Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Crowder made a face. “Oh, Sir, I got programs out the wazoo, Sir. Don’t worry about that.”

  Now the head merely stared at Crowder. No more blinking. “And you’ve learned to game the programs sufficiently to play hooky?”

  Crowder watched his shoes as if to keep a sharp eye on some visible line between fibbing and lying. There were only certain subtleties a kid could get away with when dealing with a Charley, and none of them had to do with Motherland Security. And as he looked at his shoes, he scowled in Huandyai’s direction, for the latter, though almost two years younger, seemed poised to establish distance between them. But Crowder, standing his ground, nodded. Then he mumbled something.

  “I can’t hear you,” the head told him.

  This is what the head would have said under any circumstances, as Crowder well knew. But then he mumbled something again.

  “I said,” repeated the head, its inflection conveying less patience, “I—can’t—hear—you.”

  “I said, Sir, that a kid has to find out where the boundaries are,” Crowder enunciated clearly, looking up. “Sir.”

  Huandyai knew his friend to be a ballsy little heckaheck. It was one of the reasons he liked to hang out with him. But this gambit, or whatever Crowder thought it was, looked certain to be letting them both in for an official session of Gluteal Ardence. Why couldn’t the clown leave well enough alone? All they wanted to do was play hooky and take a walk in the Headlands, for Klegasakes.

  They could practically hear silicon making demands on superconductivity. But after what seemed like forever the head came back. Still not taking its eyes off Crowder, it said, “That’s pretty good, kid. Has anybody ever suggested that you might have what it takes to be Motherland rocket jock?”

  “Really?” Crowder lied.

  “I’m marking your card,” the Charley told them, with avuncular condescension. “We’ll see.”

  That much, both kids knew, was true.

  “Now beat it,” the Charley said, with the gruff inflection of sentimental pride.

  “Thank you, Sir,” the two declared almost simultaneously. And though Crowder’s shoes went straight to Skate, and he was across Union Square and heading north against the beam traffic on Powell Street before Huandyai could manual from Park through Trudge and eventually to Canter, he wasn’t all that far behind.

  The eye in the back of the Charley’s head, which the algorithm never bothered to blink, watched them go.

  Despite the heat of the day, the ascent to Coyote Ridge from Tennessee Valley presented little challenge to either pair of shoes. Sensing dirt both pairs defaulted to arcane settings approximating Primordial Hike. Crowder’s pair had all kinds of Tread modes, in fact it had the latest feature you could get for under five hundred shells, called Fuzzy Jog; and Huandyai’s did okay when manualed to any of its mere three Tread settings; but Hike was a crude function on either pair. Still, the ergonomics of both pairs were way ahead of, like, bare feet. You hear what the Info is e-cephing?

  Being a habitué of the last library in San Francisco, Crowder had taken the time to browse its vast inventory of paper nautical charts, and eventually noticed the tiny designation of Pirates Cove, just a few miles north of San Francisco in the most hotly contested piece of undeveloped real estate left in Northern California. The chart labeled it the Marin Peninsula; locals called it the Marin Headlands.

  The name caught his fancy. A precocious and prodigious reader, Crowder had long since burned through Dewey Decimal Section 910.45, “Voyages and Voyaging,” which included a great deal of single-hander literature from the twentieth-century, as well as pirate literature from the centuries preceding, and, so, like many a young lad before him, Crowder had buccaneers and the crack of canvas on his mind.

  And thus it came to pass that a day of hooky had been planned. Each boy had charged up his shoes, laid in a supply of sunscreen, and prepared a hearty lunch of vitamins and hydration fluids.

  It turned out it was only two miles, as the drone flies, once the beam let them off at the mouth of Tennessee Valley, but almost five miles as the shoes ambulate. The first mile, down the valley to Tennessee Cove, is flat, the next half mile switchbacked up to the ridge, and the next two miles is switchbacks, arroyos, ridgerunning, coyote signs and gopher holes, proving the gopher/coyote homeostasis to be humming right along, and a great deal of poison oak. They never did see an Audubon’s warbler—they wouldn’t see one if they parked an ever-vigilant Head on the highest point on the ridge and left it there for the next hundred years. Huandyai didn’t know it, but Crowder suspected it was so, and the Charley had statistics on its side. But the Charley was programmed to dispense Hope to the citizens whenever it wouldn’t cost the Program anything, and, thus, rumors to the effect that maybe the Audubon’s warbler wasn’t extinct after all were encouraged. Still, since nobody Crowder knew had ever actually seen a bird that wasn’t a crow, a seagull, or a pigeon, and despite this evidence that the carrion/garbage homeostasis was humming right along, which you would think might suggest the salubrity of the bird/insect homeostasis, a kid had to wonder.

