The Wild Shore
Page 40
I noticed something I had never seen before. On the flat blue sea were perfect reflections of the tall clouds, clearly shaped so you could tell they were upside down. It looked like they were floating underwater, in a dark blue sky. “Will you look at that,” I said aloud, and stood. Ever so slowly the clouds drifted onshore over the valley, and their upside-down twins disappeared under the beach. I stayed and watched that all day, feeling like oceans of clouds were filling me. Later the afternoon onshore breeze ruffled the mirror clouds, and the sun got too low and glared off the water. But I went home satisfied.
* * *
In the winter the scavengers hole up in some of the big, shattered old houses—a dozen or more of them to a house, like dens of foxes. At night they use the neighboring houses for firewood, and light big bonfires in the front yards, and they drink and dance to old music, and fight and howl and throw jewelry at the stars and into the snow. A solitary man, gliding over the drifts on long snowshoes, can move amongst these bright noisy settlements without trouble. He can crouch out in the trees like a wolf, and watch them cavort in their colored down jackets for as long as he likes, undisturbed. Their summer haunts are open to his inspection. And there are books up there, yes, lots of books. The scavengers like the little fat one with the orange sun on the cover, but many more lie unattended in the ruins around them—whole libraries, sometimes. A man can load himself down till his snowshoes sink knee-deep, and then return, a scavenger of a different sort, to his own country, his own winter den.
* * *
At the end of January a particularly violent storm undermined the side of the Mendez’s garden shed (they called it a barn), and as soon as the rain stopped all the immediate neighbors—the Marianis, the Simpsons, and Pa and I, with Rafael called in for advice—got out to give them a hand in shoring up that wall. The Mendez garden was as cold and muddy as the ocean floor, and there wasn’t a patch of solid ground to set beams on, to prop up the wall while we worked under it. Eventually Rafael got us to tie the shed to the big oak on the other side of it. “I hope the framing was nailed together good,” Rafael joked when we were back under the sagging wall. Kathryn and I worked one side, Gabby and Del dug out the other, and we practically drowned in mud. By the time we got beams set crosswise under the wall for foundations, all four families were ready for the bathhouse. Rafael had gone before us, so when we got there the fire was blazing and the water steamed. We stripped and hopped in the dirt bath and hooted with glee.
“My suggestion is you leave that rope there,” Rafael said to old Mendez. “That way you’ll never have to find out if those beams will hold it up or not.” Mendez wasn’t amused.
I rolled over into the clean bath and floated with him and Mrs. Mariani and the others. Kathryn and I sat on one of the wood islands and talked. She asked me if I was still writing. I told her I was nearly done, but that I’d stopped because it was so bad.
“You’re no judge of that,” she said. “Finish it.”
“I suppose I will.”
We talked about the storms, the snow, the condition of the fields (they were under tarps or cover crops for the winter), the swells battering the beach, food. “I wonder how Doc is doing,” I said.
“Tom goes up there a lot. They’re getting to be like brothers.”
“Good.”
Kathryn shook her head. “Even so—Doc’s busted, you know.” She looked at me. “He won’t last long.”
“Ah.” I didn’t know what to say. After a long pause looking at the swirling water, I said, “Do you ever think about Steve?”
“Sure.” She eyed me. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah. But I have to, with this book.”
Under my reproachful gaze she shrugged, and her nipples bobbed on the bubbling surface. “You would book or not. If you’re like me. But it’s past, Henry. That’s all it is—the past.”
I told her about the day when the sea had been so glassy that it mirrored the clouds, and she sat back and laughed. “It sounds wonderful.”
“I don’t know when I’ve ever seen anything so pretty.”
She reached over the wood island, and ran a finger down the crease between the muscles of the backside of my arm. I arched my eyebrows, and with a grin slipped off the seat to float around and tussle with her. She caught me by the hair. “Henry,” she laughed, and held my head under, giving me more immediate matters to think about, like choking on water and drowning. I came up spluttering. She laughed again and gestured at the friends around us. “Well?” I said, and went under for a submerged approach, but she stood and sloshed away, leading me to the wall seats where the others were. After that we talked with Gabby and Kristen, and later old Mendez, who thanked us for our help with his barn.
