The Wild Shore

11

After Tom went home I slept like a dead man for the rest of the day and all that night. When I woke up the next morning I was annoyed to see that the storm was over. The sun streamed in the door like it had never left. Why, if we had held on one more day in our shelter, we could have waltzed home easy as you please! Pa heard me moan and he stopped sewing. “Want me to get the water this morning?”

“No, I’ll do it. I’m sore is all.” Actually my arms were blocks of wood, and my legs scissors, and I was unhappy to discover a host of scratches and scrapes and bruises that hurt practically every time I breathed. But I had an urge to get out and look around.

When I got outside and started down the path (buckets jerking my poor arms every step) the sunlight stung my eyes. There were still some clouds but mostly it was sunny, everything steaming. The Costas’ drum house looked like it was on fire it was steaming so. I creaked down the path staring and staring.

Have I described the valley yet? It is in the shape of a cupped hand, and filled with trees. Down in the crease of the palm is the river winding to the sea, and the fields of corn and barley and potatoes. The heel of the hand is Basilone Hill, and up there is the Costas’ place, and Addison’s tower, and Rafael’s rambling house and workshop. Across from that, the spiny forested fingers of Tom’s ridge. All of the oldest houses were eccentric, I noticed; I had never thought of it that way before, but it was so. Rafael kept adding rooms to store machinery and things, and they followed the contour of the hillside, so that in time, if you were to try and draw a plan of it, it would look like an X written on top of a W. Doc Costa had made his house of oil drums, as I’ve said, to hold in the heat in the winter and the cool in the summer. Probably he hadn’t counted on the house whistling like a banshee in the least little breeze; he said it didn’t bother him any, but I thought it might be the reason Mando scared so easily. The Nicolins had their big old time house on the beach cliff, and the Eggloffs had their home burrowed back into the hillside where thumb and finger would meet, if you were still thinking of the valley as a cupped hand; they lived like weasels in there, and by the graveyard too, but they claimed to have Doc all beat as far as warmth in the winter and cool in the summer were concerned. And then there was Tom, up on his ridge where he was bound to get frozen by storms and baked by the sun, but did he care? Not him—he wanted to see. So did Addison Shanks, apparently, set up on Basilone Hill in a house built around an old electric tower; but maybe he was there because it was nice and close to San Clemente, where he could conduct his dealings with no one the wiser. The newer houses, now, were all down in the valley next to the fields, convenient to the river, and everybody had helped build them, so that they looked pretty much the same: square boxes, steel struts at the corners, old wood for walls, wood or sheet metal, maybe tiles, for a roof. The same design twice as long and you had the bathhouse.

When I got to the river I sat gingerly. It all looked so familiar and yet so strange. Before my trip south Onofre was just home, a natural place, and the houses, the bridge and the paths, the fields and the latrines, they were all just as much a part of it as the cliffs and the river and the trees. But now I saw it all in a new way. The path. A broad swath of dusty dirt cutting through the weeds, curving here to get around the corner of the Simpsons’ garden, narrowing there where rocks cramped it on both sides… It went where it did because there had been agreement, when folks first moved to the valley, that this was the best way to the river from the meadows to the south. People’s thinking made that path. I looked at the bridge—rough planks on steel struts, spanning the gap between the stone bases on each bank. People I knew had thought that bridge, and built it. And the same was true of every structure in the valley. I tried to look at the bridge in the old way, as part of things as they were, but it didn’t work. When you’ve changed you can’t go back. Nothing looks the same ever again.

Walking back from the river, arms aching with the weight of the full buckets, I was grabbed roughly from behind.

“Ow!”

“You’re back!” It was Nicolin, teeth bared in a grin. “Where you been hiding?”

“I just got back last night,” I protested.

He took one of my buckets. “Well, tell me about it.”

We walked up the path. “Man, you’re all dinged up!” Steve said. “You’re hobbling!” I nodded and told him about the train ride south, and the Mayor’s dinner. Nicolin squinted as he imagined the Mayor’s island house, but I thought, he’s not getting it right. There was nothing I could do about it by talking, either. When I told him about the trip home, my swim and all, he put his bucket down in Pa’s garden and took me by the shoulders to shake me, laughing at the clouds. “Jumped overboard! And in a storm! Good work, Henry. Good work.”

“Hard work,” I said, rubbing my arm as he danced around the bucket. But I was pleased.

He stopped dancing and pursed his lips. “So these Japanese are landing in Orange County?”

I nodded.

“And the Mayor of San Diego wants us to help put a stop to it?”

“Right again. But Tom doesn’t seem real fond of the idea.”

There were snails on the cabbage, and I stooped to kill them off. Down close I could see the damage pests had done to every head. Miserable cabbage it was, and I sighed, thinking of the salads at the Mayor’s dinner.

“I knew those scavengers were up to no good,” Nicolin said. “But helping the Japanese, that’s despicable. We’ll make them pay for it. And we’ll be the American resistance!” He swung a fist at the sky.

“Part of it, anyway.”

The idea took him into regions of his own, and he wandered the garden insensible to me. I yanked some weeds and inspected the rest of the cabbages. Gave it up as a bad job.

The next morning Steve dropped by to walk with me down to the rivermouth. The men there stopped launching the boats long enough to greet me and ask some questions. When John walked by we all shut up and looked busy until he passed. Eventually we got the boats off, and getting them outside the swell took all our attention. The men were impressed that I’d managed to swim in through such a swell at night, and to tell the truth so was I. In fact I was scared all over again. Far to the south the long curving lines of the swell swept toward the land, crashed over, tumbled whitely to shore. For a display of raw power there was nothing to match it. I was lucky to be alive, damned lucky!

Rafael wanted to hear everything about the Japanese, so all the time we were getting the nets out I talked, and he questioned me, and I had a good time. John rowed by and ordered Steve to get out and do the rod fishing—told me to stay with the nets. Steve got in the dinghy and rowed off south, with a resentful glance over his shoulder at us.

And then it was fishing again. The boats tossed hard in the swell, the spray gleamed in the sun, the green hills bounced. We cast the nets (my arms complaining with every pull or throw), and rowed them into circles and drew them up again heavy with fish. I rowed, pulled on nets, whacked fish, caught my balance on the gunwale, talked, kneaded my arms, and, looking up once at the familiar sight of the valley from the sea, I figured my adventure had ended. Despite all I was sorry about that.

When the fishing was done and the boats on the flat, Steve and I found the whole gang waiting for us on the top of the cliff. Kathryn hugged me and Del and Gabby and Mando slapped my sore back, and oohed and aahed over my cuts and bruises. Kristen and Rebel joined us from the bread ovens, and they all demanded that I tell my story to them. So I sat and began to tell it.

Now this was the third time I’d told the tale in two days, and I had latched on to certain turns of phrase that seemed to tell it best. But it was also the third time that Nicolin had heard it, and I could tell by the tightness in the corner of his mouth, and the way he looked off into the trees, that he was getting tired of it. He recognized all my phrases, and it slowed me down. I found new ways to describe what had happened, but that didn’t make much difference. I found myself passing over events as fast as I could, and Gab and Del jumped in to pepper me with questions about the details. I answered the questions, and I could see that Nicolin was listening, but he kept looking into the trees. Even though I was just telling the facts I began to feel like I was bragging. Kathryn braided her disobedient hair and encouraged me with an exclamation here and there; she saw what was going on, and I caught her giving Steve a hard look. We got back on the subject of San Diego, and I told them about La Jolla, thinking that Nicolin hadn’t yet heard about that part of the trip. I described the ruined school, and the place where they printed books, and sure enough Nicolin’s mouth relaxed and he looked at me.

“… And then after he’d shown us the whole place he gave Tom a couple of books, a blank one to write in, and another one they just printed, called”—I hesitated for effect—“An American Around the World.”

“What’s this?” Steve said. “A book?”

“An American around the world,” Mando said, savoring the words, his eyes fish-round.

I told them what I knew. “This guy sailed to Catalina, and from there he went all the way around the world, back to San Diego.”

“How?” Steve asked.

“I don’t know. That’s what the book tells, and I haven’t read it. We didn’t have time.”

Said Steve, “Why didn’t you tell me about this book before?”

I shrugged.

“Do you think Tom is done reading it yet?” Mando asked.

“I wouldn’t be surprised. He reads fast.”

Nicolin stood up. “Henry, you know I’ve already heard about your swim, so you’ll excuse me if I go pry that book out of the old man’s hands for us.”

“Stephen,” Kathryn said impatiently, but I cut her off, saying, “Sure.”

“I got to read that book. If I get hold of it we can read it together in the morning.”

“By that time you’ll be done with it,” Gabby said.

“Steve,” Kathryn said again, but he was already on his way and he waved her off without looking back.

We all sat there and watched him hurry up to the freeway. I went on with my story, but even though Steve had been putting a crimp in my style, it wasn’t as much fun.

It was near sunset when I finished. Gabby and Del took off. Mando and Kristen followed; at the freeway Mando sidled up to Kristen and took her hand. I raised my eyebrows, and seeing it Kathryn laughed.

“Yeah, something’s going on there.”

“Must have happened while I was gone.”

“Earlier, I think, but they’re bolder now.”

“Anything else happen?”

She shook her head.

“What was Steve like?”

“Oh… not so good. It bothered him, you and Tom being off. Things were tight between him and John. Those two…”

“I know.”

“I was hoping he would calm down when you got back.”

“Maybe he will.”

She shook her head, and I guessed she was right. “Those San Diegans will be coming this way again, right? And that book. I don’t know what will happen when he reads that.” She looked afraid, and it surprised me. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Kathryn look afraid.

“Just a book,” I said weakly.

She shook her head and gave me a sharp look. “He’ll end up wanting to go around the damn world, I know it.”

“I don’t think he could.”

“Wanting is enough as far as I’m concerned.” She sounded so bitter and low that I wanted to ask her what was going on between her and Steve. Surely it was more than the book. But I hesitated. It was none of my business, no matter how well I knew them and no matter how curious I was. “We’d best be home,” she said. Sun slipping under the hills. I followed her to the river path, watching her back and her wild hair. Across the bridge she put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze that hurt me. “I’m glad you didn’t drown out there.”

“Me too.”

She laughed and took off. Once again I wondered what went on between her and Steve—what their talk was like, and all. It was like anything else: I was most curious about the things I couldn’t know. Even if one of them were willing to tell me about it, they couldn’t—there wasn’t the time for it, nor the honesty.

That night Nicolin came by fuming. “He wouldn’t give me the book! Can you believe it? He says come back tomorrow.”

“At least he’s going to let us read it.”

“Well of course! He sure better! I’d punch him if he didn’t and take it away from him! I can’t wait to read it, can you?”

“I want to bad,” I admitted.

“Do you suppose the author went to England? That would tell us more about the east coast; I hope he did.” And we discussed possible routes and travel problems, without a fact to base our speculation on, until Pa kicked us out of the house, saying it was his bedtime. Under the big eucalyptus tree we agreed to go up to Tom’s next day after fishing, and beat the book out of him if we had to; we were fiercely determined to dent our ignorance of the world, and this book seemed likely to do it.

By the time we got up to Tom’s place the following day, Mando and Kristen and Rebel were already there. “Give it over,” Nicolin said as we burst in the door.

“Ho ho,” Tom said, tilting his head and staring at Steve. “I was thinking I might give it to someone else first.”

“If you do I’ll just have to take it away from them.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Tom drawled, looking around the room. “By rights Hank here should get first crack at it. He saw it first, you know.”

This was touching a sore spot; Nicolin scowled. He was dead serious, but Tom met his black gaze blinking like a lamb.

“Ha,” Tom said. “Well, listen here, Steve Nicolin. I got to go and work the hives for a while. I’ll lend you the book, but since these others want to read it too, you read a chapter or three aloud before you go. In fact, read until I get back, and we’ll talk about our lending agreement then.”

“Deal,” Nicolin said. “Give it over.”

Tom went into his bedroom and reappeared with the book in hand. Nicolin pounced on him and they yelled and pounded each others’ shoulders until Nicolin had it. Tom gathered his beekeeping gear, saying, “You be careful of those pages now,” and “Don’t bend the back too hard,” and the like.

When he was gone Steve sat by the window. “Okay, I’m gonna read. Sit down and be quiet.”

We sat, and he read.

AN AMERICAN AROUND THE WORLD

Being an Account of a Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 2030 to 2039, by GLEN BAUM.

I was born in La Jolla, the son of a ruined country, and I grew up in ignorance of the world and its ways; but I knew it was out there, and that I was being kept from it. On the night of my twenty-third birthday I stood on the peak of Mount Soledad and looked out at the ocean’s wide waste. On the horizon to the west faint lights blinked like red stars, clustered together constellationlike on the black lump in the blackness that was San Clemente Island. Under those red pricks of light strode the never seen foreigners whose job it was to guard me from the world, as if my country were a prison. Suddenly I found the situation intolerable, and I resolved then and there, kicking the rocks of the summit into a cairn as a seal of my pledge, that I would escape the constraints put upon me, and wander the globe to see what I would. I would discover what the world was really like; see what changes had occurred since the great devastation of my country; return, and tell my countrymen what I had seen.

After some weeks of thought and preparation I stood on the stub of Scripps pier with my tearful mother and a few friends. The little sloop that had been my father’s bobbed impatiently over the waves. I kissed my mother good-bye, promising to return within four years if it was within my power, and climbed down the pier’s ladder into my craft. It was just after sunset. With some trepidation I cast off and sailed away into the night.

It was a clear night, the Santa Ana wind blowing mildly from my starboard rear quarter, and I made good time northwest. My plan was to sail to Catalina rather than San Clemente Island, for Catalina was rumored to have ten times as many foreigners as San Clemente, and it also had the major airport. In my boat I carried a good thick coat, and a pack filled with bread and my mother’s cheese; nothing else I could obtain in La Jolla would have been any use to me, I reckoned. I crossed the channel in ten hours, on the same reach the entire way.

To the east blues were leaking into blacks by the time I approached the steep side of Catalina Island. Its black hills, ribbed by lighter black ridges, were starred by lights red and white and yellow and blue. I sailed around the southern end of the island, planning to land on a likely looking beach and walk to Avalon. Unfortunately for my plan, the west side of Catalina appeared to be very sheer, beachless rock cliffs, unlike any similar stretch of the San Diego coast; and it was now that time of the dawn when everything is distinguishable but the colors of things. Through that gray world I coasted (in the island’s lee the wind was slack) when to my surprise a sail was hauled up on a mast I hadn’t seen before, against the cliff. Immediately I tried to veer back out to sea, but the boat tacked slowly out ahead of me and intercepted my course. I was contemplating steering into the cliff and taking my chances there, when I saw that the only person aboard the other boat was a blackhaired girl. She put her boat on a parallel course after crossing ahead of me, and brought her boat next to mine, staring all the while at me.

“Who are you?” she called.

“A fisherman from Avalon.”

She shook her head. “Who are you?”

After a moment’s indecision I chose boldness and cried, “I come from the mainland, travelling to Avalon and the world!”

She gestured for me to pull down my sail; I did, she did likewise, and our boats came together. Though her skin was white, her features were Oriental. I asked her if there was a beach I could land on. She said there was, but that they were patrolled, like all the island’s shore, by guards who either saw your papers or took you to jail.

I had not foreseen this difficulty, and was at a loss. I watched the water lap between our boats, and then said to the girl, “Will you help me?”

“Yes,” she replied, “And my father will get you papers. Here, get in my boat; we must leave yours behind.”

Reluctantly I clambered over the gunwales, pack in hand. My father’s boat bucked emptily. Before we cast off from it, I took a hatchet from the bottom of the girl’s boat, reached over and knocked a hole in the bottom of mine. Surreptitiously I wiped a tear from my eye as I watched it founder.

When we rounded the southern point and approached Avalon the girl—her name was Hadaka—instructed me to get under the fish in the bottom of her boat. She had been night fishing, and had a collection on her keel that I was unhappy to associate with—eels, squid, sand sharks, rockfish, octopus, all thrown together. But I did as she said. I lay smothering, still as the dead fish over me, as she stopped to be questioned in Japanese at the entrance to Avalon harbor; and I sailed into Avalon with an octopus on my face.

When Hadaka had docked the boat I quickly jumped up and acted as her assistant. “Leave the fish,” she said when they were covered. “Quick, up to my house.” We walked up a steep street past markets just opening. I felt conspicuous, for my smell if for no other reason, but no one paid any untoward attention to us, and high on the hill surrounding the town we slipped through a gate and were in her family’s little yard garden. To the east the sun cracked the floor of America and shone on us. I had left my country behind; I was on foreign soil for the first time in my life.

“Well, that’s Chapter One,” Steve said. “He’s on Catalina!”

“Read some more!” Mando cried. “Keep going!”

“No more,” Tom said from the door. “It’s late, and I need some peace and quiet.” He coughed, and put his bee gear down in a corner. He waved us out: “Nicolin, you can keep the book for as long as it takes you to read it—”

“Yow!”

“Wait a minute! For as long as it takes you to read it aloud to the others here.”

“Yeah!” said Mando as he hungrily eyed the book.

“That would be fun,” Kristen said, glancing at Mando.

“Okay,” Steve agreed. “I like it that way anyway.”

“Well then, get home to supper. All of you!” Tom shooed us out the door with some dire warnings to Steve about what would happen if the book should come to harm. Steve laughed and led us down the ridge path, holding the book up triumphantly. I looked out in the direction of Catalina with whetted curiosity, but clouds obscured it from view. Americans were on that island! How I longed to travel there myself. My battered toe thumped a rock and with a howl I returned my attention to the ground beneath me. Down where the trail divided we stopped and agreed to meet the following afternoon to read some more.

“Let’s meet at the ovens,” Kristen said. “Kathryn wants to do a full batch tomorrow.”

“After the fishing.” Steve nodded, and skipped down the beach path, swinging the book overhead.

But the next day after fishing he wasn’t so cheerful. John was on him for something or other, and when we got the boats pulled out of the river Steve was ordered to help sort and clean the fish. He stood still as a rock staring at his pa, until I sort of nudged him and got him to walk away. “I’ll tell them you’ll be late,” I said, and beat it up the cliff before he took his frustration out on me with more than a glare.

Up at the ovens Kathryn had the girls at work: Kristen and Rebel were pumping the bellows, all flushed with the effort, their hair streaked with flour. Kathryn and Carmen Eggloff were shaping the tortillas and loaves and arranging them on the trays. The air above the brick ovens shimmered with heat. Around behind the corner of the Marianis’ house Mrs. M. was helping some of the other girls knead barley dough. Kathryn stopped bossing Kristen and Rebel long enough to greet me. “Go ahead and sit down,” she said when I told them Steve would be late. “Mando and Del aren’t here yet anyway.”

“Men are always late,” Mrs. M. said around the corner. It was her great pleasure to hang out with the girls and gossip. “Henry, where’s your friend Melissa?” she asked, hoping to embarrass me.

“Haven’t seen her since I got back,” I replied easily.

Rebel and Carmen were arguing. “I can’t believe Jo would be so stupid as to get pregnant again,” Carmen said. “It’s a shame.”

“Not if she has a good one,” said Rebel.

“She’s had four bad ones in a row. I think that’s a sign she should heed.”

Rebel said, “But it’s hard to be pregnant all that time and nothing to show for it.”

“They were bad ones,” Carmen said. “Real bad.”

“God made the bad ones too,” Rebel said, pursing her lips.

“He didn’t make them bad,” Carmen countered. “It was radiation that did that, and I’m sure God doesn’t approve. Those that are born bad, it’s a blessing to them to send them back to God and let Him try with them again. If we let them live they’d be a burden on themselves as much as on us. I can’t see how you don’t see that, Reb.”

Rebel shook her head stubbornly. “They’re all God’s children.”

“But they would be a burden,” Kathryn put in practically. “You have to figure you’re not about to have a kid until after its Name Day.”

“We don’t have the right,” Rebel said. “What if you had been born with only one arm, Kate? You’d still have had the brains and drive to bring bread back to this valley. Your gift isn’t in your body.”

“It was yeast brought bread back, not me,” Kathryn said, trying to lighten things.

“But if we let them live,” Carmen said, “half the valley would be crippled. And the generation after that might not survive.”

“I don’t believe that,” Rebel said. Her mom had had three bad ones after Del and her, and she was pretty touchy about it. I think she missed those little tykes. But Carmen was just as firm the other way. She and Doc made the decisions, and I don’t think she liked the matter discussed at all. Kathryn saw they were getting wrought up, and noticed my interest, and I don’t think she wanted it happening with me around. She said, “Maybe Jo didn’t plan to get pregnant.”

“I bet she didn’t,” Mrs. M. said with a smirk. “Marvin Hamish is not one to watch the moon too close.” They laughed, even Rebel and Carmen. Then Mando and Del arrived, and the conversation shifted to the quality of the grain this season. Kathryn was depressed about it; the storm that had almost killed me had succeeded with a good portion of her crop.

Then Steve arrived. He swung Kathryn off the ground with a hug, and dusted the flour off his hands.

“Katie, you’re a mess!” he cried.

“And you smell like fish!” she cried back.

“Do not. All right, it’s time for Chapter Two of this fine book.”

“Not until we get these trays into the ovens,” Kathryn said. “You can help.”

“Hey, I finished my day’s work.”

“Get over there and help,” Kathryn commanded. Steve shambled over, and we all got up to get the trays in.

“Pretty tough boss,” Steve scoffed.

“You shut up and watch what you’re doing,” Kathryn said.

When we got the trays in we all sat, and Steve pulled the book from his coat pocket, and started the story again.

Chapter II. The International Island.

Between two rosebushes thick with yellow blooms stood a tall white woman holding a pair of garden shears. Though they did not look much alike, she was Hadaka’s mother. When she saw me she snapped the shears angrily.

“Who is this?” she cried, and Hadaka hung her head. “Have you brought home another one, foolish girl?”

“So that’s how she gets her boyfriends,” Rebel interjected, to hoots from the girls. “Not a bad method!”

“That’s what you call fishing for men all right,” Carmen said.

“Quiet!” Steve ordered, and went on.

“I saw him sailing to the forbidden shore, mother, and I knew he came from the mainland—”

“Quiet! I’ve heard it all before.”

I put in, “I am deeply grateful to your daughter and yourself for saving my life.”

“This only encourages your father,” Hadaka’s mother fumed. Then to me: “They wouldn’t have killed you unless you tried to escape.”

“See,” Kathryn said to me, “they might have killed you when you jumped off their ship. You were in a more dangerous position than you’ve let on.”

I began “Umm, well—”

“Stow it,” said Steve. He was tired of hearing about my adventure, that was sure. Mando added, “Please.” Mando was desperate to hear the story; he really loved it. Steve nodded approvingly and started again.

Her shears snipped the air. “Come in and get yourself cleaned up.” She wrinkled her nose as I passed her, and beslimed and bewhiskered as I was I could hardly blame her; I felt like a barbarian. Inside their tile-walled bathing room I washed under a shower that provided water from freezing to boiling, depending on the bather’s desire. Mrs. Nisha (for such, I found, was their family name) brought me some clothes and showed me how to use a buzzing shaver. When all was done I stood before a perfect mirror in gray pants and a bright blue shirt, a cosmopolitan.

When he arrived home Hadaka’s father was less upset by my presence than his wife had been. Mr. Nisha looked me up and down and shook my hand, invited me in harsh English to sit with the family. He was Japanese, as I may not have said, and he looked much like Hadaka, although his skin was dark. He was a good deal shorter than Mrs. Nisha.

“Must procure you papers,” he said after Hadaka told him the story of my arrival. “I get you papers, you work for me a little while. Is it a deal?”

“It’s a deal.”

He asked a hundred questions, and after that a hundred more. I told him everything about me, including my plans. It seemed I had been even luckier than I yet knew, having Hadaka intercept me, for Mr. Nisha was a worker in the Japanese government of the Channel Islands, in the department supervising the Americans living there. In this work he had met Mrs. Nisha, who had crossed the channel as I had some twenty years before. Mr. Nisha also had a hand in a dozen other activities at least, and most of them were illegal, although it took me a week or two to realize this fully. But from that very night I saw that he was quite an entrepreneur, and I took pains to let him know I would serve him in any way I could. When he was done questioning me all three of them showed me to a cot in their garden shed, and I retired in good spirits.

Within the week I had papers proving I had been born on Catalina and had spent my life there, serving the Japanese. After that I could leave the Nishas’ house freely, and Mr. Nisha put me to work fishing with Hadaka and weeding their garden. Later, after this trial period was done, he had me exchange heavy brown packages with strangers on the streets of Avalon, or escort Japanese from the airport on the backside of the island into town, without of course subjecting them to the inconveniences of the various checkpoints.

It should not be imagined that these and the other clandestine activities Mr. Nisha assigned to me were at all unusual in Avalon. It was a town teeming with representatives of every race and creed and nation, and as the United Nations had declared that the island was to be used by the Japanese only, and only for the purpose of quarantining the American coast, it was obvious that many visitors were there illegally. But officials like Mr. Nisha existed in great numbers, at all levels, both on Catalina and in the Hawaiian Islands, which served as the entry point to western America. Almost everyone in town had papers authorizing their presence, and it was impossible to tell whose were forged or bought; but wandering the streets I saw people dressed in all manner of clothing, with features Oriental, or Mexican, or with skin as black as the night sky; and I knew something was amiss in the Japanese administration.

I was happy to try conversing with any or all of these foreigners, employing my few words of Japanese, and listening to some peculiar versions of English. The only persons I was wary of talking to were those who looked American, and I noticed that they were not anxious to talk with me either. Chances were too good that they were refugees as I was, employed in some desperate enterprise to stay in Avalon; it was rumored that quite a few worked for the police. In the face of such dangers it seemed best to ignore any fellow feeling.

The old part of Avalon stood much as it had in the old time, I was told: small whitewashed houses covering the hillsides that fell into the little bay that served as the harbor. Jetties had been built to enlarge the harbor, and new construction spilled over the hills to the north and west, hundreds of buildings in the Japanese style, with thick beams and thin walls, and peaky tile roofs. The whole of the island had new concrete roads, lined with low stone walls that divided the grounds of parklike estates, on which were giant mansions that the Japanese called dachas. Here officials of the U.N. and the Japanese administration made their homes. The dachas on the west side of the island were smaller; the really big ones faced the mainland, as the view of America was greatly prized. The biggest dachas of all, I heard, were on the east side of San Clemente Island; it was their lights I had seen on the night I decided to circumnavigate the globe.

A few weeks passed. I travelled in a car over the white roads, drove once and nearly crashed into a wall; when one drives there is a gale created merely by one’s passage over the road, and everything moves a bit too fast for the reflexes.

“Isn’t that what you said you felt when you were on the trains?” Rebel interrupted to ask me.

“That’s true,” I said. “You go so fast that you’re ripping through the air. I’m glad we didn’t have to drive that train; we would’ve crashed a hundred times.”

“Quiet!” Mando exclaimed, and Steve nodded and went on, too absorbed in the story to even look up from the page.

I saw the giant flying machines, jets, land at the airport like pelicans, and take off with roars that almost burst the ears. And all the while I pursued various tasks for the gain of Mr. Nisha. When I had fully obtained his trust, he asked me if I would guide a night expedition to San Diego, consisting of five Japanese businessmen who were visiting Catalina expressly for that purpose. I was extremely reluctant to return to the mainland, but Mr. Nisha proposed to split the fee he charged for such a trip with me, and it was enormous. I weighed the advantages, and agreed to it.

So one night I found myself motorboating back to San Diego, giving instructions to the pilot, Ao, the only other person aboard who spoke English. Ao knew where the coast patrol ships were to be that night, and assured me there would be no interference from them. I directed him to a landing site on the inside of Point Loma, took them up to the ruins of the little lighthouse, and walked them through the lined-up white crosses of the naval cemetery—a cemetery so vast it might have been thought to hold all of the dead from the great devastation. At dawn we hid in one of the abandoned houses, and all that day the five businessmen clicked their huge cameras at the spiky downtown skyline, and the blasted harbor. That night we returned to Avalon, and I felt reasonably happy about it all.

