The Wild Shore

19

Outside it was dark, and the wind howled. I stood at the log bench in the garden and watched wind tear at the potato tops, felt it tear at me. To the west Cuchillo poked into the last blue before night’s black. It all looked different, as if I had walked out of the drum house into another time. Wind tore my breath from me, shoved it back in. I tried to collect myself.

“Ready?” Steve said sharply, and I jumped. He and Mando and Gabby were behind me. Impossible in the wind to hear anybody come up on you.

“Very funny,” I said.

“Let’s go.”

Mando said, “I have to make sure Pa’s awake to look after Tom.”

“Tom’s up,” I said. “He can call your pa if he wants him. If you wake him up, what will you tell him you’re going to do?”

In the dark Mando’s blurred, uneasy face.

“Let’s go,” Steve insisted. “If you want to come along, that is.”

Without a word Mando took off down the trail, back into the valley. We followed him. In the woods the wind became no more than a gust here and there. Trees creaked, moaned, hummed. Over Basilone we hiked, steering clear of the Shankses’ house. Through overgrown foundations to the freeway, where we picked up the pace. Quickly enough we were in San Mateo Valley, and past the spot where I had confronted Add. Steve stopped, and we waited for him to decide what to do.

He said, “We’re supposed to meet them where the freeway crosses the river.”

“We’d best keep going, then,” Gabby said. “It’s ahead a bit.”

“I know, but… seems to me we shouldn’t walk right down there. That doesn’t seem like the right way to do it.”

“Let’s get down there,” I put in. “They might be waiting, and we’ve got a long way to go.”

“Okay…”

We walked close together so we could hear each other in the wind. A ball of tumbleweed bounced across the freeway and Mando shied. Steve and Gabby laughed. Mando pressed on ahead. We followed him to the San Mateo River. Nobody was there.

“They’ll see us and let us know where they are,” I guessed. “They need us, and they know we’ll be on the freeway. They can hide.”

“That’s true,” said Steve. “Maybe we should cross—”

A bright light flashed on us from below the freeway’s shoulder, and a voice from the trees said “Don’t move!”

We squinted into the glare. It reminded me of the Japanese surprising us in the fog at sea, and my heart hammered like it wanted to bound off by itself.

“It’s us!” Steve called. Gabby snickered disgustedly. “From Onofre.”

The light went out, leaving me blind. Under the sound of the wind, some rustling.

“Good.” A shape loomed on the sea side of the freeway. “Get on down here.”

We felt our way down the slope, bumping together in a clump. There were a lot of men around us. When we got to the bottom of the slope we stood in bushes that came to our waists. A dozen or more men surrounded us. One of them bent over and opened the shade on a gas lantern; most of its light was caught in the lower branches of the brush, but standing in one dim beam in front of the lantern was Timothy Danforth, Mayor of San Diego. His trousers were muddy.

“Four of you, are there?” he said in his loud bray. His voice brought back every detail of my night at his house on the freeway island, and it was Nicolin who answered, “Yes, sir.”

More men joined us, dark shapes coming up through the brush from the river. “That’s all of you?” the Mayor said.

“Yes, sir,” Steve said.

“That’s all right. Jennings, get these men guns.”

One of the men, looking like Jennings now that he had been named, crouched over a large canvas bag on the ground.

“Is Lee here?” I asked.

“Lee doesn’t like this sort of thing,” Danforth said. “He’s no good at it, either. Why do you want to know?”

“He’s someone I know.”

“You know me, right? And Jennings here?”

“Sure. I was just wondering, that’s all.”

Jennings gave a pistol to each of us. Mine was big, and heavy. I crouched and looked at it in the lantern’s light, holding it in both hands. Black metal business end, black plastic handle. It was the first time I had held a gun outside a swap meet. Jennings handed me a leather pouch filled with bullets, and kneeled beside me. “Here’s the safety catch; you have to push it to here before it will shoot. Here’s how you reload.” He spun the cylinder to show me where the bullets fit in. The others were getting instructions around me. I straightened and blinked to help my night sight return, hefting the pistol in my hand. “You got a pocket it’ll fit in?”

“I don’t think so. Well—”

“All right, men!” If it weren’t for the wind, the Mayor’s voice would be heard all the way back in Onofre, it seemed. He limped over to me, and I had to look up at him. His hair danced over his shadowed face. “Tell us where they’re landing, and we’ll be off.”

Steve said, “We can’t tell you till we’re up there.”

“None of that!” said the Mayor. Steve looked at me. The Mayor went on: “We’ve got to know how far away they’re landing, so we can decide whether or not to take the boats.” So, I thought, they had boated up the coast to get past Onofre. “You men have got guns, and you’re part of the raid. I understand your caution, but we’re all on the same side here. I give you my word. So let’s have it.”

The circle of men stood around us silently.

“They’re landing at Dana Point,” I said.

There it was. If they wanted to leave us now, there was nothing we could do about it. We stood watching the Mayor. No one spoke, and I could feel Nicolin’s accusing gaze, but I kept staring into the underlit face of the Mayor, who looked back at me without expression.

“Do you know what time they’re landing?”

“Midnight, I heard.”

“And who’d you hear from?”

“Scavengers who don’t like the Japanese.”

Another silence followed that. Danforth looked over at a man I recognized—Ben, his assistant.

“We’d better get going,” Danforth said after this silent conference. “We’ll go on foot.”

Steve said, “It’ll take a couple hours to walk to Dana Point.”

Danforth nodded. “Is the freeway the best route?”

“Up to the middle of San Clemente it is. After that there’s a coastal road that’s faster, and less exposed to scavengers.” Now that he was sure we were going, Steve’s voice was filled with excitement.

“We don’t have to worry about scavengers tonight,” Danforth said. “They wouldn’t attack a party this size.”

We climbed back up the shoulder into the hot dry blast of the wind. Like me, Mando carried a gun in his hand; Steve and Gab had room in their coat pockets for theirs. When we were all on the roadway the San Diegans started north, and we followed. A few men disappeared ahead and behind us. They had all sorts of guns with them: rifles, pistols as long as my forearm, little fat guns on tripods.

Trees swayed on each side of the road, and branches tumbled through the air like injured night birds. The stars winked brightly in the cloudless black sky, and by their light I could see a great deal: shapes in the forest, the whitish slash of the freeway stretching ahead through the trees, the occasional scout jogging back down the road to us, to report to the Mayor. The four of us kept right behind Danforth, and listened silently as he discussed things and gave orders in a voice calculated to warn every scavenger in Orange County. Walking down the middle of the road, we topped the rise where brick walls tumbled into the freeway, climbed over them and were in San Clemente itself.

“I expect the wind will slow them coming in,” Danforth remarked to Ben, unaware of the boundary we had crossed, the boundary I had promised Tom I would never cross. “I wonder how much they had to pay those patrols to let them through? What do you think the going price is for a trip to the mainland, eh? Do you think they tell them it could cost their lives?” Nicolin kept right on the Mayor’s heels, soaking in every word. I fell farther and farther back, but I could still hear him when the three men in the rearguard climbed out of the brick tangle and one said, “Either stay up there with them or get off the road with us.” I picked up my pace and rejoined the Mayor’s group.

Up and down, up and down, over the hills. Trees bounded in place under the wind’s hard hand, and the wires still in the air swung like jumpropes. Eventually we came to the road Nicolin had mentioned, that would lead us through San Clemente to Capistrano Beach and Dana Point. Once off the freeway and down in the rubble-filled streets I was obsessed by thoughts of ambush. Branches flew out from between broken walls, planks slapped each other, tumbleweed ran at us or away from us, and time after time I clicked over the safety of my pistol, ready to dive for cover and shoot. The Mayor highstepped over the junk in the middle of the street easy as you please. “That’s our point man,” he shouted to us, aiming with his pistol at a silhouette dodging through the street ahead. “There’s tails a block behind us, too.” He gave us the whole strategy of our positions in the street, which seemed like accidents of the moment. The men all had their rifles at the ready, and they were spread out well. “No wreckrats are going to give us trouble tonight, I don’t believe.” He kicked a brick in the road and stumbled. “Damn this road!” It was the third time he had nearly fallen. In all the rubbish it was necessary to watch every step, but he was above that sort of thing. “Doesn’t the freeway go right to Dana Point?” he asked Steve. “The maps showed that it did.”

“It turns inland about a mile from the harbor,” Steve said, his voice raised to carry over the clatter the wind was making.

He still sounded weak compared to the Mayor, who was talking in his everyday voice.

“That’s good enough,” Danforth declared. “I don’t like the footing in this junk.” He called to the forward scouts in a voice that made me wince. “Back to the freeway,” he told them. “We need to hurry more than we need to hide.” We turned up a street headed inland, and intersected the freeway after climbing over a fallen building. Once on the freeway we marched at good speed north, all the way through San Clemente to the big marsh that separates San Clemente from Dana Point.

From the south side of the marsh we could see Dana Point clearly. It was a curve of bluffs, not tall like the cliffs down in San Diego, but tall for our part of the coast, and the curve stuck out from the generally straight line of the land. Now it was a dark mass against the stars, not a light on it anywhere. Underneath the sheer part of the bluff was a tangle of marsh and island, trees and ruins, bounded by a rock jetty that protected a narrow strip of water. Once or twice when fishing to the north we had taken refuge there in storms. The jetty was invisible from where we stood, but Steve described it in as much detail as he could to the Mayor.

“So they’ll probably land there,” the Mayor concluded.

“Yes sir.”

“What about this marsh here? It looks like a good-sized river. Is there a place where we can cross?”

“The beach road has held,” Steve said. “It’s a high bridge over the rivermouth, so it drains right and none of it’s ever been washed out.” He said this as proudly as if he were the bridge builder. “I’ve been across it.”

“Excellent, excellent. Let’s get over it, then.”

The road leading from the freeway to the bridge was gone, however, and we were forced to descend a ravine, cross the creek at its bottom, and climb the other side. My pistol was getting to be quite an irritation in all this climbing, and I could see Mando felt the same. Danforth’s exhortations kept us hurrying. Once on the beach road we hurried over the thick sand that covered it, to the mouth of the estuary. As Steve had said, the bridge was still there, in good shape. In a low voice Gabby asked me, “How does he know all this?” but all I could do was shrug and shake my head. Nicolin had made night treks on his own, I knew that—and now I knew that he had come all the way up here, on his own, and had never told me of it.

Out on the bridge we caught the full brunt of the wind for the first time since we had entered San Clemente. It peeled over the bridge with a force that made us stagger, and it shoved the water of the river in choppy waves against the pilings. The waves burst into foam and rebounded into the channel, to be carried out to sea gurgling and sucking and hissing. We didn’t tarry there, and were quickly over the bridge and under the bluffs of Dana Point, out of the wind’s full power.

Tucked under the bluffs was the marshy flat that had once been the harbor. Only the channel directly behind the rock jetty was free of the sand and scrub that had drifted in and covered the rest of the little bay. We struggled through nettles and man-high brush to the beach facing the jetty, less than a stone’s throw away from it. Swells broke over submerged sections of the line of rocks, giving it a white edging and making it visible in the starlight. Weak remnants of the swell washed up the pebbly beach. The jetty ended almost directly across from us; we stood at the entrance of what remained of the harbor.

“If they land here they’ll have to get through this marsh,” Jennings said to the Mayor.

“You think they’ll sail in there, then?” the Mayor said, pointing up the channel to where it ended against the curve of the bluff.

“Maybe, but when the swell is small like it is tonight, I don’t see why they wouldn’t avoid all this and sail over to the beach back there.” Jennings pointed back the way we had come, at the wide beach stretching from the harbor south to the bridge.

“But what if we go there and they land here?” said Ben.

“Even if they do land somewhere in here,” Jennings said, “they’ll have to go by us over there if they’re going to go up the valley to see the mission like we think they are.”

“Like you think they are,” Danforth said.

“Don’t you agree?”

“Maybe.”

Jennings said, “Well either way, if we’re over there we’ll have them. They’ll come by us wherever they land—they won’t be going up those cliffs.” He waved at the north end of the channel. “If we stay here and they land on that beach, they’ll be able to run inland. We want to trap them against water.”

“That’s true,” Ben said.

Danforth nodded. “Let’s get back there, then.” Everyone heard him, of course, and we tramped back through the thick shrubs cursing and struggling. Back on the road that led to the bridge, the Mayor called us together.

“We’ve got to be well hidden, because the scavengers might come to greet this landing, and they’ll be coming from behind us. So I want us all in buildings or thick trees, or some such shelter as that. We’re assuming they’re going to land at this beach here, but it’s a good long stretch, so we may have to move after we sight them. If there’s a group on the beach to greet them, we’ll be able to adjust sooner, but we’ll have to be very quiet about it.” He led us from the road onto the beach. “Don’t walk where fresh tracks will show! Now. Main force, over here behind this wall.” Several men followed his pointing finger, and walked over to a low tumbled-down wall of broken brick. “Get tucked in there good.” He walked south down the beach. “Another group in that clump of trees. That will make a good crossfire. And you Onofre men…” He came back north, passed the first wall, came to a pile of cement blocks. “In here. See, this was a latrine. Clear some of these out and hunker down in here. If they try slipping around into that harbor swamp, you’ll be here to stop them.”

Mando and I put down our guns, and we climbed into the blocks and weeds and tossed some blocks out to make more room for us.

“That’s good,” Danforth said. “We don’t want to make too much of a disturbance, they may have landed around here before, in which case we don’t want to change anything much. Get in that, let’s see how well hidden you are.” We climbed over the junk in the doorway and stood inside. Two of the walls didn’t meet anymore, and we had a good view through the crack of the beach and the water. “Good. One of you stay where you can see down the beach.”

“We can see through this break,” Steve said, looking through the crack.

“Okay. That might be a good slot for shooting through, too. Stay out of sight, remember. They’ll have night glasses, and they’ll have a good look around before they land.”

The rest of the San Diegans had disappeared in their various blinds. The Mayor looked around and saw they had dispersed; he checked the watch on his wrist and said, “Okay. It’s still a couple hours before midnight, but the scavengers may come earlier to greet them, and they may land early anyway. When you see them come in, stay down. Don’t even release the safeties of your guns until we fire on them, understand? That’s very important. When we fire is your signal to fire too. Don’t waste bullets. Lastly, if anything happens and we get separated in the fighting, we’ll all meet on the bridge we crossed, and go back through San Clemente together. You know where I mean?”

“Sure,” Steve said. “The big bridge.”

“Good men. I’m going to join the main group. Keep quiet, and keep one man looking hard.” He shook each of our hands in turn, leaning into the latrine to do it. Once again he crushed my hand. “One more thing—we’ll hold our fire until they’re all on the beach. Remember that. Okay? Okay, then”—clenching a fist and swinging it overhead—“now’s our chance to get them!” Then he was off, limping across the soft sand to the broken wall down the beach.

No one in sight. Steve stood at the big crack facing the water and said, “I’ll take the first lookout.”

We each slid into the best seat we could make, and began to wait. Gabby settled down on a pile of disintegrating cement blocks. Mando and I got as comfortable as we could, sitting on each side of him. There was nothing to do but listen to the wind batter the ruins. Once I stood and looked over Steve’s shoulder at the slice of the sea visible through the crack. Waves broke and sluiced up and down the beach; the offshore wind threw back a little spray, in white arcs barely lit by the starry sky. Whitecaps flecked the surface farther out to sea. Nothing else. I sat back down. Counted the bullets in my leather pouch. There were twelve of them. The gun was loaded, so theoretically I could kill eighteen Japanese. I wondered how many there would be. With my fingernails I could pluck the loaded bullets from their chambers and slip them back in, so I figured reloading wouldn’t be a problem. Mando saw me and began fiddling with his gun, too.

