But, he thought, I don’t know why I’m waiting. That happened two years ago. Virginia got me, then. And the rest is nothing.
“Hi,” Liz said, appearing.
“Hi,” he said, standing up and putting aside his magazine.
She came over to him and kissed him. “Do you know anything about carbine lamps?”
“Carbide,” he said.
“I smell like garlic,” she said. “We had pizzas down at Sam’s Oriental Pizza Palace or something like that.” She had a proper bag full of stuff she had bought; supporting it against her with one arm she hugged him, breathing up into his face. She did smell of garlic, and of shampoo.
“You smell okay,” he said. “What’s in the bag?”
“Marshmallows and buns for the hike.” Her face filled with delight. “This time we’re not taking any tents; we’re going to sleep on the ground, in sleeping bags only. And we’re going to dig a trench in the ground and build the fire down in it, and put a grating over the fire, and cook on that. What do you say? If you don’t want to go, I won’t go either.”
“Sounds fine to me,” he said, sharing her excitement.
From the phone in Mrs. Alt’s office he called Virginia at the store. A man, one of the salesmen, answered. “L & B Appliance Mart,” the salesman said.
“Let me talk to Mrs. L,” he said. At her desk, Mrs. Alt smiled a little.
“Hello,” Virginia’s voice said presently.
“I’m calling from the school,” he said. “I’m going to stay overnight this time. We’ll probably drive back tomorrow afternoon. If we decide to stay Saturday night, I’ll call you.”
Virginia said, “I hope you have a good time.”
“We’re going on an overnight hike,” he said. “Up into the Los Padres. It’s open again.”
“Is Liz there, this time?”
He said, “What do you care?”
“All right,” she said. “But if you’re going hiking, be careful of your side.”
After he had hung up the phone, Mrs. Alt said, “You have something to change into, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Upstairs.”
He went upstairs to their room. In the closet he got out a pair of work trousers and shirt and heavy shoes. While he was lacing up the shoes, Liz slipped into the room and shut the door after her. He stopped lacing up the shoes.
At four-thirty the group started out toward the great forest, their packs on their backs. Mr. Van Ecke led the way. Seven or eight children, all boys and all of them older, followed him in a good-natured, confident gang. After them came Mrs. Alt and Mrs. McGivern and Liz and Roger, saying little, taking things easy.
“The rule here,” Mrs. Alt said, “is no exertion. If we get tired, we’ll stop for a while.”
An argument began as to whether they could smoke.
“Absolutely not,” Mrs. McGivern said.
“But the ground’s wet,” Liz said.
“That has nothing to do with it. You can’t even bring cigarettes or matches across the line.”
“We have matches for the fire,” Liz said.
“Actually, we’re breaking the law. We’re camping by special dispensation.”
To Roger, Liz said, “I’m going to smoke.”
They entered the forest along the bank of a dried-up stream. The gully was filled with logs and boulders and broken sticks. Farther on, they passed the remains of a dam, and then a fire-watch tower that had fallen into decay. The trail cut upward, at an extreme incline, and then leveled off to follow a natural surface of earth. The soil was dry and light-colored. Except for one variety of plant, nothing grew. The area had a barren, windy quality. Halting, Roger looked back and saw the valley behind them, the squares that were separate fields and crops, the roads, the school itself on the side of the slope. From this point, the slope could be seen as a series of mounds, on which no trees, at least no living trees, were visible. A far-off region, a kind of plateau, had been burned several years ago; it was black, and from it stuck the dead trunks of trees.
Ahead of them the trail crossed to the other side of the dried stream, circled a higher knob, and then could be seen in the form of a spiral around the first peak. Haze had settled down to make the peak itself indistinct.
“Up there?” he said to Mrs. Alt.
“No,” she said. “We take a cut-off.”
