The Gold Coast
Page 43
“Oh,” Jim says awkwardly. “I hadn’t heard. I was up in the mountains with Tashi.”
“Yeah. They got all my files and everything else.” He shakes his head bleakly. “Ambank has already pulled out of the Pourva Tower project because of the delays, they said. I just think they’re scared, but whatever. It doesn’t matter. The project is a goner.”
“I’m sorry, Humph,” Jim says. “Real sorry.” And the part of him that would have been pleased at this unexpected turn—something good coming out of his madness, after all—has gone away. Seeing the expression on Humphrey’s face it has vanished, at least for the moment, from existence. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Humphrey says, looking puzzled. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Uh-huh. Still, you know. I’m sorry.”
* * *
All these apologies. And he’s going to have to give Sheila Mayer a call sometime, and apologize to her too. He groans at the thought. But he’s going to have to do it.
* * *
So Jim spends the afternoon pacing his little living room. He stares at his books. He’s much too restless to read. To be on his own, by himself—not today, though! Not today. He calls Hana again. No answer, no answering machine. “Come on, Hana, answer your phone!” But he can’t even tell her that.
Okay. Here he is. He’s alone, on his own, in his own home. What should he do? He thinks aloud: “When you change your life, when you’re a carbrain suddenly free of the car, off the track, what do you do? You don’t have the slightest idea. What do you do if you don’t have a plan? You make a plan. You make the best plan you can.”
Okay. He’s wandering the living room, making a plan. He walks around aimlessly. He’s lonely. He wants to be with his friends—the shields between him and his self, perhaps. But they’re all gone now, scattered by some force that Jim feels, obscurely, that he initiated; his bad faith started it all.… But no, no. That’s magical thinking. In reality he has had hardly any effect on anything. Or so it seems. But which is right? Did he really do it, did he really somehow scatter everyone away?
He doesn’t know.
Okay. Enough agonizing over the past. Here he is. He’s free, he and he only chooses what he will do. What will he do?
He will pace. And mourn Tashi’s departure. And rail bitterly against … himself. He can’t escape the magical thinking, he knows that it has somehow been all his fault. He’s lonely. Will he be able to adapt to this kind of solitude, does he have the self-reliance necessary?
But think of Tom’s solitude. My God! Uncle Tom!
He should go see Tom.
He runs out to the car and tracks down to Seizure World.
On the way he feels foolish, he is sure it’s obvious to everyone else on the freeway that he is doing something utterly bizarre in order to prove to himself that he is changing his life, when in reality it’s all the same as before. But what else can he do? How else do it?
Then as he drives through the gates he becomes worried; Tom was awfully sick when he last dropped by, anything can happen when you’re that old, and sick like he was. He runs from the parking lot to the front desk.
But Tom is still alive, and in fact he is doing much better, thanks. He’s sitting up in his bed, looking out the window and reading a big book.
“How are you, boy?” He sounds much better, too.
“Fine, Tom. And you?”
“Much better, thanks. Healthier than in a long time.”
“Good, good. Hey Tom, I went to the mountains!”
“Did you! The Sierras? Aren’t they beautiful? Where’d you go?”
Jim tells him, and it turns out Tom has been in that region. They talk about it for half an hour.
“Tom,” Jim says at last, “why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me about it and make me go up there?”
“I did! Wait just a minute here! I told you all the time! But you thought it was stupid. Bucolic reactionary pastoral escapism, you called it. Mushrooms on the dead log of Nature, you said.”
That was something Jim read once. “Damn my reading!”
Tom squints. “Actually, I’m reading a great book here. On early Orange County, the ranchero days. Like listen to this—when the rancheros wanted to get their cowhides from San Juan Capistrano to the Yankee trading ships off Dana Point, they took them to the top of Dana Point bluff, at low tide when the beach was really wide, and just tossed them over the side! Big cowhides thrown off a cliff like frisbees, flapping down through the air to land out there on the beach. Nice, eh?”
“Yes,” Jim says. “It’s a a lovely image.”
They talk a while longer about the book. Then a nurse comes by to shoo Jim away—visiting hours are over for a while.
“Jail’s closed, boy. Come back when you can.”
“I will, Tom. Soon.”
* * *
Okay. That’s one stop, one step. That’s something that will become part of the new life. All his moaning about the death of community, when the materials for it lay all around him, available anytime he wanted to put the necessary work into it.… Ah, well.
Okay. What else? Restlessly Jim tracks home, starts pacing again. He tries calling Hana, gets no answer. And no machine. Damn it, she’s got to be home sometime!
What to do. No question of sleep, it’s early evening and again this isn’t a night for it, he can tell. His head is too full. As a seasoned insomniac he knows there isn’t a chance.
He stops by his desk. Everything neatly in place, the torn-up and taped-together OC pages on top at one corner. He picks them up, starts to read through them.