“Do you think these things shoot straight?” he said.

“If you’re close enough,” said Gabby.

We waited some more. Leaning back against the cement wall I even dozed a bit, but I had one of those waking dreams, a quick vision of a green bottle tumbling my way, and I jerked awake again, my heart pumping. Still, nothing was happening, and I almost drifted off again, thinking in a disconnected dreamy way about the bricks of the latrine. Who had made such once-perfect bricks?

“I wish they’d get here,” Mando said.

“Shh,” Steve said. “Don’t talk. It’s getting close to time.”

If they come at all, I thought. Overhead the stars flickered in the velvet black sky. I shifted to the other side of my butt. We waited. Off on the bluffs a pair of coyotes matched yowls. A lot of time passed, heartbeat by heartbeat, breath by breath. Nothing slower than time passing, sometimes.

Steve jerked and reached a hand back to snap in our faces. He leaned over, hissed “scavengers” in a whisper. We jumped to our feet and looked through the crack, peering around Steve.

Dark. Then against the white gleam of the shorebreak I made out figures moving down the beach. They stopped for a while near the wall where the San Diegans were hidden, then moved north, until they were between us and the water. Their voices were almost loud enough to be understood. They clumped together and then moved south again, stopping before they had come even with the San Diegans. One of them leaned down and struck a lighter near the sand, and by its tiny flame several pants legs were illuminated. They were dressed in their finery: in the little circle of light were flashes of gold, ruby, sky-blue cloth. The man with the lighter lit five or six lanterns and left them on the sand with several dark bags and a couple of boxes. One of the lanterns had green glass. Another scavenger took that one and a clear one, went to the water and swung them overhead, crossing them once or twice. By the lanterns’ light we could make out parts of the whole crew, silver flashing from their ears and hands, wrists and waists. Several more appeared, carrying dry brush and some bigger branches, and with difficulty they started a fire. Once it was going the kindling burst into flame, and the bigger pieces crackled and spit burning pitch into the sand. Now in the bouncing light they were all clearly visible: fifteen of them, I counted, dressed in yellow and red and purple and blue and green, and weighted down with rings and necklaces of silver and copper.

“I don’t see any boat out there,” Steve whispered. “You’d think if they were signaling we could make out the boat.”

“Too dark,” Mando whispered. “And the fire cuts what we can see.”

“Shh,” Steve hissed.

“Look,” said Gabby in an urgent whisper. He pointed past Steve’s shoulder, but already I saw what he meant: there was a dark bulk rising out of the water, just off the end of the jetty. Waves rolled over this dark shape, defining it.

“It’s coming up from under the water!” Gabby said tightly. “It didn’t sail in at all.”

“Get down,” Steve said, and we crouched at his sides. “That’s a submarine.”

The man on the beach waved one lantern overhead now, the green one. Their fire gusted in the wind and the bright light bounced off yellow coats, emerald pants.

“So that’s how they get past the coast guard,” Gabby said.

“They go under them,” Steve agreed, awe in his voice.

“Do you think the San Diegans see it?” Mando said.

“Shh,” Steve hissed again.

One of the submarine’s lights came on, illuminating a narrow black deck. Figures came out of a hatch onto this deck, and in the water beside it they inflated big rafts. Others piled out of the submarine into the rafts. The scavengers’ firelight reflected off the oars as the rafts were rowed to the beach. Two scavengers welcomed the raft by wading into the water up to their waists, and pulling it up the beach beyond the white wavefoam. Several men jumped out of the raft, and a couple more of them lifted packages and wooden boxes out of it. Scavengers handed them jars of amber liquid that glistened in the firelight, and as the Japanese visitors drank we could just hear the scavengers’ greetings, raucous and jovial. The Japanese all looked very round, as if they were wearing two coats each. One of them looked just like my captain.

I pulled back from the crack. “We’ll be too far from them when the ambush starts,” I told Steve.

“No we won’t. Look, here’s another raft full of them.”

I said, “We should get out of this latrine and get in the trees behind. Once they figure out where the firing is coming from, we’ll be stuck here.”

“They won’t figure it out—how are they going to do that in the dark?”

“I don’t know. We should be out of here.”

One more raft was filled, rowed to shore, pulled up the beach. The thick Japanese men stepped out, looked around. The light on the submarine went out, but its dark bulk remained. Boxes were lifted out of the last raft, and some of the scavengers gathered around the boxes as they were pried open. One in a scarlet coat held up a rifle from a box for his fellows to see.

Crack! crack! crack! The San Diegans opened fire. Shot after shot rang out. From my crouch, looking past Steve’s leg, I could see only the response of our victims on the beach: They fell to the sand, the lanterns were out in an instant, the fire knocked to sparks. From then on I couldn’t see much, but already spits of flame showed they were firing back. I aimed to fire, and at the same moment there was a flat whoosh-BOOM, and we were in a cloud of oily gas, coughing and choking, gasping, crying—my eyes burned so badly I couldn’t think of anything else—I feared the gas was eating them out of my head. As the wind swept the cloud out to sea there was another boom, and another, and the popping sound of our ambush was overwhelmed by tremendous long bursts of gunfire spraying off the beach. Through eyes burning with tears all I saw was the whitish flame spurting from the Japanese guns. I coughed and spit, feeling sick, raised my gun to shoot it for the first time (Steve was already shooting). I pulled the trigger and my gun went click, click, click.

A searchlight speared the darkness, originating on the submarine and lighting somewhere south of us, near the wall hiding the San Diegans. The whole area down there exploded. Gunfire ran in the street behind us, and another cloud of poison gas mushroomed over the beach. The Japanese and the scavengers trapped on the beach stood and marched toward us through the gas, wearing helmets and firing machine guns. Blocks of our latrine fell on us. “Let’s get out of here!” Steve cried. We leaped over the latrine’s back wall and ran for the trees backing the beach. Once on the trash-blocked street flanking the strand, we ran—hopped, rather—struggled over piles of soggy wood and old brick, tripped and fell, got up again. My nose was streaming snot from the poison gas; I threw away my pistol. In an eyeblink the whole area was bright as day, bright with a harsh blue glare, the shadows solid as rocks. In the sky over us a flare was sputtering light, revealing the tiny parachute holding it up. The whole unit quickly tumbled off to sea, lighting the harbor so that for an instant between trees I could see the submarine, and men on it firing a mounted gun at us.

“The bridge!” Steve was shouting. “The bridge!” I read his lips more than heard him. It was astounding how loud the gunfire was, I wanted to collapse and clamp my hands over my ears. We scrambled over rubbish, fallen trees, driftwood from storm tides; Mando caught his foot and we pulled him loose. Bullets whanged over us, tearing the air zip, zip, and I ran hunched down so far my back hurt. Another flare burst into life, higher and farther inland. It floated over us like a falling star, making our way plain but also showing us to everyone so we had to crawl, foot by foot. Rips of machine gun fire came from the sea side of us, and behind us were explosions at frequent intervals: with a blinding flash and a crack to break the ears a building down the street fell all over the rubble. We got up from a tangle of planks and ran again, crouched over. Another flare lit the sky above. We fell and waited for the wind to take it to sea. A wrecked building up the hill exploded, then a trio of redwood trees were knocked down. The flare blew away and we stumbled through the shadows for a good way before another flare burst into life, and we lay flat in a copse of eucalyptus.

“Do you think—” Gabby gasped. “Did the San Diegans get away?” No one answered. Mando was still carrying his pistol. We were just a ways from the bridge, and I wanted to get over it before the submarine blasted it into the river. Dana Point still rang with gunfire, it sounded like a real battle was going on, but they could have been fighting shadows. I wasn’t sure the San Diegans would have run like we had. We got up again and scurried over the trash in the streets. A waft of the poison gas. Another fire sparked, but this one plunged fizzing into the marsh. I fell and cut my hand and elbow and knee. We made it to the bridge.

No one was there. “We’ve got to wait for them!” Steve shouted.

“Get across,” I said.

“They won’t know we’re here! They’ll wait here—”

“They will not,” Gabby said bitterly. “They’re over it and long gone. They told us to wait here so we’d slow down the Japs.”

Steve stared at Gab open-mouthed. Another flare burst right above us and I crouched by the rail. Looking between the concrete rail posts I saw several of the flares tailing out to sea, making a ragged string that fell closer to the water, until the ones farthest out lit patches of water. The latest one sailed offshore and over the submarine.

“Go before they put up another one,” Gabby said furiously. He stood and ran across the bridge without waiting for us to agree. We followed him, but another flare sparked the sky, lighting the bridge in ghastly detail. There was nothing to do but keep running, and run we did, because the submarine commenced shooting at us. The railing clanged and the air ripped like stiff cloth, like the first tearing sound of thunder. We got to the far side of the bridge and threw ourselves flat behind a stretch of canted asphalt. The submarine pummeled the bridge. From the hills inland a siren howled, low at first and then rising fast. Scavengers, sounding the alarm. But who were they fighting? Darkness, distant explosions, siren howls. The submarine stopped firing but my head rang so I couldn’t hear. Little bangs ahead of us in San Clemente, felt more than heard. Steve put his face to my ear. “Go back through streets—” and something I didn’t catch. The shooting to the south meant the San Diegans were already down there, I decided, and I cursed them for leaving us. We ran again, but the submarine must have seen us through its night glasses, because it fired again. Down we went. Crawled and hopped, ran doubled over through the ruins on the coastal road. The submarine stayed in the rivermouth, pounding away. We got off the coastal road, back against a low cliff, through trees and on another road. Into the wreck of San Clemente, the maze of trash. Mando was falling behind, limping. I thought it was his foot. “Hurry up!” Steve screamed.

Mando shook his head, limped to us. “Can’t,” he said. “They shot me.”

We stopped and sat him down in the dirt. He was crying, he had his left hand up to his right shoulder. I lifted his hand away and felt the blood run over mine.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Steve cried.

“It just happened,” Gabby said roughly, and pushed me away. He put his arm around Mando’s. “Come on, we got to get him back as quick as we can.”

By the distant light of the last flare I could make out Mando’s face. He was staring at me as if he had something to tell me, but his mouth only jerked. “Help me carry him,” Gabby rasped, his voice cracking. I could feel the blood soaking the back of his shirt. Steve picked up his pistol and we were off. We could only take several steps at a time before some beam or collapsed wall stopped us. “We’ve got to stop him bleeding,” I finally dared to say. It was running inside my sleeve and down my arm. We put him down and I ripped my shirt into strips. It was hard getting the compress tight over the bullet hole. By accident I brushed the wound with my fingers: a little tear under the shoulderblade, on his right side. It wasn’t bleeding fast. Mando still stared at my face with a look I couldn’t read. He didn’t speak. “We’ll have you home in a jiffy,” I said hoarsely. I stood up too fast and staggered, but Steve helped us get him up, and we were off again.

The center of San Clemente is one big ruin, no plan or pattern to it, no clear way through. Gabby and I carried Mando between us and struggled along, while Steve ranged forward pistol in hand to find the best way. Sirens cut through the wind’s shrieking from time to time, and we had to hide more than once to avoid roving bands of scavengers. Gunshots echoed in the clogged streets. I had no idea who was firing at who. A wall fell in the wind. We hiked into dead ends more than once. Steve yelled instructions back to us but sometimes Gabby and I just picked the easiest way; this caused Steve to yell more, in a high desperate shout. Calls came from behind us and Gabby and I lowered Mando to the ground, stuck in the middle of the street. Three scavengers approached us, guns in hand. Steve ran up and fired, crack crack crack crack! All the scavengers went down. “Come on,” Steve screamed. We picked Mando up and staggered on. Dead ends made us backtrack and after a long time trying to find a way we caught up to Steve sitting in the road, houses collapsed all around us, wind and gunfire beyond, no way forward—our way blocked by a giant mare’s nest of bones.

“I don’t know where we are,” Steve cried; “I can’t find a way.” I prodded him to take my side carrying Mando, grabbed his gun and ran across the street. Through trees I saw the ocean, the only mark we really needed when it came down to it. “This way!” I called, and hopped over a beam, dragged it out of their path, ran down and got another fix on the sea, picked a road, did what I could to clear it. That went on and on, till it seemed like San Clemente had stretched out all the way down Pendleton. And scavengers on the prowl, setting off their sirens and guns, howling with glee at the hunt. They put us to ground more than once; I didn’t dare shoot at them because I wasn’t sure how many they were or how many bullets were left in Steve’s gun, if any.

While we cowered in the dark of our cover I did what I could for Mando. His breath was choked. “How are you, Mando?” No answer. Steve cursed and cursed. I nodded to Gabby and we got Mando up again. I left Steve to carry him and went out scouting. Scavengers gone, at least out of sight, that was all I wanted. I set to finding a way again.

Somehow we got to the southern end of San Clemente, down in the forest below the freeway. Scavengers were roaming the freeway; we heard their shouts and occasionally I saw their shapes. The only way across San Mateo River was the freeway. We were trapped. Sirens mocked us, gunshots might have marked a skirmish with the San Diegans, although I suspected Gabby was right and they were long gone, on their boats and under way. They wouldn’t be back to help us. Gabby had Mando resting on his lap. Mando’s breath gurgled in his throat. “We got to get him home,” Gab said, looking at me.

I took the bullets from my pocket and tried to fit them into Steve’s gun.

“Where’s your gun?” Steve said.

The bullets didn’t fit. I cursed and threw the pouch at the freeway. In the dirt we sat on was a rock I could just fit my hand around. I hefted it and started for the freeway. I don’t know what I had in mind. “Bring him up close to the road and be ready to move him across San Mateo fast,” I told them. “You go when I tell you to.” But a series of explosions blasted the freeway above us, and when they ended (burnt powder smell blown by) it was quiet. Not a scavenger to be heard. The silence was broken by the sound of a vehicle coming up the freeway from the south. A little whirrr. I crawled up the shoulder of the road to take a look at it. I jumped out of the road to wave at him. “Rafael! Rafael! Over here!” I screamed, the words tearing out of me like no others ever had.

Rafael rolled up to me. “Christ, Hank, I almost shot you dead there!” He was in the little golf cart that sat in his front yard, the one he swore he could make work if he ever found the batteries.

“Never mind that,” I said. “Mando’s hurt. He’s been shot.” Gabby and Steve appeared, carrying Mando between them.

Rafael sucked air between his teeth. “Put him in back.”

Scattered shots rang out from up the freeway, and one spanged off the concrete near us. Rafael reached into his cart and pulled out a metal tube, held by struts at an angle on a flat base. He put it on the road and dropped a hand-sized bomb or grenade (it looked like a firecracker) in it. Thonk, the tube said hollowly, and a few seconds later there was an explosion just off the freeway, about where the shots had come from. While Gabby and Steve got Mando in the cart Rafael kept dropping grenades in, thonk, BOOM, thonk, BOOM, and pretty soon no one was firing at us. With a final burst of three he jumped in the cart and we were off.

“When we go uphill, get out and push,” Rafael said. “This thing won’t carry all of us. Nicolin, take this and keep an eye out to the rear.” He handed Steve a rifle. “How about more bullets,” Steve said. Rafael gestured at the floor beside him. “In the box there.” We hit the steep hill at the very south end of San Clemente, and pushed the cart up it at a slow run. Sirens wailed off the hills; I could make out three different ones, wavering at different levels as the wind tore at their sound. We made the rise and rolled into the San Mateo Valley. I cradled Mando’s head and told him we were close to home. There were faint shouts behind us, but now we were moving faster than men on foot could. We reached the rise to Basilone Ridge and Rafael said, “Push again.” He was calm, but when he looked at me his eye was hard. When we reached the top of Basilone rise Steve cried wildly, “I’m going back to make them pay!” and he was off in the dark, back up the freeway to the north, rifle in hand. “Wait!” I shouted, but Rafael struck my arm.