I led four more expeditions to San Diego after that, and they were all simple and lucrative but for the last, in which I was convinced against my better judgement to lead the boat up the mouth of the Mission River at night. My readers in San Diego will know that the mouth of the Mission is congested with debris, runs over an old pair of jetties and a road or two, changes every spring, and is in general one of the most turbulent, weird, and dangerous rivermouths anywhere. Now on this night the ocean was as flat as a table, but it had rained hard the day before, and the runoff swirled over the concrete blocks in the rivermouth as over waterfalls. One of our customers fell overboard under the weight of his camera (they have cameras that photograph at night), and I dove in after him. It took a lot of effort from myself and Ao to reunite us all, and escape to sea. In a sailboat we would have drowned, and I was used to sailboats.

After that I was not so pleased with the notion of guiding further expeditions. And I had accumulated, through Mr. Nisha’s generosity, a good quantity of money. Two nights after the disaster trip, there was a big party at one of the plush dachas high on the east flank of the island, and the man whose life I had saved offered, in his dozen words of English, to hire me as a servant and take me with him to Japan. Apparently Ao had told him of my aspiration to travel, and he hoped to repay me for saving his life.

I took Hadaka out into the shaped shrubbery of the garden, and we sat over a lighted fountain that gurgled onto the terrace below. We looked at the dark bulk of the continent, and I told her of my opportunity. With a sisterly kiss (we had shared kisses of a different nature once or twice.

“I’ll bet they had!” Rebel crowed, and the girls laughed. Kathryn imitated Steve’s reading voice:

“And I prepared to tell my dear mother back home that her grandchildren would be one-quarter Japanese…”

“No interruptions!” Steve shouted, but we were in stitches now. “I’m going to go right on!” He read,

(we had shared kisses of a different nature once or twice, but I did not feel an attraction strong enough to risk Mr. Nisha’s anger)

“Oooh, coward!” Kristen cried. “What a chicken!”

“Now wait a minute,” said Steve. “This guy has a goal in mind; he wants to get around the world. He can’t just stop on Catalina. You gals never think of anything but the romance part of the story. Quiet up now or I’ll stop reading.”

“Pleeeeeeease,” Mando begged them. “I want to know what happens.”

Hadaka informed me that it would be best for all if I took the chance and departed; though the Nishas had not made me aware of it, my staying with them was not entirely safe, as my papers could be proved counterfeit, which would immerse Mr. Nisha in all kinds of trouble. It occurred to me that this was why he had shared so much of the profit of our mainland trips with me—so I could eventually leave. I decided that they were a most generous family, and that I had been exceedingly lucky to fall in with them.

I went back inside the dacha, therefore, and avoiding the naked American girls who pressed drinks and cigarettes on everybody, I told my benefactor Mr. Tasumi that I would take up his offer. Soon afterward I bade a sad farewell to my Catalina family. When I had left my mother and friends in San Diego, I could truthfully say to them that I would try to return; but what could I say to the Nishas? I kissed mother and daughter, hugged Mr. Nisha, and in a genuine conflict of feelings was driven to the airport, there to embark on a seven thousand mile flight over the great Pacific Ocean.

“That’s Chapter Two,” Steve said, closing the book. “He’s on his way.”

“Oh read some more,” Mando said.

“Not now.” He gave a sour glance at the women, who were getting the trays out of the ovens. “It’s about time for supper, I guess.” Standing up, he shook his head at me and Mando. “These gals sure are hard on a story,” he complained.

“Oh come on,” Kathryn said. “What’s the fun of reading it together if we can’t talk about it?”

“You don’t take it seriously.”

“What does that mean? Maybe we don’t take it too seriously.”

“I’m off home,” Steve said, sulking. “You coming, Hank?”

“I’m going back to my place. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Tom wants a town meeting at the church tomorrow night,” Carmen told us. “Did you know?”

None of us did, and we agreed to try to get together before the meeting, and read another chapter.

“What’s the meeting about?” Steve asked.

“San Diego,” said Carmen.

Steve stopped walking away.

“Tom’ll bring up the question of helping the San Diegans fight the Japanese,” I said. “I told you about that.”

“I’ll be there,” Steve assured us sternly, and with that he was off. I helped Kathryn scrape the new loaves off the trays, and took one home to Pa, gnawing at one end of it and wondering how many days it would take to fly across the sea.

12

Usually our big meetings were held in Carmen’s church, but this time she and Tom had been nagging every person in the valley to come—Tom had even gone into the back country to roust Odd Roger—so the church, which was a narrow barnlike building in the Eggloffs’ pasture, wasn’t going to be quite big enough, and we were meeting at the bathhouse. Pa and I got there early and helped Tom start the fire. As I carried in wood I had to dodge Odd Roger, who was inspecting the floor and walls for grubs, one of his favorite foods. Tom shook his head as he eyed Roger. “I don’t know if it was worth the trouble dragging him here.” Tom seemed less excited about the meeting than I’d expected him to be, and unusually quiet. I myself was really hopping around; tonight we were going to join the resistance, and become part of America again, at long last.

Outside the evening sky was streaked with mare’s tail clouds still catching some light, and a stiff wind blew onshore. People talked and laughed as they approached the bathhouse, and I saw lanterns sparking here and there through the trees. Across the Simpsons’ potato patch their dogs were begging with pathetic howls to join us. Steve and all his brothers and sisters arrived, and we sat down on the tarps. “So I saw that the shark had his big mouth open and was about to swallow me,” Steve was telling them, “and I stuck my oar between his jaws so he couldn’t bite me. But I had to hang on to the oar to keep from being sucked down whole, and I was running out of air too. I had to figure something out.”

Then John and Mrs. Nicolin rounded the bend in the river path, and their kids got inside quick. Marvin and Jo Hamish ambled across the bridge, Jo in a white shift that billowed away from her quickening belly. I remembered the conversation at the ovens, and wondered what she had growing in her this time. And then people were coming from everywhere, descending on the bathhouse from every direction. A gaggle of Simpson and Mendez kids appeared around the side of the grain barrows, leading their fathers, who conferred heads together as they walked. Rafael and Mando and Doc came down the hill across the river, and behind them were Add and Melissa Shanks. I waved at Melissa and she waved back, her black hair flying downwind. A bit later Carmen and Nat Eggloff trooped out of the woods, carrying a heavy lantern between them and arguing, while Manuel Reyes and his family hurried behind them to stay in the lantern light. It sounded like a swap meet was crammed into the bathhouse, and when the Marianis arrived I thought we might have more than a capacity crowd. But it was cold outside, so Rafael took over and sat everyone down: the men against the walls, the little kids in their mothers’ laps, our gang in one of the empty bathing tubs. When we were done the whole population of the valley was packed in like fish in a box, ready to go to market. Lanterns were hung on the walls and some big logs in the fire caught, and the room blazed like it never did during baths. The chattering was so loud off the sheet metal roof that the babies started to shriek and cry, and the rest of us were nearly as excited, because we never got together in such a way except for Christmas and the rare valley meeting.

Tom moved about the room slowly, talking with folks he hadn’t seen in a while. He called the meeting to order as he went, but the visiting continued despite his announcements, and others had begun to circulate and argue behind him. Lots of people had nothing but questions, however, and when Marvin said to Tom, “So what’s this all about?” the question was repeated, and the room grew quieter.

“All right,” Tom said hoarsely. He started to tell them about our trip to San Diego. Sitting on the tub edge I looked around at all the faces. It seemed like an awful long time since Lee and Jennings had walked into this same room out of the rain, to tell us of their new train line. So much had happened to me since then that it didn’t seem possible a few weeks could hold it all. I felt like a different person than the one who had listened to Lee and Jennings tell their tales; but I didn’t know exactly how. It was just a feeling, a discomfort, or an ignorance—as if I had to learn everything over again.

The way Tom told it, the San Diegans kept looking to be fools or wastrels, no better than scavengers. So I had to interrupt him from time to time and add my opinion of it—tell them all about the electric batteries and generators, and the broken radio, and the bookmaker, and Mayor Danforth. We were arguing in front of everybody, but I thought they needed to know my side, because Tom was against the southerners. He disagreed with me sharply when I went on about the Mayor. “He lives in style, Henry, because he’s got a gang of men doing nothing but help him run things, that’s all. That’s what gives him the power to send men off east to contact other towns.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But tell them what they found out east.”

Tom nodded and addressed the others. “He claims that his men have been as far as Utah, and that all the inland towns are banded together in a thing called the American resistance. The resistance, they say, wants to unify America again.”

That hushed everyone. From the wall near the door John Nicolin broke the silence. “So?”

“So,” Tom continued, “he wants us to do our part in this great plan, by helping the San Diegans fight the Japanese on Catalina.” He told them about our conference with the Mayor. “Now we know why dead Orientals have been washing onto our beach. But apparently they haven’t stopped trying to land, and now the San Diegans want our help getting rid of them for good.”

“What exactly do they mean by help?” asked Mrs. Mariani.

“Well…” Tom hesitated, and Doc cut in:

“It means they’d want our rivermouth as an anchorage to base attacks from.”

At the same time Recovery Simpson, Del and Rebel’s pa, said, “It means we’d finally have the guns and manpower to do something about being guarded like we are.”

Both of these opinions got a response from others, and the discussion split into a lot of little arguments. I kept my mouth shut, and tried to listen and find out who was thinking what. I could see that even a group as small as ours could be divided into even smaller groups. Recovery Simpson and old man Mendez led the families who did the bulk of their work in the back country, hunting or trapping or sheep herding; Nat and Manuel and the shepherds were quick to follow Simpson’s lead, usually. Then there were the farmers; everyone did a little of that, but Kathryn directed all the women who grew the big crops. Nicolin’s fishing operation was the third big group, including all the Nicolins, the Hamishes, Rafael and me; and lastly there were the folks who didn’t fit into any one group, like Tom, and Doc, and my pa, and Addison, and Odd Roger. These groupings were false in a way, in that everyone did a bit of everything. But for a while I thought I noticed something; I thought that the hunters, whose work was already like fighting, were going for the resistance, while the farmers, who needed things to be the same from year to year (and who were mostly women anyway), were going against it. That made sense to me, and I bet to myself that the way Nicolin went would decide the issue; but then all around me I saw that there were as many exceptions to my pattern as there were examples of it, and I lost the momentary feeling that I understood what was happening.

Doc was one of the first to defy my expectations. Here he was as old as Tom, almost, and always arguing at the ancients’ table at the swap meet that America had been betrayed by those who wouldn’t fight. It had seemed obvious to me that he would be disagreeing with Tom again, and arguing for joining the San Diegans in their fight. But here he stood saying, “I remember once when Gabino Canyon folks were asked by the Cristianitos Canyon people to join them when they were fighting with Talega Canyon over the wells at the Four Canyon Flat. They did it; but when the fight was over there wasn’t any Gabino Canyon at the swap meet anymore. It was just Cristianitos. The thing is, bigger towns tend to eat up the littler ones around them. Henry will tell you there’s hundreds of people down there—”

“But we’re not just the next canyon over from them,” Steve objected. “There’s miles and miles between us and them. And we should be fighting the Japanese. Every town should be part of the resistance, otherwise it’s hopeless.” He was vehement, and several people nodded, ignoring the talk around them. Steve had a presence, all right. His voice turned people’s ears.

“Miles aren’t going to matter if the train works,” Doc answered. So he was against joining. Shaken, I was about to ask him how he could drop all his swap meet talk just when the chance for action had arrived, when Tom said real loudly, “Hey? Let’s go it one at a time now.”

Rafael jumped in the gap. “We should fight the Japanese every chance we get. Face it, they’re hemming us in. We’re like fish in a big purse net. And they’re not only keeping us from the world, they’re keeping us from each other, by bombing tracks and bridges.”

“We only have the San Diegans’ word for those attacks,” Doc said. “How do we know they’re telling the truth?”

“Of course they’re telling the truth,” Mando said indignantly. He waved a fist at his pa: “Henry and Tom saw the bombs hit the tracks.”

“That may be so,” Doc admitted. “But it doesn’t mean everything else they said is true. Could be they want us scared and looking for help. That Mayor of San Diego will start thinking he’s Mayor of Onofre the moment we join him.”

“But what could he do to us?” Recovery said. The other hunters nodded, and Recovery stepped forward to take the argument from Doc and Mando. “All it means is that we’ll be dealing with one more town, just like we deal with all the towns that come to the swap meet.”

Doc dropped on Cov’s argument like a pelican flopping on a fish. “Exactly not! San Diego’s a lot bigger than us, and they don’t just want to trade. Like you said, Cov, they’ve got a lot of guns.”

“They ain’t going to shoot us,” Cov said. “Besides, they’re fifty miles away.”

“I agree with Simpson,” old man Mendez said. “An alliance like this is part of knitting things up again. Those folks don’t want anything we have, and they couldn’t do anything to us if they did. They just want help in a fight that’s our fight too, whether we join it or not.”

“That’s what I say,” Rafael added firmly. “They’re holding us down, those Japanese! We’ve got to fight them just to stand up.”

Steve and I nodded our heads like puppets in a swap meet puppet show. Gabby stuck his fist between us and shook it triumphantly. I hadn’t known Rafe felt so strongly about our situation, because it wasn’t something he talked about. The gang was impressed. I felt Steve shifting in the tub, twitching catlike as he nerved himself to stand up and pitch in with those who wanted to fight. But before he did his father stepped out from the wall he had been leaning against, and spoke.

“We should be working. That’s what we should be doing. We should be gathering food and preserving it, building more shelter and improving what we got, getting more clothes and medicines from the meets. Getting more boats and gear, firewood, all of that. Making it all work. That’s your job, Rafe. Not trying to fight people out there who have a million times the power we do. That’s a dream. If we do anything in the way of fighting, it should be right here in this valley, and for this valley. Not for anybody else. Not for those clowns down south, and sure not for any idea like America.” He said it like the ugliest sort of curse, and glared at Tom as he said it. “America’s gone. It’s dead. There’s us in this valley, and there’s others in San Diego, Orange, behind Pendleton, over on Catalina. But they’re not us. This valley is the biggest country we’re going to have in our lives, and it’s what we should be working for, keeping everyone in it alive and healthy. That’s what we should be doing, I say.”

The bathhouse was pretty quiet after that. So John was against it. And Tom, and Doc… I felt like the wind had been taken out of our sails by John, but Rafael rose to speak. “Our valley isn’t big enough to think that way, John. All the people we trade with depend on us, and we depend on them. We’re all countrymen. And we’re all being held down by the guards on Catalina. You can’t deny that, and you got to agree that working for us in this valley means being free to develop when we can. The way it is, we don’t have that freedom.”

John just shook his head. Beside me Steve hissed. He was near boiling over—his hands were clenched into white fists as he tried to hold himself in. This was nothing new. Steve always disagreed with his father at meetings. But John wouldn’t abide Steve crossing him in public, so Steve always had to stay shut up. The usual meeting ended with Steve bursting with indignation and resentful anger. I don’t know that this meeting would have been any different, but for Mando speaking up earlier, and arguing with Doc. Steve had noted that; and could he stand by silent, not daring to do what little Armando Costa had? Not a chance. And then I had been arguing with Tom all night. There were too many fires under Steve at once, and all of a sudden he popped up, face flushed and fists trembling at his sides. He looked from person to person, at anybody but his pa.

“We’re all Americans no matter what valley we come from,” he said rapidly. “We can’t help it and we can’t deny it. We were beat in a war and we’re still paying for it in every way, but some day we’ll be free again.” John stared at him fiercely, but Steve refused to back down. “When we get there it’ll be because people fought every chance they could get.”

He plopped back down on the tub edge, and only then did he look across the room at John, challenging him to reply. But John wasn’t going to reply; he didn’t deign to argue with his son in public. He just stared at him, his color high. There was an uncomfortable pause as everyone saw what was happening—saw John denying Steve’s right to join the discussions.

Tom looked up from warming his hands at the fire, and saw what was going on. “What about you, Addison?” he said.

Add was against the wall, Melissa seated at his feet; he stroked Melissa’s glossy hair from time to time, and watched the rest of us carefully as we argued. Now Melissa looked down, her lower lip between her teeth. If it were true that Add dealt with scavengers, then he would likely have problems if we joined raids in Orange County. But he shrugged and met our stares boldly, as if it didn’t matter a damn to him. “I don’t care much one way or the other.”

“Pinché!” old Mendez said. “You must have some opinion.”

“No,” drawled Add, “I don’t.”

“That helps a lot,” said Mendez. Gabby looked surprised to see his father speak; old Mendez was a silent man.

“Yeah, Add, what did you come for, anyway?” Marvin said.

“Wait a minute.” It was my pa, scrambling to his feet. “Ain’t a crime to come here without an opinion one way or other. That’s why we talk.”

Addison gave Pa a polite nod. That was just like Pa; the only time he spoke was to defend silence.

Doc and Rafael ignored Pa and went at it again, getting heated. There were arguments breaking out all over, so they could say angry things without embarrassing the other. “You’re always wanting to play with those guns of yours,” Doc said scornfully. Eyes flashing under his thick black brows, Rafael came back: “When you’re the only medical care in the valley, we ain’t doing so well you must admit.” No one who heard them liked such talk, and I waved a hand between them and said, “Let’s not get personal, eh?”

“Oh we’re just talking about our lives is all,” Rafe snapped sarcastically. “We wouldn’t want to get personal about it. But I tell you, the doctor here is going to kiss snake’s butt if he thinks I mess with guns just for the fun of it.”

“But you guys are friends—”

“Hey!” Tom cried, sounding weary. “We haven’t heard from everyone yet.”

“What about Henry?” Kathryn said. “He went to San Diego too, so he’s seen them. What do you think we should do?” She gave me a look that was asking for something, but I couldn’t tell what it was, so I said what I was thinking and hoped it would do.

“We should join the San Diegans,” I said. “If we feel like they’re trying to make us part of San Diego, we can destroy the tracks and be rid of them. If we don’t, we’ll be part of the country again, and we’ll learn a lot more about what’s going on inland.”

“I learn all I want to know at the swap meet,” Doc said. “And wrecking the tracks isn’t going to stop them coming in boats. If there’s a thousand of them, as they say, and we number, what, sixty?—and most of them kids?—then they can pretty much do what they want with this valley.”

“They can whether we agree or not,” Cov said. “And if we go along with them now, maybe we can get what we want out of it.”

John Nicolin looked especially disgusted at that sentiment, but before he could speak I said, “Doc, I don’t understand you. At the swap meets you’re always grousing for a chance to get back at them for bombing us. Now here we got the chance, and you—”

“We don’t got the chance,” Doc insisted. “Not a thing’s changed—”

“Enough!” Tom said. “We’ve heard all that before. Carmen, it’s your turn.”

In her preaching voice Carmen said, “Nat and I have talked a lot about this one, and we don’t agree, but my thoughts are clear on the matter. This fight the San Diegans want us to join is useless. Killing visitors from Catalina doesn’t do a thing to make us free. I’m not against fighting if it would do some good, but this is just murder. Murder is never the means to any good end, so I’m against joining them.” She nodded emphatically and looked to the old man. “Tom? You haven’t told us your opinion yet.”

“The hell he hasn’t,” I said, annoyed at Carmen for sounding so preacherly and commonsensical, when it was just her opinion. But she gave me a look and I shut up.

Tom roused himself from his fireside torpor. “What I don’t like about this Danforth is that he tried to make us join him whether we want to or not.”

“How?” Rafael challenged.

“He said, we’re either with them or against them. I take that as a threat.”

“But what could they do to us if we didn’t join?” Rafe said. “Bring an army up here and point guns at us?”

“I don’t know. They do have a lot of guns. And the men to point them.”

Rafael snorted. “So you’re against helping them.”

“I guess so,” Tom said slowly, as if uncertain himself what he thought. “I guess I’d like to have the choice of working with them or not, depending on what they had in mind. Case by case, so to speak. So that we’re not just a distant section of San Diego, doing what they tell us to.”

“The point is, they can’t make us do what they say,” Recovery said. “It’s just an alliance, an agreement on common goals.”

“You hope,” said John Nicolin.

Cov started to argue with John, and Rafael was still pressing Tom, so the discussion broke up again, and pretty soon every adult in the room was jawing it, and most of the kids too. “Do you want them in our river?” “Who, the Japs or the San Diegans?” “You’ll risk your life for nothing.” “I’m damned if I want those cruisers setting the border on my whole life.” On it went, arguments busting in on neighboring arguments as the participants heard something they liked or disliked. Fingers were waved under noses, curses flew even around Carmen, Kathryn had Steve by the front of the shirt as she made a point… It sounded like we were evenly split, too, so that neither side could win on the volume of their voices. But I could see that we joiners were in trouble. The old man, John Nicolin, Doc Costa, and Carmen Eggloff—all four of them were against, and that was the story right there. Rafael and Recovery and old Mendez were important in the valley, and they had a strong voice in things, but they didn’t wield the same sort of influence that the others did. John and Doc circulated around the room arguing and conferring on the sly with Pa and Manuel, Kathryn and Mrs. Mariani; and I knew which way things were shifting for the vote.

At the height of the arguing Odd Roger stood and waved his arms with an absurd gleam of comprehension in his eye. He squawked loudly, and Kathryn scowled. “He’s lucky he wasn’t born in this valley,” she muttered; “he’d never have made it to Name Day.” A lot of people were like that, upset that Tom had brought Roger at all. But suddenly Roger broke into English, in a shrill reedy voice:

“Kill every scavenger on the land, kill them! Scavenger poisons the water, breaks the snares, eats the dead. Unless the corruption be cut from the body the body dies! I say kill them all, kill them all, kill them all!”

“All right, Roger,” Tom said, taking his arm and leading him to his corner. When he returned to the hearth Tom shouted the arguments down, vexed at last. “Shut up! Nobody’s saying anything new. I propose we have the vote. Any objections?”

There were plenty of those, but after a lot of bickering over the wording of the proposition we were ready.

“All those in favor of joining San Diego and the American resistance to fight the Japanese, raise their hands.”

Rafael, the Simpsons, the Mendezes, Marvin and Jo Hamish, Steve, Mando, Nat Eggloff, Pa and me: we raised our hands and helped Gabby’s little brothers and sisters to raise theirs. Sixteen of us.

“Now all those against?”

Tom, Doc Costa, Carmen; the Marianis, the Shankses, the Reyes; and John Nicolin went down the line of his family, pulling up the arms of Teddy and Emilia, Virginia and Joe, Carol and Judith, and even Marie, as if she were one of the kids, which in mental power she was. Little Joe stood at attention, hand high, black hair falling over his face, belly and tiny pecker sticking out under a snot-smeared shirt. Mrs. N. sighed to see that shirt. “Oh, man,” Rafael complained; but that was the rule. Everyone voted. So there were twenty-three against. But among the adults it was a lot closer, and in the strained silence after Carmen finished counting there were some hard stares exchanged. It was like nothing I had ever seen in the valley. A coming fight can feel good, say at the swap meet when facing off with a scavenger gang; but in the valley, with no one there but friends and neighbors, it felt bad. Everyone was affected the same way, I think; and no one thought of a way to patch this one up.

“Okay,” Tom said. “When they show up again I’ll tell Lee and Jennings we aren’t going to help them.”

“Individuals are free to do what they want,” Addison Shanks said out of the blue, as if he were stating a general principle.

“Sure,” Tom said, looking at Add curiously. “As always. We aren’t making any alliance with them, that’s all.”

“That’s fine,” Add said, and left, leading Melissa out.

“It’s not fine by me,” Rafael declared, looking around at us, but especially at John. “It’s wrong. They’re holding us down, do you understand? The rest of the world is getting along, making good progress with the help of machines, and medicines for the sick, and all of that. They blasted that away from us, and now they’re keeping it away from us. It isn’t right.” His voice was as bitter as I’d ever heard it; not really Rafael’s voice at all. “We should be fighting them.”

“Are you saying you aren’t going to go along with the rest of us?” John asked.

Rafael gave him an angry look. “You know me better than that, John. I go with the vote. Not that I could do much by myself anyway. But I think it’s wrong. We can’t hide in this valley like weasels forever, not sitting right across from Catalina like we do.” He took in a big breath and let it out. “Well, shit. I don’t guess we can vote it away anyway.” He threaded his way through the folks still sitting, and left the bathhouse.

The meeting was done. I crossed the bathhouse with Steve and Gabby. Steve was doing his best to avoid his pa. In all the milling around we saw Del gesture at us, and with a nod to Mando and Kathryn we followed them out.

Without a word we trailed up the river path, following someone else’s lanterns. Then over the bridge, to the big boulders at the bottom of the barley field. In the blustery dark my companions were no more than shapes. Across the river lanterns blinked through the trees, stitching the trails that our neighbors were taking home.

“Could you believe all that talk?” Gabby said scornfully.

“Rafael was right,” Nicolin said bitterly. “What will they think of us in San Diego, and across the country, when they hear about this?”

“It’s over now,” said Kathryn, trying to soothe him.

“Over for you,” Steve said. “It turned out the way you wanted. But for us—”

“For everyone,” Kathryn insisted. “It’s over for everyone.”

But Steve wouldn’t have it. “You’d like that to be true, but it isn’t. It won’t ever be over.”

“What do you mean?” Kathryn said. “The vote was taken.”

“And you were mighty happy with the results, weren’t you,” Steve accused her.

“I’ve had enough of this for one night,” Kathryn said. “I’m going home.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and do that,” Nicolin said angrily. Kathryn glared at him. I was glad I wasn’t Steve at that moment. Without a word she was off toward the bridge. “You don’t run this valley!” Steve shouted after her, his voice hoarse with tension. “Nor me neither! You never will!” He paced into the barley field. I could just make out Kathryn as she crossed the bridge.

“I don’t know why she was being such a bitch tonight,” Steve whined.

After a long silence, Mando said, “We should have voted yes.”

Del ha-ha’d. “We did. There weren’t enough of us.”

“I meant everybody.”

“We should have joined,” Nicolin shouted from the barley.

“So?” Gabby said—ready as always to egg Steve on. “What are you going to do about it?”

Across the river dogs yapped. I saw the moon for a wisp of time, above the scudding clouds. Behind me barely rustled, and I shivered in the cold wind. Something in the shifting shadows made me remember my miserable, desperate hike up the ravine to find Tom and the San Diegans, and the fear came on me again, rustling through me like the wind. It’s so easy to forget what fear feels like. Steve was pacing around the boulders like a wolf caught in a snare. He said,

“We could join them ourselves.”

“What?” Gab said eagerly.

“Just us. You heard what Add said at the end there. Individuals are free to do as they like. And Tom agreed. We could approach them after Tom tells them no, and tell them we’d be willing to work with them. Just us.”

“But how?” Mando asked.

“What kind of help do they want from us, hey? No one in there could say, but I know. Guides into Orange County, that’s what. We can do better at that than anyone else in Onofre.”

“I don’t know about that,” Del said.

“We can do it as well as anybody!” Steve revised, for it was true that his pa and some others had spent a good bit of time up north in years past. “So why shouldn’t we if we want to?”

Fearfully I said, “Maybe we should just go along with the vote.”

“Fuck that!” Steve cried furiously. “What’s with you, Henry? Afraid to fight the Japanese, now? Shit, you go off to San Diego and now you tell us what to do, is that it?”

“No!” I protested.

“You scared of them now, now that you’ve had your great voyage and seen them up close?”

“No.” I was shocked by Nicolin’s anger, too confused to think how to defend myself. “I want to fight,” I said weakly. “That’s what I said in the meeting.”

“The meeting doesn’t mean shit. Are you with us or not?”

“I’m with you,” I said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t!”

“Well?”

“Well… we could ask Jennings if he wants some guides, I guess. I never thought of it.”

“I thought of it,” Steve said. “And that’s what we’re going to do.”

“After they talk to Tom,” Gabby said, clearing things up, pushing Steve on.

“Right. After. Henry and I will do it. Right, Henry?”

“Sure,” I said, jumping at his voice’s prod. “Sure.”

