Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So he was lulled a bit, deep in the rhythms of what was essentially a very ordinary game, when suddenly things picked up. The Oranges scored four runs in their final at-bat, and now with two outs Santos Perez was coming to bat. Santos was a strong pull hitter, and as Donna prepared to pitch, Kevin settled into his cleat-scored position off third base, extra alert.

  A short pitch dropped and Santos smashed a hot grounder to Kevin’s left. Kevin dove instantly but the ball bounced past his glove, missing it by an inch. He hit the dirt cursing, and as he slid forward on chest and elbows he looked back, just in time to see the sprinting Ramona lunge out and snag the ball.

  It was a tremendous backhand catch, but she had almost over-balanced to make it, and now she was running directly away from first base, very deep in the hole. There was no time to stop and set, and so she leaped in the air, spun to give the sidearm throw some momentum, and let it fly with a vicious flick of the wrist. The ball looped across the diamond and Jody caught it neatly on one hop at first base, just ahead of the racing Santos. Third out. Game over.

  “Yeah!” Kevin cried, pushing up to his knees. “Wow!”

  Everyone was cheering. Kevin looked back at Ramona. She had tumbled to the ground after the throw, and now she was sitting on the outfield grass, long, graceful, splay-legged, grinning, black hair in her eyes. And Kevin fell in love.

  * * *

  Of course that isn’t exactly how it happened. That isn’t the whole story. Kevin was a straightforward kind of guy, and crazy about softball, but still, he was not the kind of person who would fall in love on the strength of a good play at shortstop. No, this was something else, something that had been developing for years and years.

  He had known Ramona Sanchez since she first arrived in El Modena, when they were both in third grade. They had been in the same classes in grade school—including, yes, the class with the famous debate—and had shared a lot of classes in junior high. And Kevin had always liked her. One day in sixth grade she had told him she was Roman Catholic, and he had told her that there were Greek Catholics too. She had denied it disdainfully, and so they had gone to look it up in the encyclopedia. They had failed to find a listing for “Greek Catholic,” which Kevin could not understand, as his grandfather Tom had certainly mentioned such a church. But having been proved right Ramona became sympathetic, and even scanned the index and found a listing for “Greek Orthodox Church,” which seemed to explain things. After that they sat before the screen and read the entry, and scanned through other articles, talking about Greece, the travels they had made (Ramona had been to Mexico, Kevin had been to Death Valley), the possibilities of buying a Greek island and living on it, and so on.

  After that Kevin had had a crush on Ramona, one that he never told anyone about—certainly not her. He was a shy boy, that’s all there was to it. But the feeling persisted, and in junior high when it became the thing to have romantic friends, life was a dizzying polymorphous swirl of crushes and relationships, and everyone was absorbed in it. So over the course of junior high’s three years, shy Kevin gradually and with difficulty worked himself up to the point of asking Ramona out to a school dance—to Homecoming, in fact, the big dance of the year. When he asked her, stammering with fright, she made him feel like she thought it was an excellent idea; but said she had already accepted an invitation, from Alfredo Blair.

  The rest was history. Ramona and Alfredo had been a couple, aside from the brief breaks that stormy high school romances often have, from that Homecoming to the present day.

  In later years, however, as El Modena High School’s biology teacher, Ramona had developed the habit of taking her classes out to Kevin’s construction sites, to learn some applied ecology—also carpentry, and a bit of architecture—all while helping him out a little. Kevin liked that, even though the students were only marginally more help than hassle. It was a friendly thing, something he and Ramona did to spend time together.

  Still, she and Alfredo were partners. They never married, but always lived together. So Kevin had gotten used to thinking of Ramona as a friend only. A good friend, sort of like his sister Jill—only not like a sister, because there had always been an extra attraction. A shared attraction, it seemed. It wasn’t all that important, but it gave their friendship a kind of thrill, a nice fullness—a kind of latent potential, perhaps, destined never to be fulfilled. Which made it romantic.