“Let him go.” For the first time he sounded angry. He drove the cart to his house and jumped out, ran inside and came back out with a stretcher. We got Mando on it. His eyes were still open, but he didn’t hear me. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Gabby was huffing beside the stretcher as Rafael and I carried him. We struck out through the forest, traversing the side of Cuchillo to get to the Costas’ as fast as possible. I stumbled and groaned, and Gabby took over my end. We got to the Costas’ place. Wind whistled over the oil drums; there was no way they could have heard us approach. Rafael propped the stretcher against his thigh, banged the door like he was out to break it. Wham. Wham.

“Get out here, Ernest,” he said, still banging the door. “Get out here and doctor your boy.”

20

It must have been something Doc had imagined many times before, the moment when they came to the door and it was his own son hurt. When he pulled the door away from Rafael’s banging he didn’t say a word to us; he came out and picked Mando up off the stretcher and carried him through the kitchen into the hospital without a glance or a question.

We followed him. In the hospital he laid Mando on the second bed, a small one, and pulled it out from the wall. At the scraping Tom snorted, rolled over. One of his closed eyes opened a crack, and when he caught sight of us he sat up, ground his knuckles in his eyes, surveyed the scene wordlessly. Doc used scissors to cut off Mando’s coat and shirt, gesturing for Gabby to pull off his pants. Gabby squinted as they peeled away the bloody cloth of the shirt. Mando coughed, gargled, breathed fast and shallow. Under the bright lamps Rafael carried in from the kitchen his body looked pale and mottled. Below his armpit was that little tear, surrounded by a bruise. Rafael nearly tripped over me walking in and out. I sat on my heels against the wall, knees in my armpits, arms wrapped around my legs, looking away from Tom. Doc looked at no one but Mando. “Get Kathryn here,” he said. Gabby glanced at me, hurried out.

Tom said, “How is he?”

Doc felt Mando’s ribs carefully, tapped his chest, took his pulse at wrist and neck. He muttered, more to himself than Tom, “Middle caliber nicked the lung. Pneumothorax… hemothorax…” Like a spell. He cleaned the blood from Mando’s ribs with a wet cloth. Mando choked and Doc adjusted his head, reached in his mouth and pulled his tongue around. A plastic thing from the supply shelf behind Doc served to clamp the tongue in place. Plastic vise on the side of Mando’s face, stretching his mouth open… my spine rolled up and down the oil drum behind me. The wind picked up, wheeeeee, wheeeeeee.

“Where’s Nicolin?” Tom asked me.

I kept my eyes on the floor. Rafael answered from the kitchen:

“He stayed north to fire some rounds at the scavengers.”

Tom was shifting around against his back wall, and he coughed. “Quit moving,” Doc said. A flying branch knocked the house sharply. Mando’s breathing was rapid, harsh, shallow. Doc tilted his face to the side and wiped bright blood from his mouth. Doc’s own mouth was a tight lipless line. Bright blood on cloth. Under me the floor, the grainy smooth boards of the floor. Knots raised above the worn surface, cracks, splinters all shiny and distinct in the lamplight, scrubbing sand in the corners against the walls. The bedpost closest to me was shimmied. The sheets were so old that each thread of the fabric stood out; needlework in the patches. I stared at that floor and never raised my eyes. My breath hurt so it might have been me shot. But it wasn’t. Kathryn’s legs walked into the room, bending down the floorboards a bit. Gabby’s legs followed.

“I need help,” Doc said.

“I’m ready,” said Kathryn calmly.

“We need to get a tube between these ribs and drain the blood and air in the chest cavity. Get a clean jar from the kitchen and put a couple inches of water in it.” She left, came back. Their feet faced each other under Mando’s bed. “I’m afraid air’s getting in and not getting out. Tension pneumothorax. Here, put down the tube and tape, and hold him steady. I’m going to make the incision here.”

Muffled coughs from the old man. A quick glance up: Kathryn’s back, in sweatshirt and string-tie pants; the old man, watching them with an unflinching gaze. Down on the floor went the jar, clear plastic tube stuck in the water at the bottom of it. Suddenly the water bubbled. Blood ran down the sides of the tube and stained the water. More bubbles. The old man’s steady gaze: I wrapped my arms over my stomach and looked up. Kathryn’s broad back blocked my view of Mando. Shudders rattled me. Broad shoulders, broad butt, thick thighs, slim ankles. Elbows busy as she pulled tape from a roll and applied it to Mando, where I couldn’t see.

She looked at me over her shoulder. “Where’s Steve?”

“Up north.”

She grimaced, turned to the work at hand.

Tom coughed again, lightly but several times. Doc looked at him. “You lie back down,” he said harshly.

“I’m okay, Ernest. Don’t mind me.”

Doc was already back at it. He leaned over Mando with a desperate look in his eye, as if the skills his father had taught him so long ago were not enough for this one. “We need oxygen.” He tapped Mando’s chest and the sound was flat. Mando’s breathing was faster. “Got to stop the bleeding,” Doc said. The wind gusted till I couldn’t make out their voices over the house whistling. “Use the wound to put in another tube…” Tom asked Gabby what had happened, and Gab explained in a sentence or two. Tom didn’t comment on it. The wind dropped again and I could hear the snip of Doc’s scissors. He wiped sweat from his forehead.

“Hold it. Okay, get the other end in the jar, and give me the tape quick.”

“Tape.”

Something in the way she said it made Doc wince, and look at Tom with a bitter smile. Tom smiled back but then he looked away, eyes filling with tears. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Rafael.

“Come on out to the kitchen like Gabby is now, Henry. You can’t do anything in here.”

I shook my head.

“Come on, Henry.”

I shrugged off his hand and buried my face in the crook of my arm. When Rafael was gone I looked up again. Tom was chewing on a curl of his hair, watching them intently. Kathryn put her head to Mando’s chest. “His heart sounds distant.”

Mando jerked on the bed. His feet were blue. “And his veins,” Doc said, voice dry as the wind. “Tamponade, ohhh…” He drew back, his fist clenched up by his neck. “I can’t help that. I haven’t got the needles.”

Mando stopped breathing. “No,” Doc said, and with Kathryn’s help he shifted Mando from his side to his back. “Hold the tubes,” he said, and put his mouth and hands to Mando’s mouth. He breathed in, holding Mando’s nostrils shut, then straightened up and pressed hard on Mando’s chest. Mando’s body spasmed. “Henry, come hold his legs,” Kathryn said sharply. I got up stiffly and held Mando by the shins, felt them twitch, struggle, tense up, slacken. Go slack. Doc breathed into him, breathed into him, pushed his chest till the pushes were nearly blows. Blood ran down the tubes. Doc stopped. We stared at him: eyes closed, mouth open. No breath. Kathryn held his wrist, feeling for a pulse. Gabby and Rafael were in the doorway. Finally Kathryn reached across Mando and put her hand on Doc’s arm; we had all been standing there a long time. Doc put his elbows on the bed, lowered his ear onto Mando’s chest. His head rolled till it was his forehead resting on Mando. “He’s dead,” he whispered. Mando’s calves were still in my hands, the very muscles that had just been twitching. I let go, scared to be touching him. But it was Mando, it was Armando Costa. His face was white; it looked like the pinched face of a sick brother of Mando’s.

Kathryn got out a sheet from the cupboard against the wall and spread it over him, pushing Doc gently away so she could do it. Her sweatshirt was sweaty, bloodstained. She covered Mando’s face. I recalled the expression his face had had when I was carrying him through San Clemente. Even that was preferable to this. Kathryn rounded the bed and pulled Doc to the door.

“Let’s get him buried,” Doc said intently. “Let’s do it now, come on.” Kathryn and Rafael tried to calm him but he was insistent. “I want it over with. Get the stretcher and let’s get him down to the graveyard. I want it over with.”

Tom coughed harshly. “Please, Ernest. Wait until morning at least, man. You’ve got to wait until daylight. Got to get Carmen, and dig the grave—”

“We can do that tonight!” Doc cried petulantly. “I want it over with.”

“Sure we can. But it’s late. By the time we’re done it will be day. Then we can carry him over and bury him with people there. Wait for the day, please.”

Doc rubbed his face in both hands. “All right. Let’s go dig the grave.”

Rafael held him back. “Gabby and I will do that,” he said. “Why don’t you stay here.”

Doc shook his head. “I want to do it. I got to, Rafe.”

Rafael looked to Tom, then said, “All right. Come on with us, then.”

He and Gabby got Doc into his coat and shoes, and bumped through the doorway after him. I offered to go but they saw I was useless and told me to stay. From the front door I watched them walk down the path to the river. Predawn twilight, Gabby and Rafael on each side of Doc, holding him. Three little figures under the trees. When they were out of sight I turned around. Kathryn was at the kitchen table, crying. I went outside and sat in the garden.

The wind was dying down a bit with the coming of day. It only hit hard in gusts. The light grew; I could make out gray branches waving. Under the pale sky all distances seemed equal. Leaves fluttered and hung still, fluttered again, in waves that swelled across the treetops out to sea. The dome of the sky grew lighter and taller, lighter and taller. Grays took on color, and then the sun, leaf green and blinding, cracked the horizon. Wind gusted.

I sat in the dirt. My knee, elbow, and hands throbbed where I had cut them falling. It was impossible that Mando was dead, and that reassured me for long stretches of time. Then my hands felt his calves got slack. Or I heard Kathryn inside, clearing up—and I knew that impossible or not, it was real. But it wasn’t a thought I could grasp for long.

The sun was more than a hand’s breadth over the hills when Doc and Gabby came back up the path, Marvin and Nat Eggloff behind them. Rafael was down the river path, pounding on doors and waking folks up. Gabby fairly staggered up the last part of the path. His eyes were ringed red, and he was dirty, as were Doc and Nat. Doc looked up from the path at his house, stopped and waited. Marvin nodded to me and they went inside. I heard them talking with Kathryn. Then she started yelling at the old man. “Lie down! Don’t be a fool! We got enough burials today!” Tom must have said his goodbyes to Mando inside. They came out with Mando on Rafael’s stretcher, wrapped in the sheet. Unsteadily I stood. Everyone took a stretcher pole in hand, three on a side. We carried him down to the river, across the bridge. Sun brutal off the water. We took the river path through the trees. People given the news by Rafael caught up with us, family by family, looked shocked, or tearful, or withdrawn. Once looking back I saw John Nicolin leading all the rest of the Nicolins bar Marie and the babies, his face puffy with displeasure. My pa came to my side and put his arm around my shoulder. When he saw my face he squeezed my shoulders hard. For once he didn’t look stupid to me. Oh he still had that vague look of someone who doesn’t quite get it. But he knew. Suffering you don’t have to be smart to understand. With the knowledge in his eyes was mild reproach, and I couldn’t look at him.

Back in the neck of the valley we were in the shade. Carmen met us outside her home and led us to the graveyard. She was wearing her preaching robe and carrying the Bible. In the graveyard was a new hole in the ground, a mound of fresh earth on one side of it, Mando’s mother Elizabeth’s grave on the other. We laid the stretcher on her grave and all the people trailing us circled around. Most of the valley’s people were there. Nat and Rafael lifted Mando’s body and the sheet into a coffin twice Mando’s size. Nat held the lid in place while Rafael nailed it down. Whap, whap, whap, whap. Sunbeams filtered through the branches. Doc watched the nails being driven home with a desolate look. Both his wife and Mando had been so much younger than him, their years didn’t add up to half his.

When the coffin was nailed shut John stepped forward and helped them arrange the ropes under the coffin. He and Rafael and Nat and my pa picked up the ropes and lifted the coffin over the hole. They lowered it to John’s curt, quiet instructions. When it was settled in the hole they pulled the ropes up. John gathered them and gave them to Nat, his jaw muscles so tight it looked like he had pebbles in his mouth.

Carmen stepped to the edge of the grave. She read some from the Bible. I watched a sunbeam twisting through the trees. She told us to pray, and in the prayer she said something about Mando, about how good he had been. I opened my eyes and Gabby was staring at me from across the grave, accusing, terrified. I squeezed my eyes shut again. “Into Thy hands we commend his spirit.” She took a clod of dirt and held it over the grave; held a tiny silver cross over it with the other hand. She dropped them both in. Rafael and John shoveled the damp earth into the hole, it made the hollow sound. Mando was still down there and I almost cried out for them to stop it, to get him out. Then I thought, it could have been me in that grave, and an awful terror filled me. The bullet that struck Mando had been one of swarms of them; that one or any of the others could have hit me, could have killed me. It was the most frightening thought I had ever had in my life—the terror filled me entirely. Gabby kneeled beside Rafael and pushed dirt in with his two hands. Doc twisted away, and Kathryn and Mrs. Nicolin led him back toward the Eggloffs’. But all I did was stand and watch; I watched and watched; and it fills me with shame to write it, but I became glad. I was glad it wasn’t me down there. I was so glad to be there alive and seeing it all, I thought thank God it wasn’t me! Thank God it was Mando got killed, and not me. Thank God! Thank God!

Sometimes after a funeral quite a wake would develop at the Eggloffs’, but not this morning. This morning everyone went home. Pa led me down the river path. I was so tired my feet didn’t make it over bumps. Without Pa I would have fallen more than once. “What happened?” Pa asked, reproachful again. “Why’d you go up there?” There were people strung along the trail, shaking their heads, talking, looking back at us.

When we got home I tried to explain to Pa what had happened, but I couldn’t do it. The look in his eye stopped me. I lay down on my bed and slept. I would say I slept like a dead man, but it isn’t so.

Sleep doesn’t knit the raveled sleeve of care, no matter what Macbeth said (or hoped). He was wrong that time as he was so often. Sleep is just time out. You can do all the knitting you like in dreams, but when you call time in it unravels in an instant and you’re back where you started. No sleep or dream was going to knit back the last day for me; it was unraveled for good.

Nevertheless, I slept all through that day and evening, and when Pa’s voice, or his sewing machine, or a dog’s bark pulled me halfway out of slumber, I knew I didn’t want to wake even though I didn’t quite remember why, and I worked at returning to sleep until I slid back down the slope to dreams again. I slept through most of the evening, struggling harder and harder to hold onto it as the hours passed.

But you can’t sleep forever. What broke my last hold on an uneasy half-sleep was the w-whoo, w-whoo of the canyon owl—Nicolin’s signal, repeated insistently. Nicolin was out there, under the eucalyptus no doubt, calling me. I sat up, looked out the door; saw him, a shadow against the treetrunk. Pa was sewing. I got my shoes on. “I’m going out.” Pa looked at me, hurt me once again with the puzzled reproach in his eyes, the slight hint of condemnation. I was still wearing the torn clothes I had had on the night before. They stank with fear. I was ravenous, and paused to break off half a loaf of bread on my way out. I approached Steve chewing a big lump. We stood together silently under the tree. He had a full bag over his shoulder.

When the bread was done I said, “Where you been?”

“I was in Clemente till late this afternoon. God what a day! I found the scavengers that had been chasing us, and sniped at them till they didn’t know who was after them. Got some too—they thought a whole gang was after them. Then I went back up to Dana Point, but by that time they had all gotten away. So—”

“Mando’s dead.”