“I’m for it,” Del said.

“Me too,” cried Mando. “I want to too. I’ve been in Orange County as much as any of you.”

“You’re in it too,” Steve assured him.

“And me,” Gabby said.

“And you, Henry?” Steve pressed. “You’re with us too?”

Around us nothing but shadows, windblown in the darkness. The moon slid into a cloud crease and I could see the pale blobs of my friends’ faces, like clumps of dough, watching me. We put our right hands together above the central boulder, and I could feel their calloused fingers tangle with mine.

“I’m with you,” I said.

13

The next time I saw the old man I gave him hell, because it was very possible that if he had come out on the side of the resistance the vote would have been different. And if the valley had voted to join the resistance, then Steve wouldn’t have come up with his plan to join the San Diegans secretly, and I wouldn’t have caved in and gone along with it. To avoid admitting to myself that I had caved in to Steve, I decided his plan was a good one. So in a way it was all the old man’s fault. It was too bad we had to sneak off to help the San Diegans, but we had to be part of the resistance. I remembered vividly how it felt to be staring at the metal deck of the Japanese ship, crying because I thought Tom and the others were dead, and vowing to fight the Japanese forever. And it was no thanks to them that Tom had survived, either. He just as well could have died, and so could have I. I told Tom as much as I stood berating him for his vote in the meeting. “And any time we go out there, the same thing could happen,” I concluded, shaking a finger under his nose.

“Any time we sail out on a foggy night and shoot guns at them, you mean,” he said, through a mouth jammed with honeycomb. We were out in his yard, sweltering under high filmy clouds, and he was scorching the slats of several boxlike supers from an unsuccessful hive. Hive stands and smokers and supers lay strewn about us on the weeds. “It may be that the jays ate every bee in this hive,” he mumbled. “This one scrub jay was popping down ten at a meal. I set one of Rafael’s mousetraps on top of the post he was landing on, and when he landed the trap knocked him about fifteen feet. Was he mad! He cursed me in every language known to jays.”

“Ah, shit,” I said, yanking some of his long white hair out of the corner of his mouth before he chewed it down. “All our lives you’ve been telling us about America. How great it was. Now we’ve got a chance to fight for it, and you vote against the idea. I don’t get it. It’s contrary to everything you’ve taught us.”

“Is not. America was great in the way that whales are great, see what I mean?”

“No.”

“You’ve gotten remarkably dense lately, you know that? I mean, America was huge, it was a giant. It swam through the seas eating up all the littler countries—drinking them up as it went along. We were eating up the world, boy, and that’s why the world rose up and put an end to us. So I’m not contradicting myself. America was great like a whale—it was giant and majestic, but it stank and was a killer. Lots of fish died to make it so big. Now haven’t I always taught you that?”

“No.”

“The hell I haven’t! What about all those arguments at the swap meet with Doc and Leonard and George?”

“There you’re different, but just to rile Doc and Leonard. Here at home you always make America sound like God’s own country. Besides, right in the here and now there’s no doubt we’re being held down, just like Rafe said. We have to fight them, Tom, you know that.”

He shook his head, and sucked in his cheek on the caved-in side of his mouth, so that from my angle it looked like he only had half a face. “Carmen hit the nail hardest, as usual. Did you listen to her? I didn’t think so. Her point was, murdering those dumb tourists doesn’t do a thing to change the structure of the situation. Catalina will still be Japanese, satellites will still be watching us, we’ll still be inside a quarantine. Even the tourists won’t stop coming. They’ll just be better armed, and more likely to hurt us.”

“If the Japanese are really trying to keep people away, we could kill all the visitors who sneak in.”

“Maybe so, but the structure remains.”

“But it’s a start. Anything as big as this can’t be done all at once, and the start will always look small. Why, if you’d been around during the Revolution, you’d have been against ever starting it. ‘Killing a few redcoats won’t change the structure,’ you’d have said.”

“No I wouldn’t, because it wasn’t the same structure. We aren’t being occupied, we’re being quarantined. If we joined San Diego in this fight the only result would be that we’d be part of San Diego. Doc was right just like Carmen was.”

I thought I had him on the run, and I said, “The same objection could have been made in the Revolution. People from Pennsylvania or wherever could have said, if we join the fight we’ll become part of New York. But since they were part of the same country, they worked together.”

“Boy, it’s a false analogy, like historical analogies always are. Just ’cause I taught you your history don’t mean you understand it. In the Revolution the British had men and guns, and we had men and guns. Now we still have men and guns like in 1776, but the enemy has satellites, intercontinental missiles, ships that could shell us from Hawaii, laser beams and atom bombs and who knows what all. Think about it logically for a bit. A tiger and a titmouse would make a better fight.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I grumbled, feeling the weight of his argument. I wandered through the dismantled hives, the sundials and rain barrels and junk, to regroup. Below us the valley was a patchwork, the fields like gold handkerchiefs dropped on the forest, with gliding patches of sunlight making even larger fields of brilliant green. “I still say that every revolution starts small. If you had voted for the resistance, we could have thought of something. As it is, you’ve put me in a tough spot.”

“How so?” he asked, looking up from the supers.

I realized I’d said too much. “Oh, in talk, you know,” I floundered. Then I hit on something: “Since we aren’t going to help the resistance, I’ll be the only one of the gang who got to go to San Diego. Steve and Gabby and Del don’t like that much.”

“They’ll get there some day,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief to have him off the track. But I felt bad to keep something from him; I saw that I would be lying to him regularly, from then on. His arguments had a sense that couldn’t be denied, even though I was sure his conclusions were wrong. Because I wanted his conclusions to be wrong.

“You got your lesson ready?” he asked. “Other than the history of the United States?”

“Some of it.”

“You’re getting to be as bad as Nicolin.”

“I am not.”

“Let’s hear it then. ‘I know you. Where’s the king?’ ”

I called the page up before my mind’s eye, and against a fuzzy gray mental field appeared the yellow crumbly page, with the rounded black marks that meant so much. I spoke the lines as I saw them.

“Very good!” Tom cried. “That was our night, all right. ‘All-shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity of the world, crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once that make ingrateful man.’ ”

“Wow, you memorized two whole lines,” I said.

“Oh hush. I’ll give you lines from Lear. You listen to this.

“We that are young?” I inquired.

“Hush! O sharper than a serpent’s tooth indeed. The oldest hath borne most, no lie.” He shook his head. “But listen, ungrateful wretch, I gave you those lines to help you to remember our trip back up here in that storm. The way you’ve been carrying on up here since then, it’s like you’ve already forgotten it—”

“No I haven’t.”

“—Or you haven’t been able to believe in it, or fit it into your life. But it happened to you.”

“I know that.”

Those liquid brown eyes looked at me hard. Quietly he said, “You know that it happened. Now you have to go on from there. You have to learn from it, or it might as well not have happened.”

I didn’t follow him, but all of the sudden he was scraping the super resting on his knees. And saying, “I hear they’re reading that book we brought back, down at the Marianis’—how come you’re not down there?”

“What?” I cried. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“They weren’t going to start until the bread was done. Besides, it was time for your lesson.”

“But they would have finished baking midafternoon!” I said.

“Isn’t that what time it is?” he asked, looking at the sky briefly.

“I’m gone,” I said, snatching a dripping honeycomb from the flat behind him.

“Hey!”

“See you later.” Off I ran, down the ridge trail, through the woods on a shortcut of my own, and through the potato patches to the Mariani herb garden. They were all out on the grass between the ovens and the river: Steve, Kathryn, Kristen, Mrs. Mariani, Rebel, Mando, Rafael, and Carmen. Steve was reading, and the others barely glanced at me as I sat down, huffing like a dog. “He’s in Russia,” Mando whispered. “Well shit!” I said. “How’d he get there?” Steve never looked up from the page, but kept on reading, from about here as I recall:

“In the first year after the war they were very open with the U.N., to show they had nothing to do with the attack. They gave the U.N. a list of all the Americans in Russia, and after that the U.N. was adamant about knowing where we were and what was happening to us. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t be speaking English. They would have assimilated us. Or killed us.”

Johnson’s tone made me look more closely at the heavily clad, harmless-looking Russians who were crowded in with us. Some of them glanced at us furtively when they heard our foreign speech; most slumped in their seats and slept, or stared dully out the compartment window. The smell of tobacco smoke was powerful, masking to a certain extent other smells: sweat, cheese, the raw alcohol odor of the drink vodka. Outside the huge gray city of Vladivostok was replaced by rolling forest, mile after hilly mile of it. The train rolled along the tracks at a tremendous clip, and we crossed scores of miles every hour; still, Johnson assured me that our journey would take many days.

We had done little more than shake hands before walking under the eyes of the train guards, and playing our parts. Now I asked him about himself; where he lived, what his history had been, what his occupation was.

“I’m a meteorologist,” he said. Seeing my look, he explained, “I study the weather. Or rather, I did study it. Now I watch a Doppler screen used to predict weather and give severe storm warnings. One of the last fruits of American science, the Doppler systems, as a matter of fact. But they’re old now, and it’s a minor position really.”

Naturally I was interested in this. I asked him if he could tell me why the weather had become so much colder on the California coast since the war. This was several hours into our trip, and the Russians around us filled the compartment with an air of utter boredom; at the prospect of talking about his specialty, Johnson’s face brightened somewhat.

“It’s a complicated question. It’s generally agreed that the war did alter the world’s weather, but how it effected the change is still debated. It’s estimated that three thousand neutron bombs exploded on the continental United States that day in 1984. Not too much long term radiation was released, luckily for you, but a lot of turbulence was generated in the stratosphere—the highest levels of air—and apparently the jet stream altered its course for good. You know about the jet stream?”

I indicated that I did not. “I have flown on a jet, however.”

He shook his head. “At the upper levels of the air the wind is constant, and strong. Big rivers of wind. In the northern hemisphere the jet stream circles around west to east, and zigzags up and down as it goes around the world, about four or five zigs and zags for every trip around.” He made a ball of his fist and traced the course of the jet stream with a finger of his other hand. “It varies a little every time, of course, but before the war there was one anchor point, which was your Rocky Mountains. The jet stream invariably curved north around the Rockies, and then back south across the United States, like this.” He pointed out the knuckle that had become the Rockies. “Since the war, that anchoring point has been gone. The jet stream has cut loose, and now it wanders—sometimes it’s sweeping straight down from Alaska to Mexico, which is why you in California get Arctic weather occasionally.”

“So that’s it,” I said.

“That’s part of it,” he corrected me. “Weather is such a complex organism, you can never point to any single thing and say, that’s it. The jet stream is on the loose, but tropical storm systems are changed as well—and which caused which? Or are they causally related? No one can say. The Pacific high, for instance—this would affect you in southern California—there was a high pressure system, very stable, that sat off the west coast of North America. In the summer it would shift north and sit off California, keeping the jet stream pushed north; in the winter it would descend to an area below Baja California. Now it doesn’t move north in the summer anymore, and so you aren’t protected by it. That’s another big factor: but again, cause or effect? And then there’s the dust thrown into the stratosphere by the bombs and the fires, dropping world temperatures by a couple of degrees—and the permanent snowpack that resulted in the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, generating glaciers that reflect the sunlight and cool things even more… and the shifting of Pacific currents… lots of changes.” Johnson’s expression was a curious mixture of gloom and fascination.

“It sounds as if California’s weather has changed most of all,” I said.

“Oh, no,” Johnson said. “Not at all. California has been strongly affected, no doubt about it—like moving fifteen degrees of latitude north—but a few other parts of the world have been just as strongly affected, or even more so. Lots of rain in northern Chile!—and my, is that washing all that sand off the Andes into the sea. Tropical heat in Europe during the summer, drought during the monsoon—oh, I could go on and on. It has caused more human misery than you can imagine.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Ah. Yes. Well, it isn’t only the Russians’ gray empire that has made the world such a sad place since the war; the weather has had a large part in it. Happily Russia itself has not gone unaffected.”

“How so?”

He shook his head, and wouldn’t elaborate.

Two days later—still in Siberia, despite our speed—I saw what he meant.

We spent the morning out in the corridor of our car, exhibiting our travelling papers to a trio of suspicious conductors. The fact that I spoke not a word of Russian was a real stumbling block to their acceptance of us, and I chattered at them in Japanese and fake Japanese in a nervous attempt to assure them I was from Tokyo as my papers declared me to be, hoping they would not know how unlikely that was. Luckily our papers were authentic, and they left satisfied.

When they were gone Johnson was too upset to return to our compartment. “It’s those stupid busybodies in there who got the conductors on us. They heard us speaking a foreign language and that was enough. That’s the Russians for you all over. Let’s stay out here for a while. I can’t stand the stink in there anymore anyway.”

We were still out in the corridor, leaning against the windows, when the train came to a halt, out in the middle of the endless Siberian forest, with not a sign of civilization in sight. Tree-covered hills extended away in every direction for as far as the eye could see; we crossed a rolling green plane, under a low blue hemisphere filled with even lower clouds. I stopped my description of California, which Johnson could not get enough of, and we leaned out the window looking toward the front of the train. To the west the clouds, which had been low and dark, were now a solid black line. When Johnson saw this he leaned far out of the window, saying, “Hold my legs. Hold me in by the legs.” When he slid back in there was a fierce grin on his usually dour face. Leaning close to me he whispered, “Tornado.”

Within a few minutes conductors arrived in our car and instructed everyone to get off.

“Won’t do a bit of good,” Johnson declared. “In fact, I’d rather be on the train.” Nevertheless we joined the crowd before the door.

“Why do they do it, then?” I asked, trying to keep an eye on the clouds to the west.

“Oh, once a whole train got picked up and flung all over the countryside. Killed everyone on it. But if you’d been standing right next to it you’d have been just as dead.”

This was not very reassuring to me. “These tornadoes are common, then?”

Johnson nodded with grim satisfaction. “That’s the weather change in Russia I mentioned. Warmer midcontinent, but they get tornadoes now. Before the war ninety-five percent of the world’s tornadoes occurred in the United States.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s true. They were the result of a combination of local weather conditions, and the specific geography of the Rockies, the Great Plains, and the Gulf of Mexico—or so they deduced, tornadoes being another meteorological mystery. But now they’re common in Siberia.” Our fellow travellers were staring at us, and Johnson waited to continue until we were off the train. “And they’re big. Big like Siberia is big. Several towns have been torn off the map by them.”

The conductors herded us to a clearing beside the track, at the very end of the train. Black clouds covered the sky, and a cold wind made a ripping sound in the trees. The wind grew stronger in a matter of minutes; leaves and small branches fell almost horizontally through the air above us, and by drawing just a few feet apart from the rest of the passengers, we could talk without being overheard; indeed, we could barely hear ourselves.

“Karymskoye is just ahead, I think,” Johnson said. “Hopefully the tornado will hit it.”

“You hope it will?” I said in surprise, thinking I had misunderstood, for to tell the truth Johnson’s English was accented somewhat.

“Yes,” he hissed, his face close to mine. In the muted green light he suddenly looked wild, fanatical. “It’s retribution, don’t you see? It’s the Earth’s revenge on Russia.”

“But I thought it was South Africa that set the bombs.”

“South Africa,” he said angrily, and grabbed me by the arm. “How could you be so naive? Where did they get the bombs? Three thousand neutron bombs? South Africa, Argentina, Vietnam, Iran—it doesn’t matter who actually put them in the United States and set them off, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure—perhaps they all did—but it was Russia that made them, Russia that arranged for their use, Russia that profited most from them. The whole world knows it, and notes how these monstrous tornadoes plague them. It’s retribution, I tell you. Look at their faces! They all know it, every single one of them, it’s the Earth’s punishment. Look! There it is.”

I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw that the black cloud to the west now sank to the earth at a certain point, in a broad, swirling black funnel of cloud. The wind howled around us, tearing at my hair, and yet I could still hear a low grinding noise, a vibration in the ground, as if a train many times larger than ours was speeding along distant tracks.

“It’s coming this way,” Johnson shouted in my ear. “Look how thick it is!” On his bearded, craggy face was an expression of religious rapture.

The tornado now slimmed to a black column, spinning furiously on itself. At its base I could make out whole trees flying away from it, scores of them. The bass roar of it grew; some of the Russians in the clearing fell to the ground, others knelt and prayed, raising twisted faces to the black sky; Johnson waved a fist at them, shouting soundlessly in the roar, his face contorted. The twister must have struck Karymskoye, because the flying trees were replaced by debris, pieces of a city reduced to rubble in an instant. Johnson danced a little tilted jig, leaning into the wind.

I myself kept an eye on the unearthly storm. It was moving from left to right ahead of us, approaching at an angle. The condensed spinning column was so solidly black that it might have been a tower of whirling coal. The bottom of this tower bounced off the ground from time to time; it touched down on a hill past the stricken town, blasted trees away from it, bounced into the air almost up to the black cloud above it, extended and touched down again, moved on. To my considerable relief it appeared that it would pass to the north of us by three or four miles. When I was sure of that, some of Johnson’s strange elation spilled into me. I had just seen a town destroyed. But the Soviet Union was responsible for my country’s destruction—thousands of towns—so Johnson had said, and I believed him. That made this storm retribution, even revenge. I shouted at the top of my lungs, felt the sound get torn away and carried off. I screamed again. I had not known how much I would welcome a blow struck against the murderers of my country—how much I needed it. Johnson pounded my shoulder and wiped tears from his eyes, we staggered against the wind across the clearing and into some trees, where we could scream and point and laugh, and cry and shout curses too terrible to be heard, lamentations too awful to be thought. Our country was dead, and this poor exile my guide felt it as powerfully as I did. I put my arm around him and felt that I held up a countryman, a brother. “Yes,” he hissed again and again. “Yes, yes, yes.” Within twenty minutes the tornado bounced back up into the cloud for good, and we were left in a stiff cold wind to compose ourselves. Johnson wiped his eyes. “I hope it didn’t tear up much track,” he said in his slightly guttural accent, “or we’ll be here a week.”

A shadow fell across the book, and Steve stopped reading. We all looked up. John Nicolin stood there, hands on hips.

“I need your help replacing that bad keel,” he said to Steve.

Steve was still in the forests of Siberia, I could tell by the distant focus of his eyes. He said, “I can’t, I’m reading—”

John snatched the book from him and closed it, thud. Steve jerked up, then stopped himself. They glared at each other. Steve’s face got redder and redder. I held my breath, disoriented by the abrupt removal from the story.

John dropped the book on the grass. “You can waste your time any way you want when I don’t need your help. But when I need it, you give it, understand?”

“Yes,” said Steve. He was looking down at the book now. He stretched to pick it back up, and John walked away. Steve kept inspecting the book for grass stains, avoiding our gazes. I wished I wasn’t there to see it. I knew how Steve felt about having such scenes observed. And here were Kathryn, Mando, Kathryn’s mother and sister and the others… I watched John’s wide back disappear down the river path and cursed him in my thoughts. There was no call for that sort of showing it over Steve. That was pure meanness—no past could excuse it. I was glad he wasn’t my father.

“Well, so much for reading,” Steve said in his joking tone, or close to it. “But how about that tornado, eh?”

“I got to get home to supper anyway,” Mando said. “But I sure want to hear what happens next.”

“We’ll make sure you’re at the next reading,” Kathryn said, when it became clear that Steve wasn’t going to respond. Mando said goodbye to Kristen and scampered off toward the bridge. Kathryn stood up. “I’d best see to the tortillas,” she said. She bent over to kiss Steve’s head. “Don’t look so glum, everybody’s got to work sometime.”

Steve gave her a bitter glance and didn’t reply. The others wandered off with Kathryn, and I stood up. “I’m off too, I guess.”

“Yeah. Listen Hank, you’re still seeing Melissa, aren’t you?”

“Now and then.”

He eyed me. “But you make good use of the time, I bet.”

I shrugged and nodded.

“The thing is,” he went on, “if we offer to guide these San Diegans into Orange County, we’ve got to know more than how to follow the freeway north. Anyone can figure that out. They might not want to have anything to do with us if that’s all we can offer them. But if we knew where the Japanese were going to land, and when, they’d be bound to take us along, don’t you see.”

“Maybe.”

“Sure they would! What do you mean maybe?”

“Okay, but so what?”

“Well, since you’re friends with Melissa, why don’t you ask Addison if he could help us out like that?”

“What? Oh, man—I barely know Add. And his business in Orange County is his own, no one ever asks him anything about that.”

“Well,” Steve said, looking at the ground despondently, “it sure would help us out.”

I winced to hear him sound like that. We looked at the ground for a while. Steve thwacked the book against his thigh. “Wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?” he pleaded. “If he doesn’t want to tell us something like that, he can just say so.”

“Yeah,” I said doubtfully.

“Give it a try, okay?” He still wasn’t looking me in the eye. “I really want to do something up north—fight ’em, you know?”

I wondered who he really wanted to fight, the Japanese or his pa. There he stood, looking down, frowning, hangdog, still smarting from his pa’s lording it. I hated to see him look that way.

“I’ll ask Add and see what he says,” I said, letting my reluctance sound clear in my voice.

He ignored my tone. “All right!” He gave me a brief smile. “If he tells us something, we’ll be guiding the San Diegans for sure.”

It felt odd to receive gratitude from Steve. I hadn’t seen it very often. Before, what we had done for each other was part of being friends—brothers. Before… oh, it was all changed now, changed past repair. Before when I disagreed with him, it was no big deal; we argued it out, and whatever the result, it was no challenge to his leadership of the gang. But now if I argued with him in front of the group, he wouldn’t abide it, he’d get furious. Now questioning him was questioning his leadership, and all because I had been to San Diego and he hadn’t. I was beginning to wish I’d never taken that stupid trip.

And now, to add to the mess, I was the one who was friendly with Melissa and Addison Shanks, so just when he least wanted to, Steve had to ask me to act, while he stood on the sidelines again and watched; and he had to be grateful in the bargain! And me—I couldn’t argue with him without endangering our friendship; I had to go along with his every plan, even the ones I didn’t like; and now I had to go at his request and do something he would have loved to do himself, that I had no taste for. Things were… out of my control. (Or so it felt. We lie to ourselves a lot with that one.)

All of this occurred to me in a single snap of understanding—one of those moments when a lot of things I’d seen but not comprehended came together, as bits in the pattern of someone else’s behavior, which now made sense. It was something that had happened to me more and more often that summer, but it still took me aback. I blinked and glanced at Steve again in a quick evaluation. “You’d better get down there and help your pa,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, pissed again. “Back to the pit. All right, see you soon, okay buddy?”

“See you,” I replied, and walked up to the river path. When I got home I realized I hadn’t seen a thing along my way.

14

I was out in Pa’s garden one clear evening, enjoying the still sky and its arched range of blues, when I saw the fire on the ridge. A bonfire at Tom’s place, blinking bright yellow in the dusk. I stuck my head in the door—“Off to Tom’s,” I said to Pa—and was gone. In the forest birds squeaked as I navigated my shortcut. It wasn’t really visible at night, but I knew it by the feel of the ground and the shapes of the shadows, and even without the voices of the trees to guide me I almost ran. Through certain openings in the branches the bonfire winked at me, urging me along.

Up on the ridge I ran into Rafael, Addison and Melissa, the Basilone neighbors, standing in the trail and drinking a jar of wine. Tom’s bonfires drew people. Steve and Emilia and Teddy Nicolin were already in the yard, tossing pitchy wood on the blaze. Tom led Mando and Recovery out of his house, coughing and laughing. The Simpson kids were popping around the junk in the yard, trying to scare each other. “Rebel! Deliverance! Charity! Get your asses out of there!” Recovery shouted. I grinned. It was a welcome sight, Tom’s bonfire on the hill in the evening. We greeted each other and arranged the stumps and chairs a comfortable distance from the fire, and cheered a little when John and Mrs. Nicolin showed up with a bottle of rum and a big chunk of butter wrapped in paper. By the time Carmen and Nat and the Marianis showed up the party was in full swing. No one referred to the meeting, of course, but looking around I couldn’t help thinking of it. This party was the antidote, so to speak. The idea of the gang bucking the vote made me uneasy, and I tried to forget it, but Steve kept jerking his head in Melissa’s direction, already impatient for me to work on the Shankses.

Melissa was gulling with the Mariani girls, so I took my cup of hot buttered rum and sucked on it cautiously before the fire. Watched the flame spurt out of the beads of pitch. Mando was trying to make tripods of branches over the hottest part of the fire, playing with it (he learned that from me). Fire dazzles the mind into a curious sort of peace. It commands the eye’s attention like no other sight. Yellow transparent banners, flicking up from wood and vanishing: what is that stuff, anyway? I asked Tom, but it was about the lamest of his explanations, and that’s saying a lot. What it came down to was, if things got hot enough they burned; and burning was the transformation of wood to smoke and ash by way of flame. Rafael nearly strangled on his rum laughing when Tom finished.

“Very enlightening,” I hooted, and dodged Tom’s blows. “That’s the lamest—hooo, heee—the lamest explanation you’ve ever made!”

“Wha—what about lightning?” Raphael cackled.

“What about why dolphins are warm-blooded?” Steve nodded. Tom waved us off like mosquitoes and went for more rum, and we settled down to giggling.

But Tom knew why fire so captured the eye and mind, or so it seemed to me. One time I had ventured that fire made a good image of the mind—thoughts flickering like flames, eventually exhausting the wood of our flesh. Tom had nodded but said no, it was the other way around. The mind, he said, was a good image of fire—at least in this respect: for millions of years, humans had lived even more humbly than we did. Right on the edge of existence, for literally millions of years. He swore to that length of time, and made me try to imagine that many generations, which of course I couldn’t. I mean, think about it. Anyway, back at the beginning fire only appeared to humans as lightning and forest infernos, and they scorched a path from the eye to the brain. “Then when Prometheus gave us control of fire—” Tom said.

“Who’s this Prometheus?”

“Prometheus is the name for the part of our brains that contains the knowledge of fire. The brain has growths like tubers, or boles on a tree, where knowledge of certain subjects accumulate. As the sight of fire caused this particular bole to evolve it got bigger, until it was named Prometheus and the human animal was in control of fire.” So, he went on, for generation after generation to a number beyond counting men had sat around fires and watched them. To these ice-bitten ancestors fire meant warmth; to them, who bolted the flesh of smaller creatures every third day or so, it meant food. Between the eye and Prometheus grew a path of nerves like a freeway, and fire became a sight to turn the head and make one rapt. In the last century of the old time, civilized humanity had lost its dependence on simple fires, but that was no more than a blink of the eye in the span of human time; and now the blink was over, and we stared at fires hypnotized again.

“Let’s have a story,” Rebel Simpson said.

“Yes, tell us one, Tom,” Mando said.

“Tell us Johnny Pinecone,” Rebel pleaded. “I want to hear Johnny Pinecone.”

I nodded at that. It was one of my favorite things, to hear how in the last seconds of the old time Johnny had stumbled on one of the hidden atom bombs in the back of a Chevy van, and had thrown himself on it like a Marine on a grenade, to use Tom’s expression, hoping to protect his fellow citizens from the blast—how he had survived in the bubble of still air at ground zero, but been blown miles high and rearranged by cosmic rays, so that when he floated down like a eucalyptus leaf he was loony as Roger, and immortal as well. And how he had hiked up into the San Bernadino Mountains and up San Gorgonio, and gathered pinecones and taken them back to the coastal plains, planting them on every new riverbank “to put a cloak of green over our poor land’s blasted nakedness”—back and forth, back and forth for year after year after year, until the trees sprang up and blanketed the countryside, and Johnny sat down under a redwood growing like Jack’s beanstalk and fell asleep, where he snores to this day, waiting for the time when he’s needed again.

It was a fine story. But others objected that Tom had told it last season. “Don’t you know more than three stories, Tom?” Steve ragged him. “Why don’t you ever tell us a new one? Why don’t you ever tell us a story about the old time?”

Tom gave him his mock glare and hacked. Rafael and Cov chimed in with Steve. “Give us one about you in the old time.” I sucked rum and watched him closely. Would he do it this time? He looked a touch worn and out of sorts. He glanced at me, and I think he recalled our argument after the meeting, when I told him how great he always made America seem to us.

