The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  His mother was standing crouched over in front of the tree facing the center of the room where his father stood. Her lips were drawn tight and thin so that her teeth showed. She was talking in a low fierce voice, just opening her teeth enough to let the words out. All Mike could remember of her face was the lips and chin and the white teeth.

  "God damn you, John Freesmith. If I had the strength I'd claw your eyes out," she whispered at him. "You've beat them down so often with your crazy talk of injustice and your beautiful bloody revolution that's going to make all men brothers they don't know where or what to stand on. You're making them confused, almost crazy. You just keep cutting the ground out from underneath them."

  A fleck of spittle ran down her chin and with an incredibly sharp motion she jerked her hand across her lips and went on talking.

  "I don't care about the food and this house, but you have to leave them something to live on. When they're older let them become anarchists or revolutionaries and begin to hate, but now those ideas are just dry bones that mean nothing to them. Oh, for the sake of Jesus Christ, let them have something."

  Mike's father stood startled in the middle of the room, his eyes bulging slightly as he listened. Occasionally he looked at the shattered Christmas tree in the corner and flexed his fingers with that quick expert way he had. Finally he began to talk. He talked of the brotherhood of man again and how Christmas had corrupted the ideal, but Mike could tell he was uncertain. He hesitated over the words and tried to rephrase the arguments in a new and more persuasive way.

  Mike's mother stood listening to the words flow from his mouth and finally she gave a shudder and turning toward the broken tree buried her face in her hands. Then the old flat dull cry began to tear out between her hands and as soon as both Mike and his father heard it they both knew she had surrendered. Suddenly his father's words became confident again and began to flow faster and after Mike had closed the door and crawled in bed he could hear the confident monotone drone on through the dreary Christmas night . . .

  Miss Bell was quivering. Her neck was pink and on her cheek Mike could see a round bright spot. He put a hand over her breast and squeezed. She shuddered and a tiny, sharp yelp of pleasure came unexpectedly out of her mouth. She turned and stretched out beside him on the bed and put her arms around him.

  "You won't forget me," she whispered harshly, "I won't let you. I just won't let you. Ever, ever, ever . . . " Her fingers dug into his back.

  Mike laughed, his hands full of her flesh, automatically caressing. He laughed for he had already forgotten her, quite literally for a moment he could not remember her name and he had no memory of her face or body or actions. She was already forgotten and he was thinking of other things.

  CHAPTER 3

  Across the Grapevine

  Highway 99 between Los Angeles and Bakersfield cuts directly across the Tehachapi Mountains in a twisting narrow road which was known as the Ridge Route. At the bottom of almost every elevation there was the huge burned-out hulk of a truck which wore out its brake-shoes on the descent and had to crash off the road. On the Bakersfield side of the Ridge Route, beyond the Grapevine, is a smooth long strip of asphalt which drops gently toward Bakersfield for twenty miles without a turn in the road. Here is where the great semi-trailers are in the most danger, for the slope is so gradual that unless the driver drops down into a lower gear every few miles he is soon going so fast that his brakes are crisped black at the first touch and the truck runs away. On the long slope the runaway trucks reach eighty or ninety or even one hundred miles an hour before the driver will run the truck off the road. The straight rows of eucalyptus trees that line the road are scarred and battered by the accidents and occasionally an entire tree will be destroyed or stunted.

  In the summer the wrecks are marked by enormous clots of alfalfa that look as if they had been exploded over the landscape. In the spring the wrecks will scatter carrots down the road and occasionally an egg truck will crash and gobbets of egg yolk are splattered over the fields, the roadside cafés, the black asphalt and passing cars. When one of the milk trucks crashes there is a sudden eruption of milk running down the side of the road and then, with incredible speed, the flies arrive in great dense clouds.

  Hank Moore and Mike came down the Grapevine in Hank's Model-A on their way to Stanford. Hank kept his long thin fingers on the gearshift and when it wobbled too much he double-clutched and slid it into second gear. Then the Ford would tremble, the rear wheels would shriek against the asphalt and the car would slow down to forty-five miles an hour.

  "How much money have you got, Hank," Mike asked.

  "About five hundred bucks," Hank said.

  Mike whistled. "Where did you get that?" he asked.

  "I had it. Had it around for a long time."

  "I'm damned. Old Hankus with all that money and no one knew it. You're a funny one. Live by yourself in a boardinghouse, don't have a family, only work a little bit and you've got five hundred' bucks. I work every Saturday and all summer and all I've got is two hundred bucks. And fifty of that my mother gave me. I don't know where she got it. Come on, Hank. Where did you get that money?"

  Hank looked over at Mike and grinned.

  "Maybe I'll tell you later. But I didn't steal it. It's mine. I earned it."

  "How long will my two hundred bucks last at Stanford?"

  "Not very long. Tuition is $115, room and board at Encina is $120 a quarter. Books will cost a little. You haven't got enough to last even a quarter."

  "I'll make it do. I've got ways. I understand you can sign a note for the tuition and pay it off when you graduate. So I'll have enough for the first quarter."