As he does, the actual words on the page disappear, and he sees not OC’s past but the last few weeks. His own past. Each painful step on the path that got him here. Then he reads again, and the anguish of his own experience infuses the sentences, fills the county’s short and depressing history of exploitation and loss. Dreams have ended before, here.
Okay. He’s a poet, a writer. Therefore he writes. Therefore he sits down, takes up a sheet of paper, a ballpoint pen.
There’s a moment in OC’s past that he’s avoided writing about, he never noticed it before and at first he thinks it’s just a coincidence; but then, as he considers it, it seems to him that it has been more than that. It is, in fact, the central moment, the hinge point in the story when it changed for good. He’s been afraid to write it down.
He chews the end of the pen to white plastic shards. Puts it to paper and writes. Time passes.
82
This is the chapter I have not been able to write.
Through the 1950s and 1960s the groves were torn down at the rate of several acres every day. The orchard keepers and their trees had fought off a variety of blights in previous years—the cottony cushion scale, the black scale, the red scale, the “quick decline”—but they had never faced this sort of blight before, and the decline this time was quicker than ever. In these years they harvested not the fruit, but the trees.
This is how they did it.
Gangs of men came in with trucks and equipment. First they cut the trees down with chain saws. This was the simple part, the work of a minute. Thirty seconds, actually: one quick downward bite, the chain saw pulled out, one quick upward bit.
The trees fall.
Chains and ropes are tossed over the fallen branches, and electric reels haul them over to big dumpsters. Men with smaller chain saws cut the fallen trees into parts, and the parts are fed into an automatic shredder that hums constantly, whines and shrieks when branches are fed into it. Wood chips are all that come out.
Leaves and broken oranges are scattered over the torn ground. There is a tangy, dusty citrus smell in the air; the dust that is part of the bark of these trees has been scattered to the sky.
The stumps are harder. A backhoelike tractor is brought to the stump. The ground around the stump is spaded, churned up, softened. Chains are secured around the trunk, right at ground level, or even beneath it, around the bigg
est root exposed. Then the tractor backs off, jerks. Gears grind, the diesel engine grunts and hums, black fumes shoot out the exhaust pipe at the sky. In jerks the stump heaves out of the ground. The root systems are not very big, nor do they extend very deeply. Still, when the whole thing is hauled away to the waiting dumpsters, there is a considerable crater left behind.
The eucalyptus trees are harder. Bringing the trees down is still relatively easy; several strokes of a giant chain saw, with ropes tied around the tree to bring it down in the desired direction. But then the trunk has to be sawed into big sections, like loggers’ work, and the immense cylinders are lifted by bulldozers and small cranes onto the backs of waiting trucks. And the stumps are more stubborn; roots have to be cut away, some digging done, before the tractors can succeed in yanking them up. The eucalyptus have been planted so close together that the roots have intertwined, and it’s safest to bring down only every third tree, then start on the ones left. The pungent dusty smell of the eucalyptus tends to overpower the citrus scent of the orange trees. The sap gums up the chain saws. It’s hard work.
Across the grove, where the trees are already gone, and the craters bulldozed away, surveyors have set out stakes with red strips of plastic tied in bows around their tops. These guide the men at the cement mixers, the big trucks whose contents grumble as their barrels spin. They will be pouring foundations for the new tract houses before the last trees are pulled out.
Now it’s the end of a short November day. Early 1960s. The sun is low, and the shadows of the remaining eucalyptus in the west wall—one in every three—fall across the remains of the grove. There are nothing but craters left, today; craters, and stacks of wood by the dumpsters. The backhoes and tractors and bulldozers are all in a yellow row, still as dinosaurs. Cars pass by. The men whose work is done for the day have congregated by the canteen truck, open on one side, displaying evening snacks of burritos and triangular sandwiches in clear plastic boxes. Some of the men have gotten bottles of beer out of their pickups, and the click pop hiss of bottles opening mingles with their quiet talk. Cars pass by. The distant hum of the Newport Freeway washes over them with the wind. Eucalyptus leaves fall from the trees still standing.
Out in the craters, far from the men at the canteen truck, some children are playing. Young boys, using the craters as foxholes to play some simple war game. The craters are new, they’re exciting, they show what orange roots look like, something the boys have always been curious about. Cars pass by. The shadows lengthen. One of the boys wanders off alone. Tire tracks in the torn dirt lead his gaze to one of the cement mixers, still emitting its slushy grumble. He sits down to look at it, openmouthed. Cars pass by. The other boys tire of their game and go home to dinner, each to his own house. The men around the trucks finish their beers and their stories, and they get into their pickup trucks—thunk! thunk!—and drive off. A couple of supervisors walk around the dirt lot, planning the next day’s work. They stop by a stack of wood next to the shredder. It’s quiet, you can hear the freeway in the distance. A single boy sits on a crater’s edge, staring off at the distance. Cars pass by. Eucalyptus leaves spinnerdrift to the ground. The sun disappears. The day is done, and shadows are falling
across our empty field.