“… I know.”

“Who told you?”

“My sister. I snuck in to get some of my stuff, and she caught me just as I was leaving. She told me.”

We stood there for a long time. Steve took in a deep breath and let it out. “So, I reckon I got to leave.”

“What do you mean?”

“… Come give me some help.” My night vision was coming in and with the exhausted sound of his voice I could suddenly see his face, dirty, scratched, desperate. “Please.”

“How?”

He took off toward the river.

We went to the Marianis’, stood by the ovens. Steve made his owl call. We waited a long time. Steve tapped his fist against the side of the oven. Even I, with nothing at stake, felt nervous. That led me back to all that had happened the night before.

The door opened and Kathryn slipped out, in the same pants she had worn the night before, but a different sweatshirt. Steve’s fingernails scraped the brick. She knew where he would be, and walked straight to us.

“So you came back.” She stared at him, head cocked to one side.

Steve shook his head. “Just to say goodbye.” He cleared his throat. “I—I killed some scavengers up there. They’ll be out to get back at us. If you tell them at the swap meet that I did it and took off, that it was all my doing, maybe it will all stop there.”

Kathryn stared at him.

“I can’t stay after what’s happened,” Steve said.

“You could.”

“I can’t.”

The way he said that, I knew he was leaving. Kathryn knew it too. She folded her arms over her chest and hugged herself as if she were cold. She looked over at me and I looked down. “Let us talk awhile, Henry.”

I nodded and wandered to the river. The water clicked over snags like black glass. I wondered what he was saying to her, what she was saying to him. Would she try to change his mind when she knew he wouldn’t?

I was glad I didn’t know. It hurt to think of it. I saw Doc’s face as he watched his son, the living part of his wife, lowered into the ground beside her. Helpless to stop myself I thought what if the old man dies tonight, right up there at Doc’s place? What about Doc then?… What about Tom?

I sat and held my head but it didn’t stop me thinking. Sometimes it would be such a blessing to turn all the thinking off. I stood and tossed rocks in the water. I sat down again when the rocks were gone, and wished I could throw away thoughts as easily, or the deeds of the past.

Steve appeared and stood looking over the river. I stood up.

“Let’s get going,” he said thickly. He walked down the river path toward the sea, cut into the forest. There was no talk between us, just the silent walking together, side by side, and briefly I recalled how it had felt for so long, for all our lives, when we had hiked together silently in the woods at night like brothers.

He went down the cliff path without looking at it, going from foothold to foothold with careless mastery. There was a slice of moon, nearly on the water. I descended the obscure cliff more slowly. Once on the sand I followed him to the boats. We broke the sand’s water crust, left big footprints in the loose sand below.

A couple of the fishing boats had sockets on the keel, where you could step a small mast and spread a sail. Nicolin went to one of those. Without a word we took bow and stern and skewed the boat from side to side in the sand. Normally four or five men push a boat into the water, but that’s just for convenience; Steve and I got it moving pretty easily. When it was across the tide flat and in the shallows we stopped. Nicolin climbed in to step the mast, and I held the hull steady on the sand bottom.

I said, “You’re going to sail to Catalina, like the guy who wrote that book.”

“That’s right.”

“You know that book is a bunch of lies.”

He never stopped unfurling the sail. “I don’t care. If the book is a lie then I’ll make it true.”

“They aren’t the kind of lies you can make true.”

“How do you know?”

I did know, but I couldn’t say. The mast was stepped and he started jamming the cotter pin through the socket. I didn’t want to just come out and ask him to stay. “I thought you were going to spend your life fighting for America.”

He stopped working. “Don’t you think I’m not,” he said bitterly. “You saw what happened when we tried to fight here. There’s not a thing we can do. The place where something can be done is Catalina. I bet there’s a lot of Americans already there who think the same, too.”

I could see he would have an answer to everything. I shifted the boat’s stern, got ready to push.

“I’m positive the resistance is strongest over there,” he said. “Most effective. Don’t you think so? I mean—aren’t you coming with me?”

“No.”

“But you should. You’ll regret it if you don’t. This is a little out of the way valley here. That’s the world out there, Henry!” He waved a hand westward.

“No.” I leaned over the stern. “Now come on, do you want help with this boat or not?”

He pursed his lips, shrugged. His shoulders drooped when the shrug was done, and I saw how tired he was. It would be a long sail. But I wasn’t going to go, and I wasn’t going to explain. He hadn’t expected me to say yes anyway, had he?

He roused himself, got out of the boat to push. Quickly it floated clear of the sand. We stared at each other from across the boat, and he stuck out his hand. We shook. I couldn’t think of anything to say. He leaped in and got the oars out while I held the stern. I shoved it into the current and he started rowing. With the crescent moon behind him I couldn’t make out his features, and we didn’t say a word. He rowed over a swell coming upriver. Soon he’d be out where what was left of the Santa Ana would clear the cliff, and catch his sail.

“Good luck!” I cried.

He rowed on.

The next swell hid the boat from me for a moment. I walked out of the river, feeling chill. From the beach I watched him clear the rivermouth. The sail, a faint patch against the black, flapped and filled. Soon he was beyond the break. From there he wouldn’t hear me unless I shouted. “Do some good for us over there,” I said, but I was talking to myself.

I climbed the cliff path, water dripping from my pants. By the time I got to the top I was warmer. I walked along the cliff. It was a cloudless night again, and the setting moon shone across the water, marking the distance to the horizon. It was a night to make you see how vast the world was: the ocean, the spangled sky, the cliff, the valley and the hills behind, they were all so huge I might as well have been an ant. Out there under a pale handkerchief patch was another ant, in an ant’s boat.

On the horizon I could see it: dark mass of the sea below, dark sky above, and between them the black bulk of Catalina, bejeweled with white points of light both fixed and moving, and red lights to mark the highest peaks, and a few yellow and green lights here and there. It was like a bright constellation, the finest constellation, always on the verge of setting. For years I had considered it the prettiest sight I had ever seen. There was a cluster of light on the water at the south end that was invisible from the cliff—the foreigners’ port—it could be seen from the height of Tom’s house on a night like this, but I had no desire to go up there and see it. The dim patch of Nicolin’s sail moved out of the narrow path of moonlight on the water, and disappeared. He was one of the shadows among the few moony glitters on the black sea, but strain my eyes as I might I couldn’t tell which one he was. For all I could tell the ocean had swallowed him. But I knew it hadn’t. The little boat was still out there somewhere, sailing west to Avalon.

I stayed on the cliff looking out to sea for a long time. Then I couldn’t stand it, and took off into the forest. Leaves clacked and pine needles quivered as I trudged under the trees. The valley never seemed so big and empty as it did then. In a clearing I looked back; the lights of Catalina blinked and danced, but I turned and walked on. I didn’t give a damn if I never saw Catalina again.

21

The forest at night is a funny place. The trees get bigger, and they seem to come alive, as though during the day they were asleep or gone from their bodies, and only at night do they animate themselves and live, perhaps even pulling up their roots and walking the valley floors. If you’re out there you can sometimes almost catch them at it, just beyond the corner of your eye. Of course on a moonless night it only takes a little wind to imagine such things. Branches dip to tousle the hair, and the falling-water sounds of the leaves are like soft voices calling in the distance. Two holes make eyes, a trail blaze is a smiling mouth, branches are arms, leaves hands. Easy. Still I think it may be true that they are a type of nocturnal animal. They are alive, after all. We tend to forget that. In the spring they sprout joyously, in the summer they bask in the sun, in the winter they suffer bare and cold. Just like us. Except they sleep during the day and come awake at night. So if you want to have much to do with them, night is the time to be out among them.

The different trees wake up in different ways, and they treat you differently. Eucalyptus trees are friendly and talkative. Their branches tend to grow across each other, and in a wind they creak constantly. And their hanging leaves twirl and clack together, making the falling-water sound, a rising and falling voice. The eucalyptus has a great voice. But you wouldn’t want to touch one, or give it a hug, unless you could see it and avoid the gum. The bark is smooth and cool, fragrant like the rest of the tree with that sharp dusty smell, but it doesn’t grow as fast as the wood inside it, I guess, and there are a lot of breaks in it as a result, cracks that split it completely. These cracks leak gum like a dog slobbers, and in the dark you can’t keep from getting your hands and arms in it, and coming away all sticky.

Pine trees are more forbidding speakers. In a breeze their quiet whoooos are fey, and the wild ohhhhhhhs they utter when the wind is up can raise the hair on the back of your neck. But pines feel good to the touch, and you can look at their black silhouettes against the sky forever. Torrey pines have the longest needles, and their little branches are all curly. And the rough, brittle bark feels wonderful against the skin, it’s like a giant cat’s tongue. Redwood bark is even better, all split and hairy; you can put your fingers in cracks around the sides and hold on for dear life. It’s like hugging a bear, or holding on to your ma and crying into her hair. Good friends, pine trees, though you have to ignore their stern voice and touch them to find that out.

Of course there are real living things in the forest at night, mobile things I mean, animals like us. A whole bunch of them, in fact: coyotes and weasels and skunks and raccoons and deer, and cats and rabbits and possums and bears and who knows what all. But damned if you’d know it by just walking around. Even a lone human sitting in the forest for hours might not catch sight of a single creature—much less a human who is crashing around hugging trees and such. Someone like that isn’t going to see a single animal, or even hear one except for frogs. Frogs don’t scare easily, they’ve got the river to hop in and they don’t care. You have to come close to stepping on them before they’ll shut up, much less move. All the others, though, they hear you coming or smell you way off, and they get out of the way and you never know they’ve been there, except if you chance to hear a rustle off in the distance. Of course a big cat might decide to eat you, but you hope they’d be wary enough to stay out of the valley. Generally they avoid crowds, and in the fall they’re not very hungry. So… if you walk about you don’t see a creature anywhere, which is funny because you know they’re around you, getting a drink, chomping on sprouts or dead prey, hunting for or hiding from each other.

But I forgot about the birds. Occasionally you’ll see the quick black shape of an owl, flying without a sound. It’s uncanny how complete their silence is. Or higher, geese or herons migrating, their heads poked ahead on those long necks, flying in V’s that flow in and out of shape.

That night I saw a flock of geese, flying south. Two pairs of wide V’s, passing over the valley in the hour before dawn, when the sky was blueing and I could see them quite clearly. Slow, steady wing strokes, and quite a conversation going on up there in that honk and squawk language…

Of course they aren’t part of the forest proper, but you can see them while in the forest. And I did see them that night. I slept earlier against a redwood, and then for a while curled between two gnarly roots. Mostly, though, I walked around. I had spent a lot of time in the forest, day and night, without paying the least attention to it. But this night I studied tree after tree, hung out with them and really got to know them well, touched them, climbed a couple.

Where the creek from Swing Canyon meets the river is a little meadow that always has a lot of animal tracks in it. I wandered that way when I woke up and saw the geese overhead, in hope of seeing some furry brothers taking a drink. Sure enough, after I lay in the ferns behind a fungus-riddled log for a while, watching a spider weave her morning web, a family of deer came down and drank. Buck, doe, fawn. The buck looked around and sniffed; he knew I was there, but he didn’t care about it, which showed good judgment. When they were done drinking they pushed off, across the meadow and out of sight.

I clambered up stiffly, went down to the creek and drank myself. My pants were still damp and my legs were cold, and I was stiff, and dirty, and cut up, and hungry, and dog tired, but mainly I felt all right. I walked down the west riverbank empty as an empty bowl. I wasn’t going to start crying again, no matter whether I thought of Mando and Steve or not. I could think of them and not feel much of anything. It was done, and I was empty.

But then I rounded the bend above the bridge, and caught sight of a figure downriver on the same bank, at the foot of the cornfields. This was still early morning, when the whole world was nothing but shades of gray—a thousand shades of gray, but not a hint of color. Dew soaked every gray leaf and sprig and fern on the ground, a sign that the Santa Ana was ending.

The figure downstream was a woman. (If a person is visible we know their sex, no matter how distant they are—I’m not sure how we tell sometimes, but it’s so.) And the dark gray shade of this woman’s hair would be brown in the sun, brown with a bit of red in it. Already in this world of grays I could see that touch of red. Kathryn it was, standing at the foot of her fields. From the knee down her pants were darker—wet, then, which meant she had been out walking for a while. Maybe she had been out all night too, I thought, yet another animal in the night forest that I had not seen. Her back was to me. I would have gone to her, but something held me. There are times when a back a hundred yards away is as expressive as ever our faces are. She started and began walking downstream, toward the bridge. At the end of the field she suddenly swung to her right and gave a fearsome kick to the last cornstalk. She wears big boots and the stalk shuddered and stayed tilted over. That didn’t satisfy her. She got set and kicked it again and again, till it was flattened. The scene blurred before me and I stumbled away through the woods, all our catastrophes made real to me again.

I took to spending a lot of time on the beach. I couldn’t abide being with people. One day I tried to rejoin the fishing, but that was no good; they were too hard. Another time I wandered by the ovens, but I left; poor Kristen had a look that pierced me. Even eating with Pa made me feel bad. Everyone’s eyes questioned me, or condemned me, or watched me when they didn’t think I was going to notice: they tried to console me, or to act like nothing was different, which was a lie. I didn’t want any part of them. The beach was a good place to get away. Our beach is so wide from cliff to water, and so long from the coarse sand at the rivermouth to the jumbled white boulders of Concrete Bay, that you can wander on it for days without crossing your path, hardly. Long furrows from old high tides, filled with brackish water; tangled driftwood, including old logs with their octopus roots sticking up; sandflea-infested seaweed, like mounds of black compost; shells whole and broken; sand crabs and the telltale bubbles they leave in the wet sand; the little round white sandpipers with their backwards knees, charging up and down the shingle together to avoid the soup; all of these were worth investigating for hours and days. So I wandered up and down the beach and investigated them, and was miserable, or empty.

See, I could have not told them. Of course I could have refused to have anything to do with the whole plan right from the start. That is what I should have done. But even after I went along with it, I could have kept to myself what I had found out about the landing, and none of it would ever have happened. I had even considered it, and came close to doing just that. But I hadn’t. I had made my decision, and everything that had happened—Mando’s death, Steve’s flight—all followed from that. So it was my fault. I was to blame for one friend’s running away, another’s death. And for who knows how many other deaths that had come that night, of people who were strangers to me, but who no doubt had families and friends grieving for them like we grieved for Mando. All of it came from my thinking; from my decision. I would have given anything to change that decision. But there’s nothing as unchangeable as the past. Striding up the river path to home I recalled what the old man had said there, about how we were wedged in a crack by history so our choices were squeezed down; but now I knew that compared to the way the past is wedged in there, the present is as free as the open air. In the present you have choices, but in the past you only did one thing; regret it with all your power, it won’t change.

If I had been smarter, Mando wouldn’t have died. Not only smarter—more honest. I had lied to and betrayed Kathryn, Tom, Pa—the whole valley, because of the vote. Everybody but Steve, and he was on Catalina. What a fool I had been! Here I thought I had been so clever, getting the time and place out of Add, leading the San Diegans up to the ambush.

But it was us who had been ambushed. As soon as I thought of it that way it was obvious. Those folks hadn’t just been defending themselves on the spur of the moment—they were ready for us. And who else would have warned them but Addison Shanks? He knew we knew about the landing, and all he had had to do was tell the scavengers we knew, and they could prepare for us. Ambush us.

Well once I thought of it, it was as obvious as the sun in the sky, but it really hadn’t occurred to me until then, walking up the river path and brooding over it. They had ambushed the ambushers.