“Okay,” he decided. “I’ll give you a story of the old time. But I warn you, nothing fancy. This is just something that happened.”

We settled back on out stumps and in our rain-warped chairs, satisfied.

“Well,” he said, “back in the old time I owned a car. God’s truth. And at the time of this story I was driving that car from New York to Flagstaff. A drive like that would take about a week, if you hurried. I was near the end of the trip, on Highway Forty in New Mexico. It was about sunset, and a storm was coming. Big black clouds looked like a wave rolling off the Pacific, and the land below was desert floor littered with mesas. Nothing on it but shrubs and the two lines of the road. Ghost country.

“First thing I noticed was two sunbeams breaking over the top of the cloud front. You’ve seen that happen, but these two were like beacons, fanning out to left and right of me, like signs of some sort.

“Second thing that happened, the old Volvo puffed over a big rise, and a sign on top said Continental Divide. I should have known. Before the downslope there was a hitchhiker by the side of the road.

“Now at the time I was a lawyer, and I valued my solitude. For a whole week I didn’t have to talk, and I liked that. Even though I owned a car I had hitchhiked in my time, and I had known the hitchhiker’s despair, made of a whole bunch of little disappointments in humanity, slowly adding up. And it was about to rain, too. But I still didn’t want to pick this guy up, so as I drove by I was kind of looking off to the left so I wouldn’t have to meet his eye. But that would have been cowardice. So at the last second I looked at him. And believe me the moment I recognized him I put the car on the shoulder and skidded over the gravel to a halt.

“That hitchhiker was me. He was me myself.”

“Oh you liar,” Rebel said.

“I’m not lying! That’s what it was like in the old time. I mean to tell you, stranger things than that happened every day. So let me get on with it.

“Anyway. We both knew it, this guy and me. We weren’t just lookalikes, like the ones friends tell you about and then you meet them and they don’t look anything like you. This guy was the one I saw in the mirror every morning when I shaved. He was even wearing an old windbreaker of mine.

“I got out of the car, and we stared at each other. ‘So who are you?’ he said, in a voice I recognized from tape recordings of myself.

“ ‘Tom Barnard,’ I said.

“ ‘Me too,’ says he.

“We stared at each other.

“Now as I said, at this time I was a lawyer, working winters in New York City. So I was a pretty slight little guy, with a bit of a gut. The other Tom Barnard had been doing physical work, I could tell; he was bigger, tough and fit, with a beard starting and a dark weathered color to his skin.

“ ‘Well, do you want a ride?’ I said. What else could I say? He nodded a bit hesitantly, picked up his backpack and walked to my car. ‘So the Volvo is still hanging in there,’ he said. We got in. And the two of us sitting there, side by side in the car, made me feel so strange I could hardly start the engine. Why, he had a scar on his arm where I once fell out of a tree! It was too uncanny. But I took off down the road anyway.

“Well, sitting there silent gave us both the willies, and we started to talk. Sure enough, we were the same Tom Barnard. Born in the same year to the same parents. By comparing pasts all through the years we quickly found the time we had separated or broken in two or whatever. One September five years before, I had gone back to New York City, and he had gone to Alaska.

“ ‘You went back to the firm?’ he asked. With a wince I nodded. I had thought of going to Alaska, I remembered, after my work with the Navaho Council was done, but it hadn’t seemed practical. And after much deliberation I had returned to New York. In the end we pinned down the moment exactly: the morning I left for New York, driving before sunrise, there was a moment getting on Highway Forty when I couldn’t remember if the onramp was a simple left turn, or a cloverleaf circle to the right; and while I was still thinking about it I came to, already on the freeway headed east. The same thing had happened to my double, only he had gone west. ‘I always knew this car was magical,’ he said. ‘There’s two of it, too—but I sold mine in Seattle.’

“Well—there we were. The storm crashed over us, and we drove through little flurries of rain. Wind pushed the car around. After a time we got over our amazement, and we talked and talked. I told him what I had done in the last five years—mostly lawyering—and he shook his head like I was crazy. He told me what he had done, and it sounded great. Fishing in Alaska, mapping rivers in the Yukon, collecting animal skeletons for the fish and game service—hard work, out in the world. How his stories made me laugh! And from him I heard my laugh like other people heard it, and it only made me laugh the harder. What a crazy howl! Has it ever occurred to you that other people see you in the same way you see them, as a collection of appearances and habits and actions and words—that they never get to see your thoughts, to know how wonderful you really are? So that you seem as strange to them as they all appear to you? Well, that night I got to look at myself from the outside, and he sure was a funny guy.

“But the life he had lived! As we drove on, it gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach. See, he had lived a life right close to the one I had imagined living, there every winter in my little New York apartment. My life there—well, it was just sitting in boxes, one after the next, and watching people talk or talking myself. That was my life. But this Tom! He had gone and done what I wanted to do. And he didn’t know what the rest of his life was going to be like, laid out for him like the road in front of us. I realized that I loved my cross-country drives because I crossed country—that during the times when I wished that I could turn the car around in New Mexico and head back to New York, there to turn and come west again, and keep on like that, as if the Volvo were on a pendulum hanging from the North Pole—it was because I wanted to stay in the country, to be out in it. I began to feel the emptiness of my life, the emptiness I had felt when I looked in the shaving mirror in my apartment in New York, looking at the lines under my eyes and thinking I could have lived a different life, I could have made it better.

“I got to feeling so low that eventually I suggested to my double that maybe I was no more than a hallucination he was having. It seemed to make sense. He had made the strong choice, I the weak—didn’t it make sense that I was no more than a ghost come to haunt him, a vision of what would have happened if he had made the mistake of returning to New York?

“ ‘I don’t think so,’ he answered. ‘It’s likelier I’m a hallucination of yours, that you stopped and picked up along the way. You’d have to be a hell of a hallucination to ferry me all the way across New Mexico, after all. No, we’re both here all right.’ He punched me lightly in the arm, and the spot he hit got very warm.

“ ‘I guess we’re both here,’ I admitted. ‘But how?’

“ ‘There was too much of us for any one body to hold!’ he said. ‘That was why we had trouble sleeping.’

“ ‘I still get insomnia,’ I said. And I knew why—I had lived my life wrong, I had chosen to live in boxes.

“ ‘Me too,’ he said, surprising me. ‘Maybe from sleeping on the ground so much. But maybe from living such a life as mine.’ For a moment he looked as discouraged as I felt. He said, ‘I don’t feel like I’m doing anything real sometimes, ’cause no one else does. I’m against the grain, I guess. It can cut into your sleep all right.’

“So he had his troubles too. But they sounded like nothing compared to mine. He was healthier and happier than I, surely.

“The storm picked up and I put on the windshield wipers, adding their squeak to the hum of the engine and the hiss of the wet tires. Our headlights lit up gusts of rain, and on the other road trucks trailing long plumes of spray roared by, going east. We put Beethoven’s Third on the tape deck; the second movement was up, sounding like noises made by the storm. We sat and listened to it, and talked about when we were a kid. ‘Do you remember this?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘Do you remember that?’ ‘Oh man, I never wanted anyone else to find out about that.’ And so on. It was pretty friendly, but it wasn’t comfortable. We couldn’t talk about our different lives anymore, because there was something wrong there, a tension, a disagreement even though neither of us was satisfied.

“It was starting to rain harder, and the car was buffeted hard by wind. Very little was visible outside the cones of light from the headlights—the black mass of the earth, the black clouds above. The march from the second movement, music grander than you folks can imagine, poured out of the speakers, matching the storm stroke for stroke. And we talked and laughed, and we howled and pounded on the roof of the car, overwhelmed by all that was happening—because the two of us being there meant we were special, you see. It meant we were magical.

“But right in the middle of our howling the Volvo sputtered, at the top of another rise. I pressed on the gas, but the engine died. I coasted onto the shoulder and tried to start it. No luck. ‘Sounds like water in the distributor,’ my double said. ‘Didn’t you ever get that fixed?’

“I admitted I hadn’t. After some discussion we decided to try and dry it off. That wasn’t going to be easy, but it beat sitting in the car all night. We got out our ponchos, and luckily the rain diminished to a steady falling mist. By the time I got my poncho on, my companion had the hood up and was leaning over the engine. He had a small flashlight in one hand, and was pulling at the distributor with the other. I reached in and three Barnard hands went to work on it, taking the distributor cap off, pulling it apart, drying it, getting everything back together dry. My double ran to get a plastic bag while I hunched over the engine, feeling its warmth, my poncho extended like a cape. My double returned—we were working at emergency speed, you understand—and he leaned over the engine, and then all four of our hands were working on the distributor with uncanny coordination. When we were done clamping it down he dashed to the driver’s seat and started the engine. It caught and ran, and he revved it. We had fixed it! As I closed the hood my double got out of the car grinning. ‘All right!’ he cried, and slapped my hand, and suddenly he leaped up and spun in the air, howling out the vowel-y Navaho chant we had learned as a boy—and there I was spinning with him, swirling my poncho out like a Hopi dancing cape, screaming my lungs out. Oh it was a strange sight, the two of us dancing in front of that car, on that high ridge, hollering and spinning and stomping in puddles, and I felt—oh there isn’t the word for the way I felt at that moment, truly.

“The rain had stopped. On the horizon to the south little lines of lightning flashed from low clouds into the earth. We stood side by side and watched them, two or three every second. No thunder.

“ ‘My life feels like this,’ one of us said, but I wasn’t sure who. And my right arm was hot, where it touched his left arm. I looked at it—

“And saw our arms met to enter a single hand. We were becoming one again. But it was a left hand—his hand. Then I noticed our legs came down to the same boot, a right boot. My foot.

“On the forearm wavering between us I could make out the reddish tissue connecting our arms, like burn-scar tissue. And I could feel the hot pulling and plucking. We were melting together! Already we shared part of the upper arm, and soon we would be joined at the shoulder like Siamese twins, and I felt the same burning in my right leg, oh, our time was up! First arms and legs, then torso then heads!

“I looked in his face and saw my mirror image, twisted with horror. I thought, that’s what I look like, that’s who I am, our time is over. Our eyes met.

“ ‘Pull,’ he said.

“We pulled. He grabbed the fender with his right hand, and I stepped out with my left foot, trying for traction in the muddy gravel. I leaned out and pulled like I had never pulled before. That forearm stuck out between us like a claw. We gasped and grunted and pulled, and the scar tissue above the elbow burned, and stretched, and gave us back a little of our arms. It was as painful as if I held onto something and deliberately tried to pull my arm off. But it was working. We both had elbows of our own now.

“ ‘Hold on tight,’ I gasped, and dove for the road! Boom! Rip!—an instant of agony, and I crashed onto wet asphalt. I pushed myself up with both hands. My feet were both there, I shook my right hand violently, grabbed my right boot. I was whole again.

“I looked at my double. He was leaning against the car, holding his left forearm in his right hand, shaking. Seeing it I felt my own trembling. He was staring at me with a furious expression, and for a second I thought he would attack me. For a second I had a vision, and saw him leap on me and pummel me, fists sinking into me and never coming out, so that we struggled and bit and kicked and melded into each other with every blow, until we became a single figure hitting itself, prone on the gravel, jerking and twitching.

“But that was a vision I had. In actuality, he shook his head hard, his lip curled into a bitter look.

“ ‘I’d better go,’ he said.

“Said I, ‘I think you better.’ As I got to my feet he walked to the passenger door, and got his backpack out. He pulled his poncho off to get the pack on his back.

“ ‘Back to home for you, eh Thomas?’ he said. There was contempt in his voice, and suddenly I was angry.

“ ‘And you can hit the road again,’ I said. ‘And I’m glad to see you go. You had me feeling like my whole life was a mistake, like you did it right and I did it wrong. But I’m not doing it wrong! I’m living with people the way a human being should, and you’re just taking the escape, wandering the road. You’ll burn out quick enough.’

“He glared at me, and said, ‘You’ve got me wrong, brother. I’m trying to live my life the best I know how. And I’m not going to burn out, ever.’ He put his poncho back on. ‘You take the name,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if we live in the same world or not, but someone might notice. So you keep the name. I have the feeling you’re the real Tom Barnard, anyway.’

“So we had traded curses.

“He looked at me one last time. ‘Good luck,’ he said. Then he walked away from the road, up the ridge. Through the mist, under that poncho, he looked inhuman. But I knew who he was. And as I watched him fade into the dark and the shrubs my spirit sank, and I was filled with despair. That was my own self disappearing there; I was watching my own true self walk away in the rain. No one should have to watch that.

“When I couldn’t see him anymore I drove off in a panic. Creaks in the car made me jump into the steering wheel, and I was too scared to look back and see what it was. I drove faster and faster, and prayed the distributor would stay dry. The valleys of east Arizona rolled on and on, and for the first time, I think, I realized how gigantic the country really was. I couldn’t stop thinking of what had happened. Things we had said seemed to ring aloud in the air. I wished that we had had more time—that we had parted friends—that we had allowed the joining to take place! Why were we so afraid of wholeness? But I was afraid; the fear of that union washed over me, and I drove ever faster, as if he might be running down the highway after me, wet and exhausted, miles behind.”

Tom coughed a few times, and stared into the fire, remembering it. We watched him open mouthed.

“Did you ever see him again?” Rebel asked anxiously. That broke the spell and most of us laughed, including Tom. But then he frowned at her and nodded.

“Yes, I did see him again. And more than that.”

We settled back; the older folks, who had heard this story before, I guessed, looked surprised.

“It was several years later when I next saw him; you’ll know what year I mean. I was still a lawyer, older and slouchier and tubbier than ever. That was life in the old time—the years in the boxes took it out of you fast.” At that point Tom looked at me, as if to make sure I was listening. “It was a stupid life really, and that’s why I can’t see it when people talk about fighting to get back to that. People back then struggled at jobs in boxes so they could rent boxes and visit other boxes, and they spent their whole lives running in boxes like rats. I was doing it myself, and it made no sense.

“Part of me knew that it made no sense, and I fought back in a weak sort of way. At this time I was out west doing that again, hiking a little. I decided to hike to the top of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the United States. Weak as I was it was a killer task just to get up that ten mile trail, but after a couple days’ hard work I made it. Mount Whitney. Right before sunset, this was—again—so that I was the only person on the peak, which was rare.

“So I was walking around the top, which was broad, nearly an acre. The trail goes up the west side, which is nice and gradual. But the eastern face is almost sheer, and looking down it into the shadows made me feel funny. Then I noticed a climber. He was coming up that sheer face alone, up one of the cracks in the face. Old John Muir had climbed the face alone like that, but he was crazy for risks, and few climbers since had exposed themselves to such danger. It made me dizzy to look at this guy’s exposure, but I watched all the same, naturally. As he got higher he kept looking up, and at one point he saw me and waved. And I felt funny. The closer he got the more familiar he looked. And then I recognized him. It was my double, in climbing gear and full beard, looking as strong an animal as you could ask for. And there on that granite face!

“Well, I thought about hightailing it down the trail, but at one point when he looked up at me, I saw that he recognized me too, and I realized we would have to say hello. Or something. So I waited.

“It seemed to go on forever, the last part of that climb, and him in mortal danger the whole time. But when he crawled over the top, the sun was still over that distant western horizon, out over the Pacific way out there in the haze. He stood up, and walked toward me. A few feet away he stopped and we stared at each other wordlessly, in an amber glow of light like you only get in the Sierras at dusk. There didn’t seem anything to say, and it was like we were frozen.

“And then it happened.” Here Tom’s voice took on a hoarse, harsh quality, and he leaned forward in his lame chair, stopping its rocking, and stared into the fire refusing to look at any of us. He hacked three or four coughs and spoke rapidly: “The sun was about half an orange ball lying out on the horizon, and—and one bloomed beside it, and then a whole bunch of others, up and down the California coast. Fifty suns all strung out and glowing for sunset. The mushroom balls as tall as us, and then taller. Little haloes of smoke around each column. It was the day, folks. It was the end.

“I saw what it was, and then I knew what it was; I turned to look at my double, and saw he was crying. He moved to my side and we held hands. So simple. We melted together as easy as that—as easy as agreeing to. When we were done, I was up there all alone. I remembered both of my pasts, and felt my brother’s strength. The mushroom clouds blew toward me, coming on a cold wind. Oh I felt all alone, believe me, shivering and watching that horrible sight—but I felt, well… healed somehow, and… Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I got down off of there somehow.”

He leaned back and almost rocked too far in his chair. We all took a deep breath.

Tom stood and prodded the fire with a stick. “You see, you couldn’t live a whole life in the old time,” he said, his voice relaxed again, even peevish. “It’s only now that we’re out by a fire, in the world—”

“No morals if you please,” Rafael said. “You’ve told us enough of those lately, thank you.” John Nicolin nodded at that.

The old man blinked. “Well, okay. Stories shouldn’t have morals anyway. Let’s get some more wood on that fire! This story’s over, and I need something to drink.”

With a cough he went to get the drink himself, and released us. Some stood and threw wood on the fire, others asked Mrs. N. if there was more butter—all a bit subdued, but satisfied. “How the old man talks,” Steve said. Then he took my arm and indicated Melissa, over on the other side of the fire. I shrugged him off, but after a bit I walked around the fire and joined her. She put her arm around me. Feeling that small hand over my hip made the rum in me jump. We wandered out in the junk of the yard, and kissed hungrily. I was always surprised at how easy it was with Melissa. “Welcome home,” she said. “You still haven’t told me about your trip—I’ve heard it all second hand! Will you come over to my house later and tell me about it? Daddy will be there of course, but maybe he’ll go to bed.”

I agreed quickly, thinking more about her kisses than the information I was supposed to get from Add. But when it occurred to me (while nuzzling Melissa’s neck, so beautiful in the firelight), I was pretty pleased with myself. It was going to be easier than I thought. “Let’s see if there’s more rum,” I said.

A while later we had found the rum and downed it, and Addison had found us. “Let’s be off,” he said to Melissa gruffly.

“It’s early yet,” she said. “Can we bring Henry with us? I want to hear about his trip, and show him our house.”

“Sure,” Add said indifferently. I waved goodbye to Steve and Kathryn behind Melissa’s back, and felt pretty slick when I saw Steve’s startled expression. The three of us took off down the ridge trail. Add led Melissa and me across the valley without a word or a look back, so he didn’t see Melissa’s arm around my waist, nor her hand in my pocket. The pocket had a hole convenient to her, but I was none too comfortable with Add right in front of us, and I didn’t respond except with a kiss on the bridge, where I could trust my footing. Stumbling along the path up Basilone I could feel the rum in my blood, and Melissa’s fingers groping in my pants. Whew! But at the same time I was thinking, how am I going to ask Add about the scavengers and the Japanese? The rum sloshed my thoughts when I considered it, but it was more than the drink. There wasn’t a good way, that was all there was to it. I would have to cast without bait and hope for the best.

The Shanks house was one of the old ones, built by Add before hardly anybody lived in Onofre. He had used an electric wire tower as the framework of the place, so it was small but tall, and strong as a tree. The shingled walls sloped inward slightly, and the four metal struts of the tower protruded from the corners of the roof, meeting in a tangle of metal far above it.

“Come on in,” Add said hospitably, and took a key from his pocket to unlock the door. Once inside he struck a match and lit a lantern, and the smell of burnt whale oil filled the room. Boxes and tools were stacked against the walls, but there wasn’t any furniture. “We live upstairs,” Melissa said as Add led us up a steep plank staircase in one corner. She giggled and pushed my butt as she followed me up, and I almost banged into one of the thick metal struts of the old electric tower.

Nobody from Onofre Valley had ever been on the second floor, as far as I knew. But it was nothing special: kitchen in one corner, blond wood tables, an old couch and some chairs. Scavenger stuff all. A stairway leading to a trapdoor indicated another floor above. Add set the lantern on the stove, and commenced opening windows and throwing back the shutters guarding them. There were a lot of shutters. When he was done we had a view in all four directions: dark treetops, every way. “You’ve got a lot of windows,” I said, rum-wise. Add nodded. “Have a seat,” he said.

“I’m going to change clothes,” Melissa said, and went up the stairway to the floor above.

I sat in one of the big upholstered chairs, across from the couch. “Where’d you get all this glass?” I asked, hoping that would be a start on my ultimate subject. But Add knew that I knew where the glass came from, and he gave me a crooked smile.

“Oh, around. Here, have another glass of rum. I’ve got rum better than the Nicolins’.”

I was fine on rum already, as I’ve mentioned, but I took a glass from him.

“Here, sit on the couch,” Add said, and took back the glass while I moved. “It’s got the better view. If the air’s clear you’ll see Catalina. If not, then the great sea. Getting to be your second home, I hear.”

“My last home, almost.”

He laughed long and loud. “So I hear. So I hear. Well.” He sipped from his glass. “Quite a pleasant evening, this. I like Tom’s stories.”

“So do I.” We both drank again, and for a moment it looked like we had run out of things to say. Luckily Melissa came back down the stairs, in a white house dress that pinched her breasts together. Smiling at us, she got a glass of rum for herself, and sat right beside me on the couch, pressing against my arm and leg. It made me nervous, but Add gave us his crooked smile (so different from Tom’s crooked smile, which came of a busted mouth—Add only pulled back one side of his), and nodded, seeming satisfied with how cozy we were. He leaned back and balanced his glass on the worn arm of his chair.

“Good rum, isn’t it?” Melissa said. I agreed that it was.

“We traded two dozen crabs for it. We only trade for the best rum available.”

“I wish we were going to be trading with San Diego,” Add said peevishly. “Was San Diego as big as Tom said it is?”

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe bigger.”

Melissa rested her head on my shoulder. “Did you like it down there?”

“I guess so. It was quite a trip, I’ll say that.”

They began to ask me about the details of it. How many little towns were there? Were there railroad tracks to all of them? Was the Mayor popular? When I told them about the Mayor’s morning target practice they laughed. “And he does that every morning?” Add asked, rising to get us refills.

“So they said.”

“That must mean they have a lot of ammunition,” he said to himself in the kitchen. “Hey, this bottle’s polished.”

“You bet they do,” I said. It seemed like there would be a way to get the conversation over to the scavengers pretty soon, so I relaxed and began to enjoy getting there. “They’ve got all those naval warehouses down there, and the Mayor has had every one of them explored.”

“Uh huh. One moment; I have to go downstairs and get another bottle.”

The second his head disappeared down the stairs Melissa and I kissed. I could taste the rum on her tongue. I put my hand on her knee and she tugged her dress up so I was holding her bare thigh. More kissing, and my breath got short. I kept pushing the dress higher and higher, until I found she wasn’t wearing anything under it. Blood knocked in my ears with the shock of the discovery. Her belly pulsed in and out and she rocked over my hand, pushing down on it. We kissed harder, her hand squeezed my cock through my pants, and my breath left me entirely, whoosh, whoosh!

Thump, thump, answered Add’s boots on the ladder, and Melissa twisted aside and threw her dress down. Fine for her, but I had a hard-on bulging my pants, and Melissa gave it a last malicious squeeze to make it harder still, giggling at my expression of dismay. I drank my rum and scrunched around in the corner of the couch. By the time Add had gotten in the room and broken the seal on the new bottle I was presentable, although my heart was still pounding double time.

We drank some more. Melissa left her hand on my knee. Add got up and wandered the dimly lit room, peering out the windows and opening first one and then another, adjusting the circulation, he said. The rum was clobbering me.

“Doesn’t lightning ever hit your house?” I asked.

“Sure,” they both said, and laughed. Add went on: “Sometimes it’ll hit and a whole wall of shingles will pop off. Later when I check them they look all singed.”

“My hair stands right on end,” said Melissa.

“Aren’t you afraid of being electrocuted?” I asked, patiently rolling out the last word.

“No, no,” Add said. “We’re pretty well grounded here.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means the lightning runs down the corner poles into the ground. I had Rafe out to look at the place, and he said we’re in no danger. I like to remember that when the lightning hits and the whole house shakes, and blue sparks are bouncing around like hummingbirds.”

“It’s exciting,” Melissa said. “I like it.”

Add continued to play with the windows. When he was looking away Melissa took my hand and put it in her lap, trapping it between her legs. When he turned our way she released it and I yanked back upright. It was driving me wild. It got to where I didn’t wait for her to take my hand, but plunged for her whenever I could. We drank some more. Finally the windows were adjusted to Add’s satisfaction, and he stood over the side of the couch, looking down at me as if he knew what we had been up to.

“So what do you think that Mayor of San Diego is really after?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said I. I was in a daze—impatient to get back under Melissa’s dress, but very aware of Add standing right over me.

“Does he want to be king of this whole coastline?”

“I don’t think so. He wants the Japanese off the mainland, that’s all.”

“Ah. That’s what you said before, in the meeting. I don’t know if I believe it.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no sense to it. How many men does he have working for him, did you say?”

“I don’t think I said. I never really knew, exactly.”

“Do they have any radio gear?”

“Why, how did you guess? They’ve got a big old radio down there, but it doesn’t work yet.”

“No?”

“Not yet, but they said they were planning to get a man over from the Salton Sea to fix it.”

“Who said this, now?”

“The folks in San Diego. The Mayor.”

“Well what do you know.”

With all these questions I judged that it was a perfect time for some questions of my own. “Add, where did you get all this glass from?”

“Why, at the swap meets, mostly.” He was looking at Melissa, now—they exchanged a glance I didn’t understand.

“From the scavengers?”

“Sure. They’re the ones selling glass, aren’t they?”

I decided to tack a little closer to the wind. “Do you ever trade directly with the scavengers, Add? I mean, outside the swap meets?”

“Why no. Why do you ask?” He was still grinning his crooked grin, but his eyes got watchful. The grin left.

“No reason,” I said, feeling all of a sudden like he could see through my eyes and read what I was thinking. “I was wondering, that’s all.”

“Nope,” he said decisively. “I never deal with the zopilotes, no matter what you hear. I trap crabs under Trestles, so I’m up there a lot, but that’s the extent of it.”

“They lie about us,” Melissa said tragically.

“No matter,” Add said, the grin back in place. “Everyone collects stories of one sort of another, I reckon.”

“True,” I said. And it was true; everyone who didn’t live right on the valley floor, where their lives were under constant examination, had stories told about them. I could see how rumors would grow especially fast around Addison, him being such a private man. It really wasn’t fair to him. I didn’t know what to say. Obviously Steve was going to have to find some other way to get information for the San Diegans. I blinked and breathed deep and regular, trying to control the effects of the rum. Add had never lit more than the one lantern, and even though the single flame was reflected in five or six windows, the room danced with shadows. There were a couple more swallows of the amber liquor in my glass, but I resolved to pass on them. Addison moved away from the couch, and Melissa sat up. Add went to the kitchen corner and consulted a large sand clock.

“It’s been fun, but it’s getting late. Melissa, you and I ought to be abed. We’ve got lots of work to do in the morning.”

“Okay, Daddy.”

“You walk Henry down and say goodnight to him real quick. Henry, come back and give us a visit sometime soon.” I got to my feet, unsteady but eager, and Add shook my hand, squeezing hard and grinning at me. “Careful walking home.”

“Sure. Thanks for the rum, Add.” I followed Melissa down the ladder to the ground floor, and then out the door into the night. We kissed. I leaned back against the sloping wall of their house to keep myself upright, one leg thrust between Melissa’s as she pressed against me. It reminded me of the first time we fooled around at the swap meet, only this time I was drunker. Melissa rubbed up and down my thigh, and let me feel her some more as she kissed my neck and breathed umm, umm, very softly. Then:

“He’s waiting. I’d better go upstairs.”

“Oh.”

“Good night, Henry.”

A peck on the nose and she was gone. I shoved off from the wall and staggered across the little clearing into the woods. There were foundations out there from the old time, the remnants of houses it looked like. Everything was gone except the concrete slabs, cracking under the weeds. I stumbled onto one of these and sat down for a bit, looking back through the trees at the Shankses’ tower. There was a silhouette in front of the lights in the living room. I tasted the finger that had been feeling Melissa. The blood rushed to my head. It seemed a terrible amount of trouble to stand again, so I sat awhile and recalled the feel of her. I could see her, too—the silhouette was her—moving about the kitchen part of the upper room. Cleaning, I guessed. I don’t know how much time passed, but suddenly their kitchen lantern went dark, then reappeared—once, twice, three and then four times. That seemed a little odd.