But when Rafael declared the day’s allotment of wood was burned, and we got out of the baths and dried off, and dressed, I looked around the room, and there was Kathryn looking at me from the door. I followed her out. The evening air chilled my head and hands instantly. There was Kathryn, on the path between two trees. I caught up with her and took her in a hug. We kissed. There are kisses that have a whole future in them; I learned that then. When we were done her mother and sisters were chattering out the bathhouse door. I let her go. She looked surprised, thoughtful, pleased. If it had been summer—but it was winter, there was snow everywhere. And summer was coming. She smiled at me, and with a touch walked off to join them, looking back once to meet my gaze. When she was out of sight I walked home through the dusk (white snow, black trees) with a whole new idea in mind.
* * *
Some afternoons I just sat before the window and looked at the book—left it closed, in the middle of the table, and stared at it. One of these times the snowflakes were drifting down through the trees as slowly as tufts of dandelion, and every branch and needle was tipped with new white. Into this vision tramped a figure on snowshoes, wearing furs. He had a pole in each hand to help his balance, and as he brushed between trees he sent little avalanches onto his head and down his back. The old man, out trapping, I thought. But he hiked right up to the window and waved.
I slipped on my shoes and went outside. It was cold. “Henry!” Tom called.
“What’s up?” I said as I rounded our house.
“I was out checking my traps, and I ran into Neville Cranston, an old friend of mine. He summers in San Diego and winters in Hemet, and he was on his way over to Hemet, because he got a late start this year.”
“That’s too bad,” I said politely.
“No, listen! He just left San Diego, didn’t you hear me? And you know what he told me? He told me that the new mayor down there is Frederick Lee!”
“Say what?”
The new mayor of San Diego is Lee. Neville said that Lee was always in trouble with that Danforth, because he wouldn’t go along with any of Danforth’s war plans, you know.”
“So that’s why we stopped seeing him.”
“Exactly. Well, apparently there were a lot of people down there who were behind Lee, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it while Danforth and his men had all the guns. Neville said this whole fall has been a dog fight down there, but a couple months ago Lee’s supporters forced an election, and Lee won.”
“Well, what do you know.” We stared at each other, and I found myself grinning. “That’s good news, isn’t it.”
He nodded. “You bet it’s good news.”
“Too bad we blew up those train tracks.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it is good news, no doubt about it. Well”—he waved one of his poles overhead—“Lousy weather to be standing around chattering in. I’m off.” And with a little whistle he snowshoed off through the trees, leaving a trail of deep tracks. And I knew I could finish.
* * *
The book lay on the table. One night (February the 23rd) the full moon was up. I went to bed without looking at the book, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of it, and talking to the pages in my mind. I heard a voice inside me tha
t said it all perfectly, said it far better than I ever could: this voice rattled off long imaginary passages, telling it all in the greatest detail and with the utmost eloquence, bringing it back just as lived. I heard the rhythms of it as sure as the rhythms of Pa’s snores (though the sense of it was not as clear), and it put an ache in me it was so beautiful. I thought, It’s some poet’s ghost come to visit me, maybe, come to show me how to tell it.
Eventually it drove me to get up and finish the thing off. Our house was cold, the fire in the stove was down to filmy grey coals. I put on pants and socks, and a thick shirt and a blanket over my shoulders. Moonlight poured in the window like a silver bar, turning all the bare wood furnishings into finely carved, almost living things. It was a light so strong I could write by it. I sat at the table under the window and wrote as fast as my hand would move, though what I wrote was nothing like the voice I had heard when I was lying down. Not a chance.
Most of the night passed. My left hand got sore and crampy from writing, and I was restless. The moon was dipping into the trees, obscuring my light. I decided to go for a walk. I put on my boots and my heavy coat, and shoved the book and some pencils in the coat’s big pocket.