They hiked on. Their trail, a smaller one, took them downward, into a wide gully in which trees grew. They crossed a narrow spillway of water and followed the stream eastward for a half hour. The ascent was mild. None of them became tired. At five-twenty their trail turned steeply away from the water, up over a crest. As they climbed, their view was cut off. Roger, helping Liz up, saw only the darkening evening sky and haze, and the elongated, exposed, weedy crest.
At the top, Mr. Van Ecke and the boys waited for them to catch up. The campsite was on the far side of the crest. The ground dropped in a series of levels. Here, there was no view of the valley. They were between hills. The air had become chill and thin, and it had a bitter smell. Sounds carried for miles. Somewhere far off an object rolled down a steep slope, probably a bundle of dirt-clods and roots. Birds flew among the clumps and plants, in a hopping motion. Bits of newspaper, left by earlier campers, rose up and swirled off, out of sight, carried into a ravine by the wind. Already, the lower places, the gullies and ravines, had become dark. Light remained in the hillsides, spread out over the higher slopes, but the colors were dimming away. Only a light brown and brownish green of foliage were left. The sky had turned from blue to gray.
They hiked on, down the slope and past rows of massive trees that cut off the wind and sunlight. The trail was vague; they stumbled among heaps of rock fragments that had broken loose and settled from the slope onto the flat places. A snake got out of their way. Mr. Van Ecke and the boys tramped on past the spot, but Mrs. McGivern and Liz halted.
“What kind of snake was that?” Mrs. McGivern said.
“A deadly nightshade,” Mrs. Alt said, going on. Roger led Liz on, and she came, staring down at the ground.
The trail passed between two cliffs, into a slot. They had to climb rocks, holding onto roots. After a few minutes, Mr. Van Ecke appeared above them and declared that they had arrived at the campsite. The rest of them reached the top and found themselves at a level, smooth bowl between the rise of slopes. Here there was no wind. The spot seemed peaceful and protected.
Mrs. McGivern lit the gasoline lantern and stuck it up high so that its light bothered everyone. Roger took the short spade and began digging a hole for the fire. When he had finished, everyone brought firewood—their notion of the law varied according to their need—and crumpled newspapers. By seven o’clock dinner was cooking in skillets and pots over the grate, and the several sleeping bags had been laid out here and there. Now the sky was totally black. The only light came from the sizzling gasoline lantern.
Liz, circling the lantern, said, “Is there any chance it’ll blow up?”
“No,” Mr. Van Ecke said. “But somebody should keep their eye on it to pump it up when the pressure gets low.”
A boy, one of Liz’s, was assigned to watch the lantern.
For dinner they had lamb chops and baked potatoes and green beans, cake, milk from the thermos flask, coffee for the adults. Unopened cans of hash were put off to one side for breakfast in the morning.
The sky showed them stars in unending number, and for an hour different members of the hiking party pointed out constellations. Once, a meteor dropped like a stone the entire length and was lost to sight among the mountains to the north. No one saw it start; it seemed to come into existence out of nothing. And, they agreed, it did look as if it had come unattached. Gravity had yanked it down.
Beyond the light of their gasoline lantern, living creatures stirred and hooted. One sound repeated itself, a whirring, guttural and excited. “That’s a ground squirrel,” Mrs. Alt said.
Liz said, “You’re sure it isn’t a wildcat?”
>
“Ground squirrels are all around here,” Mr. Van Ecke said.
Later in the evening, a frantic squabble broke out in the darkness. Screams and thrashings in the underbrush woke up all the sleeping boys.
Mr. Van Ecke said, “Something just now got something.”
“Probably an owl,” Mrs. Alt said. “It probably caught a field mouse or a squirrel.”
She and Mrs. McGivern and Mr. Van Ecke and Liz and Roger sat around the fire, prodding it now and then with the sticks that had been used to toast marshmallows. The time was eleven-thirty.
“It’s getting cold,” Mrs. McGivern said.