Off to my right I heard a twig snap. I knew instantly it was people, walking over another foundation. I crawled silently between two large trees and listened. Around to the north of the house there were people, at least two of them, not doing a very good job of moving through the woods quietly. Valley people would never have made such noise. And there was no reason for any of them to be up there anyway. All this occurred to me rapidly, no matter that I was drunk. Without thinking about it I found myself flat on my stomach behind a tree, where I could see the Shankses’ door. Sure enough, shadows on the other side of the little clearing resolved into moving shapes, then into people, three of them. They walked right up to the door, said something up at the second story.

It was Melissa who let them in. While they were still on the first floor I slipped through the trees quiet as owlflight, and hauled butt over to the wall of their house. I blessed my speed (fastest in Onofre by far) and held my breath. Only then did I wonder if I really wanted to be there. That’s drunkenness for you—sometimes it can speed action by cutting out the thought.

From the ground I could hear their voices, but I couldn’t make out enough of what they were saying to make sense of it. I remembered seeing blocks of wood nailed to the side of the house next to the door, making a ladder to the roof. I shifted along the wall to them, and step by step I ascended the blocks, taking a minute for each block so they wouldn’t creak. When my head was under one of the windows I stopped and listened.

“They’ve got a radio,” Addison said. “He says it isn’t working yet, but they have someone from the Salton Sea coming out to try and fix it.”

“That’s probably Gonzalez,” said a nasal, high voice.

A deeper voice added: “Danforth is always bragging he’s got equipment right on the edge of working, but it doesn’t always happen. Did he describe the radio’s condition?”

“No,” Add said. “He doesn’t know enough to judge it, anyway.”

They had been pumping me! Here I had gone up there thinking to pump them for information, and they had been pumping me instead. My face burned. And what was worse, Melissa had probably arranged with Add to come on to me after I had gotten good and drunk, to distract my attention from the questions! Now that was ugly.

And then Melissa said scornfully, “He doesn’t know any more than the rest of those farmers.”

“He knows books,” Add corrected her. “And he was digging around trying to find out something, I don’t know what. Glass? Or Orange, more likely. He may have just been curious. Anyway, he’s not as ignorant as most of them.”

“Oh, he’s all right,” Melissa said. “Can’t hold his liquor, though.”

One of the scavengers was moving about the room, and I could make out the bulk of him as he passed above me. I pressed into the wall and tried to look like a shingle. If they caught me… well, I could beat any of them through the woods at night. Unless I fell. I was in no shape for running, and suddenly I was scared, like I should have been all along.

They continued to discuss the San Diegans, and Addison and Melissa told them everything I had said. I was surprised at how much I had told them; I didn’t even remember some of it. They had pumped me good, that was sure. And I hadn’t learned a thing from them. I felt like a fool, and gritted my teeth with dislike for those two.

But now I was getting back at them. And despite what she had done and what she was saying, part of me wanted to get Melissa’s dress up again.

“Our island friends were planning to bring over people and goods soon,” the nasal one said. “We need to know how much Danforth knows, and what he could do about it if he did know anything. Maybe we should move the landing.”

“They don’t know anything,” Add said. “And Danforth is nothing but talk. If they could touch Dana Point they wouldn’t be asking the Onofre folks for help.”

“They may just want a good harbor up the coast here,” the man above me said. He was facing my way. “Las Pulgas has got too many sandbars, and it’s too far away.”

“Maybe. But from the sound of it they’re nothing to worry about.”

The nasal one seemed to agree: “Danforth doesn’t abide his best man, from what I hear—he can’t be much of a leader.”

They discussed Danforth and his men in some detail, and on my wooden step I trembled. To know so much they must have spies everywhere! We were ignorant simpletons, compared to such a network.

“We should be off,” said the nasal guy. “I want to be in Dana Point at three.” He went on, but the moment he mentioned leaving I started inching down the blocks, shifting my weight ever so slowly, and praying that the man above me was looking into the room. I was stuck against the house; no matter which way I left, there was a good chance someone would see me. The shortest gap was to the west, so I went to that side of the building and waited. Had they started downstairs? I guessed that they had, and stole off into the trees. Foxes couldn’t have crossed that ground as fast as I did.

Sure enough, the scavengers quickly appeared at the front door, and I saw Melissa in the doorway waving goodbye, still in her white dress. I was tempted to approach the house again and spy on the two of them, but I didn’t want to press my luck. As long as they didn’t know I had overheard their meeting with the scavengers, I had turned the tables on them. That felt good. I started off for the river, walking slowly and quietly. In the end I had gotten more information than they had, and they still thought I was a dimwit; that might give me an advantage later. I wanted fiercely to get back at them. If only the scavengers had said exactly when the Japanese landing was going to be… But I knew it was to be soon, and at Dana Point, and that was something substantial to tell Steve. Would I have a story for him. He would be envious again, I judged with drunken clarity. But I didn’t care. I would get the Shankses—show Steve what I could do—whip the Japanese—get Melissa’s dress off—triumph every which way—

A tree creaked and I jumped out of my shoes, practically. I started paying attention to my progress through the forest. It took a long time to get home, and then a long time to get to sleep. Such a night! I recalled hanging on the wall of the Shankses’ house. Why, I had done it again. That Melissa, though—she had hurt my feelings. But all in all I felt good. Escaping the Japanese ship, foxing scavengers and their spies… smart work all round… After some more of this drunken fuddle I fell asleep. That night I dreamt there were two of me, chased by two of the Japanese captain, and in a house over the river that didn’t exist two Kathryns rescued us.

15

“Well, Henry,” Steve said when I told him about my night (juicing it up a little, and leaving out the part where Add and Melissa had pumped me for everything I knew), “we’re going to have to know when they’re going to land at Dana Point, or we don’t have anything. Think you can find out?”

“Now how am I going to do that?” I demanded. “Add isn’t going to tell me a thing. Why don’t you find that out?”

He looked offended. “You’re the one who knows Melissa and Add.”

“Like I said, that’s no help.”

“Well—maybe we could spy on them again,” he suggested dubiously.

“Maybe we could.”

We went back to fishing in silence. Sun smashing down on the water and breaking bright white over every swell. Hot days like this were my special joy—the hillsides steamed, the water and sky were two shades of the same rich blue—but on this day I wasn’t paying much attention to it. Steve was speculating about how we might spy on Add, and planning what he would say to Lee and Jennings. He had worked out everything he was going to say to them to convince them to let us guide them into Orange. As we rowed back to the rivermouth I spoke for the first time since telling him my story: “You can put all that good planning to work—that’s Jennings on the beach talking to your pa.”

“It is?”

“Yep. Don’t you recognize him?” Even with his face smaller than my little fingernail I knew him. At the sight of him all my San Diego trip came back to me at once, as something that had really happened to me. It made me shiver. There was no sight of Lee. Jennings was talking as usual. Now that I could see him in the flesh our whole plan seemed foolish. “Steve, I still don’t think dealing with the San Diegans on our own is a good idea. What’ll the rest of the valley say when they find out?”

“They won’t find out. Come on, Henry, don’t fade on me now. You’re my best friend, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. But that don’t mean—”

“It means you’ve got to help me with this. If you don’t help I can’t do it.”

“Well… shit.”

“We’ve got to hear what they’re saying there.” He rowed like he was in a race to the flats. As we grounded over the sand I said,

“How will we get close enough to hear?”

We jumped out and lifted the boat forward on the next spent swell. “Walk the fish past them and listen while you’re near. I’ll follow you, and we’ll piece together what we heard.”

“That won’t be easy.”

“Shit, we know what Pa is saying. Just do it!”

I picked up a pair of rock bass by the gills and trundled slowly across the rimpled sand to the cleaning tables, walking right behind Jennings. He turned and said, “Why hello, Henry! Looks like you made it home safe enough.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Jennings. Where’s Mr. Lee?”

“Well, now…” His eyes narrowed. “He’s not with us this time. He sends his regards.” The two men with Jennings (one had been on my train, I thought) smirked.

“I see.” That was too bad, I thought.

“We went up to see your friend Tom, but he was in bed sick. He told us to come and talk to Mr. Nicolin here.”

“Which is what we’re doing now,” John said, “so clear out, Hank.”

“Sick?” I said.

“Get going!” John said.

Jennings said, “Talk to you later, friend.”

I carried the bass up to the cleaning tables and said hello to the girls. Walking back to the boat I passed Steve, then heard John say, “You got no call to be pressing on this, Mister. We don’t want any part of it.”

“All well and good,” Jennings said, “but we need to use the tracks, and they run right across your valley.”

“There are tracks back in the hills. Use those.”

“Mayor doesn’t want that.”

And then I was out of earshot. It was tough hearing their voices with the gulls stooping us and screeching over the offal. I picked up a bonita and another bass and hurried back. Steve was just past them.

“Barnard wouldn’t talk to me,” Jennings said. “Is that because he wants us to work together?”

“Tom voted against helping you along with the majority of the people here, so that’s that.”

Over at the cleaning tables Mrs. Nicolin said, “Why is that man arguing with John?”

“He wants us to let them use the train tracks in the valley, and all that.”

“But they’re ruined, especially at the river.”

“Yeah. Say, is the old man sick?”

“So I hear. You should go up and see.”

“Is he bad?”

“I don’t know. But when the old get sick…”

Steve nudged me from behind, and I turned to walk back.

“The Mayor ain’t going to like this,” Jennings was saying. “No one down our way is. Americans got to stick together in these times, don’t you understand that? Henry! Did you know your trip to San Diego has gone to naught?”

“Um—”

“You know what’s going on here?”

John waved a hand at me angrily. “You kids clear out,” he ordered.

Steve heard that over the crying gulls, and he led me up the cliff path. From the top we looked back at the river flat; Jennings was still talking. John stood there with his arms across his chest. Pretty soon he was going to grab Jennings and throw him in the river.

“That guy is a fool,” Steve said.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. The old man is sick, did you know that?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t sound interested.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He didn’t reply.

“I’m going to go see how he’s doing.” He had been coughing a lot when he told his story. And even back at the meeting he had seemed listless and hacky. All I remembered about my mother’s death was that she had coughed a lot.

“Not yet,” Steve said. “When that guy gives up on Pa we can catch him alone and tell him our plan.”

“Jennings,” I said sharply. “His name is Jennings. You’d better know that when you talk to him.”

Steve looked me up and down. “I knew it.”

I walked down the path a ways, angry. Down by the tables John walked away from the San Diego men, brushing by one of them with his shoulder. He turned to say something, and then the San Diegans were left to look at each other. Jennings spoke and they started up the cliff trail. “Let’s get out of sight,” Steve said.

We hid in the trees south of Nicolins’ yard. Soon Jennings and his two men appeared over the cliff edge and started our way. “Okay, let’s go,” I said. Steve shook his head. “We’ll follow them,” he said.

“They might not like that.”

“We have to talk to them where no one will see us.”

“Okay, but don’t surprise them.”

When they were in the trees to the south we took off in pursuit, stopping every few trees to peer ahead, like bandits in a story.

“There they are,” Steve said, flushed with excitement. Their dark coats flashed through the trees ahead of us, and I could hear snatches of Jennings’ voice, carrying on as usual.

Steve nodded. “In these woods is as good a place as any.”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, let’s stop them.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m not holding you back.”

Once again he gave me the eye. He stepped out from behind a tree. “Hey, stop! Stop up there!”

Suddenly the forest was silent, and the San Diegans were nowhere to be seen.

“Mr. Jennings!” I called. “It’s me, Henry! We need to talk to you.”

Jennings stepped out from behind a eucalyptus, putting a pistol back in a coat pocket. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” he said irritably. “You shouldn’t be surprising people in the woods.”

“Sorry,” I said, giving Steve a look. He was flushed red.

“What do you want?” Jennings said impatiently. His two men appeared behind him.

“We want to talk with you,” Steve said.

“I heard that. So speak up; what do you want?”

After a pause Steve said, “We want to join the resistance. Not everyone in the valley is against helping you. In fact, it was a damn close vote. If some of us were to help you, the rest of the valley might come along, eventually.”

One of Jennings’ men snickered, but Jennings silenced him with a gesture. “That’s a good thought, friend, but what we really need is access through your valley to the north, and I don’t think you can give us that.”

“No, we can’t. But we can guide you when you’re up in Orange, and that’s more important. If that goes right, like I said, the rest of the valley will probably join in later.”

I stared at Steve in dismay, but Jennings wasn’t looking at me.

“We know scavengers who are on our side,” Steve went on. “We can find out from them when the Japanese will be landing, and where.”

“Who can tell you that?” Jennings asked skeptically.

“People we know,” Steve replied. Seeing the doubtful look on Jennings’ face he said, “There are scavengers up there who know about the scavengers dealing with the Japanese, and they don’t like it. There’s not much they can do about it, but they can tell us, and then we’ll do something about it, right? We’ve been up there a lot, we know the lay of the land and everything.”

Jennings said, “We could use information like that.”

“Well, we can do it.”

“Good. That’s good.” Slowly he said, “We might make arrangements for getting information from you now and then.”

“We want to do more than that,” Steve said flatly. “We can guide you up to whatever spot the Japanese are landing at, no matter where it is. There aren’t any of you know the ruins like we do. We’ve been up there at night a whole bunch of times. If you’re going up there on a raid, you’ll need to have someone who knows the land, to get you there and back fast.”

Jennings’ face wasn’t much at concealing his thoughts, and now he looked interested.

“We want to go up there with you and fight them,” Steve said more vehemently. “We’re like the Mayor—we want the Japanese too scared to come ashore ever again. You provide the men and guns, and four or five of us will guide you up there and fight with you. And we’ll tell you when the landings are going to happen.”

“That’s quite a proposal.” Jennings drawled, looking at me.

“We’re young, but that doesn’t matter,” Steve insisted. “We can fight—we’d ambush them good.”

“That’s what we do,” Jennings said harshly. “We ambush and kill them. We’re talking about killing men.”

“I know that.” Steve looked offended. “Those Japanese are invaders. They’re taking advantage of our weakness. Killing them is defending the country.”

“True enough,” Jennings agreed. “Still… that man down there wouldn’t appreciate us dealing with you behind his back, would he. I don’t know if we should do that.”

“He’ll never hear of it. Never know of it. There’s just a few of us, and none of us will say a word. We go up into the ruins at night a lot—they’ll think we’re doing that again when we go with you. Besides, if things go well, they’ll have to join us.”

Jennings shifted his gaze to me. “Is that so, Henry?”

“Sure is, Mr. Jennings.” I went right along with it. “We could guide you up there and no one would be the wiser.”

“Maybe,” Jennings said. “Maybe.” He glanced back at his men, then stared at me. “Do you know right now when a landing party is coming in?”

“Soon,” Steve said. “We know one is coming in soon. We already know where, and we’ll find out exactly when in the next few days, I’d guess.”

“All right. Tell you what. If you hear of a landing, you come tell us at the weigh station where we stopped working the tracks. We’ll have men there. I’ll go back south and talk to the Mayor, and if he agrees to the idea, which maybe he will, then we’ll bring men up and be ready to move. We got the tracks working again, did I tell you that, Henry? It was tough, but we did it. Anyway, you know where those buildings are, the weigh station.”

“We all know that,” Nicolin said.

“Fine, fine. Now listen: when you get word of a Jap landing, hustle to the station and tell us, and we’ll see what we can do about it. We’ll leave it at that for now.”

“We have to go along on the raid,” Steve insisted.

“Sure, didn’t I say that? You’ll be our guides. All this depends on the Mayor, you understand, but as I said, I think he’ll want to do it. He wants to hit those Japs any way he can.”

“So do we,” Steve said, “I swear it.”

“Oh, I believe you. Now, we’d better be off.”

“When can we check with you and see what the Mayor said?”

“Oh—a week, say. But get down there sooner if you hear word.”

Nicolin nodded, and Jennings pointed his men south.

“Good talking with you, friends. Good to know that someone in this valley is an American.”

“That we are. We’ll see you soon.”

“Goodbye,” I added.

We watched them slip through the trees in the forest. Then Steve struck me on the arm.

“We did it! They’re going for it, Henry, they’re going to do it.”

“Looks like it,” I said. “But what was that you said about how we’ll know when the landing will come in a few days? You lied to them! There’s no way we can be sure when we’ll find that out, if we ever do at all!”

“Ah come on, Henry. You could see I had to tell them something. You pretend to object to all this, but you like it as much as I do. You’re good at it! You’re the fastest thinking, fastest running resistance man around, and the cleverest in figuring these kinds of things out. You’ll be able to find out that landing date if you want to.”

“I suppose I can,” I said, pleased despite myself.

“Sure you can.”

“Well… let’s get back before anyone notices we’re missing.”

He laughed. “See? You are good at this, Henry, I swear you are.”

“Uh huh.”

And the thing is, I thought he was right. I was the one who had kept Jennings and his men from shooting us by mistake, back there. And every time I was in a spot, the right things seemed to happen to get me out of it. I began to feel that these things didn’t just happen to me, but that I was doing them. I made them turn out right. I could make sure that we joined the resistance, and fought the Japanese, without breaking the vote or getting the rest of the valley angry at us. I really thought I could do it.

Then I remembered the old man, and all my feeling of power vanished. We were still in the forest between the Nicolins’ and Concrete Bay; if I headed inland I would soon run onto Tom’s ridge.

“I’m going up to see how the old man is doing,” I said.

“I’ve got to get back to the pit,” Steve said. “But I’ll—wait a minute!”

But I was already off, making my way through the trees inland.

16

The old man’s yard always looked untended, with weeds growing over the collapsing fence and junk scattered everywhere. But now as I climbed the ridge path apprehension made me see it all again: the small weatherbeaten house with its big front window reflecting the sky; the yard drowning in weeds; the gnarled trees on the ridge tossing in the wind, and snatching at the clouds that were growing with every minute. It all looked abandoned. If the house’s owner had been dead and buried ten years, it would all look as it did now.

Kathryn appeared in the window, and I tried to change my thoughts. Wind pushed the weeds up and down. Kathryn saw me and waved, and I lifted my head in hello. She opened the door as I walked into the yard, and met me in the doorway.

Casually I said, “So how’s he doing? What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s asleep now. I don’t think he slept much last night, he was coughing so bad.”

“I remember he coughed some when he told us that story.”

“It’s worse now. He’s all congested.”

I studied Kathryn’s face, saw the well-known pattern of freckles shifted by lines of concern. She reached out to hold my arm. I hugged her and she put her head to my shoulder. It scared me. If Kathryn was scared, I was terrified. I tried to reassure her with my hug, but I was trembling.

“Who’s that out there?” Tom called from the bedroom. “I’m not sleeping, who’s there?”

Then he coughed. It was a deep, wet, hacking sound, like he was choosing voluntarily to put a lot of force behind it.

“It’s me, Tom,” I said when he was done. I went to the door of his room. None of us had ever been welcome in there; it was his private place. I looked in. “I heard you were sick.”

“I am.” He was sitting up in bed, leaning against the wall behind it. He looked sick, there was no doubt about it. Hair and beard were tangled and damp, face sweaty and pale. He eyed me without moving his head. “Come on in.”

I walked into the room for the first time. It was filled with books, like the storeroom down the hall. There was a table and chair, several books on each; a stack or two of records; and tacked to the wall under the one small window, a collection of curled photographs.

I said, “I guess you must have caught a cold on our trip back.”

“Seems to me it should’ve been you who got it. You got the coldest.”

“We all got cold.” I remembered how he had walked on the seaward side of me to break the wind. The times he had held me up as we walked. I looked at the photographs, heard Kathryn move things around in the big room.

“What’s she doing out there?” Tom asked. “Hey, girl! Quit that in there!” He stared to cough again.

When he was done my heart was pounding. “Maybe you shouldn’t shout,” I said.

“Yeah.”

Lamely I added, “It’s rotten to have a cold in the summer.”

“Yeah. Sure is.”

Kathryn stood in the doorway.

“Where’s your sister?” Tom said. “She was just here.”

“She had to go do some things,” said Kathryn.

“Anybody home?” came a voice from the door.

“That must be her now,” Kathryn said. But it had been Doc’s voice.

“Uh oh,” said Tom. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” Kathryn said apologetically.

Doc barged into the room, black bag in hand, Kristen on his heels.

“What are you doing here?” Tom said. “I don’t want you fussing with me, Ernest. You hear?” He shifted in his bed until he was against the side wall.

Doc approached him with a fierce grin.

“Leave me alone, I’m telling you—”

“Shut up and lie flat,” Doc said. He put his bag on the bed, and pulled his stethoscope from it.

“Ernest, you don’t need to do this. I’ve just got a cold.”

“Shut up,” Doc said angrily. “Do as I say, or I’ll make you swallow this.” He held up the stethoscope.

“You couldn’t make me blink.” But he lay flat, and let Doc take his pulse, and listen to his chest with the stethoscope. He kept complaining, but Doc stuck a thermometer in his mouth, which shut him up, or at least made him incomprehensible. Then Doc went back to listening.

After a bit he removed the thermometer from Tom’s mouth and examined it. “Breathe deep,” he ordered, listening again to Tom’s chest.

Tom breathed once or twice, caught—held his breath till he turned pink—then coughed, long and hard.

“Tom,” Doc said in the following silence (I had been holding my breath), “you’re coming to my house for a visit to the hospital.”

Tom shook his head.

“Don’t even try to argue with me,” Doc warned. “It’s the hospital for you, boy.”

“No way,” Tom said, and cleared his throat. “I’m staying here.”

“God damn it,” Doc said. He was genuinely angry. “It’s likely you have pneumonia. If you don’t come with me I’m going to have to move over here. Now what’s Mando going to think of that?”

“Mando would love it.”

“But I wouldn’t.” And Tom caught the look on Doc’s face. It was probably true that Doc could have moved to Tom’s easier than Tom could move to Doc’s. But Doc’s place was the hospital. Doc didn’t do much serious doctoring any more—I mean he did what he could, but that wasn’t much, sometimes. Breaks, cuts, births—he was good at those. His father, a doctor gone crazy for doctoring, had made sure of that years ago when Doc was young, teaching him everything he knew with a fanatic insistence. But now Doc was responsible for his best friend, who was seriously ill—and maybe moving Tom to the hospital was a way to say to himself that he could do something about it. I could see Tom figuring this out as he looked at Doc’s face—figuring it out more slowly than he usually would have, I thought. “Pneumonia, eh?” he said.

“That’s right.” Doc turned to us. “You all go outside for a bit.”

Kathryn and Kristen and I went out and stood in the yard, amid all the rusty machine parts staining the earth. Kristen told us how she had located Doc. Kathryn and I stared out at the ocean, silently sharing our distress. Clouds were rolling in. It happened so often like that—a sunny day, blanketed by mid-afternoon by clouds. Wind whipped the weeds, and our hair.

Doc looked out the door. “We need some help in here,” he said. We went inside. “Kathryn, get some of his clothes together, a few shirts he can wear in bed, you know. Henry, he wants to get some books together; go find out which ones he wants.”

I went back in the bedroom and found Tom standing before the photographs tacked to the wall, holding one flat with a finger. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Which books do you want to take?”

He turned and walked slowly to the bed. “I’ll show you.” We went to the storeroom, and he looked around at the books stacked in the gloom. A pile near the door contained every book he wanted. He handed them to me from a crouch. Great Expectations was the only title I noticed. When my arms were full he stopped. He picked up one more.

“Here. I want you to take this one.”

He held out the book that Wentworth had given us, the one with blank pages.

“What am I going to do with this?”

He tried to put it in my arms with the rest, but there wasn’t room.

“Wait—I thought you were going to write your stories in that.”

“I want you to do it.”

“But I don’t know the stories!”

“Yes you do.”

“No I don’t. Besides, I don’t know how to write.”

“The hell you don’t! I taught you myself, by God.”

“Yeah, but not for books. I don’t know how to write books.”

“It’s easy. You just keep going till the pages are full.” He forced the book under my arm.

“Tom,” I protested, “no. You’re supposed to do it.”

“I can’t. I’ve tried. You’ll see the pages ripped out of the front. But I can’t.”

“I don’t believe it. Why, the story you told the other night—”

“Not the same. Believe me.” He looked desolate. We stood there looking at the blank book in my arms, both of us upset. “The stories I’ve got you wouldn’t want written down.”

“Oh, Tom.”

Doc came in the room. “Henry, you aren’t going to be able to carry those books. Give them to Kristen; she’s got a bag.”

“Why, what am I carrying?”

“You and I are carrying Tom here, young man, can’t you figure that out? Does he look like someone ready to walk across the valley?”

I thought Tom would hit him for that, but he didn’t. He just looked morose and tired and said, “I wasn’t aware you owned a stretcher, Ernest.”

“I don’t. We’ll use one of your chairs.”

“Ah. Well, that sounds like hard work.” He walked into the big room. “This one by the window is the lightest.” He carried it out of the house himself, then sat in it.

“Put those books in Kristen’s bag,” said Doc.

“Ooof,” Kristen said as I piled them in. I went to help Kathryn find Tom’s shirts. Curiously I checked the photograph Tom had been looking at; it was a woman’s face. Kathryn lifted an armful of clothes, and we went outside. The old man was staring at the sea. It was getting blustery, and halfway to the horizon a few whitecaps appeared and disappeared.

“Ready?” Doc asked.

Tom nodded, not looking at us. Doc and I got on either side of him and lifted the chair by its arms and bottom. Tom craned around to look back at his house as we stepped slowly down the ridge trail. Mouth turned down he said, “I am the last American.”

“The hell you are,” I said. “The hell you are.” And he chuckled, faintly.

It was tricky getting down the ridge path, but on the valley floor he seemed heavier. “Change places with me,” Kathryn said to Doc. We put the chair down; Tom sat there with his eyes closed and never said a word. So strange, to have the old man quiet! Though the wind was brisk, there was sweat beading on his forehead.

Kathryn and I lifted him. She was a lot stronger than Doc, so I had less to carry. Into the forest shade we went.

“Am I heavy?” Tom asked. He opened his eyes and looked up at Kathryn. Her thick freckled arms came together at the elbows, pinning her breasts together in front of his face. He mimicked a bite at them.

She laughed. “No more than a chairful of rocks,” she said.

At the bridge we stopped for a rest, and watched the clouds roll over us, talking as if we were on a normal outing. But with Tom in the chair it wasn’t natural. On the bank upstream a group of kids splashed in the water; they stopped to watch us as we got across the bridge, which was narrow enough to force me to lead, walking backwards. Tom stared mournfully at the naked brats as they pointed and shrieked. Kathryn saw the look on his face and she squinted at me unhappily. Fat gray clouds lowered over us, the wind tossed our hair, it was cold, and getting darker… Miserably I tried to find a way to distract Tom.

“I still don’t see what I’m going to do with that blank book,” I said. “You better keep it, Tom, you might want to do some writing in it up at Doc’s.”

“Nope. It’s yours.”

“But—but what am I going to do with it?”

“Write in it. That’s why I’m giving it to you. Write your own story in it.”

“But I don’t have a story.”

“Sure you do. ‘An American at Home.’ ”

“But that’s nothing. Besides, I wouldn’t know how.”

“Just do it. Write the way you talk. Tell the truth.”

“What truth?”

After a long pause, he said, “You’ll figure that out. That’s what the book is for.”

He lost me there, but by that time we were working our way up the path to the Costas’, and were almost to the little cleared terrace in the hillside that it sat on. I looked at Kathryn and she thanked me for distracting him with a quick smile. We hefted him up the last steps.