  The eucalyptus trees whirred by, big shreds of bark hanging from their boles, putting a pungent oil smell out into the air. They passed a truck going very slowly and as they went by they saw huge round bottles labeled ACID nestled in excelsior on the bed of the truck.

  "Look, Mike. I don't want a lot of talk and crap about money when we get up there," Hank said, and his voice was sharp. "I'm going to have enough other things to worry about. We'll pool our money and I'll let you know when we start to run out. When that happens we'll talk about money. Not before. O.K.?"

  "That wouldn't be fair. You're the guy with most . . . " Mike started to say.

  "Don't give me that crap, I said," Hank cut in. "Just say yes or no. If I put in more money than you I'll get a good return on it. One way or another."

  "What do you mean by that?" Mike asked.

  "For one thing I'm depending on you to pull me through some of the courses. The ones in English and history and that sort of thing. I don't do very well in those." Hank hesitated and then went on. "I didn't tell you, but I'm going to take a pre-med come. There will be lots of chemistry and biology and that sort of thing. I want to concentrate on those. You pull me through the other courses and we'll forget about the money. Just say yes or no."

  "Yes."

  From behind them they heard the shrill, peculiarly heavy whine of truck tires going too fast. Hank looked in the rear-view mirror and pulled far over to the right. The truck flashed by them; too fast to see anything except a white blob of a face, a long stack of red bricks and the blur of wheels. As it passed they heard a harsh long-continued grind, the raw smash of metal against metal, and then a snap as the transmission refused to slip into a lower gear.

  "He must be doing eighty," Hank said quietly.

  "His brakes were gone," Mike said. "You could smell them as he went by."

  The truck quickly grew smaller, seemed to fade away. The red bricks shimmered for a moment and then the truck disappeared around a slower-moving truck. Faintly, but still with the savage tear of metal gnashing, they heard the truck try to go into gear. Each time it snapped out. Then even the sound was gone.

  "Mike, what do they do when you get to Stanford?" Hank asked. "I mean do they have someone to meet you, to show you around?"

  Mike looked over, startled.

  "Hankus, no one is goi
ng to say hello, goodbye, or yes, no, kiss my ass," Mike said. "They'll take your money, stamp your cards and that will be it. What did you expect?"

  "I didn't know what to expect. That's why I asked. O.K. Now I know."

  "You know, but it doesn't make you feel very good," Mike said. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in the seat. "Well, it makes me feel good. I don't want anyone to shake my hand and show me around and then feel that he has done me a favor. I want to arrive and look around and know that every person I look at doesn't give the slightest damn about me. No obligations, no debts. Then you can do what you want."

  "What do you want to do?" Hank asked quietly.

  "I'm not sure. But when I decide I want to be able to do it. I want to be able to look at every person and figure they are enemies and then decide what I want to do. I don't want to be tied up with some of them." Mike hesitated, reached for adequate words. "It sounds a little crazy, Hank. I know. But I've got a theory."

  "What's your theory?"

  "I don't have it all worked out yet. Just part of it. But I'll work out the rest of it. But right now I know I don't want to feel obligated. I don't want a lot of this phony friendship crap. Later when I know more I'll tell you the whole theory."

  Hank looked over at Mike. Mike was looking straight ahead and he had an odd half-smile; the lips drawn back as if to smile, no real humor on his face. Really, Hank thought, it's like the beginning of a snarl, but when Mike does it, it looks attractive. He knew that Mike would never tell him the rest of the theory.

  Ten miles later they passed the semi with the bricks. When it hit a tree at the side of the road the bricks had kept moving and sliced off the top of the cab. There was an ambulance there and someone was picking wet fragments off the stacks of bricks. A bored cop was motioning cars past. A man and woman had stopped their car and were quickly loading some of the loose bricks into the back seat. A cop ran toward them and waved them away. Hank drove quickly past and a few miles later he took the turnoff for Coalinga and Blackwell's Corners.

  They drove for a half hour past old oil well derricks. The derricks were oil soaked and great clots of dust stuck to them. Beneath most of the derricks was a neat shiny engine which drove a pumping ann slowly up and down. The various pumps were connected by a pattern of pipes which led to large shiny tanks. There were no men in the oil fields for these were old wells and needed little care. They slowed down for Taft and then shot down the road toward Coalinga.

  "Hank, where did you come from before you came to L.A.?" Mike asked.

  Hank looked at Mike and saw that he was smiling, but he saw it was a different smile now. "North Dakota."

  "Really? I thought you were from New York or Chicago."

  "That's because I'm Jewish. Everybody in California thinks that Jews come from Brooklyn or Chicago."

  "Was your name Hank Moore in North Dakota?" Mike asked. "That isn't a very Jewish name."

  "It isn't Jewish at all. My name has always been Hank Moore though. I had a father who thought if you called things by different names you might eventually change them."

  "And he wanted to change things?"