Next to Roger, Liz sat with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped about them. She wore rolled-up jeans, and in the firelight her calves shone dark-red, smooth, bare. As smooth, he thought, as bone. Reaching out his hand, he touched her on the ankle; he tugged at her sock and she put one hand down and closed her fingers over his. Her skin was hot from the closeness of the fire. The fire had become mostly coals, giving off a deep low current of heat. Liz had crouched forward so that her head was near. Her hair reflected the color of the fire, the reddish brown that came so close to being black. He saw that her neck was streaked with dampness, and it reminded him of the day, two years ago, when Virginia had burst into the house, and Liz had gone out of the bedroom, by herself, to meet her. In times of fear, and in times of excitement and exertion and even happiness, she seemed to become a little damp. She had leaped up in a kind of splash, as if she were rising to the surface.
But, he thought to himself, the texture, the substance in which she lived, had closed over for her. It had become calm and she had retired to that perfect core of unchangeability in which she was so much at home. Perhaps, he thought, she revolved slightly. But he saw no change in her. Nothing had happened to her. And, he thought, that was what he had sought out in the beginning. He saw that in her eyes; or rather, he saw within her eyes. Anybody could do that. The eye is not opaque. Looking straight at her, he had seen, revolving within, the utterly complete person. Nothing could alter her or affect her; Virginia had barged into the house, and Liz had leaped up and run from the bedroom, not so much to defend her house and honor but to protect him—and even that had passed over her and gone. And she was exactly the same as before.
Here she sits, he thought, with her head on her knees and her fingers closed over my own. Her legs are smooth and dark and shiny and warm. Her hair smells good, as it always has; she will always have that fine smile, and, beyond anything else, she will admit my gaze into her, all the way in, so that I can see, as I have never seen in anyone else before, what it is that I am really speaking to. And she will never be evasive. She will never lie. As long as I can hold her attention, I will see it as it really is. She is a kind of ultimate being, in so far as she goes. Within the bounds of her existence, she is absolute. And that, he thought, is because she has no real relationship to anything, except that she can be seen. But she can never be reached or taken over. Or acquired.
Her happiness, he thought, comes in this, in sitting by herself, next to me, doing nothing, needing nothing, going nowhere, and in a sense having been nowhere. Lacking memory, unable to anticipate, knowing nothing about death—as if, he thought, she had always been here, before the fire, with her fingers closed over his.
But as far as I go, he thought, I am finished. It was the end of me. Perhaps it failed to touch her, but it certainly touched me. Does she know that? She did her best, he thought, to get out of the room and between me and Virginia. She did everything she could. So she must have known what it would do to me. And Virginia did get by her, and did get into the room.
That goddamn Virginia, he thought. But eventually even Virginia would sicken and die. Her life would dwindle and she would creep about in a mid-world, knowing things only by their touch.
But I’ll be long since gone by then, he thought. So it won’t make much difference. I’ll be the first to go. In a sense, I am already gone.
Beside him, Liz said, “If a wildcat jumps down in front of you, what do you do? Bang on a pan?”
“Yes,” he said. “Or call on God.”
Swinging her head, she fixed on him her earnest, hopeful gaze. “You don’t believe in God; I know, you told me.”
Roger said, “That’s true.”
“Shouldn’t you?” she said.
“Maybe I should,” he said. Leaning towards her, he kissed her on the mouth.
The next afternoon, Saturday afternoon, he and Gregg drove back to Los Angeles.
“Did they have stamps back in Roman times?” Gregg said.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“I think I have a stamp from Rome.”
“Maybe so,” he said.
The glare bothered his eyes and he got his dark glasses from the glove compartment, the lenses that clipped over his regular glasses.
“I didn’t feel like coming along on the hike,” Gregg said. “I don’t care for hikes.”
“Why not?” he said.
“Well, once Billy Haag and I got lost. We were hiking by ourselves. We never told anybody. We were lost two hours.”
“Better watch it,” he said.
“We were using Billy’s compass.”
Ahead of the car, along the road, stood a bunch of Mexican farm workers, hitchhiking. They waved their hands at him, and he slowed the car a little.
She would stop, he said to himself.