The Costas’ house gleamed black against the trees and clouds. Mando came out and greeted us. “How are you, Tom?” he said brightly. Without answering Tom tried to stand up and walk through the door into their house. He couldn’t do it, and Kathryn and I carried him in. Mando led us to the corner room that they called the hospital. Its two outer walls were oil drums; there were two beds, a stove, an overhead trap door to let sun and air in, and a smooth wood floor. We put Tom on the corner bed. He lay there with a faint frown turning his mouth. We went into the kitchen and let Doc look at him.

“He’s real sick, huh?” said Mando.

“Your dad says it’s pneumonia,” Kathryn said.

“I’m glad he’s here, then. Have a seat, Henry, you look bushed.”

“I am.” While I sat Mando got us cups of water. He was always a conscientious host, and when Mando and Kristen weren’t looking, Kathryn and I smiled a little to see him. But not much; we were glum. Mando and Kristen talked on and on, and Mando got out some of his animal drawings to show her.

“Did you really see that bear, Armando?”

“Yes, I sure did—Del can tell you, he was with me.”

Kathryn jerked her head at the door. “Let’s go outside,” she said to me.

We sat on the cut log bench in the Costas’ garden. Kathryn heaved a sigh. For a long time we sat together without saying a word.

Mando and Kristen came out. “Pa says we should find Steve, and get him to come up and read from that book,” Mando said. “He said Tom would like that.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Kathryn said.

“I think he’ll be at his house,” I told them. “Or down the cliff right by the house, you know the place.”

“Yeah. We’ll try there.” They walked on down the path, hand in hand. We watched them till they were out of sight, then sat silently again.

Abruptly Kathryn slapped at a fly. “He’s too old for this.”

“Well, he’s gotten sick before.” But I could tell this time was different.

She didn’t answer. Her wild hair lifted and fell in the nippy onshore wind. Under the growing clouds the valley’s forest was intensely green. All that life…

“I think of him as ageless,” I said. “Old, but—you know—unchanging.”

“I know.”

“It scares me when he gets sick like this!”

“I know.”

“At his age. Why, he’s ancient.”

“Over a hundred.” Kathryn shook her head. “Incredible.”

“I wonder why we get old at all. Sometimes it doesn’t seem… natural.”

I felt her shrug more than saw it. “That’s life.”

Which wasn’t much of an answer, as far as I was concerned. The deeper the question the shallower the answer—until the deepest questions have no answers at all. Why are things the way they are, Kath? A sigh, arms touching, curled hairs floating across one’s face, the wind, the clouds overhead. What more answer than that? I felt choked, as if oceans of clouds filled me to bursting. A strand of Kathryn’s hair rolled up and down my nose, and I watched it fiercely, noted its every kink and curl, every streak of red in the brown, as a way to hold myself all in… as a way to grab the world to me with my senses, to hold it against me so it couldn’t slip away.

Time passed. (So all our ways fail.) Kathryn said, “Steve is so tense these days I’m afraid he’s going to break. Like a twenty-pound bowstring on a sixty-pound bow. Fighting with his pa. And all that shit about the resistance. If I don’t agree with every word he says, he starts a fight with me. I’m getting so sick of it.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Couldn’t you talk to him about it, Henry? Couldn’t you discourage him about this resistance thing somehow?”

I shook my head. “Since I got back, he won’t let me argue with him.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen that. But in some other way. Even if you’re for the resistance yourself, you know there’s no reason to go crazy over it.”

I nodded.

“Something other than arguing with him. You’re good with words, Henry, you could find some way to dampen his enthusiasm for all that.”

“I guess.” What about my enthusiasm, I wanted to say; but looking at her I couldn’t. Didn’t I have doubts, anyway?

“Please, Henry.” She put her hand on my arm again. “It’s only making him unhappy, and me miserable. If I knew you were working on him to calm him down, I’d feel better.”

“Oh Kath, I don’t know.” But her hand tightened around my upper arm, and her eyes were damp. With her hand touching me I felt connected with all this world that rushed over us, so chill and so beautiful. “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you. No matter what you say, he listens to you more than anybody else.”

That surprised me. “I’d think he’d listen to you most.”

She pursed her lips, and her hand returned to her lap. “We aren’t getting along so well, like I said. Because of all this.”

“Ah.” And I had agreed to help her there (I would always agree to help her if she asked, I realized) at the same time that I was conspiring with Steve in every spare moment to take the San Diegans into Orange County! What was I doing? When I thought about what I had just done it made me feel sick. All my connection with the green and white and the sea smell and the trees’ voices disappeared, and I almost said to Kathryn I can’t do it, I’m with Steve on this. But I didn’t. I felt a knot tie inside me, over my stomach.

Steve appeared on the path below, leading Mando and Kristen and Gabby, carrying the book in one hand and waving with the other. Mando and Kristen had to jog to keep up with him.

“Halloo!” he cried cheerfully. “Ahoy up there!”

We stood and met them at the Costas’ door.

“So Doc brought him here, eh?” Steve said.

“He thinks he has pneumonia,” said Kathryn.

Steve winced and shook his head. Under his thick black hair has brow was wrinkled with worry. “Let’s go keep him company, then.”

Once inside I began to lose the knot, and when Steve and Tom went into their usual act I laughed with the others.

“What are you doing in the hospital, you old layabout? Have you bit any nurses yet?”

“Only to discourage them when they’re washing my body,” Tom said with a faint smile.

“Sure, sure. And is the food terrible? And the what d’you call thems, the bedpans is it?”

“Watch it, boy, or I’ll turn a bedpan over your head. Bedpan indeed—”

And by the time they were done tussling and pounding each other, Steve had Tom up in his bed and leaning back against the oildrums. The rest of us crowded into the hospital and sat on the other bed, or the floor, and laughed like we were at one of Tom’s bonfire parties. Steve could do that for us. Even Kathryn was laughing. Only Doc stayed serious through it all, his eye on Tom. Over here Tom was his responsibility, and already you could see the strain on him. I don’t think Doc liked being our doctor. He’d rather have stuck to gardening, if he’d had his way. But the custom was that he did the doctoring in the valley, and though he had trained Kathryn to assist him, and swore she knew everything he did, only he was trusted with the care of our sick. He was the one with the knowledge from the old time, and it was his job. But even in the mildest cases I could see he didn’t like it; and now, with his best friend in his care, he looked truly distressed.

Mando was wild about An American Around the World, even worse than Steve, and now he clamored for it. Steve sat on the bed at Tom’s feet, and Kathryn sat on the floor beside his legs. Gabby and Doc and I sat on chairs brought in from the kitchen, and Mando and Kristen took the empty bed, holding hands again.

The first chapter Steve read was Chapter Sixteen, “A Vengeance Symbolic Is Better Than None.” By this time Baum was in Moscow, and on the day of the big May parade, when all the tyrants of the Kremlin came out to review Russia’s military might, Baum smuggled a packet of fireworks—the strongest explosives he could get his hands on—into a trash can in Red Square. At the best part of the parade the fireworks went off, spewing red, white and blue sparks, and sending the entire government under their chairs. This prank, a tiny echo of what Russia had done to America, gave Baum as much pleasure as the tornado had. But he also had to hightail it out of the capital, as the search for the culprit was intense. The things he had to do in the next chapter to make it to Istanbul would have tired a horse. It was one adventure after another. Doc rolled his eyes and actually began to chuckle in some places, like when Baum stole a hydrofoil boat in the Crimea, and piloted it over the Black Sea pursued by gunboats. Baum was in mortal danger, but Doc kept on giggling.

“Now why are you laughing?” Steve stopped to demand of Doc, annoyed that his reading of Baum’s desperate last-chance flight into the Bosporus had been marred.

“Oh no reason, no reason,” Doc was quick to say. “It’s just his style. He’s so cool when he tells about it all, you know.”

But in the next chapter, “Sunken Venice,” Doc laughed again. Steve scowled and stopped reading.

“Now wait a minute,” Doc said, anticipating Steve’s censure. “He’s saying the water level is thirty feet higher there than it used to be. But anyone can see right out here that the water level is the same as ever. In fact it may be lower.”

“It’s the same,” Tom said, smiling at the exchange.

“Okay, but if so, it should be the same in Venice.”

“Maybe things are different there,” Mando said indignantly.

Doc cracked up again. “All the oceans are connected,” he told Mando. “It’s all one ocean, with one sea level.”

“You’re saying this Glen Baum is a liar,” Kathryn said with interest. She didn’t look at all displeased by the idea, and I knew why. “The whole book is made up!”

“It is not!” Steve cried angrily, and Mando echoed him.

Doc waved a hand. “I’m not saying that. I don’t know what all is true in there. Maybe a few stretchers, to liven things up, though.”

“He says Venice sank,” Steve said coldly, and read the passage again. “The islands sank, and they had to build shacks on the roofs to stay above the water. So the sea level didn’t have to rise.” He looked peevishly at Doc. “It sounds likely to me.”

“Could be, could be,” Doc said with a straight face. Steve’s jaw was tight, his face flushed.

“Let’s go on reading,” I said. “I want to know what happens.”

Steve read again, his voice harsh and rapid. Baum’s adventures picked up their pace. He was in as much danger as ever, but somehow it wasn’t the same. In the chapter called “Far Tortuga,” when he parachuted from a falling plane into the Caribbean, with several others who then inflated a raft, Doc left the hospital and went into the kitchen, his face averted to conceal a wide grin from Steve and Mando. The men on the inflatable raft, by the way, perished one by one, victims of thirst and giant turtle attacks, until only Baum was left to land on the jungle beach in Central America. It should have been pretty dramatic, and sad, but when Baum met up with a jungle headhunter Tom went “heee, heee, heee, heee,” from his bed, and we could hear Doc busting up in the kitchen, and Kathryn started laughing too, and Steve slammed the book shut and nearly stomped on Kathryn as he stood up.

“I ain’t reading for you folks any more,” he cried. “You’ve got no respect for literature!”

Which made Tom laugh so hard he started to cough again. So Doc came in and kicked us all out, and the reading session was done.

But we came back the next night, and Steve agreed sullenly to read again. Soon enough An American Around the World was done, which was probably just as well, and we went on to Great Expectations, and took the parts to read in Much Ado About Nothing, and tried some other books as well. It was all good fun. But Tom kept coughing, and he got quieter, and thinner, and paler. The days passed in a slow sameness, and I didn’t feel like joining in the joking on the boats, or memorizing my readings, or even reading them. Nothing seemed interesting or good to me, and Tom got sicker as day followed day, until on some evenings I couldn’t bear to look at him, lying on his back hardly aware of us, and each day I woke up with that knot over my stomach, afraid that it might be the last day he could hold on to this life.

17

Mornings I got up at dawn before the boats went out, and went up to check on him. Most mornings he was asleep. The nights were hard, Doc said. He got sicker and sicker, right up to the edge of death—I had to admit it—and there he hovered, refusing to pass on. One morning he was half awake and his bloodshot eyes stared at me defiantly. Don’t write me off yet, they said. He hadn’t slept that night, Mando told me. Now he didn’t feel up to talking. He just stared. I pressed his hand—his skin was damp, his hand limp and fleshless—and left, shaking my head at his tenacity. Living a hundred years wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to live forever. That look in his eyes told me, and I smiled a little, hoping he could do it. But the visit scared me. I hustled down the hill to the boats as if I was running from the Reaper himself.

Another morning I noticed it was aging Doc to care for him. Doc was over seventy himself; in most towns he would have been the oldest one. Pretty soon he might be ours. One morning after a hard night I sat with Mando and Doc at the kitchen table. They’d been up through the small hours trying to ease Tom’s coughing, which had lost power but was more constant. All Doc’s wrinkles were red and deep, and there were rings under his eyes. Mando let his head rest on the table, mouth open like a fish’s. I got up and stoked their fire, got some water on, made them some tea and hot cereal. “You’re going to miss the boat,” Doc said, but smiled his thanks with one corner of his mouth. His hand trembled his tea mug. Mando roused at the smell of corn and scraped his face off the table. We laughed at him and ate. I trudged down the hill with the knot over my stomach.

That was Saturday. Sunday I went to church. There were people there who (like me) hardly ever went to church: Rafael, Gabby, Kathryn, and hiding at the back, Steve. Carmen knew why we were there, and at the end of her final prayer she said, “And Lord, please return our Tom to health.” Her voice had such power and calmness, to hear it was like being touched, being held. Her voice knew everything would be right. The amens were loud, and we walked out of the church like one big family.

That was Sunday morning, though. The rest of the week the tension made folks irritable. Mando lost sleep, and took the short end of Doc’s temper; he didn’t much care what books I read from, or even whether we read at all. “Armando!” I said. “You of all people have got to want to read.” “Just leave me be,” he said blearily. Around the ovens the women talked in quiet voices. No boisterous tattling, no shrieks of laughter tearing the air. No old man jokes on the boats. I went out to help the Mendezes gather wood, and Gabby and I nearly got in a fight trying to decide how to carry a fallen eucalyptus tree to the two-man saw. Later that day I passed Mrs. Mariani and Mrs. Nicolin, arguing heatedly at the latrine door. No one would have believed me if I had told them about that. I hurried down the path unhappily.

One day at the rivermouth it got worse. They were pulling the boats onto the flat when I arrived—I was spending a week helping the Mendezes, and only came down to help clean up. I joined those moving fish from the boats to the cleaning tables. Steve was over with Marvin, pulling the nets out of the boats and washing them in the shallows, then rolling them up. Usually Marvin did this by himself; John saw Steve and called, “Steve, get over and help Henry!”

Steve didn’t even look up. On his knees on the hard sand of the flat, he tugged at the stiff wire rope at the top of the net. Answer him! I thought. John walked over and looked down at him.

“Go over and help get the fish out,” he ordered.

“I’m folding this net,” Steve said without looking up.

“Stop it, and get over to the fish.”

“And just leave the net here, eh?” Steve said sarcastically. “Just let me be.”

John grabbed him just under the armpit and yanked him to his feet. With a stifled cry Steve twisted and jerked out of John’s grasp, staggering back into the shallows. He pulled up and charged John, who walked straight at him and shoved him back into the shallows again. Steve stood and pulled back a fist, and was about to swing when Marvin jumped between them. “For God’s sake!” Marvin cried, shouldering John back a step. “Stop this, will you?”

Steve didn’t appear to hear him. He was rounding Marvin when I seized his right wrist in both hands and dragged him away, falling in the shallows to duck a left cross. If Rafael hadn’t wrapped Steve in a bearhug he would have pounded me and gone after John again; his eyes were wild, they didn’t recognize any of us. Rafael carried him down the beach a few steps and let him loose with a shove.

Every man and woman on the beach had stopped what they were doing. They watched now with faces grim, or expressionless, or secretly pleased, or openly amused. Slowly I stood up.

“You two are making it hard to work in peace around here,” Rafael scolded. “Why don’t you keep your family matters to yourself.”

“Shut up,” John snapped. He surveyed us and with a chopping motion of his hand said, “Get back to work.”

“Come on,” I said to Steve, pulling him up the flat and away from the boats. He shrugged free of me impatiently. We stumbled over the net where it had all started. “Come on, Steve, let’s get out of here.” He allowed me to pull him away. John didn’t look at us. I decided against the cliff path, worrying that Steve might throw rocks down on his pa, and led him up the riverbank. I was shaken, and glad that Marvin had had the wit to jump between them. If he hadn’t been so quick… well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Steve was still breathing heavily, as if he had just bodysurfed every wave of a big set. Between his clenched teeth he was cursing, repeating the words in an incoherent string. We took the river path to the broken end of the freeway, and sat under a torrey pine that hung over the whitish boulders and the river below. Going for cover, like coyotes after a scrap with a badger.

For a while we just sat. I swept pine needles into stacks, and then scraped through the dirt to concrete. Steve’s breathing slowed to normal.

“He’s trying to make me fight him,” he said in a voice straining for calmness. “I know he is.”

I doubted it, but I said, “I don’t know. If he is, you shouldn’t rise to it.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” he demanded.

“Well, I don’t know. Just avoid him, and do what he says—”

“Oh sure,” he cried, twisting to his feet. He leaned over and bawled at me, “Just keep on crawling around on my belly eating shit! That’s a real help! Don’t you try to tell me what to do with my life, Mister Henry Big Man. You’re just like all the rest! And don’t you get in my way again when I go after him, or I’ll bust your face instead of his!” He stalked down the freeway, cut into the potato patch and disappeared.

I let out a deep breath, relieved that he hadn’t hit me right then and there. That was my best feeling; other than that I was pretty low.

Kathryn had said that Steve listened to me more than to anybody else. Maybe that meant he didn’t listen to anybody anymore. Or maybe Kathryn was wrong. Or maybe I had said the wrong thing—or said it in the wrong way. I didn’t know.

It took me a long time to get up the spirit to stand and walk away from that place.

One day I took off up the river path, past the gardens and the ovens and the women washing clothes at the bridge bend, on up to where the hills closed together and the forest grew right down into the water on both banks. Here the path disappeared and everyone had to make their own way. I moved back into the trees and sat down, leaned back against the trunk of a big pine.

Wandering into the forest, to sit and be with it, was something I had done for a long time. I started when my mother died, and I imagined I could hear her voice in the trees outside our house. That was dumb, and soon I stopped. But now it was a habit again. With Tom sick there was no one I could talk to, no one who didn’t want something from me. It made me lonely. So when I felt that way I went out into the woods and sat. Nothing could touch me there, and eventually the knot would leave my stomach.

This was a particularly good spot. Around me trees clustered, big torrey pines surrounded by littler daughter trees. The ground was padded with needles, the trunk bowed at just the right angle for a backrest, and the curly branches above blocked most of the sun, but not all of it. Patches of light swam over my patched blue jeans, and shadow needles fenced with the brown needles under me. A pinecone jabbed me. I scrunched against the flaky bark of my backrest. Rolling on it, I turned and picked some of the dried crumbly gum out of a deep crack. Pressed it between my fingers until the still-liquid center burst out of the crust. Pine sap. Now my fingers would be sticky and pick up all sorts of dirt, so that dark marks would appear on my hands and fingers. But the smell of it was so piney. That smell and the smells of sea salt, and dirt, and wood smoke, and fish, made up the odor of the valley. Wind raked through the needles and a few of them dropped on me, each fivesome of needles wrapped together by a little bark nub at their bottoms. They pulled apart with a click.

Ants crawled over me and I brushed them away. I closed my eyes and the wind touched my cheek, it breathed through all the needles on all the branches of all the trees, and said oh, mmmmmmm. Have you heard the sound of wind in pine trees—I mean really listened to it, as to the voice of a friend? There’s nothing so soothing. It put me in a trance more like sleep than anything else, though I still heard. Each buffet or slacking shifted the hum or whoosh or roar of it; sometimes it was like the sound of a big waterfall around the bend, other times like the waves on the beach—still again, like a thousand folk in the far distance, singing oh as deep and wild as they could. Occasional bird calls tweeted through the sound, but mostly it was all that could be heard. The wind, the wind, oh. It was enough to fill the ear forever. I didn’t want to hear any other voice.

But voices I heard—human voices, coming through the trees by the river. Annoyed, I rolled on my side to see if I could see who was talking. They weren’t visible. I considered calling out, but I didn’t feel obliged to them; they were invading my spot, after all. I couldn’t blame them too much, it was a small valley and there weren’t that many places to go if you wanted to get away from folks. But it was my bad luck that they’d come to this one. I laid back against my tree and hoped they would go away. They didn’t. Branches snapped off to my left, and then the voices took up again, close enough so that I could make out the words—just a few trees over, in fact. That was Steve talking, and then Kathryn answered him. I sat up frowning.

Steve said, “Everybody in this valley is telling me what to do.”

“Everybody?”

“Yes!… you know what I mean. Jesus, you’re getting to be just like everybody else.”

“Everybody?”

Just that one word and I knew Kathryn was mad.

“Everybody,” Steve repeated, more sad than angry. “Steve, get down there and catch fish. Steve, don’t go into Orange County. Don’t go north, don’t go south, don’t go east, don’t row too far out to sea. Don’t leave Onofre, and don’t do anything.”

“I was just saying you shouldn’t deal with those San Diegans behind the backs of the people here. Who knows what those folks really want.” After a pause she added, “Henry’s trying to tell you the same thing.”

“Henry, shit. He gets to go south, and when he comes back he’s Henry Big Man, telling me what to do like everyone else.”

“He is not telling you what to do. He’s telling you what he thinks. Since when can’t he do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know… It ain’t Henry.”

I scrunched down behind my tree uncomfortably. It was a bad sign, them talking of me; they’d sense me by the way my name sounded to them, and search around and see me, and I’d look like I was spying when I had only been trying to get some peace. I didn’t want to hear all this, I didn’t want to know about it. Well… that wasn’t strictly true. Anyway I didn’t move away.

“What is it, then?” Kathryn asked, resigned and a little fearful.

“It’s… it’s living this little life in this little valley. Under Pa’s thumb, stuck forever. I can’t abide it.”

“I didn’t know life here was that bad for you.”

“Ah come on, Kath. It isn’t you.”

“No?”

“No! You’re the best part of my life here, I keep telling you that. But don’t you see, I can’t be trapped here all my life, working for my dad. That wouldn’t be a life at all. The whole world is out there! And who’s keeping me from it? The Japanese are. And here we have folks who want to fight the Japanese, and we’re not helping them. It makes me sick. So I’ve got to do it, I’ve got to help them, can’t you see that? Maybe it’ll take all my life to make us free again, maybe it’ll take longer, but at least I’ll be doing something more with my life than gathering the food for my face.”

A scrub jay flashed blue as it landed in the branch above me, and informed Steve and Kathryn of my presence. They weren’t listening.

“Is that all the life here is to you?” Kathryn asked.

“No, shit, aren’t you listening?” Annoyance laced his voice.

“Yes. I’m listening. And I hear that life in this valley doesn’t satisfy you. That includes me.”

“I told you that isn’t true.”

“You can’t tell something away, Steve Nicolin. You can’t act one way for months and months and then say, no it isn’t that way, and make the months and what you did in them go away. It doesn’t work like that.”

I’d never heard her voice sound like it did. Mad—I’d heard it mad more times than I’d care to count. Now that angry tone was all beaten down flat. I hated to hear her voice sound that way. I didn’t want to hear it—any of it—and suddenly that overcame my curiosity, and my feeling that it was my place. I started crawling away through the trees, feeling like a fool. What if they saw me now, lifting over a fallen branch to avoid making a sound? I swore in my thoughts over and over. When I got out of the sound of their voices (still arguing) I stood and walked away, discouragement dogging every step. Steve and Kathryn fighting—what else could go wrong?

Beyond the neck at the end of the valley, the river widens and meanders a bit, knocking through meadows in big loops. It’s easier to travel in this back canyon by canoe, and after walking a ways I sat down again and watched the river pour into a pool and then out again. Fish tucked under the overhanging bank. The wind still soughed in the trees, but I couldn’t get back my peace no matter how hard I listened. The knot in my stomach was back. Sometimes the harder you try the less it will go away. After a while I decided to check the snares that the Simpsons had set up on the edge of the one oxbow meadow, to give me something to do.

One of the snares had a weasel caught in it. It had been going after a rabbit, dead in the same snare, and now its long wiry body was all tangled in the laces. It tugged at them one last time as I approached; squeaked, and baring its teeth in a fierce grin, glared at me murderously, hatefully—even after I broke its neck with a quick step. Or so it seemed. I freed the two little beasts and set the snare again, and set off home with them both in one hand, held by the tails. I couldn’t shake that weasel’s last look.

Back in the neck I walked along the river, remembering a time when the old man had tried to detach a wild beehive from a short eucalyptus tree up against the south hillside. He had gotten stung and dropped the shirt wrapping the hive, and the furious bees had chased us right into the river. “It’s all your fault,” he had sputtered as we swam to the other side.

Sun going down. Another day passed, nothing changed. I followed a bend to the narrows where the river breaks over a couple knee-high falls, and came upon Kathryn sitting alone on the bank, tossing twigs on the water and watching them swirl downstream.

“Kath!” I called.

She looked up. “Hank,” she said. “What are you doing here?” She glanced downstream, perhaps looking for Steve.

“I was just hiking up canyon,” I said. I held up the two dead animals. “Checking a couple of the Simpsons’ snares for them. What about you?”

“Nothing. Just sitting.”

I approached her. “You look kind of down.”

She looked surprised. “Do I?”

I felt disgusted with myself for pretending I could read her that well. “A little.”

“Well. I guess that’s right.” She tossed another stick in.

I sat down beside her. “You’re sitting in a wet spot,” I said indignantly.

“Yeah.”

“No big deal, I guess.”

She was looking down, or out at the river, but I saw that her eyes were red. “So what’s wrong?” I asked. Once again I felt sick at my duplicity. Where had I learned this sort of thing, what book of Tom’s had taught me?

A few sticks rode over the falls and out of sight before she answered. “Same old thing,” she said. “Me and Steve, Steve and me.” Suddenly she faced me. “Oh,” she said, her voice wild, “you’ve got to get Steve to stop with that plan to help the San Diegans. He’s doing it to cross John, and the way they’re getting along, when John finds out about it there’ll be hell to pay. He’ll never forgive him… I don’t know what will happen.”

“All right,” I said, my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll try. I’ll do my best. Don’t cry.” It scared me to see her cry. Like an idiot I had thought it impossible. Desperately I said, “Look, Kathryn. You know there isn’t much I can do, the way he is these days. He almost hit me for grabbing him when he went after his dad the other day.”

“I know.” She shifted onto her hands and knees, leaned out over the water and ducked her head in it. The wet spot on the wide seat of her pants stuck into the air. After a good long time she came up blowing and huffing, and shook her head like a dog, spraying water over me and the river.

“Hey!” I cried. While she was under I had wanted to say, look, I can’t help you, I’m with Steve on this one… but looking at her face to face, I didn’t. I couldn’t. The truth was, I couldn’t do anything: no matter what I chose to do, I would be betraying someone.

“Let’s go to my house,” she said. “I’m hungry, and Mom made a berry pie.”

“Okay,” said I, wiping my face off. “You don’t have to ask me twice when it comes to berry pie.”

“I never noticed,” she said, and ducked the scoop of water I sent her way.

We stood. Walked down the riverbank until the trail appeared—first as a trampled-down line in the weeds and shrubs, then as scuffed dirt and displaced rocks, then as trenches through the loam that became little creeks after a rain. New paths appeared beside these as they became too wet or deep or rocky. It reminded me of something Tom had said before we went to San Diego, about how we were all wedges stuck in cracks. But it wasn’t like that, I saw; we weren’t that tightly bound. It was more like being on trails, on a network of trails like the one crossing the bog beside the river here… “Choosing your way is easy when you’re on established trails,” I said, more to myself than to Kathryn.

She cocked her head. “Doing what people have done before, you mean.”

“Yes, exactly. A lot of people have gone that way, and they establish the best route. But out in the woods…”

She nodded. “We’re all in the woods now.” A kingfisher flashed over a snag. “I don’t know why.” Shadows from the trees across the river stretched over the rippled water and striped our bank. In the still of a side pool a trout broke the surface, and ripples grew away in perfect circles from the spot—why couldn’t the heart grow as fast? I wanted to know… I wanted to know what I was doing.

The more I feel the more I see. That evening I saw everything with a crispness that startled me; leaves all had knife edges, colors were as rich as a scavenger’s swap meet outfit… But I only felt fuzzy things, oceans of clouds in my chest, the knot in my stomach. Too mixed to sort out and name. The river at dusk; the long stride of this woman my friend; the prospect of berry pie, making my mouth water; against these, the idea of a free land. Nicolin’s plots. The old man, across the shadowed stream in a bed. I couldn’t find the words to name all that, and I walked beside Kathryn without saying a thing, all the way downriver to her family’s home.

Inside it was warm (Rafael had put pipes underneath their place to convey heat from the bread ovens), lamps were lit, the pies were on the table steaming. The women chattered. I ate my piece of pie and forgot everything else. Purple berries, sweet summer taste. When I left, Kathryn said, “You’ll help?”