83
When Jim is done, he types a fair copy into the computer. Prints it up. He sticks it in with the taped-up pages. No, those poor tape-up jobs won’t do. He types them all into the computer again, filling them out, revising them. Then he prints up new copies of each. There we go. Orange County. He never was much of a one for titles. Call it Torn Maps, why not.
Much of the night has passed. Jim gets up stiffly, hobbles out to look around. Four A.M.; the freeways at its quietest. After a bit he goes back inside, and holds the newly printed pages in his hands. It’s not a big book, nor a great one; but it’s his. His, and the land’s. And the people who lived here through all the years; it’s theirs too, in a way. They all did their best to make a home of the place—those of them who weren’t actively doing their best to parcel and sell it off, anyway. And even them … Jim laughs. Clearly he’ll never be able to resolve his ambivalence regarding his hometown, and the generations who made it. Impossible to separate out the good from the bad, the heroic from the tawdry.
Okay, what next? Light-headed, Jim wanders his home again, the pages clutched in his hand. What should he do? He isn’t sure. It’s awful, having one’s habits shattered, having to make one’s life up from scratch; you have to invent it all moment to moment, and it’s hard!
He eats some potato chips, cleans up the kitchen. He sits down at his little Formica kitchen table; and briefly, head down on his pages, he naps.
While he’s asleep, crouched uncomfortably over the table, he dreams. There’s an elevated freeway on the cliff by the edge of the sea, and in the cars tracking slowly along are all his friends and family. They have a map of Orange County, and they’re tearing it into pieces. His father, Hana, Tom, Tashi, Abe, his mom, Sandy and Angela … Jim, down on the beach, cries out at them to stop tearing the map; no one hears him. And the pieces of the map are jigsaw puzzle pieces, big as family-sized pizzas, pale pastel in color, and all his family take these pieces and spin them out into the air like frisbees, till they stall and tumble down onto a beach as wide as the world. And Jim runs to gather them up, hard work in the loose sand, which sparkles with gems; and then he’s on the beach, trying to put together this big puzzle before the tide comes in—
He starts awake.
He gets up; he has a plan. He’ll track up the Santiago Freeway to Modjeska Canyon and Hana’s house, with his pages, and he’ll sit down under the eucalyptus trees on the lawn outside her white garage, and he’ll wait there till she comes out or comes home. And then he’ll make her read the pages, make her see … whatever she’ll see. And from there … well, whatever. That’s as far as he can plan. That’s his plan.
He goes to the bathroom, quick brushes his teeth and hair, pees, goes out to the car. It’s still dark! Four-thirty A.M., oh well. No time like the present. And he gets in his car and tracks onto the freeway, in his haste punching the wrong program and getting on in the wrong direction. It takes a while to get turned around. The freeway is almost empty: tracks gleaming under the moon, the lightshow at its absolute minimum, a coolness to the humming air. He gets off the freeway onto Chapman Avenue, down the empty street under flashing yellow stoplights, past the dark parking lots and shopping centers and the dark Fluffy Donuts place that stands over the ruins of El Modena Elementary School, past the Quaker church and up into the dark hills. Then onto the Santiago Freeway, under the blue mercury vapor lights, the blue-white concrete flowing under him, the dark hillsides spangled with streetlights like stars, a smell of sage in the air rushing by the window. And he comes to Hana’s exit and takes the offramp, down in a big concrete curve, down and down to the embrace of the hills, the touch of the earth. Any minute he’ll be there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of my friends and family gave me a lot of help with various aspects of this book. I’d like to thank Terry Baier, Daryl Bonin, Brian Carlisle, Donald and Nancy Crosby, Patrick Delahunt, Robert Franko, Charles R. Ill, Beth Meacham, Lisa Nowell, Linda Rogas, and Victor Salerno.
A special thanks to Steve Bixler and Larry Huhn; and to my parents.
By Kim Stanley Robinson from Tom Doherty Associates
The Blind Geometer
Escape from Kathmandu
Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (Editor)
The Gold Coast
Green Mars
Icehenge
The Memory of Whiteness
Pacific Edge
The Planet on the Table
Remaking History
A Short, Sharp Shock
The Wild Shore
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE GOLD COAST
Copyright © 1988 by Kim Stanley Rob
inson
All rights reserved.
This book was originally published as a Tor hardcover in February 1988.
An Orb Edition
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Kim Stanley.
The Gold Coast / Kim Stanley Robinson.
p. cm. — (Three Californias)
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-312-89037-7
1. Orange County (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Robinson, Kim Stanley. Three Californias.
PS3568.O2893G65 1995]
813'.54—dc20
95-4272
CIP
eISBN 9781466861336
First eBook edition: November 2013