But he speeded up. The Mexicans swiftly fell away behind. “I should have stopped,” he said to Gregg.
“Look,” Gregg said. “There’s more.”
Another bunch of Mexicans, some of them even out on the road, waited ahead, thumbing rides. This time he slowed more; the Mexicans began running frantically toward the car, and he knew that he had committed himself whether he liked it or not.
“Open the door,” he said to Gregg.
Gregg opened the door, and the Mexicans bounded into the car, one after another. Behind them, the first group had begun to hurry; before he could start up the car they had reached it. By the time he had got them in, there was no room for Gregg. One of the Mexicans swept Gregg up and set him down on his lap.
“Where are you going?” Roger asked the Mexicans.
They conferred in Spanish. At last one of them said, “Santa Paula.”
“Across the mountains,” another said.
“Okay,” Roger said. “That’s where I’m going.”
Later, after they had got up the steep curves to the top and were descending on the south side of the range, one of the Mexicans said to him, “This is your little boy?”
“Yes,” he said.
The Mexican patted Gregg on the head.
“He goes to school,” Roger said. “Back at Ojai.”
All the Mexicans beamed at Gregg, and several more of them reached out and patted him.
“Where you going?” one of the Mexicans asked Roger. He was a dark young man with a hard, strong brow and nose. His lips were large but not fleshy; his teeth were huge.
“To Los Angeles,” Roger said.
“You live there?”
“Yes,” he said.
The young Mexican said, “We’re going down to Imperial. Go down there in winter and work.” They all agreed, those in front and in back and the one holding Gregg on his lap. “Crops all winter. Lettuce.” He made a stooping-gesture, and all the Mexicans groaned. “Time to go down there,” the Mexican said. “Getting to be late.”
“I never been down in the Imperial Valley,” Roger said.
For the balance of the trip to Santa Paula, the Mexicans told him about the Imperial Valley.
After he had let them off, Gregg said to him, “They sure all got in when you stopped.”
“They wanted to get over the mountains,” Roger said.
When he and Gregg reached Los Angeles he drove to the house and parked. The front door was open, so evidently Virginia or the colored maid was home. Probably the maid. He watched the house, and prese
ntly the maid, Kathy, came out on the porch and shook the dustmop. Seeing him and Gregg, she waved her hand.
“Let’s go in,” Gregg said, shifting around on the seat. “Come on, Dad.”
“You go ahead on in,” Roger said. His watch read five-thirty. Virginia would be home, soon. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m going to drive down to the store.”
“Okay,” Gregg said.
“Good-bye,” Roger said, as his son hopped out onto the parking strip and started towards the path.
“Good-bye,” Gregg called back.
He drove in the direction of the store. A block or so away he parked and sat smoking a cigarette. The sun had set. Lights appeared here and there. The various stores were shut up for the weekend. At six o’clock he got out, locked up the car, and walked until he came to a gas station. Inside the office the attendant was making out a lubrication tag; he did not pay any attention as Roger opened the office door and entered.
“You got any maps?” Roger said.
“What kind?” the attendant said. “Pirate maps?”
From the rack Roger took down a map of California. The other maps were all of Los Angeles. “Thanks,” he said. He left the station and walked back to his car.
Within the car, he spread out the map. Highway 66, he thought to himself. Up to Barstow and then across the Mojave Desert to Needles, and then a long grade, across the Arizona border to Kingman. And then straight east, through New Mexico and then the Texas Panhandle, to western Oklahoma as far as Oklahoma City, and then north. All the way to Chicago.
The car was half his. He had a legal right to take it out of the state. Virginia would never make anything out of that; he was positive.
But, he realized, he needed money in addition. Once he got to Chicago he could get some kind of job as a repairman, an electrician or in a factory, the work he was doing now. But he needed at least three hundred dollars to get him there. Pulling out his wallet he counted the money he had. Twenty dollars. Not enough to get him out of Arizona.
Puttering About in a Small Land Page 31
