… the wind… yeah.” I crawled to a big clump of seaweed and pulled off the top layers. They were all tangled and didn’t want to come. I got angry—“Stupid seaweed, let loose!”—blubbering like that until I got to the middle of the clump, which was still dry. Dryness felt like warmth. I pulled as many of the black leafy strands as I could carry out of the clump, and staggered back to the boat with them. Dropped the weed.

I pushed at the side of the dinghy. It might as well have been set in stone. I groaned. Pushing on the gunwale I could rock it a bit. “Turn over, boat.” I was amazed and frightened by my lack of strength; normally I could have flipped that dinghy with one hand. Now it became the great struggle of my life to overturn the damn thing. I got out the oars, slid one under the keel, lifted the wide end, and balanced it on the handle end of the other one, which had its wide end jammed in the sand. That tilted the boat, and on the other side I stepped on the low gunwale and pulled at the high one, all at once and with all my might. The boat flipped and I had to fall away from it flat on my face to avoid being crushed.

I spit out sand and regained my feet. Carried a sandstone clod to the bow. Lifting the bow was not that hard, and I rolled the clod under it to keep it up. If I had had the sense to put the seaweed in the boat I would have been set, but at this point I wasn’t thinking that far in advance. The seaweed just fit under the gap, and I stuffed it under, strand after strand, until all that I had dragged over with me was under the boat. Getting myself under was more difficult—I scraped my back, and finally pushed up with my head until the bow was lifted far enough to get my butt in.

Once under the boat I was tempted to just lie there, because I was beat. But I was still shivering like a dog, so I felt around in the blackness and pulled all the seaweed together. It made a pretty thick mat, and when I had crawled on it there was still a lot of weed left to pull over me, in a sort of blanket. I pulled the sandstone clod under the boat with me and was out of the wind, in a dry bed.

I started to shiver in a serious way. I shivered so hard my jaw hurt, and the seaweed around me cracked and rustled. Yet I didn’t feel any warmer for it. Flurries of rain or slushy snow hit the bottom of the boat, and I was pleased with myself for being sheltered. But I couldn’t stop shivering. I twisted around, put my hands in my armpits, gathered seaweed closer to me—anything to get warmer. It was a fight.

There passed one of those long hours that you seldom hear about when people are telling their tales—a cold, fearful time, spent entirely in the effort to warm up. It went on and on and on, and eventually I did warm a little. I was not toasty, you understand, but after the cold sea and the open windy beach my bed of dry seaweed under the boat felt pretty good. I wanted to stay there forever, just huddle up and fall asleep and never have to move again.

But another part of me knew I should locate Tom and the San Diegans before they got out of my reach. I figured they would be waiting out the night in some sort of shelter, like I was, and that they would take off in the morning. Pushing up the bow of the dinghy I saw a thin slice of the dawn: sand, broken cliff bottom, dark cloud. The darkest and most miserable day ever. The wind whistled over the boat, but I decided it was time to find them, before they took off and left me.

Getting out from under the boat was easier than slipping beneath it had been; I lifted the bow, setting the sandstone block under it, and slithered through the gap. Returning to the wind was a shock. All my precious warmth was blown away in an instant. In the dawn I could see down the beach much farther than before. It was bare and empty, a desolate gray reach. Moving the boat to one side exposed the seaweed, and I tied strands of it around me and looped them over my shoulders until I was fairly well covered by the crackly black leaves. It was better wind protection than I would have guessed, and far better than nothing at all.

The ravine had cut a V in the cliff almost to the level of the beach, so that I could walk right up it, in the streambed to avoid brush. I was beyond caring what might happen to my feet in the creekbed, and luckily the bottom was rounded stones.

After climbing a short waterfall I found myself among trees, and the brush became less dense. The ravine took a sharp bend to the right, then bent back again; after that the air was almost still. Overhead the treetops swayed and their needles whistled. Flurries of snow drifted among them, blurring their sharp black lines. I groaned at the sight and hiked on.