“I’ll try.” In the dark she couldn’t see my face. So she didn’t know that on the way home, at the same time I was thinking of arguments to get Steve to abandon his plan, I was also trying to figure out a way to get the landing date out of Add. Maybe I could spy on him every night until I heard him say it…

I kept thinking about it, but no good trick to fool the date from Addison came to me. The next time I fished with Steve, it got to be a problem I couldn’t sidestep.

“They’re down at the station ruins,” Steve said as we rowed out of earshot of the other boats. “I went down there and they were setting up what looked like a permanent camp in the ruins. Jennings was in charge.”

“So they’re here, eh? How many of them?”

“Fifteen or twenty. Jennings asked where you were. And he wanted to know when the Japanese were landing. When and where. I told him we knew where, and would find out when real soon.”

“Why’d you tell him that?” I demanded. “I mean, first of all, the Japanese may not be landing soon at all.”

“But you said you heard those scavengers say they would!”

“I know, but who’s to say they were right?”

“Well, shit,” he said, and tossed his lure into the channel. I stared at the steep back wall of Concrete Bay unhappily. “If you go at it that way, we can never really be sure of anything, can we. But if these scavengers told Add that much, it means Add is in on it, so he’ll know when they’re going to land. I told Jennings what we told him before, that we’d find that out for him.”

“What you told him before,” I corrected.

“You were in on it too,” he said crossly. “Don’t try and pretend you weren’t.”

I slung my lure out the opposite side from Steve’s, and let the line run out. I said, “I was in on it, but that doesn’t mean I’m sure it’s a good idea. Look, Steve, if we get caught helping these folks after the vote went against it, what are people going to say? How are we going to justify it?”

“I don’t care what people say.” A fish took his lure, and he hauled the thing up viciously. “That’s if they do find out. They can’t keep us from doing what we want, especially when we’re fighting for their lives, the cowards.” He gaffed the bonita like it was one of the cowards he had in mind, pulled it into the boat and whacked it on the head. It flopped weakly and gave up the ghost. “What is this, are you backing out on me now? Now that we got the San Diegans up here waiting for us?”

“No. I’m not backing out. I just don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.”

“We are doing the right thing, and you know it. Remember all those things you said at the meeting! You were the best one there—what you said was right, every bit of it. And you know it. Let’s get back to the matter at hand, here. We’ve got to get that date out of Add, and you’re the one who knows the Shankses. You’ve got to go up there and get to Melissa somehow, that’s all there is to it.”

“Umph.” Now it was getting to be very inconvenient that I hadn’t told Steve the whole truth about how much Melissa and Add had fooled me… I felt a bite, but I pulled too hard and the fish didn’t take. “I guess.” I couldn’t admit that I’d lied to make myself look good.

“You’ve got to.”

“All right all right!” I exclaimed. “Let me be, will you? I don’t notice you suggesting any smart schemes for getting him to tell us if he don’t feel like it. Just lay off!”

So we fished in silence, and looked after our lines. Onshore bobbed the green hillsides.

Steve changed the subject. “I hope we try whaling again this winter, I think we could make a go of it if we harpooned a small whale. From more than one boat, maybe.”

“You can leave me out of that one, thanks,” I said shortly.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s got into you, Hanker. Ever since you got back—”

“Nothing’s gotten into me.” Bitterly I added, “I could say the same about you.”

“How come? Because I think we should try whaling again?”

“No, for God’s sake.” The only time we had tried to kill one of the gray whales in their migration down the coast, we had gone out in the fishing boats and harpooned one. It was an excellent throw by Rafael, using a harpoon of his own manufacture. Then we stood in the boats and watched all of the line attached to the diving whale fly out of the boat, until it was gone. Our mistake was tying the end of the line to an eye in the bow; that whale pulled the boat right down from under us. The bow was yanked under the surface and slurp it was gone. We ended up fishing men out of that cold water rather than whale. And the line had torn across Manuel’s forearm, so that he almost bled to death. John had declared that whales were too big for our boats, and as I had been in the boat next to the one that went under, I was inclined to agree with him.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking about. “You’re pushing things,” I said slowly, “till your pa isn’t going to take it. I don’t know what you think’ll happen—”

“You don’t know what I think at all,” he interrupted me, in a way that made it clear he didn’t want me to pursue the matter. His mouth was tight, and I knew he could explode. Dogs get that look from time to time: nudge me once more, the look says, and I’ll bite your foot off. A fish took my hook, so I could drop the matter easily enough, and I did. But obviously I was on to something. Maybe he thought John would kick him out of the valley, so he’d be free of it all…

It was a big rock bass, and it took me a lot of time and effort to get it in the boat. “See, this fish is no longer than my arm, and I could barely get it in. Those whales are twice as long as this boat.”

“They catch them up in San Clemente,” Steve said. “They make a lot of silver off them at the meets, too. Why, one whale is how many jars of oil, did Tom say?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do too! What’s this I don’t know. I tell you. This whole valley is going to the dogs.”

“No lie,” I said grimly. Nicolin snorted, and we went back to fishing. After we got several more aboard he started again.

“Maybe we could poison the harpoons. Or, you know, harpoon a whale twice, from two boats.”

“We’d get all tangled. The boats would be pulled together and crushed.”

“What about poison, then.”

“It would be better to put three boats’ worth of line on the end of one harpoon, so we could let the whale run as far down as it liked.”

“Now see, there you’re talking.” He was pleased. “Or how about this, we could have the harpoon at the end of a line that extended right back to the beach—held up by little floats or something. And then when the harpoon struck, the playing of the thing would be from the beach. Eventually we could just haul it right into the rivermouth.”

“The harpoon would have to be pretty well fixed.”

“Well of course. That would be true no matter what you did.”

“I guess. But it’s also a hell of a lot of line you’re talking about. Usually those things are a mile or so offshore, aren’t they?”

“Yeah…” After some pondering, he said, “I wonder how those folks in San Clemente do catch them monsters.”

“You got me. They sure aren’t telling.”

“I wouldn’t either, if I was them.”

“What’s this? I thought you were telling me all the towns have to stick together, we’re all one country and all that.”

He nodded. “That’s true. You’ve said so yourself. But until everyone agrees to it, you got to protect your advantages.”

That seemed to have some application to me, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Anyway, I had made the mistake of bringing the subject back to the political situation, and as we rowed our full boat back to the rivermouth, Steve pressed me on more time.

“Remember, now, we’ve promised Jennings. And you know you want to go up there and fight those Japs. Remember what they did to you and Tom and the rest of you out there in that storm?”

“Yeah,” I said. Well, Kathryn, I thought, I tried. But I knew better than that. Nicolin was right. I wanted those Japanese out of our ocean.

We negotiated the mouth break, and coasted in on the gentle waves that the high tide was shoving up the throat of the river. “So, get up there and see what you can do with Melissa. She’s got a feeling for you, she’ll do what you want.”

“Umph.”

“Maybe she’ll ask Add for you.”

“I doubt it.”

“Still, you’ve got to start somewhere. And I’ll see if I can’t think of something myself. Maybe we could eavesdrop on them like you did last time.”

I laughed. “It might come to that,” I agreed. “I’ve thought of that myself.”

“Okay, but do what else you can first, all right?”

“All right. I’ll give her a try.”

I spent a couple of days thinking about it, trying to figure something out—living with the knot over my stomach, so that it was hard to sleep. One morning before dawn I gave up trying and walked over the dew-soaked bridge to the Costas’. Doc was up, sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea and staring at the wall. I tapped at the window and he let me in. “He’s asleep now,” he said with relief. I nodded and sat down with him. “He’s getting weaker,” he said, looking into his tea. “I don’t know… Too bad you guys had such miserable weather coming back from San Diego. You’re young and can take it, but Tom… Tom acts like he’s young when he shouldn’t. Maybe this will teach him to be more careful, to take better care of himself. If he lives.”

“You should remember the same thing yourself,” I said. “You look awful tired.”

He nodded.

“If the train tracks had been left alone we would have come back easy as you please,” I went on. “Those bastards…”

Looking up at me Doc said, “He may die, you know.”

“I know.”

He drank some tea. The kitchen began to get lighter with the dawn. “Maybe I’ll go to bed now.”

“Do it. I’ll stick around till Mando gets up, and keep an eye on things.”

“Thanks, Henry.” He shoved the chair back. Lifted himself up. Stood and collected himself. Stepped into his room.

So I hiked onto Basilone Ridge that afternoon, to see if I could find Melissa at their house. Through woods and over the cracked greeny concrete of the old foundations. When I walked into the clearing around their tower I saw Addison, at leisure on his roof, smoking a pipe and kicking his heels against the side of the house, thump-thump, thump-thump. When he saw me he stopped kicking, and didn’t smile or nod. Uncomfortable under his stare, I approached. “Is Melissa home?” I called.

“No. She’s in the valley.”

“No I’m not,” Melissa called, emerging into the clearing from the north side—the side away from the valley. “I’m home!”

Add took the pipe from his mouth. “So you are.”

“What’s up, Henry?” Melissa said to me with a smile. She was wearing baggy burlap pants, and a sleeveless blue shirt. “Want to go for a hike up the ridge?”

“That’s just what I was going to ask you.”

“Daddy, I’m going with Henry, I’ll be back before dark.”

“If I’m not here,” Add said, “I’ll be home for supper.”

“Oh yeah.” They exchanged a look. “I’ll keep it hot for you.”

Melissa took my hand. “Come on, Henry.” With a tug we were off into the forest above their house.

As she led the way uphill, dancing and dodging between the trees, she threw questions back my way. “What have you been doing, Henry? I haven’t seen you very much. Have you been back to San Diego? Don’t you want to go see all that again?”

Remembering what she had said to the scavengers that night, I could hardly keep from smiling. Not that I was amused. But it was so transparent what she was doing, pumping me for information once more. I lied with every answer I gave. “Yes, I’ve been down to San Diego again, on my own. It’s a secret. I met a whole…” I was going to say a whole army of Americans, but I didn’t want to show I knew what she was up to. “… a whole bunch of people.”

“Is that right?” she exclaimed. “Why, when was that?” She was quite the spy. But at the same time, she was so lithe and springy slinking through the trees, and shafts of sunlight caught and broke blue in her black hair, and I wouldn’t have minded having my hands all tangled up in that hair, spy or not.

Farther up the ridge the trees gave way to mesquite and a few stubborn junipers. We followed a little trickle ravine up to the ridge proper, and stood on it in the wind. The ridge edge was sandstone perfectly divided, like the back of a fish. We walked along that division, commenting on the views out to sea, and up San Mateo Valley. “Swing Canyon is just over that spur,” I said, pointing a little ahead of us.

“Is it?” Melissa said. “You want to go there?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s.” We kissed to mark the decision, and I felt a pang; why couldn’t she be like one of the other girls, like the Marianis or the Simpsons?… We continued along the ridge. Melissa kept asking questions, and I kept on lying as I answered her. After Cuchillo, the peak of Basilone Ridge, several spurs headed down from the main ridge into the valley. The steep box canyon formed by the first two of these spurs was Swing Canyon; from our vantage we could look right down it, and see where its small stream made the final fall into one of Kathryn’s fields. We slid on our butts down the steep walls at the top of the canyon, and then stepped carefully through thick low mesquite. All the while she questioned me. I was amazed at how obvious she was; but I suppose if I hadn’t known what she was up to, I wouldn’t have noticed. It was just like plain curiosity, after all, or almost like it. Reflecting on this, I decided I could be more bold in my own questions to her. I knew more than she did. A bit more bold in every way: helping her down a vertical break, I used her crotch as a handhold and lifted her down; she held one knee wide so it would work, and giggled as she twisted free on landing. With a kiss we headed down again.

“Have you ever heard about the Japanese that come over from Catalina to look at what’s left in Orange County?” I asked.

“I’ve heard it happens,” she said brightly. “But nothing more than that. Tell me about it.”

“I sure would like to see one of those landings,” I said. “You know, when the Japanese ship picked me out of the water, I talked with the captain for a while, and I saw he was wearing one of the high school rings that the scavengers sell!”

“Is that right,” she said, astonished. You’re overdoing it, I wanted to say.

“Yeah! The captain of the ship! I figure all those Japanese coast guard captains must be bribed to let through tourists on certain nights. I’d love to go up there and spy on one of those landings, just to see if I could recognize my captain again.”

“But why?” Melissa asked. “Do you want to shoot him?”

“No, no. Of course not. I want to know if I’m right about him or not. You know, whether he helps the landings like I think he does.” It didn’t sound very convincing to me (and I shouldn’t have said the word spy), but it was the best I could think of.

“I doubt you’ll ever find out,” Melissa said reasonably. “But good luck at it. I wish there was some way I could help, but I wouldn’t like going up there.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe you could help anyway.”

We were down to the sink at the very head of the box canyon, and I stopped the conversation to give her a long kiss. After that we walked to the swing tree, near the spring that starts the canyon’s stream. The spring made a little pool before tumbling over a sandstone rib down the canyon, and beside the pool was a flat spot, protected by a ring of sycamore trees. It was a favored spot for lovers. Melissa took my hand and led me right to it, so I guessed she was as familiar with it as I was. We sat in the gloom and kissed, then laid on the leaf and needle bed and kissed some more. We pressed against each other, rolled aimlessly over the crackling leaves. I nudged my fingers under the tie of her burlap pants, and slid them down her belly, into tightly curled hair… she held my hard-on through jeans, and squeezed hard, and we kissed, and kissed, and our breath got short and jerky. I was excited, but… I couldn’t forget about everything else and just feel her. The other times I had lain with a girl—with Melissa before, or Rebel Simpson the previous year, or that Valerie from Trabuco, who had made several swap meet nights so interesting—I would get started and my brain would melt into my skin, so that I never thought a thing and when we were done it was like coming to. This time, at the same moment I was feeling her and kissing her neck and shoulders I was wondering how I could make my desire to see the Japanese landings sound convincing, even essential; how I could ask her again to ask Addison. It was strange.

“Maybe you can help,” I said between kisses, as if it had just occurred to me. My hand was still in her pants, and I nudged her with a finger.

“How so?” she asked, squirming.

“Couldn’t your dad talk to some of his contacts about it? I mean, I know he doesn’t have many contacts up there, but you said he has one or two—”

“I did not,” she said sharply, and pulled back from me. My hand slid out from her pants and it groped over the leaves for her; no, no, it said… “I never told you anything of the sort! Daddy does his own work, like we told you before.” She sat up. “Besides, why should you want to go up there? I don’t get it. Is that why you were up talking to him today?”

“No, of course not. I wanted to see you,” I said with conviction.

“So you could ask me to ask him,” she said, not impressed.

I shuffled to her side and nuzzled her hair and neck. “See, the thing is,” I said indistinctly, “if I don’t see that Japanese captain again, I’m going to be afraid of him for the rest of my life. He’s giving me nightmares and all. And I know Add could help me to find one of those landings.”

“He could not,” she said, irritated. I tried to put my hand back down her pants to distract her, but she seized it and pushed it away. “Don’t,” she said coldly. “See? You did get me up here to ask me to pester my dad. Listen—I don’t want you bothering him about Orange County or the Japanese or any of that, you hear? Don’t ask him nothing and don’t get him mixed up in anything you do.” She brushed leaves out of her hair, crawled away from me to the edge of the pool. “He’s got enough trouble in your damn valley without you trying to give him more.” She cupped some water and drank, brushed her hair back with angry slaps.

I stood up unsteadily, and walked over to the swing tree. She had made me feel awful guilty and calculating; and she looked beautiful, kneeling there by the dark pool; but still! All that holy innocent routine, after the way she had talked to the scavengers that night—after she and Add had welcomed them into their house, to tell them what they had learned by spying on our “damn valley” and its most foolish citizen Henry Aaron Fletcher… it made me grind my teeth.

The swing tree grows out of the rib that holds the pool in. Long ago someone had tied a thick piece of rope to one of the upper branches, and the rope was used to swing out over the steep canyon below. Angrily I grabbed the rope by the knots at its loose end, and walked back from the drop-off. Taking a good hold above the knot, I ran across the clearing at an angle away from the tree, and swung out into space. It had been a long time. Swinging around in the shadows felt good. I could see the canyon wall opposite, still catching some sun, and below me, treetops in shadow. I spun slowly, looking back to locate the tree’s thick trunk. I missed it by a good margin on landing. One time Gabby had taken a swing while drunk, and had come right into the tree, back first, hitting a little broken-off nub of a branch. That had taken the color out of him.

“Don’t you talk to us about that stuff anymore, are you listening to me, Henry?”

“I’m listening.”

“I like you fine, but I won’t abide any talk about Daddy dealing with those folks up there. We get enough grief about that as it is, and for no good reason at all. There’s no cause for it.” She sounded so sorrowful and put upon, I wanted to yell down at her, you get grief for it because you’re a pair of scavengers, you bitch! I’ve seen you spy for them! But I clamped my jaws together and said “Yeah,” and started another swing. “I hear you,” I said bitterly to the air. She didn’t reply. The rope creaked loudly. I tapped my feet together, spinning nice and slow. When I came in I went out again, and then again. For a moment I felt how wonderful it was to swing, and I wished I could swing out there forever, spinning slowly at the rope’s end, free of the earth and with no worries but clearing the tree, with nothing to think about but the air rushing by me, and the shadowed trees spinning around me, and the dark green pool below to one side. Surely the knot in my stomach would leave me then. When I landed I almost smashed face first into the treetrunk. That was just the way of it: spend your time in wishing and a tree smacks your face for you.

Melissa was crouched by the pool, holding her hair back with a hand, leaning over to drink directly from the spring. “I’m leaving,” I said harshly.

“I need help getting up the ridge.” She didn’t look at me.

I considered telling her she could go down the canyon and around the valley and not need any help, but I thought better of it.

We didn’t have much to say on the way back. It was hard work climbing up the final walls of the box canyon, and we both got dirty. Melissa refused to let me help her except when she couldn’t get up without it, perhaps remembering the handhold I had used on the way down. The more I thought about the way she had worked on me, the angrier I got. And to think I had still wanted her. Why, I was a fool—and the Shankses were no better than thieves. Scavengers. Spies. Zopilotes! Not only that, but there was no way I was going to be able to get the information I needed out of them.

We walked down the Basilone slope a few trees apart. “I don’t need your help anymore,” Melissa said coldly. “You can go back to your valley where you belong.”

Without a word I turned and cut across the slope down toward the valley, and heard her laugh. Seething, I stopped behind a tree and waited a while; then I continued on toward the Shankses’, and circled around so that I came on it from the north, moving from tree to tree with great caution. From the notch of a split pine I could see their weird house perfectly. Addison was by the door, in earnest conference with Melissa. She pointed south to the valley, laughing, and Add nodded. He had on his long, greasy brown coat (a good match for his hair), and when he was done questioning Melissa, he opened the door and sent her inside with a slap on the butt. Then he was off into the woods, passing just a few trees from me as he headed north. I waited, and then followed him. There was a bit of a trail through the trees—made by Add himself, no doubt, in his many trips north—and I hustled along it tippytoe, watching for twigs on the ground, and Addison ahead. When I saw him again I dodged out of the trail and hid behind a spruce, breathing hard. I stuck my head around the tree and saw that he was still walking away from me; hopping around the trunk I highstepped through the trees, landing on the balls of my feet, on dirt or pine needles, and twisting my legs like I was dancing to avoid twigs or leaves that might snap under me. At the end of each crazy run I fetched up against a tree, and glanced around it to relocate Add. So far, so good; he didn’t seem to have the slightest notion he was being followed. Time after time I checked to make sure his back was to me, and waited until he was obscured by the trees in between us, so I couldn’t be sure which direction he was going in; then I leaped from cover and darted in whatever zigzag through the woods I thought would be the quietest. After several more batlike runs, I began to enjoy it. It wasn’t that I was just losing my fear, either—I was positively enjoying it. After all the shit that Add and Melissa had pulled on me, it was a real pleasure to be tricking him—to be better at his business than he was.

There was pleasure in flitting through the woods like that, as well. It was like trailing an animal, only now it was possible in a way that chasing an animal wouldn’t have been. Any animal in its senses would have been aware of me in an instant, and I never would have seen it again, nor known where it had gone to. A human, however, was very trackable. I could even choose which side of him I planned to come up on, and then cross over and trail him from the other side. Like it was a kind of hide and seek. Only now it was a game with some real stakes.

About halfway across San Mateo Valley I realized I was going to have a problem following him across the San Mateo River. The freeway was the only bridge, and it was as exposed as any bridge could be. I reckoned I would have to wait a long time after Add crossed it, and then hurry over, get back in the trees, and hope I could hustle ahead and relocate him.

I was still figuring all of this out when Add reached the bank of the San Mateo, considerably downriver from the freeway. I ducked behind yet another tree, a eucalyptus that was a bit too narrow for my purposes, and wondered what he was up to. He started looking all around, including back in my direction, and I crouched down and kept my head behind the trunk, so that I couldn’t see him anymore. The scruffy bark of the eucalyptus oozed gum; breathing hard, I stared at it, afraid to poke my head out again. Had he heard me? At the thought my pulse went woodpecker, and suddenly trailing a man didn’t seem pure fun after all. I lay flat, careful not to make a sound in all the eucalyptus crap behind me, and, holding my breath, I slowly stuck one eye’s worth of face around the trunk.

No Add. I stuck both eyes around and still didn’t see him. I scrambled to my feet again, and then I heard the sound of a motor, out on the river. Add came into sight again, still on the bank, looking seaward, waving a hand. I stayed put. Add never looked around again, and soon I caught sight, between the trees, of a little boat with three men in it. There weren’t any oars; there was a motor, mounted on the aft. The man in the middle was Japanese. The one in the bow stood as they approached the bank, and he leaped to shore and helped Add secure the boat with a line around a tree.

While the other men clambered out of the boat, I crawled catlike from tree to tree, and finally slithered over a thick mat of eucalyptus leaves and pine needles, to a thick torrey pine only three or four trees from them. Under its low branches, and behind its trunk, I was sure they’d never see me.

The Japanese man—who looked somewhat like my captain, but was shorter—reached back into the boat and pulled out a white cloth bag, tied at the top. He handed it to Add. They asked Add some questions, and Add answered them. I could hear their voices, especially the Japanese man’s; but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I drew in breath between my teeth, and cursed horribly in my mind. I really was very close to them—I couldn’t risk going any closer, and that was that. But except for an occasional word they said, like “how” or “you,” I could only get the tone of their voices. I was as close to them as I had been to Steve and Kathryn, when I overheard that conversation—but here the speakers were on a riverbank, and though the river didn’t seem very noisy, it was just noisy enough. You can’t eavesdrop on a riverbank successfully, I was learning; and so all my chasing and stalking was going to go to waste. Here was Add talking with a Japanese, probably discussing exactly the stuff I wanted to know; and here was I, just where I wanted to be, no more than four boat lengths away. And it wasn’t going to do me a bit of good.

Occasionally one of the two scavengers (scavengers I assumed they were, though they dressed like country folk) would laugh and kid Addison in a louder voice, so that I heard whole sentences. “Easy to fool fools,” one of them said. Add laughed at that. “This’ll all come back to us in a month or two,” the other said, pointing at Add’s bag. “Back to our whores, anyway!” the first one crowed. The Japanese man watched each of them in turn as they spoke, and never smiled at their jests. He asked a few more questions of Add, and Add answered them or so I assumed; with his back to me I could hardly hear Add at all.

And then, right before my eyes, the three men got back in the boat. Add untied the line and threw it to them, pushed off, and watched as they drifted downstream. They were out of my sight immediately, but I heard the motor start again. And that was it. I hadn’t learned a thing I didn’t know before.

Add watched them for only a moment or two, and then hiked right past me. I lay without moving for a bit, got up and headed after him. I actually pounded some of the trees I passed with my clenched fist. And Add was nowhere to be seen. I slowed down, so angry and frustrated that I didn’t know if I wanted to hunt him down. What was the point? But the alternative—hiking back to Onofre alone—was somehow even worse. I started ranging forward in big diagonals, dancing between the trees again in my silent run.

I never even saw him until he had slammed into me with his shoulder and knocked me to the ground. He pulled a knife from his belt and came after me, nearly falling on me. I rolled and kicked the forearm above the knife, twisted and kicked his knee, scrambled to my feet, dodged and struck my clasped hands into his neck, as fast as I could move. He crashed into a tree, lay stunned against it; I quick snatched the bag from his left hand, leaping back to avoid a swing of the knife. I held the heavy little bag up like a club and retreated rapidly.

“Stay right there or I’ll run and you’ll never see this bag again,” I rattled off. Thinking just ahead of my words, I said “I’m faster than you, and you won’t catch me. Nobody catches me in the woods.” And I laughed triumphantly at the look on his face, because it was true and he knew it. Nobody’s quicker than I am, and beating Add and his knife around in the trees, faster than I could think, faster than I could plan my moves, made me feel it. Add knew it too. Finally, finally, I had Addison Shanks where I wanted him.

With his free hand he rubbed his neck, glaring at me with the same hateful expression I had seen in the eyes of that snared weasel. “What do you want?” he said.

“I don’t want much. I don’t want this here bag, though it feels like quite a bit of silver, and maybe stuff more important than that, eh?” I might not have guessed the contents right, but one thing was sure—he wanted the bag. He looked at it, shifted forward, and I took three steps back and to the right, along an opening in the trees. “I reckon Tom and John and Rafael and the others would be mighty interested to see this bag, and hear what I have to tell about it.”

“What do you want?” he grated.

I stared back into his hating gaze, unafraid of him. “I don’t like how you’ve been using me,” I said. The knife in his hand jerked, and I thought, don’t tell him how much you know. “I want to see one of those Japanese landings in Orange County. I know they’re doing it, and I know that you’re in on them. I want to know when and where the next one lands.”

He looked puzzled, and let the knife drop a hand’s breadth. Then he grinned, his eyes still hating me, and I flinched. “You’re with the other kids, aren’t you. Young Nicolin and Mendez and the rest.”

“Just me.”

“Been spying on me, have you? And John Nicolin doesn’t know about it, I bet. No.”

I raised the bag. “Tell me when and where, Add, or I’m back to the valley with this, and you’ll never be able to set foot there again.”

“The hell I won’t.”

“Want to try it?”

A snarl curled his lips. I stood my ground. I watched him think it over. Then he grinned again, in a way I didn’t understand. At the time I thought he was like that weasel, giving one last fierce grin of rage as it was killed.

“They’re landing at Dana Point, this Friday night. Midnight.”

I threw the bag at him and ran.

At first I ran like a hunted deer, leaping big falls of wood and crashing through smaller ones in my new luxury of sound, scared that I might have thrown Add a gun, or that he would turn out to be a knife thrower, and put that thick blade in my back. But after crossing most of San Mateo Valley I knew I was safe, and I ran for joy. Triumphantly I danced between trees, leaped over bushes where I could have run around them, tore small branches out of my path. I ran up to the freeway, and sprinted down it at full speed. I don’t think I’ve ever run faster in my life, or enjoyed it more. “Friday night!” I crowed at the sky, and flew down that road like a car, the knot in my stomach gone at last.

18

But the knot didn’t stay away for long. I ran into the valley straight to the Nicolins’, only to be told by Mrs. N. that Steve was out somewhere with Kathryn. I thanked her and left, uneasy already. Were they arguing again? Making up? Was Kathryn talking him out of all this? (That didn’t seem likely.) I checked a few of our regular hangouts, none too anxious to find Kathryn, but compelled by a desire to see Steve immediately. No sign of them anywhere. No way of guessing where they were or what they were doing. Climbing back down Swing Canyon I realized I didn’t understand the two of them anymore, if I ever had. Where do you go after a fight like the one I had overheard? The private lives of other couples—there’s few things more private than that. Nobody but the two know what’s going on between them, even if they talk about it with others. And if they don’t then it’s a complete mystery, hidden from the world.

So that was Wednesday evening. I went back to the Nicolins’ twice that night, but no one showed up. And the longer I waited to tell Steve, the more uneasy I got about it. What would Kathryn say when she learned my part in this? She would think I had lied to her, betrayed her trust. On the other hand, if I didn’t tell Steve about the landing, and let it pass—and if he ever found out what I had done—well, that didn’t bear thinking about. I’d lose my best friend at that very moment.

