The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  "How they hate dying in Southern California," Georgia said.

  Mike looked around, startled. His eyes went over the veterans, swept up the long reach of green lawn, glanced at the other cars. His face was blank.

  "Who hates to die in Southern Galifornia?" he asked.

  "Those veterans," Georgia said. "That little bunch of them standing there. See the one with the bottle in his bathrobe pocket? He wants to shock the people going by in their new cars and they don't even look at him. He's mad.".

  The veteran in the bathrobe saw them looking at him and grinned crookedly. He pulled the bottle out of his pocket and unscrewed the top. He put it to his mouth, his eyes glaring at them. When he threw his head back, the cords in his neck drew the red wrinkled flesh tight. He looked like a person who had once been very fat and now hated being skinny.

  The signal changed and their platoon of cars picked up speed; in a collective spasm they rushed toward the next signal.

  "How do you know they hate it here?" Mike asked.

  "How do you know anything? I guess by looking at them. I think the sunshine and palm trees and salt air frustrates them. When you're dying you ought to be in a cold, dreary climate. It would make it easier. They ought to build the veterans' hospitals in the mountains and out on the deserts . . . where it's lonely and bleak. It must be hard to sit around in the sun and watch people going by in sport shirts and know you're going to die."

  She paused, looking quickly at Mike and then went on. "When I was little and read all the adventure books, I used to think it would be easier to die in the freezing Arctic, like Scott and those people. It must be easier to die in a harsh climate, a cruel place. This is a terrible place to die."

  "I never thought about it before," Mike said slowly. "I've been by this hospital a thousand times and I never noticed them. That's funny, isn't it?"

  "Not many people do notice them, I guess," Georgia said. "After a while they become just like the palm trees or fire hydrants. You just don't see the individuals anymore."

  At the next stop signal, Mike looked over at Georgia. She was sitting very straight in the seat, looking out the window. She glanced quickly from one object to another. He guessed that she was twenty-two years old.

  The land in San Fernando was owned by two polite Japs. They said the land was really not for sale and then, with much embarrassment and sucking of teeth, said that it could be had for $10,000 per acre. They all walked out and looked at the land.

  The land was very black and rich. It was planted in spring onions and the tiny light green spikes were laid out in long even rows. The earth between the rows was soft and recently turned. A Japanese woman and a boy were irrigating and the water ran down the rows in long thin streams.

  "This isn't what we want," Mike said. "They think we want it for subdividing and so they jack the price up."

  His voice was irritated and he spoke directly to the Japanese. They grinned and ducked their heads. Georgia blushed.

  On the way back to Los Angeles, Mike drove to the top of Mount Wilson. It was a clear day with the smog blown out to sea. Below them was all of Los Angeles.

  The older part of the city was dun-colored, neat and made soft by trees. Crawling out of the older city, like parasites abandoning a decrepit and useless host, were the new subdivisions. Close-packed, identical, shining-new, glittering with paint and new grass the subdivisions flowed down toward the sea and around the blackened spikes of the abandoned oil derricks of Signal Hill. They moved, in a welter of two-bedroom one-bath globs, toward Pomona and Whittier and devoured the orange trees as they went. In the Hollywood Hills and in the slopes behind Burbank, the land was scarred by raw new roads and the units were bigger and sparkled with polished glass and redwood. Only occasionally was there an open and orderly stretch of green where crops were growing.

  "Now all this is hopeless," Mike said restlessly, sweeping his hand to include the whole area from the mountains to the sea. "It's too crowded. Pretty soon it will all be subdivided. It's too expensive for farming. We have to get farther out."

  "Farther out?"

  "Yes, farther out. Out where the land hasn't been worked over. Where you are the first person to get to it. I don't know where, but not around here." With a sharp cut of his hands he rejected the city, the houses, the whole bright saucer of land. "You have to get something that's new; where you're the first one."

  Georgia glanced at him and there was interest in her face. Mike put his hands down and swpped talking. They looked out over the city for another minute.

  "All right, let's go," Georgia said. "I'll find out about Imperial Valley, the desert, all those places. I understand."

  Two days later they drove to Imperial Valley. Hank went along. Mike knew it was his day off and insisted that Hank go with them. As soon as Hank got in the back seat of the car he fell asleep.

  He fell asleep sitting up. His chin fell forward slightly, but he sat straight and stiff, as if he had just closed his eyes for a moment. Mike could see his head in the rear-view mirror. Hank was thinner and the hair above his ears was streaked with gray. He had a bone-and-gristle leanness that indicated he would never get fat. Oddly, the freckles still stood out on his nose and added to his bleached-out, tense look.

  The highway was new and broad and neat. It was eight lanes wide and was divided down the center by a strip of grass. The lanes were made of poured concrete, six inches thick. The shoulders were made of black asphalt and were bordered by a strip of gray gravel. The trees close to the highway were stifled by the gasoline fumes and their skinny limbs were as leafless as bones.