Taller waterfalls fell when the ravine got steeper, and to ascend them I had to climb through mesquite, ignoring my skin’s suffering and losing my seaweed coat strand by strand. I was so weak that when I came to the third of these tiny cliffs I didn’t think I could make it. I climbed on hands and knees, crawling right up the creek itself to avoid the brush to either side. That was stupid, maybe, because I started shivering again, but at that point I wasn’t going to win any prizes for thinking. I’m not sure there was any other way to get up the cliff anyway. Near the top I slipped and fell right under the water—I almost drowned in a knee-deep creek, after surviving the deep sea. But I managed to pull my head out, and to make it up the cliff. Once on top I was almost too tired to walk. If only I had Tom’s fins, I thought. When I realized what I had thought I choked out a laugh, and then started to cry. I waded the pool at the top of the little falls and continued on beside the stream, hunched over and trailing seaweed behind me, snuffling and crying, sure I was about to die of the cold.

That was the state I was in when I stumbled into their camp. I rounded a thicket and almost walked into the fire, blink-brilliant yellow among all the grays and blacks.

“Hey!” someone cried, and suddenly several men were on their feet. Lee had a hatchet cocked at his ear.

“Here you are,” I said.

“Henry!”

“Jesus—”

“What the hell—”

“Henry! Henry Fletcher, by God!” That was Tom’s voice. I located him. Right in front of me.

“Tom,” I said. Arms held me. “Glad to see you.”

“You’re glad to see me?” He was hugging me. Lee pulled him away to get a wool coat around me. Tom laughed, a cracked joyous laugh. “Henry, Henry! Hank, boy, are you okay?”

“Cold.”

Jennings was throwing wood on the fire, grinning and talking to me or someone else, I couldn’t tell. Lee pulled Tom off me and adjusted the coat. The fire began to smoke, and I coughed and almost fell.

Lee took me under the arms and put me by the fire. The others stared at me. They had a little lean-to made of cut branches, floored with firewood. In front of it the fire blazed, big enough to burn damp wood.

“Henry—did you swim to shore?”

I nodded.

“Jesus, Henry, we rowed around out there for the longest time, but we never saw you! You must have swum right by us somehow.”

I shook my head, but Lee said, “Shut up, now, and start rubbing his legs. This boy could die right here if we don’t get him warm, can’t you see how blue he is? And he can’t talk. Lay him down here by the fire. He can tell us what happened later.”

They laid me down at the open edge of the shelter, next to the fire. Pulled my seaweed from me and dried me with shirts. I was all sandy and I could tell the drying was scraping me, but I didn’t feel it much. I was relieved, very relieved. I could relax at last. The fire felt like an opened oven. The heat struck me in pulses, wave after wave of it washing over me, slowly penetrating me. I’d never felt anything so wonderful. I held my hand just over some side flames, and Tom pulled it up a bit and held it there for me. Lee wrapped a thick wool blanket around my legs when they were fully dry.

“W-where’d you get all the c-clothes?” I managed to say.

“We had quite a bit of stuff in the dinghy,” Jennings replied.

Tom put my arm back at my side and lifted the other one. “Boy, you don’t know how happy I am to see you. Whoo!”

“No lie,” Jennings said. “You should have seen him moaning. He sounded terrible.”

“I felt terrible, I mean to tell you. But now I feel just fine. You have no idea how glad I am to see you, boy! I haven’t been this happy in as long as I can remember.”

“Too bad we missed you in the dark,” Jennings said. “You could have rowed in with the rest of us and saved a lot of trouble, I bet. We had lots of room.” Thompson and the rest laughed hard at that.

“I got picked up by the Japanese,” I said.

“What’s this?” cried Jennings.

I told them as best I could about the captain and his questioning. “Then he said we were going to Catalina, so I jumped over the side.”

“You jumped over the side?”

“Yes.”

“And swam in?”

“Yes.”

“Whoah! Did you see the dinghy on the beach?” “How did you get in with the swell breaking so high?”

I sorted the questions with difficulty. “Swam in. Saw the boat on the beach, and rested under it. I figured you must be up here.” I looked at the men curiously. “How’d you get the boat in?”

Jennings took over, naturally. “When the sloop went down we all stepped in the dinghy, all except Lee who fell overboard. So we didn’t even get wet. We rowed off a ways and pulled Lee out of the drink and waited for you. But we couldn’t find you, and Thompson said he saw you go down under the mast. So we figured you’d drowned, and rowed ashore.”

“How’d you get the boat in?” I asked again.

“Well, that was Thompson’s doing. With all of us in that little boat we had about an inch clearance, so when he found where that little creek was pouring out and breaking the swell a bit, he booted Lee and me overboard, and we had to swim in. That was something, I tell you—although I guess you’d know. Anyway they caught one of the smaller waves and rode it right onto the beach. A nicer piece of seamanship you’ll never see.”