Outside it was colder yet. The dew on the grass sparkled where moonlight fell on it. On the river path I stopped to look back up the valley, which receded through the thick air in patchy blacks and whites. There wasn’t a trace of wind, and it was so still and quiet that I could hear the snow melting everywhere around me, dripping and plopping and filling my ears with a liquid music, plinka plonk, pip pip pip pip, gurgle gorgle plop tik tik plop, plop plop plinka plop pip pip pip.… A forest water choir, yes, accompanying me as I slushed down the path, hands in my big coat pockets. River black between salt-and-pepper trees.
On the cliff path I had to step careful, because the steps were half slush, half mud. Down on the beach the crack of each little wave break was clear and distinct. The salt spray in the air glowed, and because of it and the moon hardly a star was visible; just a fuzzy black sky, white around the moon. I walked out to the point beside the rivermouth, where a fine sand hill had built up, cut away on both sides by river and ocean. On the point where these two little sand cliffs met I sat down, being careful not to collapse the whole thing. I took out the book and opened it; and here I sit at this very moment, caught up at last, scribbling in it by the light of the fat old moon.
* * *
Now I know this is the part of the story where the author winds it all up in a fine flourish that tells what it all meant, but luckily there are only a couple of pages left in this here book, so there isn’t room. I’m glad of it. It’s a good thing I took the trouble to copy out those chapters of An American Around the World, so that it turned out this way. The old man told me that when I was done writing I would understand what happened, but he was wrong again, the old liar. Here I’ve taken the trouble to write it all down, and now I’m done and I don’t have a dog’s idea what it meant. Except that most everything I know is wrong, especially the stuff I learned from Tom. I’m going to have to go through everything I know and try to figure out where he lied and where he told the truth. I’ve been doing that already with the books I’ve found, and with books he doesn’t know I borrowed from him, and I’ve found out a lot of things already. I’ve found out that the American Empire never included Europe, like he said it did—that they never did bury their dead in suits of gold armor—that we weren’t the first and only nation to go into space—that we didn’t make cars that flew and floated over water—and that there never were dragons around here (I don’t think, although a bird guide might not be where they were mentioned, I don’t know). All lies—those and a hundred more facts Tom told me. All lies.
I’ll tell you what I do know: the tide is out, and the waves roll up the rivermouth. At first it looks like each wave is pushing the whole flow of the river inland, because all the visible movement is in that direction. Little trailers of the wave roll up the bank, break over the hard sand and add their bit to the flat’s stippled crosshatching. For a time it looks like the wave will push upriver all the way around the first bend. But underneath its white jumble the river has been flowing out to sea all the while, and finally the wave stalls on top of this surge, breaks into a confused chop, and suddenly the entire disturbance is being borne out to sea—until it’s swept under the next incoming wave, and the movement turns upriver again. Each wave is a different size, and meets a different resistance, and as a result there is an infinite variety of rippling, breaking, chopping, gliding.… The pattern is never once the same. Do you see what I mean? Do you understand me, Steve Nicolin? You rather be holding on to what can be made to last than out hunting the new. But good luck to you, brother. Do some good for us out there.
As for me: the moon lays a mirrorflake road to the horizon. The snow on the beach melted yesterday, but it might as well be a beach of snow the way it looks in this light, against the edge of the black sea. Above the cliffs stand the dark hillsides of the valley, cupped, tilted to pour into the ocean. Onofre. This damp last page is nearly full. And my hand is getting cold—it’s getting so stiff I can’t make the letters, these words are all big and scrawling, taking up the last of the space, thank God. Oh be done with it. There’s an owl, flitting over the river. I’ll stay right here and fill another book.
By Kim Stanley Robinson from Tom Doherty Associates
Escape from Kathmandu
Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias
The Gold Coast
Icehenge
The Memory of Whiteness
Pacific Edge
Remaking History and Other Stories
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 WILD SHORE
Copyright © 1984 by Kim Stanley Robinson
All rights reserved.
This book was originally published in 1984 by Ace Science Fiction Books, a division of The Berkley Publishing Group, New York.
Maps by Mark Stein
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 wild shore / Kim Stanley Robinson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-89036-2 (paperback)
1. Orange County (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Robinson, Kim Stanley. Three Californias.
PS3568.O2893W55 1995
813'.54—dc20
95-4273
CIP
eISBN 9781466861329
First eBook edition: December 2013