The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  "Well, he's going to lose the primary. If the Republicans run Daigh, he will take both nominations in the primary. My God, Georgia, nobody even knows who Cromwell is. He's just a man with some inherited money who likes to talk to people. He's good at it. In a way he's superb. But he'll never be governor."

  They came to the Santa Paula cutoff. A huge gas station glittered at the intersection. A single great truck came powerfully down Highway 126 and swung into the traffic. From the hills above Chatsworth, they could see an occasional glimpse of the sprawling geometry of Los Angeles.

  "But Mike's so sure he can do it," Georgia said.

  "He could be sure and still be wrong," Hank said.

  "Maybe," Georgia said.

  They came to Sepulveda and swung right. They went past the glittering expanse of the reservoir and then, far ahead of them, the first traffic light blinked red. The flicking, fast-moving, atomized cars slowed down, formed into bunches. Tamely, they moved into Los Angeles.

  Hank waited for a few moments. He closed his eyes and leaned back in the corner of the seat.

  "Georgia, why do you hang around with Mike?" he asked and his voice was tough and determined. "Nothing can come out of it. There's nothing in it for you."

  The car spurted forward, whined down the road. Hank had a brief flash of memory: he remembered the time when he was taking the pulse of a man after a long diagnosis. Hank told the man he had incurable cancer and at once the pulse grew thick, enormous, thudding; as if the artery would burst under his fingers. "Why do you hang around Mike?" Georgia asked.

  "Because I've known him for a long time and I like him," Hank said. "I don't know why, but I do. I like him and there's something curious, attractive about him. I keep thinking if I hang around I'll find out some answer that will make the whole thing sensible." How can I tell her, he thought? He felt dull, used up. "With you it's different. You want something he can't give."

  "I'm not sure, Hank," Georgia said and her voice was only a whisper; almost frightened. "At first I thought it was because he was so certain; always sure of everything. No doubts. No hesitations. But now I've changed. It's different. I think I make it too complicated. Maybe it's just as simple as the fact that I . . . " She paused. "Just as simple as . . . "

  "Don't talk about it," Hank said harshly, quickly. He was suddenly desperate. not to have her say it. He wanted, with a dead anxiousness, not to have her uncover herself; to speak the final words. "Shut up."

  He opened his eyes. She was looking straight down the highway, her eyes distended. On her arms the flesh was puckered and he realized that she was shivering slightly; almost invisibly.

  CHAPTER 27

  Election Year

  The California gold had been there for ages. It was washed down out of the hills in shining flakes that gathered at the bottom of river beds. Sometimes it came down in dull and tiny pieces as big as peas. Once or twice, no one knows how, it stayed in the hills in chunks as big as a boulder; heavy enough to make a man's arms strain when he tried to lift it. And heavy enough to make him scream with joy when he hefted it.

  They took it out first with iron pans. Three handfuls of black sand, wash it with river water, let the black silt sluice over the edges. Then tilt and tip, wash again and again and again. And finally the streak at the bottom: thin, yellow and heavy. Scrape it, along with the black mud, into the leather bag and to assay.

  Later came surface diggings, wet diggings, crude flumes, cradles, riffles, tailings, leads, coyotes, and each of them took some gold and left the land unchanged.

  But then they came with hydraulic gear. They came into the counties of Plumas and Placer and Eldorado with the big squat pumps, the long lengths of pipe, and the sharp lawyers who bought "hosing rights." From the end of the monitor came a hard bright gush of water. The water hissed against the startled land, It cut around rocks, chewed up adobe, lacerated hills, chewed through roots and old lava. The land resisted for a few hours. And then it turned into thin coffee-colored slop and poured slowly down the hillsides, into the ravines, down to the river beds and finally into the mouth of the big machines.

  The sharp young mountains were worn smooth. They turned into brown hills, laced with gullies and ravines. And the hills became mounds of soft leached-out dirt. And if the gold persisted, the mountain became a hole in the ground.