And the San Diegans had set us farther north than them so that if anything went wrong, we would be the last over the bridge and would take up the attention of the enemy while the San Diegans escaped. Thrown in the road to trip them.

We had been twice betrayed. And I had been an incredible fool.

And my foolishness had cost Mando his life. I wished fiercely (now that the funeral was well past) that I had died and not him. But I knew that wishing was like throwing rocks at the moon (so I was safe).

Wandering the beach and thinking about it a couple days later, I got curious and went up Basilone to the Shankses’. I didn’t have anything in mind to say to them, but I wanted to see them. If I saw their faces I would know if I was right or not about Add warning the scavengers, and then I could be shut of them for good.

Their house was burned down. Nobody was around. I stepped across the charred boards that were all that was left of the south wall, and kicked around in the piles of charcoal for a bit. Dust and ash puffed away from my boot. They were long gone. I stood in the middle of what had been their storage room, and looked at the black lumps on the ground. Nothing metal. It looked like they had emptied the place of valuables before they fired it. They must have had help moving north. After what I had caught Add doing, as soon as they heard of my survival they must have decided to move north and join the scavengers completely. And of course Addison wouldn’t leave us such a house.

The north wall was still there, black planks eaten through and ready to fall; the rest of the wood was ash, or ends and lumps scattered about. The old metal poles of the electric tower were visible again, rising up soot-black to the metal platform that had once held the wires up. I felt as empty as always. It had been a good house. They weren’t good people, but it had been a good house. And somehow, standing in the charred ruins of it, I couldn’t bring up any feeling against Add and Melissa, although I could have easily moments before. It couldn’t have been any fun to fire a good home like this and flee. And were they really that bad? Working with scavengers, so what. We all traded with them some way or other. Even helping the Japanese to land, was that surely so bad? Glen Baum had done it in that book of his (if he had done any of it), and no one called him traitor. Add and Melissa just wanted something different than I did. In ways they were better than I was. At least they kept their promises; they had their loyalties intact.

I dogged back into the valley, lower than ever. Stopped at Doc’s: Tom sick, asleep and looking like death; Doc hollow-eyed at the kitchen table, alone, staring at the wall. I hustled down to the river, crossed the bridge, stopped at the bathhouse latrine to relieve myself. I walked out as John Nicolin walked in. He glared at me, brushed by me without a word.

So I went to the beach. And the next day I went back. I was getting to know the troops of little sandpipers: the one with one leg, the black one, the broken-beaked one. The tide moved in, drowning the flies’ dining table. It moved back out, exposing the wet seaweed again. Gulls wheeled and shrieked. Once a pelican landed on the wet strand and stood there looking about aloofly. The shorebreak was big that day, however, and he was slow to get out from under a thick rushing lip; it thumped down on him and he tumbled, long wings and beak and neck and legs thrashing around in a tangled somersault. I laughed as he struggled up, all wet and bedraggled and huffy; but he walked funny as he ran to take off and glide down the beach, and when I was done laughing I cried.

The clouds came back. A gray wall sat on the horizon, and pieces of it broke loose and were carried onshore by the wind. The wind had backed at last. The Santa Ana had held the clouds out to sea for over a week, and now they were coming back to claim their territory. At first there were just a few of them, loose-knit and transparent except at their centers. Clouds beget clouds, though, and through the afternoon they came in darker and lower, until the whole wall picked up and advanced from the horizon, turning dark blue and covering the sky like a blanket. The air got cold, the gulls disappeared, the onshore wind picked up. The clouds grew top heavy, spat lightning onto the sea and then the land, sizzling waves and shattering trees on the ridges. I sat on a worn grey log and watched the first raindrops pock the sand. The iron surface of the ocean lost its sheen as the rain hit it. I pulled my coat around me and stubbornly sat there. The rain turned to hail. Hail fell until there was a layer of clear grains on top of the tawny ones: a beach of sand overlaid by a beach of glass.

I walked down the beach, climbed the cliff path. The hail turned back to rain. Hands in pockets I strode the river path, and let the rain strike me in the face. It ran down inside my coat, and I didn’t care. I stayed out and walked through clearings and treeless patches on purpose, and it gave me pleasure because it was such a stupid thing to do.

I kept on up the valley until I stood at the edge of the little clearing occupied by the graveyard. Rain poured on it from low clouds just overhead, and in the dim light trees dripped and the ground splashed. I crossed the little section near the river where all the Japanese who had washed ashore had been buried. Their wooden crosses said Unknown Chinese, Died 2045, or whatever the date happened to be. Nat did a nice job carving letters and numbers.

Out in the clearing proper were our people. I squished from grave to grave, contemplating the names. Vincent Mariani, 1992–2038. A cancer got him. I remembered him playing hide and seek with Kathryn and Steve and me, when Kristen was a baby. Arnold Kalinski, 1970–2026. He had come to the valley with a disease, Tom said; Doc had been afraid we all would catch it, but we didn’t. Jane Howard Fletcher, 2002–2030. My mother, right there. Pneumonia. I pulled out some weeds from around the base of the cross, moved on. John Manley Morris, 1975–2029; Eveline Morris, 1989–2033. Cancer for him; she died of an infected cut in the palm of her hand. John Nicolin, Junior, 2016–2022. Fell in the river. Matthew Hamish, 2034. Malformed. Mark Hamish, 2036. Luke Hamish, 2039. Both malformed. Francesca Hamish, 2044. Same. And Jo pregnant again. Geoffrey Jones, 1995–2040; Ann Jones, died 2040. They both died when their house burned. Endeavor Simpson, 2039. Malformed. Defiance Simpson, 2043. Malformed. Elizabeth Costa, 2000–2035. Some disease, Doc never figured out what. Armando Thomas Costa, 2033–2047.

There were more, but I stopped my progress and stood at the foot of Mando’s grave, looking at the fresh carving on the cross. Even the Bible says something about men living their three score and ten, and that was ever so long ago. And here we were, cut short like frogs in a frost.

The dirt filling Mando’s grave had settled, and it was sinking more in the rain. I went to the broken-up pit at the back of the clearing and took the shovel that Nat always leaves there, and started carrying dirt over to the grave, shovelful by shovelful. Mud stuck to the shovel, it spread out badly, it wouldn’t tamp down right. Bad idea. I threw the shovel back at the pit and sat on the grass at the side of the grave, where I could hold the crossbar of the marker. Frogs in a frost. Rain thinned the mud, puddled on it. I looked around at our crop of crosses, all of them dripping in the gray afternoon light, and I thought, This isn’t right. It isn’t supposed to be like this. Mando was under me and yet he wasn’t; he was plain gone, vanished, no more. He wouldn’t come back. I took a handful of mud and squished it between my fingers.

22

But the old man lived.

The old man lived. I hardly believed it. I think everybody was surprised, even Tom. I know Doc was: “I couldn’t believe it,” he told me happily when I went up to see them on a cloudy morning. “I had to rub my eyes and pinch myself. I got up yesterday and there he was sitting at the kitchen table whining where’s my breakfast, where’s my breakfast. Of course his lungs had been clearing all week, but I wasn’t sure that was going to be enough, to tell you the truth. But there he was bitching at me.”

“In fact,” Tom called from the bedroom, “where’s the tea? Don’t you respect a poor patient’s requests anymore?”

“If you want it hot you’ll shut up and be patient,” Doc shouted back, grinning at me. “How about some bread with it?”

“Of course.”

I went into the hospital and there he was sitting up in his bed, blinking like a bird. Shyly I said, “How are you?”

“Hungry.”

“That’s a good sign,” Doc said from behind me. “Return of appetite, very good sign.”

“Unless you got a cook like I do,” said Tom.

Doc snorted. “Don’t let him fool you, he’s been bolting it in his usual style. Obviously he loves it. Pretty soon he’ll want to stay here just for the food.”

“When the eagle grins I will.”

“Oooh, so ungrateful!” Doc exclaimed. “And here I had to shove the food right down his face for the longest time. It got so I felt like a mama bird, I should have digested it all first for him I guess—”

“Oh that would have helped,” Tom crowed, “eating vomit, yuck! Take this away, I’ve lost my appetite for good.” He slurped the tea, cursed its heat.

“Well, it was hard to get him to eat, I’ll tell you. But now look at him go.” Doc watched with satisfaction as Tom tossed down chunks of bread in his old starvation manner. When he was done he smiled his gap-toothed smile. His poor gums had taken a beating in his illness, but his eyes watched me with their old clear brown gaze. I felt my face stretched into a grin.

“Ah yes,” Tom said. “There’s nothing like a mutated freak immune system, I’ll testify. I’m tough as a tiger. So tough! However, you’ll excuse me if I take a little nap.” He coughed once or twice, slid down under the covers and was out like one of his lighters snapping off.

So that was good. Tom stayed at Doc’s for another couple of weeks, mostly to keep Doc company, I believe, as he was getting stronger by the day, and he surely wasn’t fond of the hospital. And one day Rebel knocked on the door and asked me if I wanted to help move Tom and his stuff back to his house. I said sure, and we walked across the bridge talking and joking. The sun was playing hide and seek among tall clouds, and coming down the path from Doc’s were Kathryn and Gabby, Kristen and Del and Doc, laughing as Tom cavorted at the head of the parade. “Join the crowd,” Tom called to us. “The young and the old, a natural alliance for a party, you bet.” Kathryn gave me Tom’s books, heavy in a burlap sack, and I threatened to throw them off the bridge as we crossed. Tom swung at me with his walking stick. We made a fine promenade up the other slope of the valley. I had never allowed myself to imagine this day; but there it was, right in my hands where I could grab it.

Once up to his house the old man got positively boisterous. With a dramatic flourish he kicked the door, but it stayed shut. “Great latch, see that?” He puffed at the dust on the table and chairs until the air was thick with it. There was a puddle on the floor, marking a new leak in the roof. Tom pulled his mouth down into a pouting frown. “This place has been poorly tended, very poorly tended. You maintenance crews are fired.”

“Ho ho,” said Kathryn, “now you’re going to have to hire us back at wages to get any help cleaning up.” We opened all the windows and let the breeze draft through. Gabby and Del yanked some weeds, and Tom and Doc and I walked up the ridge trail to look at the beehives. Tom cursed at the sight, but they weren’t that bad off. We cleaned up for a bit and went back down to the house on Doc’s orders. Smoke billowed white as the clouds from the stove chimney, the big front window was scrubbed clean, and Gabby was balanced on the roof with hammer and nails and shingles, hunting for that leak and shouting for instructions from below. When we went in Kathryn was on a stool, thumping the underside of the roof with a broom. “That’s it,” Tom said, “bust that leak right out of there.” Kathryn took a swing at him with the broom, overbalanced and leaped off the falling stool. Kristen dodged her with a yelp and quit dusting, Rebel took the kettle off the stove, and we gathered in the living room for some of Tom’s pungent tea: “Cheers,” Tom said, holding his steaming mug high, and we raised ours and said back cheers, cheers.

That evening when I came home Pa said that John Nicolin had come by to ask why I wasn’t fishing anymore. My share of the fish was our main source of food, and Pa was upset. So I started fishing again the next day, and after that I went fishing day in and day out, when the weather allowed. On the boats it was obvious the year was getting on. The sun cut across the sky lower and lower, and a cold current came in and stayed. Often in the afternoons dark clouds rolled off the sea over us. Wet hands stung with cold, and hauling net made them raw red; teeth chattered, skin prickled with goosebumps. Hoarse shouts concerning the fishing were the only words exchanged, as men conserved their energy. The lack of small talk was fine by me. Blustery winds chafed us as we rowed back in the premature dusks. Under the blue clouds the cliffs turned brown, the hillsides were the green-black of the darkest pines, and the ocean was like iron. In all that gloom the yellow bonfires on the river flat blazed like beacons, and it was a pleasure to round the first bend in the river and see them. After getting the boats up against the cliff I huddled with the rest of the men around these fires until I was warm enough to go home. As the men warmed (hands practically in the flames), the usual talk spilled out, but I never joined in. Even though I was happy the old man was well and home, the truth was that it didn’t do much to cheer me in the day to day. I felt bad a lot of the time, and empty always. When I was out fishing, struggling to make cold disobedient fingers hold onto the nets, I’d think of some crack or curse Steve would have made in the situation, and I longed to hear him say it. And when the fishing was done, there was no gang up on the cliff waiting for me to join them. To avoid climbing the cliff and feeling their absence I often walked around the point of the cliff to the sea beach, and wandered that familiar expanse. The next day I’d take a deep breath, push myself into my boots and go fishing again. But I was just going through the motions.

It wasn’t that the men on the boats were unfriendly, either. On the contrary—Marvin kept giving me the best of the fish to take home, and Rafael talked to me more than he ever had, joshing about the fish, describing his latest projects (which were interesting, I had to admit), inviting me by to see them… They were all like that, even John from time to time. But none of it meant anything to me. My heart felt like my fingers did when the fishing was done, cold and disobedient, numb even next to the fire.

Somehow Tom figured this out. Maybe Rafael told him, maybe he saw it himself. One day after the fishing I clawed my way up the cliff path, feeling like I weighed as much as three of me, and there was Tom on the top.

I said, “You’re getting around pretty well these days.”

He ignored that and shook a knobby finger at me. “What’s eating you, boy?”

I cringed. “Nothing, what do you mean?” I looked down at my bag of fish, but he grabbed my arm and pulled it.

“What’s troubling you?”

“Ah, Tom.” What could I say? He knew what it was. I said, “You know what it is. I gave you my word I wouldn’t go up there, and I did.”

“Ah, the hell with that.”

“But look what happened! You were right. If I hadn’t gone up there, none of it would have happened.”

“How do you figure? They just would have gone without you.”

I shook my head. “No. I could have stopped it.” I explained to him what had happened, what my part had been—every bit of it. He nodded as I got each sentence out.

When I was done, he said, “Well, that’s too bad.” I was shivering, and he started up the river path with me. “But it’s easy to be wise afterwards. Hindsight et cetera. You had no way of knowing what would happen.”

“But I did! You told me. Besides, I felt it coming.”

“Well, but listen, boy—” I looked at him, and he stopped talking. He frowned, and nodded once to acknowledge that it was right for me to reject such easy denials of my responsibility. We walked for a bit and then he snapped his fingers. “Have you started writing that book yet?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Tom.”

He shoved me in the chest, hard, so that I staggered out of the path and had to catch my footing. “Hey!”

“This time you might try listening to me.”

That stung. I was round-eyed as he went on. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this sniveling of yours. Mando’s dead and you’re partly to blame, yes. Yes. But it’s going to fester in you not doing you a bit of good until you write it down, like I told you to.”

“Ah, Tom—”

And he charged me, shoved me again! It was the kind of thing he used to indulge in only with Steve, and at the same time I was getting ready to punch him I was flattered. “Listen to me for once!” he cried, and suddenly I realized he was upset.

“I do listen to you. You know that.”

“Well then do as I say. You write down your story. Everything you remember. The writing it down will make you understand it. And when you’re done you’ll have Mando’s story down too. It’s the best you can do for him now, do you see?”

I nodded, my throat tight. I cleared it. “I’ll try.”

“Don’t try, just do it.” I hopped away so he couldn’t shove me again. “Ha! That’s right—do it or face a beating. It’s your assignment. You don’t get any more schooling till you’re done.” He shook his fist at me, his arm a bundle of ligaments under skin, skinny as a rope. I almost had to laugh.

So I thought about it. I got the book down from the shelf, where it had been propping up a whetstone holder with only two legs. I looked through the blank pages. There were a lot of them. It was as clear as a stonefish is ugly that I would never be able to fill all those pages. For one thing, it would take too long.