  A lifelong thing, then. And before the softball game, while warming Ramona up, he had been conscious of seeing her in a way that he hadn’t for years—seeing the perfect proportions of her back and legs, shoulders and bottom—the dramatic Hispanic coloring, the fine features that made her one of the town beauties—the grace of her strong overhand throw—her careless unselfconsciousness. Deep inside him memories had stirred, memories of feelings he would have said were long forgotten, for he never thought of his past much, and if asked would have assumed it had all slipped away. And yet there it was, stirring inside him, ready at a moment’s notice to leap back out and take over his life.

  * * *

  So when he turned to look at her after her spectacular play, and saw her sprawled on the grass, long brown legs akimbo so that he was looking at the green crotch of her gym shorts, at a white strip of their underlining on the inside of one thigh—her weight on one straightened arm, white T-shirt molded against her almost flat chest—brushing hair out of black eyes, smiling for the first time that afternoon—it was as if all Kevin’s life had been a wind-up, and this the throw. As if he had stepped into a dream in which all emotions were intensified. Whoosh! went the air out of his lungs. His heart thudded, the skin of his face flushed and tingled with the impact of it, with the recognition of it, and yes—it was love. No doubt about it.

  * * *

  To feel was to act for Kevin, and so as soon as they were done packing up equipment and changing shoes, he looked for Ramona. She had become unusually silent again, after the rush of congratulations for her game ender, and now she was biking off by herself. Kevin caught up with her on his little mountain bike, then matched her speed. “Are you going to the council meeting tonight?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Not going to see Alfredo sworn in as mayor. It was definitely true, then. “Wow,” he said.

  “Well, you know—I just don’t feel like being there and having lots of people assume we’re still together, for photos maybe even. It would be awkward as hell.”

  “I can see that. So … What’re you gonna do this afternoon?”

  She hesitated. “I was thinking of going flying, actually. Work some of this out of my system.”

  “Ah.”

  She looked over at him. “Want to join me?”

  Kevin’s heart tocked at the back of his throat. His inclination was to say “Sure!” and he always followed his inclinations; thus it was a measure of his interest that he managed to say, “If you really feel like company? I know that sometimes I just like to get off by myself.…”

  “Ah, well. I wouldn’t mind the company. Might help.”

  “Usually does,” Kevin said automatically, not paying attention to what he was saying, or how it failed to match with what he had just said before. He could feel his heart. He grinned. “Hey, that was a hell of a play you made there.”

  * * *

  At a glider port on Fairhaven they untied the Sanchezs’ two-person flyer, a Northrop Condor, and after hooking it to the take-off sling they strapped themselves in and clipped their feet into the pedals. Ramona freed the craft and with a jerk they were off, pedaling like mad. Ramona pulled back on the flaps, the sling uncoupled, they shot up like a pebble from a slingshot; then caught the breeze and rushed higher, like a kite pulled into the wind by an enthusiastic runner.

  “Yow!” Kevin cried, and Ramona said, “Pedal harder!” and they both pumped away, leaning back and pushing the little plane up with every stroke. The huge prop whirred before them, but two-seaters were not quite as efficient as one-seaters; the extra muscle did not qu
ite make up for the extra weight, and they had to grind at the tandem pedals as if racing to get the craft up to two hundred feet, where the afternoon sea breeze lifted them dizzily. Even a two-seater weighed less than thirty pounds, and gusts of the wind could toss them like a shuttlecock.

  Ramona turned them into this breeze with a gull’s swoop. The feel of it, the feel of flying! They relaxed the pace, settled into a long distance rhythm, swooped around the sky over Orange County. Hard work; it was one of the weird glories of their time, that the highest technologies were producing artifacts that demanded more intense physical labor than ever before—as in the case of human-powered flight, which required extreme effort from even the best endurance athletes. But once possible, who could resist it?

  Not Ramona Sanchez; she pedaled along, smiling with contentment. She flew a lot. Often while working on roofs, absorbed in the labor, imagining the shape of the finished home and the lives it would contain, Kevin would hear a voice from above, and looking up he would see her in her little Hughes Dragonfly, making a cyclist’s whirr and waving down like a sweaty air spirit. Now she said, “Let’s go to Newport and take a look at the waves.”