  The dredges came last. They were huge, ugly, black and created their own world. The dredges floated on water. The continuous belt of scoops dug up the earth in front of the dredge and threw the exhausted and goldless waste out behind. Each dredge moved its pond across the countryside, ignoring the old stream beds, chewing into pastures, flat land, through small hills, up valleys. The land they moved was ruined, covered with smooth round rocks that had been underground for a million years. After the dredge nothing could grow or did. Highways were built across the desolation, but that was all.

  When the gold was gone the dredges died. They died where the gold ended; the barges rotting in the artificial lakes, the pipes turning red with rust, the scoops hanging like useless claws on an iron dinosaur. The incongruous, unbelievable wreck took only ten years to rot and disappear, but the land behind them was gone forever.

  "What we need is reforestation," they said. And they said it in Nevada City, Eldorado, Yankee Jim's, Grass Valley, Gold Run, Sierra City and elsewhere. "And the state should pay for it."

  At first only the resort owners and lumbermen said it and they said it for the purposes of simple greed. Then the rotary clubs and chambers of commerce and the bankers said it. And pretty soon the Catholic priests, the Protestant ministers, the Grange and, newspaper editors began to say it.

  One day it had a slogan: "Restore the Land."

  And that day it became political and a bill was introduced named "No. 1090: A Bill to Provide for Reforestation in Certain Counties of Northern California." And soon after it became a political plank in the party platforms.

  It is a long low building built of concrete and covered with gray paint. It is surrounded by shrubs and neat lawns and behind the building is a farm with cows and barns and pigs. The land in front of the building drops slowly to the sea and in the far distance one can see the faint smudged outline of Point Buchon, the sandy spits over which the Pacific breaks, the deep green lines of windbreak eucalyptus trees.

  From the building no one watches the view, for it is an insane asylum and everyone inside is too busy. A middle-aged woman sits rigidly on a stool, her jaw tight, her eyes abstracted, passionately busy defending a dark inner privicy, locked in a catatonic rigidity which absorbs all her energy. She is oblivious even when her mouth is opened, the rubber tube is stuck in, and the warm soup funneled into her stomach.

  In a small room a man masturbates endlessly, childlessly, fondly. Once his hands were strapped so that he could not touch himself and with an infantile ingenuity he rubbed himself with the heel of his right foot and when this was strapped tight he rubbed the inside of his thighs together and they saw it was hopeless and freed his hands.

  In a common room a thin bony man talks fervently to a large, fattish, slack-jawed man.

  "And just when I had the well ready to come in and the oil people were making offers from New York, they framed me and stuck me in here," the thin man says, his eyes gleaming with paranoia, black with suspicion.

  "Shame, awful shame," the fat man says. He shakes his head and the skin of his jaw, pebbled by paresis, trembles.

  "And under that well is the god damnedest, biggest pool of oil ever seen. Reaches for miles, big and shiny, biggest pool in the world," the thin man says. Then suddenly crafty. "But I've got a plan. Can't keep a good man down."

  They smile at one another; a tiny community of two; isolated against the rest of the asylum; perfectly matched by their diseases; their afflictions enfolded and complemented within one another.

  The less afflicted work on the farm. With nightmarish slowness they pitch hay, watching each yellow curl of hay fall on the pile, turning with scarecrow awkward
ness. They stumble across the barnyard, smiling dimly, doing the rote and hard-learned tasks with a minute precision. The overalls hang from them, shred on nails and boards, and the naked skin shows through and they still continue the convoluted, elaborate ritual of the farm. Occasionally, very occasionally, through the dullness comes a sense of outrage and there are fights. Slow, shambling fights; like drowning bears fighting under water; hands pawing one another; teeth biting fingers; a pulling of ears and a welling of tears in the eyes.