But I kept thinking about it. The emptiness still afflicted me. And as the days got shorter the nights in our shack got longer, and I found those memories were always in my mind. And the old man had been awful vehement about it…

Before I even lifted a pencil, however, Kathryn declared it was time to harvest the corn. When she decided it was time, all of us who worked for her worked dawn to dusk, every day. Right after sunup I was out there with the others slashing at stalks with a scythe, then carrying stalks to the wains, pulling them over the bridge to the barrows and warehouses behind the Marianis’, stripping off the leaves, pulling off the husked ears.

The bad summer storms made it a poor harvest. Soon we were done and it was time for the potatoes. Kathryn and I worked together on those. We hadn’t spent much time together since the night at Doc’s, and at first I was uncomfortable, but she didn’t seem to blame me for anything. We just worked, and talked potatoes. Working with Kathryn was exhausting. In the mornings it seemed all right, because she worked so hard that she did more than her share, but the trouble was she kept going at that pace all day, so I got hooked into doing more than a day’s work every day no matter how much I let her go at it. And harvesting potatoes is dirty, backbreaking labor, any way you do it.

When the harvesting was done we celebrated with a little drinking at the bathhouse. No one got overjoyed, because it was a bad harvest, but at least it was in. Kathryn sat beside me in the chairs on the bathhouse lawn to watch the sunset, and Rebel and Kristen joined us. At the other end of the yard Del and Gabby tossed a football back and forth. The flames of a bonfire were scarcely visible against the salmon sky. Rebel was upset about the potato harvest, even crying a little, and Kathryn talked a lot to cheer her up. “Pests are something you have to live with. Next year we’ll try some of that stuff I got from the scavengers. Don’t worry, it takes a long time to learn farming. It ain’t like those spuds are your children, you know.” Kristen smiled at that, the first smile I had seen from her since Mando died.

“Nobody will go hungry,” I said.

“But I’m sick of fish already,” Rebel said. The girls laughed at her.

“You couldn’t tell by the way you eat them,” Kristen said.

Kathryn sipped her whiskey lazily. “What you been up to lately, Hank?”

“I’ve been writing in that book Tom gave me,” I lied, to see how it sounded.

“Oh yeah? Are you writing about the valley?”

“Sure.”

She raised her eyebrows. “About—”

“Yeah.”

“Hmph.” She stared into the fire. “Well, good. Maybe something good will come of this summer after all. But writing a whole book? It must be really hard.”

“Oh it is,” I assured her. “It’s almost impossible, to tell you the truth. But I’m keeping at it.”

All three of the girls looked impressed.

So I thought about it some more. I took the book off the shelf again, and kept it on the little stand beside my bed, next to the lamp and the cup and the book of Shakespeare’s plays Tom had given me as a Christmas present. And I thought about it. When it had all begun, so long ago… those meetings with the gang, planning the summer. It wouldn’t actually be grave-robbing, Steve had said, and I had snapped awake…

So I started writing it.

It was slow work. Me trying to write is like Odd Roger trying to talk. Every night I quit for good. But the next night, or the one after, I would begin again. It’s astonishing how much the memory will surrender when you squeeze it. Some nights when I finished writing I’d come to, surprised to be in our shack, sweat pouring down my ribs, my hand stiff, my fingers sore, my heart pounding with the emotions of time past. And away from the work, out on the boats heaving over the wild swells, I found myself thinking of what had happened, of ways to say it. I knew I was going to finish that book no matter what it took from me. I was hooked.

The evenings of the autumn took on a pattern. When the fish were on the tables I climbed the cliff. No gang to meet me. Steadfastly I ignored the ghost gathering and hiked home, usually through the early evening gloom. At home Pa greased the skillet and fried up some fish and onions, while I lit the lamp and set the table, and we made the usual small talk about what had happened during the day. When the fish was ready we sat down and Pa said grace, and we ate the fish and bread or potatoes. Afterwards we washed up and put things away and drank the rest of the dinner water, and brushed our teeth with a scavenged toothbrush. Then Pa sat at the sewing table, and I sat at the dinner table, and he stitched together clothes while I stitched together words, until we agreed it was time for bed.

I don’t know how many nights went by like that. On rainy days it was the same, only all day long. Once a week or so I went up to Tom’s. Since I promised I was writing he had relented and agreed to give me more lessons. He had me in Othello, and I was pretty sure I knew why. I thought I had things to regret, but Othello! He was the only man in Shakespeare more fool than I.

“So they had eucalyptus trees in Arabia,” I remarked to Tom when I was done, and he laughed. And when upon leaving I demanded more pencils, he cackled wildly, and scrounged them up for me.

The days passed. The further I got in the story of the summer, the further away it was in time, and the less I understood it. Perplex’d in the extreme. One day it was raining and Pa and I both worked through the afternoon. We tried keeping the door open for light, but it was too cold even with the stove going, and rain kept blowing in when the wind shifted. We had to close it and light the lamps. Pa bent over the coat he was making. His hands moved as quickly as fingers snapping as he punched the holes, and yet the holes were perfectly spaced, in a line that could have been drawn by a straightedge. He slipped a thimble on his middle finger and stitched. Poke and pull, poke and pull… cross-stitches appeared in perfect X’s, the thread tugged so that the tension on it was constant… I had never paid such close attention to his sewing. His calloused fingers clicked along as nimbly as dancers. It was as if Pa’s fingers were smarter than he was, I thought; and I felt bad for thinking it. Besides, it was wrong. Pa told his fingers what to do, no one else. They wouldn’t do it alone. It was truer to say something like, Pa’s sewing was the way in which he was smart. And in that way he was very smart indeed. I liked that way of saying it, and scribbled it down. Stitching thoughts. Meanwhile his deft fingers plied the needle, and it kept slipping through the pieces of cloth, pursing them together, pulling the thread taut, turning, piercing again. Pa sighed. “I don’t think I see as well as I used to. I wish it were a sunny day. How I miss the summer.”

I clicked my tongue. It was annoying to be sitting in a dark box in the middle of the day, using up good lamp oil. In fact it was worse than annoying. I felt my spirits plunge as I took stock of the bare insides of our shack. “Shit,” I muttered with disgust.

“What’s that?”

“I said, shit.”

“Why?”

“Ah…” How could I explain it to him, without making him feel bad too? He accepted our degraded conditions without a thought, always had. I shook my head. He peered at me curiously.

Suddenly I had an idea. I jerked in my chair. “What?” said Pa, watching me.

“I got an idea.” I got my boots on, put on my coat.

“It’s raining pretty hard,” Pa said dubiously.

“I won’t go far.”

“Okay. Be careful?”

I turned from the open door, went back and punched him lightly on the arm. “Yeah. I’ll be back soon, keep sewing.”

I crossed the bridge and went up Basilone to the Shankses’, and kicked around in the piles of burnt wood. Sure enough, buried in soggy ash inside the north wall was a rectangular piece of glass, as wide as my outstretched arms, and nearly that tall. One of their many windows. A corner of it was very wavy near the bottom, and a little pocked—it looked like it had melted some in the fire—but I didn’t care. I crowed at the sky, licked down raindrops, and very carefully returned to the valley, window held before me, dripping. Like a car’s windshield, eh? I stopped and knocked on the door of Rafael’s shop. He was at home; black with grease and hammering like Vulcan. “Rafe, will you help me put this window in the side of our place?”

“Sure,” he said, and looked out at the rain. “You want to do it now?”

“Well…”

“Let’s wait for a good day. We’ll have to be tramping in and out a lot.”

Reluctantly I agreed.

“I always wondered why you didn’t put a window in that place,” he remarked.

“Never had glass to put in it!” I said happily, and was off. And two days later we had a window in our south wall, and the light streamed in over everything, turning every dust mote to silver. There was a lot of dust, too.

We even had good windowsills, thanks to Rafael. He peered at the wavy part of the bottom. “Yep, almost melted this one down, looks like.” He nodded his approval and left, toting his tools over his shoulder, whistling. Pa and I hopped around the house, cleaning up and staring out, going outside to stare in.

“This is wonderful,” Pa said with a blissful smile. “Henry, that was one great idea you had. I can always count on you for the good ideas.”

We shook on it. I felt the strength in his right hand, and it sent a glow right through me. You got to have your father’s approval. I kept pumping his hand up and down till he started to laugh.

It made me think of Steve. He never had that approval, never would have had it. It must have been like walking around with a thorn in your shoe. I feel it in my mind’s foot, Horatio. I began to think that I understood him more, at the same time I felt like I was losing him—the real, immediate Steve, I mean. I could only recall his face well in dreams, when it came back to me perfectly. And it was hard to get him down right in the book; the way he could make you laugh, make you sure you were really living. I sat down to work on it, under the light of our new window. “I’ll have to sew us some good curtains,” Pa said, eyeing the window thoughtfully, measuring it in his mind.

A while after that I joined the small group going to the last swap meet of the year. Winter swap meets weren’t much like the summer ones; there were fewer people there, and less stuff being traded. This time it was drizzling steadily, and everyone there was anxious to get their trading done and go home. Debates over prices quickly turned into arguments, and sometimes fights. The sheriffs had their hands full. Time after time I heard one of them bellowing, “Just make your deal and move on! Come on, what’s the fuss!”

I hurried from canopy to canopy, and in the shelter from the rain did my best to trade for some cloth or old clothing for Pa. All I had to offer were some abalone and a couple of baskets, and it was tough trading.

One of the scavenger camps had gotten a fire going by pouring gas over the wet wood, and a lot of folks congregated under the canopy. I joined them, and after a bit I finally found a scavenger woman willing to trade a pile of ragged clothing for what I had.

After we had counted it out piece for piece she said, “I hear you Onofreans really did it to that crew from down south.”

“What’s this?” I said, jerking slightly.

She laughed, revealing a mouthful of busted brown stumps, and drank from a jar. “Don’t play simpleton with me, grubber.”

“I’m not,” I said. She offered me the jar but I shook my head. “What’s this we’re supposed to have done to the San Diegans?”

“Ha! Supposed to done. See how that washes with them when they come asking why you killed their mayor.”

I felt the cold of that dim afternoon shiver into me, and I went from a crouch to sitting on my butt. I took the jar from her and drank some sour corn mash. “Come on, tell me what you’ve heard,” I said.

“Well,” she said, happy to gossip, “the back country folks say you all took that mayor and his men right up into a Jap ambush.”

I nodded so she’d go on.

“Ah ha! Now he fesses up. So most of them were killed, including that mayor. And they’re pretty hot about it. If they weren’t fighting among themselves so hard to see who takes his place, they’d likely be on you pretty hard. But every man in San Diego wants to be mayor now, or so the back country folk say, and I believe them. Apparently things down there are wild these days.”

I took another gulp of her terrible liquor. It went to my stomach like a big lead sinker. Around us drizzle misted down through the trees, and bigger drops fell from the edge of the canopy.

“Say, grubber, you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” I bundled up the rags, thanked her and left, in a hurry to get back to Onofre and give Tom the news.

Another rainy afternoon I sat in Rafael’s workshop, relaxing. I had told Tom what I had heard at the swap meet, and he had told John Nicolin and Rafael, and none of them had seemed overly concerned, which was a relief to me. Now the matter was out of my hands, and I was just passing the time. Kristen and Rebel sat crosslegged before Rafael’s set of double windows, making baskets and gossiping. Rafael sat on a short stool and tinkered with a battery. Tools and machine parts littered the stained floor, and around us stood products of Rafael’s invention and industry: pipes to carry a stove’s heat to another room, a small kiln, an electric generator connected to a bicycle on blocks, and so on.

“The fluids go bad,” Rafael said, answering a question of mine. “All the batteries that were full on the day are long gone. Corroded. But lucky for us, there were some sitting empty in warehouses. There’s no use for them, so it’s easy to trade for one. Some scavengers I know use batteries, and they’ll bring the acids to the meet if I ask them. Only a few people want them, so I get a good deal.”

“And that’s how you got your cart out there running?”

“That’s right. No use for it, though. Not usually.”

We sat quiet for a while, remembering. “So you heard us that night?” I asked.

“Not at first. I was on Basilone and I saw the lights. Then I heard the shooting.”

After a bit I shook my head to clear it, and changed the subject. “What about a radio, Rafe? Have you ever tried to repair one of those?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. They’re too complicated, I guess. And the scavengers ask a lot for them, and they always look an awful wreck.”

“So does most of the stuff you bring back.”

“I guess.”

I said, “You could read how they work in a manual, couldn’t you?”

“I don’t read much, Hank, you know that.”

“But we could help you read. I’d read, and you could figure out what it meant.”

“Maybe so. But we’d have to have a radio, and lots of parts, and I still wouldn’t be sure at all that I could do anything with them.”

“But you would be up for trying it?”

“Oh sure, sure.” He laughed. “You run across a silver mine out there on that beach you been inspecting so close?”

I blushed. “Nah.”

Rafael got up and rooted around in the big wall cupboard. I sat back lazily against the floor pillow behind me. Under the window Kristen and Rebel worked. The baskets they were weaving were made of old brown torrey pine needles, soaked in water so they were flexible again. Rebel took a needle and carefully bunched together the five individual slices of it, so that they made a neat cylinder. Then she curled the needle till it made a flat little wheel, and knotted several pieces of fishing line to it, splaying them out like spokes. Another pine needle was neatened up and tied around the outside of the first one. The first several needles were tied outside the ones before them, to make a flat bottom. It took two needles to make it around the circumference, then three. After that the nubs were set directly on top of each other, and the sides of the basket began to appear.

I picked up a finished basket and inspected it while Rebel continued to whip the line around the needles. The basket was solid. Each needle looked like a miniature piece of rope, the five splits fit together so well. The four rows of nubs studding the sides of this particular basket rose in S shapes, showing just how much the basket bulged out and then back in. Such patience, arranging all the needles! Such skill, whipping all of them into place! I whapped the basket on the floor and it rebounded nicely, showing its flex and strength. Watching Rebel coax the line between two needles and through a complicated little loop of line waiting for it, it occurred to me that I had a task somewhat like hers. When I penciled in my book, I tied together words like she tied together pine needles, hoping to make a certain shape with them. Briefly I wished I could make a book as neat and solid and beautiful as the basket Rebel wove. But it was beyond hope, and I knew it.

Rebel looked up and saw me watching her, and she laughed, embarrassed.

Another day the clouds would have given us a few hours for fishing, but the seas were running so high it was impossible to get the boats out. When I was done writing I walked to the cliffs, and there was the old man, sitting on a shelf under the cliff’s lip, where he was protected from the wind.

“Hey!” I greeted him. “What you doing down here?”

“Looking at the waves, of course, like any other sensible person.”

“So you think it takes sense to come down here and gawk at waves, eh?” I sat beside him.

“Sense or sensibility, yuk, yuk.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Never mind. Look at that one!”

The swells were surging up from the south, breaking in giant walls that extended from one end of the beach to the other. The swells were visible far out to sea; I could pick one out halfway to the horizon and follow it all the way in. Near the end they built up taller and taller, until they were gray cliffs rushing in to meet our tan one. A man standing at the foamy foot of one of those giants would have looked like a doll. When the towering top of a wave pitched out and the whole thing rolled over behind it, spray exploded in the air higher than the wave had stood, with a crack and a boom that distinctly vibrated the cliff under us. The tortured water dashed over itself in a boiling race to the beach. There floods of white water swept up the sand, and sucked back to crash into the next advance. Only a strip of sand against the cliff was left dry; it would have been worth your life to walk the beach that day. Tom and I sat in a haze of white salt mist, and we had to talk over the explosive roar of the surf. “Look at that one!” Tom shouted again and again. “Look at that one! That one must be thirty-five feet tall, I swear.”