Thompson grinned. “Lucky we caught that wave right, actually.”

“So except for Lee, and me at the end there, we didn’t even get wet! But you, boy. That must have been one hell of a swim.”

“Long way,” I agreed. I lay on my side, curled so that all of me was equally close to the fire. I could feel the wool gathering all the heat and holding it around me, and I was happy—content to listen to the men’s voices, without bothering any longer to decipher what they were saying.

Several times through that day Tom roused me to see if I was doing all right, and when I mumbled something he would let me go to sleep again. The first time I woke on my own, my right arm had gone to sleep, and I needed to shift on my bed of boughs. Shaking my arm awake I felt twinges all up and down it. Both arms were sore. I shifted onto an elbow and looked around. It was near dark. Wet snow was gusting down, filtering through the branches around us. The men were under the lean-to behind me, lying down or sitting on branches Lee had cut for the night’s fire. Lee was scraping his hatchet’s edge with a whetstone; he saw I was awake, and tossed another branch on the blaze. Thompson and his men were asleep. My back was cold. I rolled so it faced the fire, and felt the heat finger me. Tom and Jennings stared into the flames, looking morose.

Our camp was in a little bend in the creek, in a hollow created where a big tree had fallen and torn out its roots. Beside our lean-to the roots still poked at the sky, adding to our shelter. The trees around the fallen one were tall enough to stick above the ravine, and their tops bobbed and swayed. I turned to the fire and nestled down again. The stream gurgled, the fire snapped and hissed, the treetops hooted as loudly as their broken voices would let them. I fell asleep.

The next time I woke it was night. The snow appeared to have stopped. We got the fire roaring, and stood and stretched around it. The last loaf of bread was pulled out of Thompson’s pack, and divided among the seven of us. Kathryn’s bread never tasted any better than this damp stale stuff. Tom pulled some sticks of dried fish from his shoulder bag and passed them around, and Lee handed us each his cup after he had heated some water in it. Noticing Tom’s bag when he reached in it I said, “Did you save those books Wentworth gave you?”

“Yes. They never even got wet.”

“Good.”

Over the ravine the wind was strengthening, and I could make out low clouds racing overhead. The San Diegans discussed their plans, dragging it out to pass the time. They got me to tell the story of my swim in detail. After that they went back to their considerations, and decided that unless the storm got worse or went away altogether, they would abandon the dinghy and hike down the rail line. They had food cached along the way, and seemed to feel there would be no trouble returning overland. Tom and I could come with them, or head north; Onofre, Lee assured us, was just a few miles away. Tom nodded at that. “We’ll head home.” Silence fell. Jennings asked me to describe the Japanese captain again, and I told them everything I could remember. When I mentioned the captain’s ring the San Diegans were disgusted, and in a way pleased. It was another sign of corruption. Tom frowned, as if he didn’t like me giving them any more signs like that. The San Diegans began to tell us tales of the life on Catalina. I was interested, but couldn’t keep awake. I sat down and nodded off.

Despite the cold and wet, I slept for several hours. I came to about midnight, however, and quickly found I had slept my fill. I took a branch from beneath me and laid it on the fire. We had a good bed of coals by that time, and the branch caught fire almost immediately. By its light I could see the other men, lying back in the lean-to or on their sides across the fire from me. To my surprise, firelight glinted off their eyes. Every one of them was awake, waiting for day to arrive. My feet were cold, I was stiff and sore all over, and there wasn’t a chance I was going to fall asleep again. The hours passed ever so slowly—cramped, stiff, hungry, boring, miserable hours—another of those stretches that are skipped over when tales are told, although if mine is any example, a good part of every adventure is spent in just such a way, waiting in great discomfort to be able to do something else. Lee tossed another branch on the fire beside mine, and we watched it give off steam until flames appeared and got a purchase on it.

A lot of branches turned to ash before the ghostly light of a storm dawn slowly created distances between all the black shapes in the ravine. It was snowing again, fitfully. I could see, looking at the whiskery lined faces of the men, that they were as stiff and cold and hungry as I was. Lee rose and went to cut some more firewood. The rest of the men stood up as well, and walked away to take a leak or stretch out sore muscles.

When Lee came back, he threw the wood he had gathered on the coals, and cursed at the smoke. “We might as well get going,” he croaked. “Weather isn’t going to get any better for a good while, I don’t believe. And I don’t want to spend another day waiting it out.”