  The Visiting Committee comes once a year. Three psychiatrists, two educators, three businessmen, one housewife and a retired army officer. They inspect the kitchen, made bright for the occasion. The housewife tastes the spaghetti and meat balls and, as the superintendent hangs nervously on the fringes of the group, she asks how much milk the inmates get per day.

  The Committee walks through the wards and rooms. They look at hydrocephalics, microcephalics, paranoiacs, schizophrenics, paretics and Mongolian idiots. They watch a fifteen-year-old girl snap her fingers, slap her right fist into her left fist, pause fifteen seconds and repeat the gesture. Her fingers are covered with thick callouses from the snapping and the palm of her left fist is a huge swollen pad of callous.

  They came to the large common room, reserved for the good and sober cases, for the patients who are cooperative. They paused and smiled out over the room and a few fragmented, disorderly, crooked smiles came back at them.

  Then the housewife sees it: the dark, shiny tendril of blood flowing across the floor. They rush forward and see that it comes from a rocking chair in which the body of the middle-aged catatonic woman rests.

  A paranoiac cheerfully reconstructed it for them. The woman had suddenly, after years of immobility, moved her head, peered shrewdly around the room and walked over to a desk. She picked up a pencil, walked back to the rocking chair and sat down. As a few of the interested patients watched, she hacked her wrist open with the pencil, chopping fiercely at the tendons and flesh and then, when she had opened an artery, sat back with a smile in the chair. They had watched passively as the blood flowed from her hand, gathered in a pool and ran across the floor and the smile on the woman's face went thinner and tighter until at last it was a thin pale snarl and the woman was dead.

  "She should have been in a private isolated room. By herself," the housewife said and looked with horror at the superintendent.

  So the Visiting Committee recommended that the legislature appropriate an additional $26,000 for the asylum. The budget read:

  For construction of six private rooms.. $23,500 For one FTE, hospital attendant ....... 2,500

  The legislative auditor recommended that the request be denied. The Budget Committee of the legilature concurred. The two lines were stricken from the budget.

  But the housewife on the Visiting Committee was the wife of the publisher of the 'San Francisco Dispatch,' a great crusading paper. Pictures appeared in the 'Dispatch' of the inmates huddling in common rooms. Stories were written by reporters. And, as a result, the official Democratic Party platform included, "Adequate budgetary provision for the care and rehabilitation of patients in State mental institutions."

  The State of California has an agency that makes building loans to veterans. Under the provisions of the original act, the state will make a loan, at a low rate of interest, to a veteran to construct a home.

  In Sacramento the applications for veteran loans are processed by machines, almost entirely. But not entirely. For at some point humans look over the forms, check them for accuracy and either approve or disapprove on the basis of the calculations which the machines have made. The individuals fix their initials to the lower left-hand corner of the forms, just below their decision. It is as neat and mechanical an operation as one could hope for.

  One of the persons who affixed his initials to the bottom of the application forms was Michael Garrity. Fifty-four years old, a Republican, a Catholic, two years of work at Santa Clara University, before he flunked out, a high blood pressure, five kids, a longing for beer; a flaccid wife, an eater of chocolates, the owner of three shiny-pants suits, a tic in his jowl, that, mostly, was Michael Garrity.

  One day Michael Garrity received a case of Old Taylor whisky and five cases of Budweiser beer from Sharp's Liquor Store. They were delivered to his door and he thought it was a marvelous mistake and drank all of the beer and half of the whisky in two weeks. Shrewdly, sharply, primitively, he reasoned that he had done nothing criminal . . . any man could drink up booze delivered to his door . . . he hadn't done anything wrong. For two weeks he enjoyed his hangovers, made sweeter by the knowledge that they were acquired at someone else's expense.

  Then Mr. Dante Ignazio appeared at his desk. Mr. Ignazio had gone to Santa Clara with Michael Garrity, but Mr. Ignazio had gone on to graduate and then went into big-scale contracting in Santa Clara Valley. He tore down prune trees and put up houses and he prospered exceedingly. He prospered until the spring of Election Year when the recession set in. Then, maddeningly, surprisingly, malignantly, buyers no longer had the down payment or did not want to put it down. They did not have enough money to qualify for the FHA loans and too few of them were veterans.