  And so they soared and dipped in the onshore wind, like their condor namesake. From time to time Kevin glanced at Ramona’s legs, working in tandem next to his. Her thighs were longer than his, her quads bigger and better defined: two hard muscles atop each leg, barely coming together in time to fit under the kneecap. They made her thighs look squared-off on top, an effect nicely balanced by long rounded curves beneath. And calf muscles out of an anatomical chart. The texture of her skin was very smooth, barely dusted by fine silky hair.…

  Kevin shook his head, surprised by the dreamlike intensity of his vision, by how well he could see her. He glanced down at the Newport Freeway, crowded as usual. From above, the bike lanes were a motley collection of helmets, backs, and pumping legs, over spidery lines of metal and rubber. The cars’ tracks gleamed like bands of silver embedded in the concrete, and cars hummed along them, blue roof red roof blue roof.

  As they cut curves in the air Kevin saw buildings he had worked on at one time or another: a house reflecting sunlight from canopies of cloudgel and thermocrete; a garage renovated to a cottage; warehouses, offices, a bell tower, a pond house.… His work, tucked here and there in the trees. It was fun to see it, to point it out, to remember the challenge of the task met and dealt with, for better or worse.

  Ramona laughed. “It must be nice to see your whole resumé like this.”

  “Yeah,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. He had been rattling on.

  She was looking at him.

  Tall eucalyptus windbreaks cut the land into giant rectangles, as if the basin were a quilt of homes, orchards, green and yellow crops. Kevin’s lungs filled with wind, he was buoyant at the sight of so much land, and all of it so familiar to him. The onshore breeze grew stronger over Costa Mesa, and they lofted toward the Irvine Hills. The big interchange of the San Diego and Newport freeways looked like a concrete pretzel. Beyond it there was a lot of water, reflecting the sunlight like scraps of mirror thrown on the land: streams, fish ponds, reservoirs, the marsh of Upper Newport Bay. It was low tide, and a lot of gray tidal flats were revealed, surrounded by reeds and clumps of trees. They could smell the salt stink of them on the wind, even up where they were. Thousands of ducks and geese bobbed on the water, making a beautiful speckled pattern.

  “Migration again,” Ramona said pensively. “Time for change.”

  “Headed north.”

  “The clouds are coming in faster than I thought they would.” She pointed toward Newport Beach. The afternoon onshore wind was bringing in low ocean clouds, as often happened in spring. The Torrey pines loved it, but it was no fun to fly in.

  “Well, what with the council meeting it won’t do me any harm to get back a little early,” Kevin said.

  Ramona shifted the controls and they made a wide turn over Irvine. The mirrored glass boxes in the industrial parks glinted in the sun like children’s blocks, green and blue and copper. Kevin glanced at Ramona and saw she was blinking rapidly. Crying? Ah—he’d mentioned the council meeting. Damn! And they’d been having such fun! He was an idiot. Impulsively he touched the back of her hand, where it rested on the control stick. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot.”

  “Oh,” she said, voice unsteady. “I know.”

  “So…” Kevin wanted to ask what had happened.

  She grimaced at him, intending it to be a comic expression. “It’s been pretty upsetting.”

  “I can imagine. You were together a long time.”

  “Fifteen years!” she said. “Nearly half my life!” She struck the stick angrily, and the Condor dipped left. Kevin winced.

  “Maybe it was too long,” she said. “I mean too long with nothing happening. And neither of us had any other partners before we got together.”

  Kevin almost brought up their talk over the encyclopedia in sixth grade, but decided not to. Perhaps as an example of a previous relationship it was not particularly robust.

  “High school sweethearts,” Ramona exclaimed. “It is a bad idea, just like everyone says. You have a lot of history together, sure, but you don’t really know if the other person is the best partner you could have. And then one of you gets interested in finding out!” She slammed the frame above the controls, making Kevin and the plane jump.

  “Uh huh,” he said. She was angry about it, that was clear. And it was great that she was letting it out like this, telling Kevin what she felt. If only she wouldn’t emphasize her points with those hard blows to the frame, so close to the controls.