  The highway rolled across the countryside without mercy. It cut through hills in great raw gashes and swept on concrete bridges across the rivers. It cut through mountains in long tunnels lined with white tile and gleaming with lights. Occasionally from the new highway, the old twisting road could be seen and the remains of the towns that had lined the old road. The towns held up their french-fried almond signs and antique signs and date shops and chirichilla ranches to the abandoned empty strip of asphalt, while the dirty windows in the back brooded malignantly over the new highway.

  Mike held the Cadillac steady at seventy-five miles an hour. The car poured into a long beautiful curve and there was the faint rasp of rubber. Hank opened his eyes, lifted his head and looked out the window.

  "Miss Blenner, do you spend all your time driving around with Mike looking for farm land?" Hank asked. "Or do you do something else?"

  Georgia turned around and looked at Hank. She smiled.

  "Sometimes I go to U.C.L.A. and take a course. I never finish them, but I start a lot of them. Ceramics, creative writing, history; things like that."

  "Why don't you finish?"

  "Sometimes because they get boring. Take sculpturing. They show you a nude girl and tell you to sculp her. But first you have to learn about armatures and keeping clay wet and plaster and anatomy and sculpturing theory. Someplace along the line I always get bored and give it up. I feel bad about it, but I never finish the courses. And then there's the family."

  "What about the family?"

  "The family is just more interesting than the courses. So I get to thinking of the family and it's more interesting than ceramics and I go home."

  "Do you have a big family?"

  "No. Not really. Just Father and Morrie, my brother. But there are always a lot of people around. Fund raisers for Israel Bonds or producers from New York or broken-down comedians who want Father to finance a new picture for them. The house is full of them."

  Something about the girl disturbed Hank. She seemed to lack a dimension, a quality. For one thing she was not careful enough. She said everything she thought. When she answered a question she thought for a moment, but not to protect herself or to be careful. She paused the way a child will pause, so that she could give a complete answer. Then she said everything. Some instinct of protection, some device of insulation or caution was missing in the girl. Really, Hank thought, it's that sh
e's exposed. No protections.

  They drove past the turn-off for Palm Springs and Thousand Palms and came to the long rows of date trees. The dates were tiny and green against the brown of the trees. At Coachella it began to get hot, and in the valley hundreds of Mexicans walked down the rows of melons. Like huge clever ants they hurried down the rows, rapping with a knuckle on the melons, picking only the ripest. The melons gathered in huge yellow mounds along the road.

  "They say only Mexicans can tell a ripe melon in the field," Mike said. "They can tell by the smell or the feel or something. Put an Irishman out there and he'd pick all the wrong melons. But a Mexican, even a little Mexican kid, never makes a mistake . . . always picks the ripe ones and leaves the green ones."

  Hank moved over to the window and looked out at the fields with new interest.

  "That's why all the big farmers encourage the wetbacks to come over from Mexico," he said. "So they'll have a supply of pickers who can smell out a ripe melon. I read somewhere that some of these Mexicans will be deported by the immigration people six or eight times during a harvest season. And they just keep coming back for more."

  They left the fields and went past the white glittering emptiness of the Salton Sea and the endless stretching away of alkali flats. Every few miles there was a little town. They were all alike. Each one had a restaurant, a few bars, a truck-fueling station with a few semis parked around it. There was a garage with a big tow truck ready to go, the hook hanging free. At the outskirts of every town there was always a great ugly heap of wrecked and abandoned cars. The Model-T's and old Chevvies were on the bottom of the heap, turning rusty and stripped almost bare, reduced to a carcass. On top of them were the layers of newer cars; Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Chryslers, Mercurys. Some were squashed up into oddly shortened and twisted bodies; others were jerked lengthways. The guts of the cars; the cushions, steering wheels, wires, rubber mats and mirrors spilled down the side of the heap. On some of the newer wrecks the blood still showed on the windshields and the rust was just beginning to eat away the fresh chrome of the bumpers.

  "So now you don't sculp or go to school or anything else except go along to see your daddy's investment is protected?" Hank asked as if they had been talking about it all along.

  Mike laughed. Georgia turned with a smile on her face, but then she saw Hank's tight unsmiling face and a bruised, confused look appeared around her eyes.

  She knows I meant it to hurt, Hank thought. He was sorry at once. The girl had no defenses, it was pointless to attack.

  "That's not the reason I'm along," she said carefully, slowly. "I just want to see what happens. See, Hank, we're Jews and we're in motion pictures and those two things make people scared of politics. At home everyone gets nervous when politics come up. They're afraid the government will censor the movies or pass legislation against Jews or something like that. Politics always seemed distant and very bad and confusing." She shrugged her shoulders, despairing of her words. "So I came along."

  "You hang around Mike and you'll learn a lot about politics," Hank said and his voice was not mocking. Then he paused and too swiftly his voice became harsh. "Jesus, Mike, you're not really going to run that bum Cromwell for governor? He doesn't have a chance. And if he does he shouldn't."