Thompson and the sailors weren’t so sure, I could tell. Jennings said to them, “When we get to Ten Post River there’s a box of food and clothing. We can put up a shelter like this one here if we need to, and we’ll have some food.”

“How far away is that?” Thompson asked.

“Five miles, maybe.”

“Pretty far in this weather.”

“Yeah, but we can do it. And these two can be back up in Onofre by midday.”

Thompson agreed to the plan, and without further ado we got ready to leave. Jennings laughed at my woeful face and gave me his underpants, thick white things that hung past my heels, and were still a trifle damp. “With these and that coat you should be okay.”

“Thanks, Mr. Jennings.”

“Say nothing of it. We’re the ones who got you dumped in the drink. You’ve had a wild one, I’d say.”

“It’s not over yet,” Tom said, looking up at the flying snow.

We hiked up the ravine until it was only a dip in the plain of the forest, and then stopped. Water dripped from the branches around us, and the wind swirled. Fearfully I felt the cold climb past my numb bare feet and up my legs; I’d had enough of that.

We said a hasty farewell to the San Diegans. “We’ll be back to Onofre soon, so I can collect my clothes,” Jennings told me.

“And the Mayor will want to hear from you,” Lee said to Tom.

We promised to be ready for them, and after some awkward shuffling of the feet they were off through the trees. Tom and I turned and walked north. Soon we came upon the torn remains of a narrow asphalt road, and Tom declared we should follow it.

“Shouldn’t we go up to the freeway?”

“Too exposed. The wind will be howling in the open stretches.”

“I know, but there are open stretches here too. And it would be easier walking.”

“Maybe so. Your feet, eh? But it’s too cold up there. Besides, this road has a whole string of little cinderblock restrooms from when it was a beach park. We can stop in them if we have to, and I’ve got a couple of them stocked with wood.”

“Okay.”

The road was just patches of asphalt on the forest floor, broken pretty regularly by little ravines. We made slow going of it, and soon I couldn’t feel my feet at all. Walking seemed exceptionally hard work. Tom kept on my windward side, and occasionally held me up with his right arm. I lost track of our surroundings until we came to a long stretch of treeless land, covered with waist-high brush that flailed in the wind. Here we could see far out to sea, and the wind struck us full force.

“Tom, I’m cold.”

“I know. There’s one of the old restrooms ahead; we’ll stop there. See it?”

But when we got there we found that the opposite side of it was smashed, and the roof was gone. It was filling with slush.

“Damn,” said Tom. “Must be the next one.”

On we went. I couldn’t seem to shiver. “Tengo sueño,” I muttered. “Ten-go suen-yo.” The cold: I know I’ve mentioned it many times. But not enough to indicate its power, its deadly influence—the way it hurts even when you’re numb, and the way that the pain saps your strength, and the way that a part of your mind stays awake, scared to death that other parts are as asleep as your fingers…

“Henry!”

“… What.”

“Here comes the next one. Put your arm around me. Henry! Put your arm around me. Like so.” He held me up, and we stumbled toward the next little block pile—the only building from the old time I had ever seen that was smaller than my home.

“That’s it,” Tom assured me. “We’ll just pop in there and get warmed up, and then take off again. It can’t blow this hard all day. We’re not more than two miles from home, I’d guess, but this wind is too much. We got to take shelter.”

The shrubs bounced against the ground again and again, and upslope the trees howled. Snow obscured the view to sea, it kept striking me in the eyes. We reached the block building, and Tom looked in the open doorway warily. “Oh good,” he said. “This is the one. And no beasties in it either.”

He pulled me inside, helped me sit down against one block wall. The doorway was on the inland side, so the wind shelter was complete. That in itself was a blessing. But in the corner across from me was a big pile of branches, wood long dead and perfectly dry. Tom leaped to the pile with cries of self-congratulation, and began shifting it into the doorway. When he had it all arranged to his satisfaction he dug around in his shoulder bag and pulled out a lighter. He snapped it; as if he had said a magic spell a tall flame stood off the end of it. Behind the little orange flame his face gleamed, a grin splitting it in two, showing his half-dozen remaining teeth. Water dripped down his pate into the complicated delta system of his wrinkles, his beard and hair were tangled, and his eyes were wide open so that the whites showed over the iris. His hand shook, and he laughed like an animal. He flicked the flame off and on twice, then crouched down and applied it to the smaller branches and twigs at the bottom of his pile. In hardly any time at all the whole pile was blazing. The air in the little room cooked. I held my feet in my hands, and shifted across the floor to put them closer to the flames. Tom saw me move on my own and he hopped around the fire cheerfully.