Out beyond the swells the ocean stretched to the haze-fuzzed horizon. A low sheet of bumpy white and gray clouds covered the sky, barely clearing the hills behind us. Breaks in the clouds were marked by bright patches in the leaden surface of the water, like the trail of a drunken scavenger with a hole in his pocket, scattering silver coins from here to the edge of the world. There was something about it all—the presence of that expanse of water, the size of it, the power of the waves—that made me stand back up and pace the cliff behind Tom’s back, stop and stare as a particularly monstrous sea cliff collapsed, shake my head in wonder or dismay, pace and turn again, slapping my thighs and trying to think of a way to say it, to Tom or anybody. I failed. The world pours in and overflows the heart till speech is useless, and that’s a fact. I wish I could speak better. I started to say things—spoke syllables and choked off the words—strode back and forth, getting more and more agitated as I tried to think exactly what it was I felt, and how I could then say that.

It was impossible, and if I had really held out for precision I reckon I would have stood there staring at those sea avalanches all day, mute and amazed. But my mind shifted to another mystery, I struck my hand to my thigh, and Tom glanced at me curiously. I blurted out, “Tom, why did you tell us all those lies about America?”

He cleared his throat. “Harumph-hmm. Who says I lied?”

I stood before him and stared.

“All right.” He patted the sand beside him, but I refused to sit. “It was part of your history lessons. If your generation forgets the history of this country you’ll have no direction. You’ll have nothing to work back to. See, there was a lot about the old time we need to remember, that we have to get back.”

“You made it seem like it was the golden age. Like we’re just existing in the ruins.”

“Well… in a lot of ways that’s true. It’s best to know it—”

I snapped my fingers at him. “But no! No! You also said the old time was awful. That we live better lives now than they ever did. That was what you said, when you argued with Doc and Leonard at the meets, and sometimes when you talked with us too. You told us that.”

“We,” he admitted uneasily, “there’s truth to that too. I was trying to tell you the way it was. I didn’t lie—not much, I mean, and not about important things. Just once in a while to give you an idea what it was really like, what it felt like.”

“But you told us two different things,” I said. “Two contradictory things. Onofre was primitive and degraded, but we weren’t to want for the old time to come back either, because it was evil. We didn’t have anything left that was ours, that we could be proud of. You confused us!”

Abruptly he looked past me to the sea. “All right,” he said. “Maybe I did. Maybe I made a mistake.” His voice grew querulous: “I ain’t some kind of great wise man, boy. I’m just another fool like you.”

Awkwardly I turned and paced around a bit more. He didn’t have any good reason for lying to us like he did. He had done it for fun. To make the stories sound better. To entertain himself.

I went over and plopped down beside him. We watched the sandbars plow a few more swells to mush. It looked like the ocean wanted to wash the whole valley away. Tom threw a few pebbles down at the beach. Gloomily he sighed.

“You know where I’d like to be when I die?” he said.

“No.”

“I’d like to be on top of Mount Whitney.”

“What?”

“Yeah. When I feel the end coming I’d like to hike inland and up three-ninety-five, and then up to the top of Mount Whitney. It’s just a walk to the top, but it’s the tallest mountain in the United States. The second tallest, excuse me. There’s a little stone hut up there, and I could stay in that and watch the world till the end. Like the old Indians did.”

“Ah,” I said. “Sounds like a nice way to go.” I didn’t know what else to say. I looked at him—really looked at him, I mean. It was funny, but now that I knew he was eighty and not a hundred and five, he looked older. Of course his illness had wasted him some. But I think it was mainly because living a hundred and five years was in the nature of a miracle, which could be extended indefinitely, while eighty was just old. He was an old man, a strange old man, that was all, and now I could see it. I was more impressed he had made it to eighty than I ever used to be that he had made it to one hundred and five. And that felt right.

So he was old, he would die soon. Or make his try for Whitney. One day I would go up the hill and the house would be empty. Maybe there would be a note on the table saying “Gone to Whitney,” more likely not. But I would know. I would have to imagine his progress from there. Would he even make it forty miles to the north, to his birthplace Orange?

“You can’t take off at this time of year,” I said. “There’ll be snow and ice and all. You’ll have to wait.”

“I’m not in any rush.”

We laughed, and the moment passed. I began thinking about our own disastrous trip into Orange County. “I can’t believe we did something that stupid,” I said, my voice shaking with anger and distress.

“It was stupid,” he agreed. “You kids had the excuse of youth and bad teaching, but the Mayor and his men, why they were damned fools.”

“But we can’t give up,” I said, pounding the sandstone, “we can’t just roll over and lie there like we’re dead.”

“That’s true.” He considered it. “And maybe securing the land from intrusion is the first step.”

I shook my head. “It can’t be done. Not with what they have and what we have.”

“Well? I thought you said we don’t want to play possum?”

“No, right.” I pulled my feet up from the cliffside so I could squat and rock back and forth. “I’m saying we’ve got to figure out some other way to resist, some way that will work. We either do something that works, or wait until we can. None of this shit in between. What I was thinking of was that all the towns that come to the swap meet, if they worked together, might be able to sail over and surprise Catalina. Take it over for a time.”

Tom whistled his weak, toothless whistle.

“For a while, I mean,” I said. The idea had come to me recently, and I was excited by it. “With the radio equipment there we could tell the whole world we’re here, and we don’t like being quarantined.”

“You think big.”

“But it’s not impossible. Not someday, anyway, when we know more about Catalina.”

“It might not make any difference, you know. Broadcasting to the world, I mean. The world might be one big Finland now, and if it is all they’re going to be able to do is say, we hear you brother. We’re in the same boat. And then the Russians would sweep down on us.”

“But it’s worth a try,” I insisted. “Like you say, we don’t really know what’s going on in the world. And we won’t until we try something like this.”

He shook his head, looked at me. “That would cost a lot of lives, you know. Lives like Mando’s—people who could have lived their full span to make things better in our new towns.”

“Their full spans,” I said scornfully. But he had jolted me, nevertheless. He had reminded me how grand military plans like mine translated into chaos and pain and meaningless death. So in an instant I was all uncertain again, and my bold idea struck me as stupidity compounded by size. Tom must have read this on my face, because he chuckled, and put his arm around my shoulders.

“Don’t fret about it, Henry. We’re Americans; it ain’t been clear what we’re supposed to do for a long, long time.”

One more white sea cliff smashed to spray and charged toward us. One more plan crumbled and swept away. “I guess not,” I said morosely. “Not since Shakespeare’s time, eh?”

“Harumph-hmm!” He cleared his throat two or three more times, let his arm fall, shuffled down the cliff away from me a bit. “Um, by the way,” he said, looking anxiously at me, “while we’re on the subject of history lessons, and, um, lies, I should make a correction. Well! Um… Shakespeare wasn’t an American.”

“Oh, no,” I breathed. “You’re kidding.”

“No. Um—”

“But what about England?”

“Well, it wasn’t the leader of the first thirteen states.”

“But you showed me on a map!”

“That was Martha’s Vineyard, I’m afraid.”

I felt my mouth hanging open, and I snapped it shut. Tom was kicking his heels uncomfortably. He looked about as unhappy as I had ever seen him, and he wouldn’t meet my eye. Gazing beyond me he gestured, with an expression of relief.

“Looks like John, doesn’t it?”

I looked. Along the cliff edge above Concrete Bay I spotted a squat figure striding, hands in pockets. It was John Nicolin all right. He walked fast in our direction, looking out to sea. On the days when we were kept from going out, when he wasn’t working on the boats he was on the cliffs, most of the time, and never more than when the weather was good and we were kept in by the swell. Then he seemed particularly affronted, and he paced the cliff grimly watching the waves, acting irritable with anyone unfortunate enough to have business with him. The swell was going to keep us off the water for two days at least, maybe four, but he stared at the steaming white walls as if searching for a seam or a riptide that might offer a way outside. As he approached us his pantlegs flapped and his salt-and-pepper locks blew back over his shoulder like a mane. When he looked our way and noticed us he hesitated, then kept coming at his usual pace. Tom raised a hand and waved, so he was obliged to acknowledge us.

When he stopped several feet away, hands still in pockets, we all nodded and mumbled hellos. He came a few steps closer. “Glad to see you’re doing better,” he said to Tom in an offhand way.

“Thanks. I’m feeling fine. Good to be up and around.” Tom seemed as uncomfortable as John. “Magnificent day, ain’t it?”

John shrugged. “I don’t like the swell.”

A long pause. John shuffled one foot, as if he might be about to walk on. “I haven’t seen you in the last couple days,” Tom said. “I went by your house to say hello, and Mrs. N. said you were gone.”

“That’s right,” John said. He crouched beside us, elbow on knee. “I wanted to talk to you about that. Henry, you too. I went down to take a look at those railroad tracks the San Diegans have been using.”

Tom’s scraggly eyebrows climbed his forehead. “How come?”

“Well, from what Gabby Mendez says, it appears they used our boys as a cover for their retreat after the ambush. And now it turns out that mayor got killed. I went and asked some of my Pendleton friends about it, and they say it’s true. They say there’s a real fight going on right now down there, between three or four groups who want the power that the mayor had. That in itself sounds bad, and if the wrong group ends up on top, we could be in trouble. So Rafe and I were thinking that the railroad tracks should be wrecked for good. I went down to look at that first river crossing, and it’s pretty clear Rafe could destroy the pilings with the explosives he’s got. And he says he can blast the track every hundred yards or so, easy.”

“Wow,” said Tom.

John nodded. “It’s drastic, but I think it’s the right move. If you ask me, those folks down there are crazy. Anyway, I wanted to know what you thought of the idea. I was going to just get Rafe and go do it, but…”

Tom cleared his throat, said, “You don’t want to call a meeting about it?”

“I guess. But first I want to know what some of you think.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Tom said. “If they think we were in on the ambush, and if that super-patriot crowd gets control… yeah, it’s a good idea.”

John nodded, looking satisfied. “And you, Henry?”

That took me aback. “I guess. We might want that track working for us someday. But we’ve got to worry about keeping them at a distance first. So I’m for it.”

“Good,” said John. “We should probably try to talk with them at the swap meet, if we get a chance. And warn the others about them, too.”

“Wait a bit, here,” Tom said. “You still have to get a meeting together, and get the vote. If we start deciding things like the boys here did, we’ll end up like the San Diegans.”

“True,” John said.

I felt myself blushing. John glanced at me and said, “I’m not blaming you.”

I scratched the sandstone with a pebble. “You should. I’m as much to blame as anyone.”

“No.” He straightened up, chewed his lower lip. “That was Steve’s plan; I can see his mark on it everywhere.” His voice tensed, pitched higher. “That boy wanted everything his way right from the start. Right out of his ma. How he cried if we didn’t jump to his wishes!” He shrugged it off, looked at me sullenly. “I suppose you think I’m to blame. That I drove him off.”

I shook my head, though part of me had been thinking that. And it was true, in a way. But not entirely. I couldn’t make it clear, even to myself.

John shifted his gaze to Tom, but Tom only shrugged. “I don’t know, John, I really don’t. People are what they are, eh? Who made Henry here want to read books so bad? None of us. And who made Kathryn want to grow corn and make bread from it? None of us. And who made Steve want to see the world out there? No one. They were born with it.”

“Mm,” John said, mouth tight. He wasn’t convinced, even if it absolved him, even if he had been saying the same thing a second ago. John was always going to believe his own actions had effects. And with his own son, who’d spent a lifetime in his care… I could read his face thinking of that as clear as you can read the face of a babe. A wave of pain crossed his features, and he shook himself, and with a somber click of tongue against teeth reminded himself that we were here. He closed up. “Well, it’s past,” he said. “I’m not much of a one for philosophy, you know that.”

So the matter was closed. I thought about how this conversation would have taken place at the ovens among the women: the chewing over every detail of event and motivation, the arguing it out, the yelling and crying and all; and I almost laughed. We men were a pretty tight-lipped crowd when it came to important things. John was walking in a circle like I had earlier, and quickly his nervous striding got to us, so that Tom and I stood to stretch out. Pretty soon the three of us were meandering in place like gulls, hands in pockets, observing the swells and pointing out to each other any particularly big ones.

Looking back at the valley, now filled with trees yellow among the evergreens, I stopped pacing and said, “What we need is a radio. Like the one we saw in San Diego. A working radio. Those things can hear other radios from hundreds of miles away, right?”

Tom said, “Some of them can, yes.” He and John stopped walking to listen to me.

“If we had one of them we could listen to the Japanese ships. Even if we didn’t understand them we’d know where they were. And we could listen to Catalina, maybe, and maybe other parts of the country, other towns.”

“The big radios will receive and transmit halfway around the world,” Tom commented.

“Or a long way, anyway,” I corrected him. He grinned. “It would give us ears, don’t you see, and after that we could begin to figure out what’s going on out there.”

“I would love to have something like that,” John admitted. “I don’t know how we’d get one, though,” he added dubiously.

“I talked to Rafael about it,” I said. “He told me that the scavengers have radios and radio parts at the swap meets all the time. He doesn’t know anything about radios right now, but he does think he can generate the power to run one.”

“He does?” Tom said.

“Yeah. He’s been working on batteries a lot. I told him we’d get him a radio manual and help him read it, and give him stuff to trade for radio parts at the swap meets this summer, and he was all excited by the idea.”

John and Tom looked at each other, sharing something I couldn’t read. John nodded. “We should do that. We can’t trade fish for this kind of stuff, of course, but we can find something—shellfish, maybe, or those baskets.”

Another huge set rolled in, washing all the way to the base of the cliff, and our attention was forced back to the waves. “Those must be thirty-five feet high at least,” Tom repeated.

“You think so?” said John. “I thought this cliff was only forty feet.”

“Forty feet above the beach, but those wave troughs are lower. And the crests are nearly as high as we are!” It was true.

John mentioned that he wanted to get the boats out on days like this.

“So you were thinking about that when you walked down here,” I said.

“Sure. See, follow the river current at high tide—”

“No way!” Tom cried.

“Look at the turbulance in the rivermouth,” I pointed out. “Even those broken waves must be ten or fifteen feet tall.”

“You’d be capsized and drowned by the first wave that hit you,” Tom said.

“Hmm,” said John reluctantly—with perhaps a gleam of humor in his eye. “You may be right.”

We meandered around our shelf again, talked about currents and the possibility of a mild winter. Out to sea shafts of light still speared the clouds to gild the lined ocean surface. Tom pointed out there. “What you should try doing is fishing the whales again. They’re due through soon.”

John and I groaned.

“No, really, you guys gave up on that one too fast. You either harpooned an extra tough one, or Rafael didn’t put the harpoon in a place that would do the beast much harm.”

John said, “Easy to say, but he’s never going to be able to place the harpoon right where he wants to.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying, it’s just that most of the time a harpoon will do them more damage, and they won’t be able to dive so deep.”

“If that’s true,” I said, “and if we added more rope to the end of the line—”

“There’s not room for it in our boats,” John told me.

But I was remembering the time Steve and I had discussed it. “We could tie the bottom end to line that runs over to a tub in another boat, and have twice as much.”

“That’s true,” John said, cocking his head.

“If we were to get into the whale business we could really make a killing at the swap meet,” said Tom. “We’d have oil to spare, and animal feed, and tons of meat.”