  Also there was hardly any resistance in his pedals. They were turning the same chain together, and she was pumping away furiously, more than enough for both of them. And they were shuddering through little sideslips every time she pounded a point home. Kevin swallowed, determined not to interrupt her thoughts with mundane worries.

  “I mean you can’t help but wonder!” she was saying, waving a hand. “I know Alfredo did. I’m not all that interesting, I suppose—”

  “What?”

  “Well, there’s only a few things I really care about. And Alfredo is interested in everything.” Bang. Right above the flaps. “There’s so many things he’s into that you can’t even believe it.” Bang! “And he was always so God-damned busy!” BANG BANG BANG!

  “You have to be, to be a hundred,” Kevin said, watching her hands and cringing. With the slips they were losing altitude, he noted. Even pumping as hard as she was.

  “Yeah, sure you do. And he could be two hundreds! He could be a millionaire if they still had them, he really could! He’s got just what it takes.”

  “Must take a lot of time, huh?”

  “It takes your whole life!” WHAM.

  Kevin pedaled hard, but he was just spinning around, as if his pedals weren’t connected to a chain at all.

  “At least that’s what it felt like. And there we were not going anywhere, high school sweethearts at thirty-two. I don’t care that much about marriage myself, but my parents and grandparents are Catholic, and so are Alfredo’s, and you know how that is. Besides I was getting ready to have a family, you know every day I’m helping out with the kids in our house, and I thought why shouldn’t one of these be ours?” Bang! “But Alfredo was not into it, oh no. I don’t have time! he’d say. I’m not ready yet! And by the time he’s ready, it’ll be too late for me!” BANG! BANG! BANG!

  “Uck,” Kevin said, looking down at the treetops apprehensively. “It, uh, it wouldn’t take that much time, would it? Not in your house.”

  “You’d be surprised. A lot of people are there to help, but still, you always end up with them. And Alfredo … well, we talked about it for years. But nothing ever changed, damn it! So I got pretty bitchy, I guess, and Alfredo spent more and more time away, you know.…” She began to blink rapidly, voice wobbling.

  “Feedback loop,” Kevin said, trying to stick to analysis. A relation
ship had feedback loops, like any other ecology—that’s what Hank used to say. A movement in one direction or another could quickly spiral out of control. Kind of like a tailspin, now that Kevin thought about it. Harder than hell to re-stabilize after you fell into one of those. In fact people were killed all the time in crashes caused by them. Uncontrolled feedback loop. He tried to remember the few flying lessons he had taken. Mostly he was a grinder when he went flying.…

  But it could work both ways, he thought as some resistance returned to his pedals. Upward spiral, a great flourishing of the spirit, everything feeding into it—

  “A very bad feedback loop,” Ramona said.

  They pedaled on. Kevin pumped hard, kept his eye on the controls, on Ramona’s vehement right fist. He found her story rather amazing in some respects. He didn’t understand Alfredo. Imagine the chance to make love with this beautiful animal pumping away beside him, to watch her get fat with a child that was the combination of him and her.… He breathed erratically at the thought, suddenly aware of his own body, of his balls between his legs—

  He banished the thought, looked down at Tustin. Close. “So,” he said, thinking to go right at it. “You broke up.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know, I was getting really angry, but I probably would have stuck it out. I never really thought about anything else. But Alfredo, he got mad at me too, and … and—”

  She started to cry.

  “Ah, Ramona,” Kevin said. Wrong tack to take, there. The direct approach not always the best way. He pedaled hard, suddenly doing the work for both of them. Enormous resistance, she didn’t seem to be pedaling at all now. Not a good moment to bother her, though. He gritted his teeth and began to pedal like a fiend. Their flyer dropped anyway, sideslipping a bit. Incredible resistance in the pedals. They were dropping toward the hills behind Tustin. Directly at them, in fact. Ramona’s eyes were squeezed shut; she was too upset to notice anything. Kevin found his concern distracted. Fatal accidents in these things were not all that infrequent.