“Now if we had food we’d be set. A castle wouldn’t beat it. My own house wouldn’t beat it. Man, look at that wind. Tearing it up. But the snow seems to be stopping. When we get nice and warm we should probably make a quick run for home and get a meal, eh? Specially if it stops snowing.”

From inside our tiny fortress the waterfall roar of the wind was loud. I got warm enough to start shivering again, and my feet pricked and burned. Tom put more wood on. “Whoo-eee! Look at that wind. Boy, this is it. This is it, you understand me?”

“Uh.” I thought I did understand him, but this wasn’t it for me. It was treading water at night outside a giant swell breaking, not knowing whether there was rocks between me and the shore. I’d had my fill of it.

We got warm enough to take off our clothes and scorch a little water out of them. Then Tom urged me to get ready to leave. “It ain’t snowing, and the day won’t last forever.” I was ravenous so I agreed with him, though I was unhappy to leave our shelter. In what sounded like a lull in the wind we left our blockhouse and hurried along the asphalt road. The wind instantly cooled our clothes back down, as I knew it would, and I could feel how wet my coat and pants were. The clouds galloped overhead, but for the moment the snow had stopped.

“Snow in July,” Tom muttered with a curse. He took the windward side again and matched me step for step. Both of us had our faces turned away from the wind. “This area never used to get snow. Never. Barely got rain. And the ocean temperature bouncing around like that. Crazy. Something severely screwed up with the world’s weather, Hank, I tell you that with the utmost certainty. I wonder if we’ve kicked off another ice age. Boy, wouldn’t that teach them? Sure would teach them, damn it. If they did it with the war, serves them right and amen to that. If we kicked it off before they got us, then that would be funny. Posthumous revenge, right Henry? Eh?” On and on he puffed with his nonsense, trying to distract me. “You learnt a passage once that fits our situation here, didn’t you Hank? Didn’t I assign you something like this? Tom’s a-cold, boy you said it. Freezing! I never did learn it by memory myself. Blow, winds! Hail, hurricanoes! Something like that. Surely good casting, if I say so myself…” and so on, until the cold got to him too, and he put his head down and his arm around my waist and we trudged it out. It seemed to go on forever. Once I glanced up, and saw the sea as green as the forest, gray clouds massed over it, whitecaps breaking out everywhere on its surface, so that it was almost as white as it was green. Then I put my head down again.

Finally Tom said, “There’s my house ridge up there. We’ve almost made it.”

“Good.”

Then we were back among trees, and crossing that ridge. Past Concrete Bay and up to the freeway. It was snowing again and we could hardly see any distance at all. Trees appeared like ghosts out of the falling slush. I wanted to hurry but my feet were gone again and I kept stumbling on things. If it weren’t for the old man I would have fallen a dozen times.

“Let’s go to my house,” I said. “Can’t climb to yours.”

“Sure. Your pa will want to see you anyway.”

Even the valley seemed to stretch out, and it took hard walking to cross it. We weaved past the big eucalypus at the corner, up to my door. I’ve never been happier to see that shack in my life. White slush slid down the roof as we pounded the door and burst in like long lost voyagers. Pa had been asleep. Looking surprised he gave me a hug, tugged his moustache. “You look terrible,” he said. “What happened to your clothes?” Tom and I laughed. I put my feet right on the stove and felt the skin scorch. Tom was talking fast as Jennings, and laughing every other sentence. I ransacked the shelves and threw Tom a half loaf of bread, saving a chunk for myself. “Got anything else?” Tom inquired, mouth full. Pa got out some jerky for us, and we wolfed it down. We ate every scrap of food in the place, and stoked up the fire in the stove higher than it had been since my ma died. “I didn’t know what I was going to tell you,” Tom was saying. “He was gone for good!” Pa’s eyes were wide. I took out the wash bucket and washed myself with a rag, getting all the sand out of my crotch and armpits. My feet burned something fierce. We both kept telling Pa our story, confusing him no end. Finally we both shut up at the same time.

“Sounds like you had a time,” Pa said.

“Yes,” Tom said. He jammed a last chunk of bread in his mouth, nodded, swallowed. “That was something.”