After my second visit to the Nicolins’ I went home and went to bed. It had been such a day I thought I would have trouble falling asleep, but a few minutes after I lay down I was out. A couple of hours later I woke up, though, and for the rest of the night I tossed and turned, listened to the wind, considered what I should do.

Just after dawn I woke up with the knot in my stomach, and trying to get back to sleep only made it worse. I faintly remembered a dream that was so awful I made no attempt to recall it more clearly—something about being chased—but a few moments later I wasn’t even sure of that. Stepping outside for my morning pee I discovered a Santa Ana wind—the desert wind that pours over from the hills to the east and pushes all the clouds out to sea, and heats up the land, and makes everything dry for a time. Santa Anas strike three or four times a year, and change our weather completely. This one was picking up even as I watched, twisting the trees all backward to their natural onshore bent. Soon pine branches would be snapping off and gliding seaward.

The empty water bucket gave me a shock when I picked it up. Static electricity, Tom called it, but try as he would he couldn’t make me understand it. Something about millions of tiny fires rushing around (of course you remember how well he explained fire to me)… and all the wires strung between towers like the Shankses’ place had carried this electricity around, and it had powered all the automatic machines of the old time. All that power from little snaps like the one I had felt.

Walking to the river in the raw morning sun it seemed that everything was packed with color, as if static electricity might be something that filled things and made them brighter. The hair on my arms stood away from my skin, and I could feel the roots in my scalp as the wind pulled my hair this way and that. Static electricity… maybe it gathered in humans over the stomach. At the river I stepped in to my knees, ducked my head under, sloshed water down my throat and back up, hoping the electricity might catch to the water and leave with it. It didn’t work.

Wide awake now. Cat’s paws fanned across the river’s surface, one after another, helping it down to sea. Already the air was warm and dry; it felt like it would be burning soon. The sky was a bright pale blue. I drank half a bucket of water, threw rocks at a fallen tree stuck against the other bank. What to do? Gulls wheeled and flapped overhead, complaining at how hard they had to work in this backwards wind. I walked back to my house and ate a loaf of bread with Pa.

“What you doing today?” he asked.

“Checking snares. That’s what old Mendez told me, anyway.”

“That should make a good break from the fishing.”

“Yeah.”

Pa looked at me and wrinkled his nose. “You sure aren’t one for talking much these days.”

I nodded, too distracted to pay much attention to him.

“You don’t want to get so’s people can’t talk to you,” he went on.

“I’m not. I’d better be off, though.”

I went to the river again, thinking to get up to the snares eventually. Sat down on one of the tiny bluffs that overhang the bank. Downriver the women appeared one by one, the Mariani clan and the rest of them, out while the Santa Ana was blowing to bathe and wash clothes and sheets and blankets and towels and anything else they could haul to the water. The air was a bit hotter every minute, and dry so you could feel it in your nostrils. The women got out the soap and stripped down, moved into the shallows at the bend with washboards and baskets of clothes and linens, and went to work, chattering and laughing, diving out into the mainstream to paddle around a bit and get the soap off them. The morning sun gleamed on their wet bodies and slicked-down hair, and I could have stayed longer to watch them, such sleek white creatures they were; like a pod of dolphins, I thought, splashing water at each other, tits swinging together as clothes were scrubbed over washboards, mouths open to laugh and grin at the sky. But they had seen me sitting upriver, and pretty soon if I stayed they would be throwing rocks, and lifting their legs to embarrass me, and calling out jokes like: Do you need some help with that? or Careful it’ll wash away like this here bar of soap… And besides I had other things on my mind anyway, so with a last glance I turned and walked upriver, forgot about the women and began to worry again. (But what would they think of all this?)

See, I could have not told him. I could have said, Steve, I didn’t find anything out and I don’t know how I could, and left it at that. And Friday night would have come and gone and we would never have known the difference. They wouldn’t have, anyway. And everything would have gone on as before. Walking the river path it occurred to me I could do this, and as I hiked from snare to snare I considered it. In some ways it appealed to me.

But I remembered my fight with Add; how I’d knocked him against a tree when he held the knife and I didn’t. And after clearing a rabbit out of a snare and resetting it, I remembered my escape from the Japanese, my swim to shore, my struggle up that ravine. It seemed like great adventure to me now. I remembered climbing up the side of the Shankses’ house to hear the conversation with the scavengers, and my silent bat-runs after Addison through the woods. I had enjoyed that more than anything that had ever happened in Onofre. I’d never felt such power. It seemed to me more than ever that these things were not just happening to me, but that I was doing them, that I was choosing to do certain things and then I was going out and doing them. And now I had the chance to do something better than anything else had been so far, to fight for my lost country. This land I walked over was ours, it was all we had left. They had to stay off it or suffer for it. We weren’t a freak show, a bigger version of those little ones that visited the swap meets sometimes, exhibiting pathetic radiation cripples, both animal and human… We were a country, a living country, living communities on living land, and they had to leave us alone.

So when I returned to the valley through the neck, I dropped off three rabbits and a smelly skunk, and continued downriver to the Nicolins’ house. Steve was out front, shouting furiously at his mother in the doorway. Something about John again, I gathered, something he had said or done to enrage Steve… I winced and waited until Steve was done shouting. As he stalked away toward the cliffs I approached him.

“What’s up?” he said as he saw me.

“I know the date!” I cried. His face lit up. I told him all about it. When I was done I felt a certain chill, and I thought, well, you’ve told him. I had never really decided to; the act itself was the decision.

“That’s great,” he kept saying, “that’s great. Now we’ve got them! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just did,” I said, annoyed. “I just found out yesterday.”

He slapped me on the back. “Let’s go tell the San Diegans. We don’t have much time—a day, whoo! They might need to get more men from south or something.”

But now that I had told him, I was more uncertain than before that it was the right thing to do. I shrugged and said, “You go on down and tell them, and I’ll tell Gabby and Del and Mando if I see them.”

“Well”—he cocked his head at me curiously—“sure. If that’s what you want.”

“I’ve done my share,” I said defensively. “We shouldn’t both go down there; it might draw attention to us.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Come by tonight and tell me what they said.”

“I will.”

When he came by that night the wind was blowing harder than ever. The big eucalyptus’s branches creaked against each other, and its leaves clicked and spinnerdrifted down on us. The pines hummed their deepest chord, and tossed up and down across the bright stars.

“Guess who was at their camp?” Steve demanded, all charged up and even bouncing on his feet. “Guess!”

“I don’t know. Lee?”

“No, the Mayor! The Mayor of San Diego.”

“Is that right? What’s he doing up here?”

“He’s here to fight the Japs, of course. He was really happy when I told him we could lead them to a landing. He shook my hand and we drank some whisky and everything.”

“I bet. Did you tell him where it was?”

“Course not! Do you take me for a fool? I said we weren’t getting the final word till tomorrow, and that we’d tell them when we were up there ourselves with them. That way they’ll have to take us, see? In fact—I told them that only you know where they’re landing, and that you wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Oh, fine. Now why should I do that?”

“Because you’re a suspicious kind of guy, naturally, and you don’t want the Japanese to find out somehow that we know. That’s what I told them.”

That suggested something to me that I hadn’t thought of before, believe it or not: the Japanese could find out we knew from Add. The landing might not take place after all. Another possibility occurred to me: Add could have lied to me about the date. But I didn’t say anything about that. I didn’t want to bring up any problems. All I said was, “They must think we’re crazy.”

“Not at all, why should they? The Mayor was real pleased with us.”

“I bet he was. How many men were with him?”

“Fifteen, maybe twenty.”

“Was Jennings one of them?”

“Sure. Listen, did you tell Del and Gabby and Mando?”

“What about Lee? Was Lee with them?”

“I didn’t see him. What about our gang?”

I was worried about Lee. I didn’t understand or like the way he had disappeared from the group. “I told Gabby and Del,” I said after a while. “Del’s going over to Talega Canyon with his pa Friday to trade for some calves, so he can’t come.”

“And Gabby?”

“He’s coming.”

“Good. Henry, this is it! We’re part of the resistance!”

The hot push of the Santa Ana burned in my nose, and I felt the static electricity all through me. Stars danced in the leaves. “True,” I said, “true.”

Steve stared at me through the darkness. “You aren’t scared, are you?”

“No! I am a bit tired, I think. I’d better get some sleep.”

“Good idea. You’re going to need it tomorrow.” With a slap to the arm he was off into the trees. A powerful blast of wind carried a soaring branch over my head. I waved at it and went back inside, where Pa was sewing.

I didn’t get much sleep that night. And the next day was the longest one I could remember. The Santa Ana blew strong all day; the land was drying out and heating up, and it got so hot that just to move was enough to break into a sweat. I checked snares in the back country all day—not an animal in any of them. After I forced down the usual fish and bread I got so fidgety that I just had to do something. I said to Pa, “I’m going up to see the old man, and then we’re going to work on the treehouse, so I’ll be home late.”

“Okay.”

Outside it was twilight. The river was a silvery sheen much lighter than the trees on the other bank. The western sky was the same silvery blue, and the whole arch of the sky seemed lighter than usual—the land was dark, but the sky still glowed. I crossed the bridge and went up to the Costas’. From their vantage I could see the whole valley forest bouncing in the gloom.

Mando met me outside the door. “Gabby told me about it and I’m going, you hear?”

“Sure,” I said.

“If you try to go without me, I’ll tell everyone about it.”

“Whoah, now. No need for threats, Armando, you’re going with us.”

“Oh.” He looked down. “I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure.”

“Why?”

“I thought Steve might not want me to go.”

“Well… why don’t you go down and talk to him. I bet he’s still at his house.”

“I don’t know if I should. Pa’s asleep, and I’m supposed to keep an eye on Tom.”

“I’ll do that, that’s what I came here for. You go tell Steve you’re coming along. Tell him I’ll be up here till we leave.”

“Okay.” Off he went, running down the path.

“Don’t threaten him!” I shouted at his back, but the wind tore my words off toward Catalina, and he didn’t hear me. I went inside. The Santa Ana was catching around the sides of the house, whistling in all the oil drums, so that the house said Whoooo, whoooo, whooooo. I looked in the hospital, where a lamp burned. Tom was flat on his back, head propped up on a pillow. He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Henry,” he said. “Good.”

It was warm and stuffy in the room; Doc’s sun heating was working too well during these hot days, and if the vents were to be opened completely the wind would have torn through and made a shambles. I walked to the bedside and sat in the chair left there.

Tom’s beard and hair were tangled together, and all the gray and white curls looked waxy. They framed his face, which was smaller and whiter than I had ever seen it. I stared at it like I’d never seen it before. Time puts so many marks on a face: wrinkles, blotches, sags and folds; the bend in his nose, the scar breaking up one eyebrow, the caved-in cheek where those teeth were missing… He looked old and sick, and I thought, He’s going to die. Maybe I was really looking at him for once. We assume that we know what our familiars look like, so that when we see them we’re not really looking, but just glancing and remembering. Now I was looking newly, really observing him. Old man. He pushed up onto his elbows. “Put the pillow so I can sit up against it.” His voice was only half as loud as it usually was. I moved the pillow and held him up while he pulled himself back to it. When we were done he was sitting upright, his back against the pillow, his head against the concave end of an oil drum. He pulled his shirt around so it was straight on his chest.

The one lamp that was lit flickered as a draft plunged down one of the partially opened roof vents. The yellow glow that filled the room dimmed. I stood and leaned over to give the flame a little more wick. The wind bent at an especially noisy angle around the corner of the house.

“Santa Ana blowing, eh?” Tom said.

“Yeah. A strong one, too. And hot.”

“I noticed.”

“I bet. This place is like an oven. I’m sure glad I don’t live in the desert if it’s like this all the time.”

“Used to be. But the wind isn’t hot because of the desert. It gets compressed coming over the mountains, and that heats it up. Compression heats things.”

“Ah.” I started to describe the effect of the Santa Ana on the trees, that were so used to the onshore wind; but he knew about Santa Anas. I fell silent. We sat there a while. There was no rush to fill silences between us. All the hours we’d spent sitting together, talking or not talking, it didn’t matter. Thinking about all those hours made me sad. I thought, You can’t die yet, I’m not done learning from you. Who’s gonna tell me what to read?

This time Tom made an effort to rouse things. “Have you gotten started on filling that book I gave you?”

“Oh, Tom, I don’t know how to do such a thing. I haven’t even opened it.”

“I was serious about that,” he said, giving me the eye. Even in that wasted visage the eye had its old severity.

“I know you were. But what am I going to write? And I don’t even barely know how to spell.”

“Spelling,” he said scornfully. “Spelling doesn’t matter. The six signatures of Shakespeare we have are spelled four different ways. You remember that when you worry about spelling. And grammar doesn’t matter either. You just write it down like you would talk it. Understand?”

“But Tom—”

“Don’t but me, boy. I didn’t spend all that time teaching you to read and write for nothing.”

“I know. But I don’t have any stories to write, Tom. You’re the one with the stories. Like that one when you met yourself, remember?”

He looked confused.

“The one where you picked yourself up hitchhiking,” I prompted him.

“Oh yeah,” he said slowly, looking off through the wall.

“Did that really happen to you, Tom?”

The wind. Only his eyes moved, sliding over to look at me. “Yes.”

Again the wind, whistling its amazement, whoooooo! Tom was quiet for a long time; he started and blinked and I realized he had lost track of what we were saying.

“That was an awful long time ago for you to remember it all so clearly,” I said. “What you said and all. There’s no way I could do that. I can’t even remember what I said last week. That’s another reason I couldn’t write that book.”

“You write it,” he commanded me. “Everything comes back when you write it down. Press the memory.”

He fell silent, and we listened to the wind’s howls. A branch thumped the wall. He clutched at the sheet covering his legs, clutched and twisted it. It had a frayed edge.

“You hurting?” I asked.

“No.” Still he kneaded it, and looked at the wall across from me. He sighed a few times. “You think I’m pretty old, don’t you boy.” His voice was weak.

I stared at him. “You are pretty old.”

“Yes. Lived a full life in the old time, was forty-five on the day—that makes me a hundred and eight years old now, is that right?”

“Sure, that’s right. You know it best.”

“And I look that old too, God knows.” He took a deep breath, held it, let it go. I noticed that he hadn’t coughed since I had arrived, and thought that the dry wind might be a help to him. I was about to remark on that when he said,

“But what if I wasn’t?”

“What?”

“What if I wasn’t that old?”

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed, shifted around under the sheet. Closed his eyes for a time, so that I thought he might have fallen asleep. Opened them again.

“What I mean is… is that I’ve been stretching my age a bit.”

“But—how can that be?”

He shifted his gaze and stared at me, his brown eyes shiny and pleading. “I was eighteen when the bombs went off, Henry. I tell you true for the very first time. Got to while I have the chance. I was going to go to that ruined school on the cliffs that we saw down south. I went for a trip in the Sierra the summer before and that’s when it happened. When I was eighteen. So now I’m… now I’m…” He blinked several times in succession, shook his head.

“Eighty-one,” I said in a voice dry as the wind.

“Eighty-one,” he repeated dreamily. “Old enough, and that’s the truth! But I only grew up in the old time. None of that other stuff. I wanted to tell you that before I go.”

I stared at him, got up and walked around the room, and ended up at the foot of the bed where I stared at him some more. I couldn’t seem to get him in focus. He stopped meeting my eye and looked uncomfortably at his mottled hands.

“I just thought you should know what I’ve been doing,” he said apologetically.

“Which is what?” I asked, stupefied.

“You don’t know? No. Well… having someone around who lived in the old time, who knew it well, too—it’s important.”

“But if you weren’t really there!”

“Make it up. Oh, I was there. I lived in the old time. Not for long, and without understanding it at the time, but I was there. I’ve not been lying outright. Just stretching.”

I didn’t believe it. “But why?” I cried.

For the longest time he was silent, and the wind howled my distress for me.

“I don’t know how to put it,” he said wearily. “To hold on to the part of our past that’s of value, maybe? To keep our spirits up. Like that book does. Can’t be sure if he did it or not. Could be a Glen Baum that did go around the world. Could be Wentworth wrote it right there in his workshop. Doesn’t matter—it’s happened now because of the book. An American around the world. We needed it even if it was a lie, understand?”

I shook my head, unable to speak. He sighed, looked away, bonged his head lightly on the oil drum. A million thoughts jammed in my mind, and yet I said something I hadn’t thought, in a voice thick with disappointment. “So you didn’t meet your double after all.”

“No. Made it up. Made a lot of things up.”

“But why, Tom? Why?” I started walking around the room again so he wouldn’t see me cry.

He didn’t answer me. I thought of all the times that Steve had called him a liar, and how often I had defended him. Ever since he had shown us the picture of the Earth taken from the moon, I had believed him, believed all his stories. I had decided he was telling the truth.

In a voice I could barely make out he said, “Sit down, boy. Sit down here.” I sat in my chair. “Now listen. I came down and saw it, see? See? I was in the mountains, like I said. That part of the story was true. All the lies were true. In the mountains on a hike to myself. I didn’t even know the bombs went off, can you believe it?” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it yet. And suddenly I realized he was telling me what he had never told anybody. “It was a fine day, I hiked over Pinchot Pass, but that night smoke blotted the stars. No stars. I didn’t know but I knew. And I came down and saw it. Every person in Owens Valley was crazy, and the first one I met told me why, and that moment—oh, Hank, thank God you won’t ever have to live that moment. I went crazy like the rest of them. I was just older than you and all of them were dead, everyone I knew. I was mad with grief and my heart broke and sometimes I think it never did get mended…”

He swallowed hard. “Now I see why I don’t talk about it.” He bonged the oil drum with his head, blinked to clear his eyes. In a fierce whisper he said, “But I got to, I got to, I got to,” banging his head lightly, bong, bong, bong.

“Stop it, Tom.” I put my hand behind his head, against the resonant metal drum. His scalp was damp. “You don’t have to.”

“Got to,” he whispered. I leaned forward to hear him. “At first I didn’t believe it. But the greyhound wasn’t running and I knew. It took me a work of walking and hitching rides with madmen to get home, but when I came down five it was still burning pillars of smoke everywhere, the whole city. I knew it was true then and I was afraid of the radiation so I didn’t go on to see my home. Up into the mountains looting and scavenging for food. How long I don’t know, lost my mind and only really remember flashes like flames through smoke. Killing. I came to in a cabin in the mountains and knew I would have to see it to believe they were all dead. My family, see? I didn’t care about the radiation anymore, don’t think I even remembered it. So I went back to Orange County, and there, oh, oh,” he exclaimed; his hand was clutching at the sheet over and over, and I held it. It was feverish.

“I can’t tell that,” he whispered. “It was… evil. I ran and came here. Empty hills, I was sure the whole world was destroyed, world of insects and people dying on the beaches. When I hoped, I thought it might be just us and Russia, Europe and China. That the other countries would get help to us eventually, ha ha.” He nearly choked, and held onto my hand hard. “But no one knew. No one knew anything beyond what they could see. I saw empty hills. That was all I knew. Marines had kept them clear. I saw I could live in these hills without going mad, if I could avoid getting killed by someone or starving. It could be done. See up to that point I didn’t know if it could be done. But here was the valley and I knew it could be done. And I never set foot in Orange County again.”

I squeezed his hand; I knew that he had been up there since.

As if to contradict me he said, “Never, not to this day.” He tugged my hand and whispered rapidly, “It’s evil, evil. You’ve seen them at the swap meets, scavengers, there’s something wrong with them, wall-eyed or something burst inside—there’s something wrong in their eyes, you can see it’s driven them crazy to live in those ruins. Insanity’s horse. And no surprise either. You got to stay out of that place, Henry. I know you’ve been up there at night. But listen to me, now, don’t go up there, it’s bad, bad.” He was leaning off the pillow toward me, both hands on my side of the bed to prop himself up, his face intense and sweaty. “Promise me you won’t go up there, boy.”

“Ah, Tom—”

“You can’t go up there,” he said desperately. “Tell me you won’t, not ever.”

“Tom, I mean sometime I’m gonna have to—”

“No! What for? You get what you need out of there from scavengers, that’s what they’re for, please, Henry, promise me. There’s evil up there so bad it can’t be spoken of please I’m asking you not to go up there—”

“All right!” I said. “I won’t go up there. I promise.” I had to say it to calm him down, you see. But the knot tightened across my stomach until I had to hold my left arm over my ribs, and I knew I had done wrong. Done wrong again.

He collapsed back against the pillow, bong. “Good. Save you from that. But not me.”

I felt so awful I tried to change the subject. “But I guess it didn’t harm you, not in the long run. Here you are all these years later.”

“Neutron bombs. Short term radiation. So I guess, but I don’t know. Something like that, though. The earth will revenge us, but it’s no solace. Revenge is no solace. Their suffering won’t pay off ours, nothing will ever, we were murdered.” He squeezed my hand so hard my knuckles hurt. He sucked in air. “The ones of us left were so hungry, so hungry, we fought each other and finished the murder off for them, ah, that was the worst of it. So crazy. In the year after more people died than had been killed by the bombs, I’m sure, and more and more until it looked like every last one of us would die. Stupid Americans so far from the earth by then that we couldn’t figure out how to live off it, or those who could were swamped by those who couldn’t. It got so’s a friend you could trust was worth more than the world to you. Until there were so few left there was no need to fight anymore, no one to fight. All dead. I saw Death walking down the road more times than you’d care to imagine. Old man in a black coat, axe over his shoulder. Got so I waved to him and walked on by. Then out of the sky the storms, weather turned bad and the storms came. There was a winter that lasted ten years, good limerick. But the suffering was too much to bear. I live to show what a person can bear and die not, good poem, remember it? Did I give you that one? It got so when you saw a living human face that wasn’t insane you wanted to hug the person right then and there. So that when we settled here… it was a start. New. Weren’t more than a dozen of us. Every day a struggle. Food, we’re slaves to it, boy, I learned that: Grew up and didn’t learn a thing about it, not really. In that America was evil. The world was starving and we ate like pigs, people died of hunger and we ate their dead bodies and licked our chops. It’s true what I say to Ernest and George, we were a monster and we were eating up the world and they had reasons to do it to us, but still, still we didn’t deserve it. We were a good country.”

“Please, Tom. You’re going to hurt your voice going on so, you can’t!” He was sweating and his voice was so strained and torn up I really did think he would hurt it. I was scared, trembling. But now he was wound up; he took a few deep breaths, and went on again, squeezing my hand and ordering me with his eyes to let him talk, to let him speak at last:

“We were free then. Not perfectly so, you understand, but it was the best we could do, we were trying, it was the best so far. Nobody else had ever done it better, we… it was the best country in history,” he whispered, like he had to convince me or die. “I tell you true now, no baiting George or babbling, with all the flaws and stupidities we were still the leader, the focus of the world, and they killed us for it. Killed the best country the earth ever had, it was genocide boy do you know that word? Genocide, the murder of a whole people. Oh it had happened before, we did it ourselves to the Indians. Maybe that’s why this happened to us. I keep coming on reasons but they’re not enough. We were wrong in a million ways and had flaws big as our strengths but we didn’t deserve this.”

“Calm down, Tom, please calm down.”

“They’ll suffer for it,” he whispered. “Tornadoes, yes, and earthquakes and floods and droughts and fires, and murder for no good reason. See I went back to see. I had to see. And it was all smoking and blasted flat. Home. And just a few blocks away it still stood, blasted flat all around it but not it, ground zero is that still spot. It really was the magic kingdom when I was a child.” Now his whispering got so rapid and desperate I could barely hear him, and what he said made no sense, and I held his forearm with both hands as he went on. “Main Street was all full of trash, dead people here and there, ruins, the smell of death. Around the corner the steamboat used to come, one time when I was a little boy my folks took me and as the steamboat rounded the corner we could hear that horn cutting across the water like Gabriel’s last call and the whole crowd knew it was him in an instant, Satchmo it was, Henry, Satchmo playing louder than the steamboat whistle, but now the lake was chock with corpses. I went to talk with Abraham Lincoln, leaned my head in his lap looked in his sad eyes and told him they killed his country like they killed him but he knew already and I cried on his shoulder. Went through the castle to the giant teacups, big blowsy woman and two men in the dead silence laughing drunk and trying to get the teacups to spin, she let a big green bottle go smash it went over the concrete and that instant I knew it was all true, and the man—the man he took his knife, oh—oh—”

“Please, Tom!”

“But I survived! I survived. Ran from evil I don’t know where or how, came to in the valley like I said. I ran all the way and learned what I had to survive. Didn’t learn a damned thing in the old time. Schoolbook rubbish, nothing more. Idiot America. Roger’s the model of reason next to it, I nearly died learning what I had to know, nearly died twenty times and more, Jesus I was lucky to live, he fell in the torrent and maybe I could have—or the time they took her, no Troy for us… harsh, harsh, harsh. Tiger justice, we’re Greek now boy, it’s as hard for us as it was for them, and if we can make something beautiful out of it it’ll be like what they made, that fine carved line pure and simple just to describe it the way it is. And Death’s fine curve sitting there always, skull under flesh in the sun, no wonder the tragedies, the harshness, verse rituals the vase, the curved line, they were just a way of talking about what’s real then and now, real as hunger, sometimes I can’t bear to think of it. We were the last of those plays, great pride a great flaw, the two the same and they killed us for it, blasted us to desolation struggling in the dirt to scratch out thirty years and die like Greeks, oh, Henry, can you see why I did it, why I lied to you, it was to keep you knowing it, to make us Greek ghosts on the land and make that something pure and simple so we can say we’re still people, Henry, Henry—”

“Yes, Tom. Tom! Calm down, please.” I was standing, holding him by the shoulders, leaning over him, shaking at his delirium. Twisting he started to speak again and I put my hand over his mouth, clamped it there. He struggled to breathe and I let my hand off him. “You’re not making any sense,” I told him. The lamp sputtered, our shadows wavered against the black circles of the wall, the wind shrieked around the corner. “You’re working yourself up too much, talking wild. Listen to me now, lie down here. Please. Doc would be furious at us if he came in. You haven’t got the strength for such carrying on.”

“Do too,” he whispered.

“Good, good. Simmer down some though, simmer down, simmer down.”

He seemed to hear me, finally. He leaned back. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and sat down again. I felt like I had been running for miles. “Jesus, Tom.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep it down. But you got to know.”

“I know you survived. Now we’re past that and that’s all I need to know. I don’t want to know any more,” I said, and I meant it.

He shook his head. “You got to.” He relaxed back into the pillow. Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

“Stop that, Tom.”

He stopped. The wind picked up again, filling the silence. Whoooo, whooooo, whooooooooooo.

“Aye, I’ll be quiet,” he said softly, the strain gone from his voice. “Wouldn’t want Doc mad at me.”

“No you wouldn’t,” I said seriously. I was still scared; my heart still pumped hard. “Besides, you’ve got to save what energy you’ve got.”

He shook his head. “I’m tired.” The wind howled like it wanted to pick us up and knock us down. The old man eyed me. “You won’t go up there, will you? You promised.”

“Ah, Tom,” I said. “Some time I may have to, you know that.”

He slumped down onto the pillow, stared at the ceiling. After a time he spoke, very calmly. “When you learn things important enough that you feel like teaching them, it always seems possible. Everything’s so clear given what you’ve gone through—the images are there, even sometimes the words to convey them with. But it doesn’t work. You can’t teach what the world has taught you. All the tricks of rhetoric, the force of personality, the false authority of being teacher, or pretending to be immensely old… none of that’s enough to bridge the gap. And nothing else would be either.

“So I’ve failed. What I did end up teaching you was no doubt exactly backwards to my purpose. But there’s no help for it. I was trying to do the impossible, and so I got… confused.”

He slid down the pillow until he was flat on his back. Snuggled under the sheet, so that it looked like he would fall asleep right then, for his eyes were closed and he was breathing deep, in the way of an exhausted man. But then one brown eye opened and stared at me, pierced me. “You’ll be taught by something strong as this wind, boy, picking you up and blowing you into the sea.”