  Georgia looked startled and then interested and Hank felt a quick relief. She had not detected his clumsy shift away from her,

  The rest of the way into Brawley they talked about Cromwell's chances. Mike nodded his head and grinned, but he did not say how he thought Cromwell could win.

  In Brawley they talked to a real estate agent. He was a lean, sun-burned, friendly man. He had an office, but he liked to do business in his air-conditioned Cadillac. He leaned back in his seat, yawned as the air-conditioner hummed quietly. He had shown them all the land that was for sale.

  "Well, thars the situation around here," he said. "Nobody really wants to sell. Maybe later if farm prices drop a bit they will. But not right now. Oh, you could get land if you wanted to go high for it. Eight or ten thousand an acre. But, God, with what they're getting for honeydews and casabas in L.A., everyone is making a fortune."

  "What if there's a depression?" Mike asked. He was irritated, restless.

  "Then watch 'em run," the real estate agent said. "None of these people are really farmers. They're just like the old prospectors. Come in, skim off the surface gold and leave before you have to get down to the low grade ore. None of 'em want to put in fertilizer or really build up the land, they just want to skim the cream."

  "O.K., let's go," Mike said. "This isn't what we're looking for."

  Later, as they drove back toward Los Angeles, Mike was silent. He did not speak until they reached the Morongo Valley turnoff.

  "I don't know anything about farm land, but I don't want to get into anything like Imperial Valley," he said.

  "I knew it," Hank said. "As soon as I saw those big melons and those solid red tomatoes and the nice straight rows in Imperial, I knew Mike wouldn't be interested. Too easy."

  Georgia looked from Hank to Mike. Mike was grinning. His teeth were held together, his eyes narrowed. He fumbled in his pocket for a cigar, slipped off the cellophane. His teeth separated and he put the cigar into the corner of his mouth, bit down with the big heavy teeth, closed his lips. He did not light the cigar for ten minutes.

  They turned east and drove past the Bouillon Mountains and the Sheep Hole Mountains. They went past the dry bed of Bristol Lake, through Bagdad and into the white, searing desert below Rasor. Mike parked the car on top of a low bluff and they got out. The sagebrush had vanished and the ground was covered with a few greasewood trees, some dwarfed yuccas, cholla cactus, and occasionally the great spiny figure of a giant saguaro. There was not a building in sight. Only the straight, narrowing strip of grease-soaked road. They stood silently and looked at it.

  "It's impossible, Mike," Georgia said. "Nothing could grow here."

  "It could if you had water," Mike said.

  Hank watched them from the back seat of the car.

  At their feet a gridiron-tailed lizard came up out of the sand. His tongue flicked wildly and suddenly he saw them and dove into the sand. He was gone instantly, leaving only a tiny cloud of dust where he had disappeared. In a few seconds he popped up a yard away and then dove under the sand again.

  "But there isn't any water," Georgia said.

  Mike walked back to the car and took out a map. It was labeled "Irrigation System Map of California." He pointed to a large irregular blank spot on the map.

  "That's where we are," he said. "Right in the middle of nothing. The land here is cheap. We could get it for almost nothing. All it needs is water. And the state could put water in here if it wanted."

  He pointed at a thick line which marked the Los Angeles Aqueduct. It ran black and promising across the map, far above the land on which they were standing:

  "All you'd have to do is to run an irrigation canal from that aqueduct and this land would be as rich as Imperial Valley," he said. His voice was tense. "Then you'd have something, Georgia. And it'd be new; brand new. Something you carved out of nothing. Better than taking over something that's already there."

  In the middle distance a big, ugly, splayfooted jack rabbit went in great bounds. His ears stood straight up as he went over some four-podspurge. Then he disappeared; instantly as if he had been swallowed by the hot sand.

  "Could this land grow anything?" Georgia said doubtfully.

  "Anything. Bring water in and it'll grow alfalfa, cotton, celery, any damned thing," Mike said. "Georgia, this is like a great big natural hothouse here. There are months when the temperature is over a hundred. And some days the humidity is absolute zero. Bring water in and you'd have tomatoes as big as . . . " he paused, searched for the right word, could not find it and moved his hands to make a globe as big as a watermelon, " . . . really, big, huge. Anything would grow."

  Georgia looked slowly around the desert, to the burning edge of the horizon, over th
e shimmering dunes.

  Hank saw the excitement start across her face. She looked from the blue hulk of the mountains, across the stretch of sand and burnt earth and her eyes glittered. She can see it already, Hank thought. An irrigation canal, rows of lettuce, enormous sweet melons, everything ordered and won.

  Mike kicked the sand. She watched him. It was not a casual kick. It was hard, deliberate, done with meaning. He kicked again and the sand sprayed away from his foot and fell in a shapeless heap. Mike grinned.

  Georgia's excitement deepened. She knew it was not her own excitement. It was something borrowed from Mike. It was a paler, more austere, thinner version of what he felt, but it was still important and big. She knew, suddenly, that her perceptions were more diminished than Mike's and she was aware of the larger, harder things that he felt. As if Mike were an instrument through which she could gather impressions of things that she would not otherwise perceive.