  "Sure. He wanted to stop being a Jew and be something else. I couldn't blame the poor bastard. When he was a kid his father took him out on the road to sell hardware, cheap jewelry, perfume, everything. Dad was no good at it and somehow he got into the hotel business and drifted from town to town. Finally he wound up owning a railroad hotel in this town in North Dakota. Ever seen a railroad hotel? Well, this one was a beauty . . . "

  It had twenty-eight rooms and was just fifty feet from the railroad tracks and a set of switching spurs. It was a square ugly old building that had been painted once, but now had only a few shreds of paint up around the eaves and in spots where the sun never hit. In the winter, the wind came solid and cold off the prairie and the half-inch boards of the hotel seemed barely able to keep it out, really to only break the flat blast of it. In the summer it absorbed all the heat in the sky; filled itself with moist-packed hotness during the day and held it tightly throughout the night. When trains went by the hotel chattered, light bulbs flickered and water spilled out of glasses that were too full. There were no fans in the hotel and each six rooms shared a toilet and bath. The washbowls had deep yellow scars in them where dripping water had built up a slow growing stain.

  Occasionally a commercial man would come there by mistake, but he would never stay longer than one night.

  Hank's father sat behind the desk in the lobby. A naked electric bulb shone down on his balding head and threw his watering eyes into the shadow. He had long sloping shoulders and big muscles, but his body had the wrinkled baggy look of an athlete who has suddenly stopped exercising. His skin drooped off his arms in sheets and was dry and scaly. The skin on his face was a collection of sags and folds that pressed down on one another. He never spoke to anyone. Occasionally he would reach an arm out and stop a brakeman or engineer who hadn't paid for a few weeks and hold his palm up. The men would laugh and give him whatever change they had and he would enter the sum in a large notebook which he kept in a childish scrawling hand.

  Once a month his father caught a ride in a caboose to Bismarck, and was back in two days. After each trip he would take a slip of white paper carefully from his pocket and drive it on the nail of a spindle that he kept in the back of the unlocked safe. Hank had looked once at the pieces of paper. The old ones on the bottom were browned with age, while the ones on the top were crisper and newer looking. At the top of each slip of paper was the letterhead, "Dr. J.J. Locke. Specialist in Men's Diseases. All Consultation Private, No Painful Operations Necessary." And then the line, "Laboratory Report." Under this would be a line in handwriting. "Wassermann test, plus." Occasionally the slips of paper would bear a prescription for pills and his father would take the pills for a few days and then forget them. A drawer under his desk was full of little blue boxes which had forgotten pills in them.

  Hank could not remember his mother. She had disappeared somewhere long ago.

  Hank had worked in the hotel when he was a boy. He had peeled potatoes in the kitchen, pounded the thick red strips of tough meat with flour, opened cans of pale string beans and helped serve the food in thick porcelain bowls. He had cut hundreds of pies into dry crusty triangles, each with a lip of thin sugary goo on its edges and served them to the men in the dining room. Sometimes when they could not get a chambermaid he made the beds and swept the corridors. The floors were old soft wood and they smelled of Lysol. The bedrooms smelled of tobacco and coal and dried grease. He liked working in the kitchen best because he could talk to the endless stream of Chinese cooks that worked there. They came in, silent, yellow and smooth skinned, cooked for several months and then moved on. One had been a college boy from Columbia on his way back to China. He had talked patiently to Hank about Confucianism, explaining over and over in his singsong voice that it all hinged on the love and respect for one's parents. Hank had laughed at him and finally the cook had left one night after slapping Hank with the flat edge of a knife.

  When Hank was eight he had asked his father about going to school. His father had turned his heavy, shiny head down from the height of the stool and looked over the counter at Hank. He had scratched his head and a few white scales fell from his fingernails. Finally he had turned his hands up in a noncommittal gesture and shrugged his shoulders. So Hank had forgotten about school until he was thirteen.

  When he was not working in the hotel Hank hung around various buildings and offices in the town. The best place was the rear of the taxicab office where the tobacco-stained politics of the town were decided. In front of the taxi office there was a neon light that blinked steadily, day and night, summer and winter, "Taxi. Five ride for the price of one." In the rear of the office there were a half dozen chairs with smooth leather cushions on them. The chairs were occupied by three scrawny-necked merchants, who were brothers, and the fat-jowled chief of police. The chief was related to one of the merchants.
In the '28 campaign they had put a picture of Al Smith underneath the spittoon and all you could see was the fringe of Al's head. Across the white part of the sign someone printed "A Dirty Cat-licker." The spit splashed brown stains over the picture, and by election time it had vanished beneath a hardened scum of old tobacco-specked saliva. When the election was over Hank had removed the poster and looked at the circle that had lain under the spittoon. There was a bright circle of a man's face with a bright politician's smile on it and the then hardened brown juice, framing it all. He cut it out with a razor and took it back to the hotel.

  In the taxi office they had a file case full of little half-pint bottles of corn whisky and when an election got close, which was seldom, they would send the three taxicab drivers out into town. The drivers would scour the town, making their tiny bribes with the bottles. They would sweep the pool hall, the hotel, the several Negro families alongside the railroad track, the farm boys in town for election, the whores, everyone before them into the polls. They would come just before the polls closed, a waving, yelling froth of men and women. They would flow into the polls and vote. The drivers would herd them in gently, joking with them and making sure that they knew where to put the X. No one ever cheated when they got behind the black curtain; none of them got that drunk, not on a half pint of whisky.