  For three weeks Mr. Ignazio's fortunes dangled in the balance. The houses did not sell; the liens poured in; the blank-faced men from the banks walked curiously about the empty project. Then Mr. Ignazio went to see his classmate, Michael Garrity.

  "Here are fifty applications of people who want to buy houses on my Santa Clara tract," Mr. Ignazio said. "That is, they will buy them if they can qualify for the veterans' loan and avoid the big down payment they have to make on FHA ordinary bank loans. Christ, Mike, why does the government jack up the down so high?"

  Michael grinned sympathetically. They both looked out the windows, down the tree-lined streets of Sacramento glittering in the sunlight.

  "Sure, Iggy," Michael said. "I'll expedite them. If they're veterans we'll get them through."

  "But that's the point, Mike," Mr. Ignazio said softly. "They're not veterans."

  "Then it's hopeless, Iggy. Really hopeless."

  "Nothing's hopeless, Mike," Mr. Ignazio said, and his voice turned regretful, but under the voice, lost in its Italian softness was a hint of steel. "I thought, Mike, when I sent you that case of Old Taylor and the beer that you understood that. Didn't you read the note? If you read the note and didn't send the liquor back, Mike, I think it's a little dishonest."

  "What note?" Michael Garrity asked.

  He looked across at Mr. Ignazio and he knew that they both understood that there was no note with the liquor. But he also knew that it did not matter. The Old Taylor was floating in his blood stream, had gone to fat around his middle. He had belched the Budweiser for two weeks, had floated euphorically on the windfall of booze, had gotten fat on the whole mess of it. Dimly Michael Garrity perceived that he had been bribed and that he had accepted; that literally the bribe had become a part of his body. Metaphysically, he was one with it; there was no way he could ever rid himself of it again. Bitterly he recalled the lectures by Brother Cooley at Santa Clara on the nature of sin and willfulness and gluttony. He knew that he had sinned; that the initialing of the forms would be a lesser sin and that, dimly, inarticulately, dumbly, he knew that the larger sin authorized the lesser.

  He looked up at Mr. Ignazio, suddenly shy with the enormity of what he was doing.

  "All right, lggy, I'll do it," he said.

  And that night Mr. Ignazio had Sharp's Liquor Store send Michael Garrity three more cases of Budweiser and another case of Old Taylor. The head clerk at Sharp's was a lean and very sharp Mexican boy, who was passionately devoted to the Democratic Party and he thought for a few days about the probity of a private contractor sending liquor to a state employee in the housing division. Then he went to the office of a lawyer who was high in the councils of the Democratic Party and told his story. The lawyer's eyes gleamed, he patted the Mexican on the back and lifted his phone.

  Three
days later the newspapers carried headlines. "Graft Charged in State Housing," "Housing Official Says Bribe Charges 'Politics,'" "Attorney General Says Indictments Will Issue," "Democrats Charge Corruption in Veterans Housing."

  Michael Garrity left his five children and his flaccid wife and his beery tastes and began an elaborate habituation of jails and lockups that ended finally when he was sentenced to five years in San Quentin.

  That spring the matter of graft in state offices became a political issue.

  And in these ways, and many others, the issues of Election Year unfolded. They were known by manifestoes, resolutions, newspaper editorials, handbills, polls and television and radio.

  The issues were made public by the leaders of the Spanish vote, the German vote, the Italian vote, the realtors vote, the Japanese vote, the oil vote, the orange vote, the lemon vote, the walnut vote, the radical vote, the conservative vote, the socialist vote, the golf-club vote, the Montgomery Street vote, the Spring Street vote, the South of Market vote, the Negro vote, the rural vote, the urban vote, and others. And nobody listened.