“If we could keep it from going bad,” John said. But he liked the idea; what was it but fishing, after all? “Could you really get the line set so that it went from boat to boat?”

“Easy!” Tom said. He knelt and picked up a pebble to draw in the dirt. He started to scratch a plan, and John crouched at his side. I looked out at the horizon, and this is what I saw: three sunbeams standing like thick white pillars, slanting each its own way, measuring the distance between the grey clouds and the gray sea.

Chapter the Last

As the year fell away to its death the storms came more frequently, until every week or so one barreled in over the whitecaps and thrashed us, leaving the valley tattered and the sea a foamy pale brown from all the dirt sluiced into it. When we did get the boats out the fishing was miserably cold, and we didn’t catch much. Most days I spent at the table under the window, where I read or wrote or watched black clouds bluster in. The clouds were the vanguard; after them a smack of the wind’s hand, and maybe a low rumble of thunder, announced the arrival of the storm’s main force. Raindrops slid down the windowpane in a thousand tributaries that met and divided again and again as they wandered down the glass. The roof ticked or tapped or drummed under the onslaught. Behind me Pa labored away on his new sewing machine, and its rn, rn, rn rn rnnnn! rebuked my idleness, sometimes so successfully that I buckled down and wrote a sentence or two. But it was hard going, and there were lots of hours when I was content to chew my pencils (writing epics on my teeth) and think about it, and watch it rain, lulled by wind, and roof patter, and the tea kettle’s whistle, and Pa’s rn rn, snip snip.

The first storm of December, it snowed. It was a real pleasure to sit in our warm house and look out the window at the flakes drifting silently through the trees. Pa looked over my shoulder. “It’s going to be a hard winter.” I didn’t agree. We had enough food, even if it was fish, and more firewood was being dried in the bathhouse every day. After all the rain I was happy to see snow just for the way it looked, for the way it fell!—so slowly it didn’t seem real, at first. Then to run outside, and hop white drifts, and slap snowballs together to throw at neighbors… I loved the snow. The day after, the sun came out under a high pale blue sky (fishbone clouds smack against the highest part of it), and the snow melted before midday. But the next storm brought more snow, and colder air, and a thicker tail of high clouds, and it was four days before the harsh sun came out and the white dusting melted and ran into the river. That got to be the pattern: valley first white-green under black skies, then black-green under white skies. Week by week it got colder.

Week by week my story got harder to write. I got lost in it—I stopped believing it—I wrote chapters and had to take a walk over the soggy leaf carpets in the woods, distressed and angry at myself. Still, I wrote it. The solstice passed, and Christmas passed, and New Year’s passed, and I went to all the parties and such, but it was like I was in fog, and afterwards I couldn’t remember who I had talked to or what I had said. The book was the only thing for me—and yet it was so hard! Sometimes I wore out pencils faster biting than writing.

But the day came when the tale was on the page, pretty much. All the action done, Mando and Steve gone. I stopped then, and took one still day to read what I had said. It made me so mad I damn near burned the thing. Here all those things had happened, they had changed us for life, and yet the miserable string of words sitting on the table didn’t hold the half of it—the way it had looked, the thoughts it had engendered, the way I felt about it all. There was no more of last summer in that book than there is of the tree in an old scrap of driftwood. And the work I had put in on it—well, it was discouraging.

I went out for a walk to try and recover. A few tall white clouds sailed above like galleons, but mostly it was a sunny day, and dead still, though the air had a bite to it. Wet snow lay on everything. Cakes of it were balanced on every branch, dripping and sparking the various colors of the rainbow. On the ground the snow crumbled to big clear grains under the sun’s glare, and the grains turned to drops of water that beaded the white blanket. Suncones melted through to tufts of grass, and snowbridges over the streams filling the paths collapsed, leaving dirty chunks of ice in the mud, and snow hummocks to each side, black with pine needles. I walked between these hummocks and over the remaining bridges (the ones in shadow) to the cliffs, thumping my boots in puddles and knocking snowcakes on branches into much and spray.

Out on the point of the cliff overlooking the river I sat down. No swell whatsoever: tiny waves lapped the strand as if the whole ocean was shifting a hand’s breadth up and down. There wasn’t any snow left on the beach, but it was wet and bedraggled, with blue-and-white puddles dotting it everywhere. The scattered galleon clouds didn’t hinder the sun much, but gave its light a tint so that the long stretch of cliff was the color of ironwood bark. No swell, still air, the ocean like a plate of blue glass, the galleons hovering over it, holding their positions.

I noticed something I had never seen before. On the flat blue sea were perfect reflections of the tall clouds, clearly shaped so you could tell they were upside down. It looked like they were floating underwater, in a dark blue sky. “Will you look at that,” I said aloud, and stood. Ever so slowly the clouds drifted onshore over the valley, and their upside-down twins disappeared under the beach. I stayed and watched that all day, feeling like oceans of clouds were filling me. Later the afternoon onshore breeze ruffled the mirror clouds, and the sun got too low and glared off the water. But I went home satisfied.

In the winter the scavengers hole up in some of the big, shattered old houses—a dozen or more of them to a house, like dens of foxes. At night they use the neighboring houses for firewood, and light big bonfires in the front yards, and they drink and dance to old music, and fight and howl and throw jewelry at the stars and into the snow. A solitary man, gliding over the drifts on long snowshoes, can move amongst these bright noisy settlements without trouble. He can crouch out in the trees like a wolf, and watch them cavort in their colored down jackets for as long as he likes, undisturbed. Their summer haunts are open to his inspection. And there are books up there, yes, lots of books. The scavengers like the little fat one with the orange sun on the cover, but many more lie unattended in the ruins around them—whole libraries, sometimes. A man can load himself down till his snowshoes sink knee-deep, and then return, a scavenger of a different sort, to his own country, his own winter den.

At the end of January a particularly violent storm undermined the side of the Mendez’s garden shed (they called it a barn), and as soon as the rain stopped all the immediate neighbors—the Marianis, the Simpsons, and Pa and I, with Rafael called in for advice—got out to give them a hand in shoring up that wall. The Mendez garden was as cold and muddy as the ocean floor, and there wasn’t a patch of solid ground to set beams on, to prop up the wall while we worked under it. Eventually Rafael got us to tie the shed to the big oak on the other side of it. “I hope the framing was nailed together good,” Rafael joked when we were back under the sagging wall. Kathryn and I worked one side, Gabby and Del dug out the other, and we practically drowned in mud. By the time we got beams set crosswise under the wall for foundations, all four families were ready for the bathhouse. Rafael had gone before us, so when we got there the fire was blazing and the water steamed. We stripped and hopped in the dirt bath and hooted with glee.

“My suggestion is you leave that rope there,” Rafael said to old Mendez. “That way you’ll never have to find out if those beams will hold it up or not.” Mendez wasn’t amused.

I rolled over into the clean bath and floated with him and Mrs. Mariani and the others. Kathryn and I sat on one of the wood islands and talked. She asked me if I was still writing. I told her I was nearly done, but that I’d stopped because it was so bad.

“You’re no judge of that,” she said. “Finish it.”

“I suppose I will.”

We talked about the storms, the snow, the condition of the fields (they were under tarps or cover crops for the winter), the swells battering the beach, food. “I wonder how Doc is doing,” I said.

“Tom goes up there a lot. They’re getting to be like brothers.”

“Good.”

Kathryn shook her head. “Even so—Doc’s busted, you know.” She looked at me. “He won’t last long.”

“Ah.” I didn’t know what to say. After a long pause looking at the swirling water, I said, “Do you ever think about Steve?”

“Sure.” She eyed me. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah. But I have to, with this book.”

Under my reproachful gaze she shrugged, and her nipples bobbed on the bubbling surface. “You would book or not. If you’re like me. But it’s past, Henry. That’s all it is—the past.”

I told her about the day when the sea had been so glassy that it mirrored the clouds, and she sat back and laughed. “It sounds wonderful.”

“I don’t know when I’ve ever seen anything so pretty.”

She reached over the wood island, and ran a finger down the crease between the muscles of the backside of my arm. I arched my eyebrows, and with a grin slipped off the seat to float around and tussle with her. She caught me by the hair. “Henry,” she laughed, and held my head under, giving me more immediate matters to think about, like choking on water and drowning. I came up spluttering. She laughed again and gestured at the friends around us. “Well?” I said, and went under for a submerged approach, but she stood and sloshed away, leading me to the wall seats where the others were. After that we talked with Gabby and Kristen, and later old Mendez, who thanked us for our help with his barn.

But when Rafael declared the day’s allotment of wood was burned, and we got out of the baths and dried off, and dressed, I looked around the room, and there was Kathryn looking at me from the door. I followed her out. The evening air chilled my head and hands instantly. There was Kathryn, on the path between two trees. I caught up with her and took her in a hug. We kissed. There are kisses that have a whole future in them; I learned that then. When we were done her mother and sisters were chattering out the bathhouse door. I let her go. She looked surprised, thoughtful, pleased. If it had been summer—but it was winter, there was snow everywhere. And summer was coming. She smiled at me, and with a touch walked off to join them, looking back once to meet my gaze. When she was out of sight I walked home through the dusk (white snow, black trees) with a whole new idea in mind.

Some afternoons I just sat before the window and looked at the book—left it closed, in the middle of the table, and stared at it. One of these times the snowflakes were drifting down through the trees as slowly as tufts of dandelion, and every branch and needle was tipped with new white. Into this vision tramped a figure on snowshoes, wearing furs. He had a pole in each hand to help his balance, and as he brushed between trees he sent little avalanches onto his head and down his back. The old man, out trapping, I thought. But he hiked right up to the window and waved.

I slipped on my shoes and went outside. It was cold. “Henry!” Tom called.

“What’s up?” I said as I rounded our house.

“I was out checking my traps, and I ran into Neville Cranston, an old friend of mine. He summers in San Diego and winters in Hemet, and he was on his way over to Hemet, because he got a late start this year.”

“That’s too bad,” I said politely.

“No, listen! He just left San Diego, didn’t you hear me? And you know what he told me? He told me that the new mayor down there is Frederick Lee!”

“Say what?”

The new mayor of San Diego is Lee. Neville said that Lee was always in trouble with that Danforth, because he wouldn’t go along with any of Danforth’s war plans, you know.”

“So that’s why we stopped seeing him.”

“Exactly. Well, apparently there were a lot of people down there who were behind Lee, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it while Danforth and his men had all the guns. Neville said this whole fall has been a dog fight down there, but a couple months ago Lee’s supporters forced an election, and Lee won.”

“Well, what do you know.” We stared at each other, and I found myself grinning. “That’s good news, isn’t it.”

He nodded. “You bet it’s good news.”

“Too bad we blew up those train tracks.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it is good news, no doubt about it. Well”—he waved one of his poles overhead—“Lousy weather to be standing around chattering in. I’m off.” And with a little whistle he snowshoed off through the trees, leaving a trail of deep tracks. And I knew I could finish.

The book lay on the table. One night (February the 23rd) the full moon was up. I went to bed without looking at the book, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of it, and talking to the pages in my mind. I heard a voice inside me that said it all perfectly, said it far better than I ever could: this voice rattled off long imaginary passages, telling it all in the greatest detail and with the utmost eloquence, bringing it back just as lived. I heard the rhythms of it as sure as the rhythms of Pa’s snores (though the sense of it was not as clear), and it put an ache in me it was so beautiful. I thought, It’s some poet’s ghost come to visit me, maybe, come to show me how to tell it.

Eventually it drove me to get up and finish the thing off. Our house was cold, the fire in the stove was down to filmy grey coals. I put on pants and socks, and a thick shirt and a blanket over my shoulders. Moonlight poured in the window like a silver bar, turning all the bare wood furnishings into finely carved, almost living things. It was a light so strong I could write by it. I sat at the table under the window and wrote as fast as my hand would move, though what I wrote was nothing like the voice I had heard when I was lying down. Not a chance.

Most of the night passed. My left hand got sore and crampy from writing, and I was restless. The moon was dipping into the trees, obscuring my light. I decided to go for a walk. I put on my boots and my heavy coat, and shoved the book and some pencils in the coat’s big pocket.

Outside it was colder yet. The dew on the grass sparkled where moonlight fell on it. On the river path I stopped to look back up the valley, which receded through the thick air in patchy blacks and whites. There wasn’t a trace of wind, and it was so still and quiet that I could hear the snow melting everywhere around me, dripping and plopping and filling my ears with a liquid music, plinka plonk, pip pip pip pip, gurgle gorgle plop tik tik plop, plop plop plinka plop pip pip pip… A forest water choir, yes, accompanying me as I slushed down the path, hands in my big coat pockets. River black between salt-and-pepper trees.

On the cliff path I had to step careful, because the steps were half slush, half mud. Down on the beach the crack of each little wave break was clear and distinct. The salt spray in the air glowed, and because of it and the moon hardly a star was visible; just a fuzzy black sky, white around the moon. I walked out to the point beside the rivermouth, where a fine sand hill had built up, cut away on both sides by river and ocean. On the point where these two little sand cliffs met I sat down, being careful not to collapse the whole thing. I took out the book and opened it; and here I sit at this very moment, caught up at last, scribbling in it by the light of the fat old moon.

Now I know this is the part of the story where the author winds it all up in a fine flourish that tells what it all meant, but luckily there are only a couple of pages left in this here book, so there isn’t room. I’m glad of it. It’s a good thing I took the trouble to copy out those chapters of An American Around the World, so that it turned out this way. The old man told me that when I was done writing I would understand what happened, but he was wrong again, the old liar. Here I’ve taken the trouble to write it all down, and now I’m done and I don’t have a dog’s idea what it meant. Except that most everything I know is wrong, especially the stuff I learned from Tom. I’m going to have to go through everything I know and try to figure out where he lied and where he told the truth. I’ve been doing that already with the books I’ve found, and with books he doesn’t know I borrowed from him, and I’ve found out a lot of things already. I’ve found out that the American Empire never included Europe, like he said it did—that they never did bury their dead in suits of gold armor—that we weren’t the first and only nation to go into space—that we didn’t make cars that flew and floated over water—and that there never were dragons around here (I don’t think, although a bird guide might not be where they were mentioned, I don’t know). All lies—those and a hundred more facts Tom told me. All lies.

I’ll tell you what I do know: the tide is out, and the waves roll up the rivermouth. At first it looks like each wave is pushing the whole flow of the river inland, because all the visible movement is in that direction. Little trailers of the wave roll up the bank, break over the hard sand and add their bit to the flat’s stippled crosshatching. For a time it looks like the wave will push upriver all the way around the first bend. But underneath its white jumble the river has been flowing out to sea all the while, and finally the wave stalls on top of this surge, breaks into a confused chop, and suddenly the entire disturbance is being borne out to sea—until it’s swept under the next incoming wave, and the movement turns upriver again. Each wave is a different size, and meets a different resistance, and as a result there is an infinite variety of rippling, breaking, chopping, gliding… The pattern is never once the same. Do you see what I mean? Do you understand me, Steve Nicolin? You rather be holding on to what can be made to last than out hunting the new. But good luck to you, brother. Do some good for us out there.

As for me: the moon lays a mirrorflake road to the horizon. The snow on the beach melted yesterday, but it might as well be a beach of snow the way it looks in this light, against the edge of the black sea. Above the cliffs stand the dark hillsides of the valley, cupped, tilted to pour into the ocean. Onofre. This damp last page is nearly full. And my hand is getting cold—it’s getting so stiff I can’t make the letters, these words are all big and scrawling, taking up the last of the space, thank God. Oh be done with it. There’s an owl, flitting over the river. I’ll stay right here and fill another book.