  Sure enough, no sooner than he thought this thought, a turkey vulture lifted over the brow of the edge of the cliff to their left, not ten meters away. Two and a half to three hundred meters below the lip of the cliff, the Pacific seethed restlessly at its base, and while this was not without its intrinsic interest, the appearance of a relatively rare member of Cathartidae indicated that there must also be relatively rare dead or dying small mammals hereabouts.

  “There used to be lots of them. They sit in trees in the morning with their wings out like this.” Crowder held out his arms. “They have to wait for the sun to dry them before they can fly.”

  “Probably doesn’t take nearly so long as it used to,” Haundyai muttered, wiping perspiration off the tip of his nose. “They need sun block?”

  That was Huandyai all over. He was intimidated by the State, but he took very little for granted. It was one of the reasons Crowder let the kid hang around with him. That, and his shoes were never up to date, even though he had parents. Crowder knew a lot about a lot of things, but he was convinced that if you had parents your shoes would automatically update. Huandyai had never been able to disabuse Crowder of this prejudice, and Crowder kept Huandyai in his orbit because he was convinced that sooner or later the kid’s shoes would update and he’d be right there to call him on it.

  All of this conveniently ignored the fact that Huandyai’s parents, who held four jobs between them, made too good a living to qualify for the Social Contract that updated Crowder’s shoes automatically.

  They landed in Pirates Cove accompanied by a cascade of serpentine rock and uprooted echeveria plants, and, even though it was already almost time to head back, allowing for daylight at the end of the round trip, they were both really glad they’d made the trek. The cove lay at the base of a cirque-like notch in the tall wall of surf-bashed cliffs that ran north from Point Bonita, at the northern edge of the Golden Gate, all the way to Stinson Beach, a matter of some twelve or thirteen kilometers as the drone patrols. Pirates Cove marked the half-way point. There was no fresh water there, the climb down to it from atop Coyote Ridge took about a half hour, and the climb out could take twice as long, depending on the heat and what kind of shoes you were wearing and the relative profusion of poison oak.

  There were all kinds of kelp, driftwood, light bulbs, disposable phones, shotgun shell waddings, feathers, syringes, and yellow polypropylene line at the high tide mark, and Huandyai and Crowder took all the time they needed to explore this stuff. The sea made so much noise around them, and bounced so much white noise off the cliff faces that surrounded them on three sides, that a mere ten meter separation gave each of the boys sufficient mental space to allow them to nearly forget that each of them wasn’t completely alone.

  The entire cove was only fifty or sixty meters across, with the Pacific heaving up and around two big rocks in the mouth of it. The near one was sufficiently ac
cessible that it looked like maybe you could climb it when the tide was out. Today, right now, the tide was out. And the chat cribs warned that lunar mining was adversely affecting the tides—not today, pal!

  “Although,” Crowder allowed darkly, “it’s true, you know. The calculations are available.”

  “The Info will set you free,” Huandyai parroted happily, apropos of nothing, as he wrapped an extremely long tendril of bull kelp around the driftwood palings of a fort he was constructing.

  “Who ya trying to keep out over there?” Crowder asked, idling digging the point of a stick into the black sand beneath some rounded gray stones at water’s edge.

  “I’m not,” Huandyai answered, half paying attention. “I was thinking this would be a good place for a Charley."

  Crowder considered this. “It would almost have to be the size of an adult humans. You ever seen a Charley that small?"

  “Nope.”

  “Thought so. There is one, you know.”

  “What?” Huandyai wasn't really listening.

  “That small.”

  “Yeah, yeah. At the Shrine.” Huandyai squinted. “What’s these?”

  Crowder blinked a few times while he scanned the sector of rote flashed by his shoes. “They’re called Vellela vellela, or sailors-by-the-wind.”

  “Must be your shoes tell you so.”

  “It must be The True.”

  “Nice color.”

  “Yeah.” He blinked. “Porphyry. They look fresh. There’s some over here dried up. Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Let’s go swimming.”

  Huandyai looked up at him, then looked at the water. “You mean, without our shoes?”

  “Sure. Why not? Besides, you want to walk home in wet shoes? Not to mention,” he added contemptuously, “yours would probably short out.”

  The water was cold, but not as cold as it once was, as Crowder reassured Huandyai. According to Crowder’s shoes the water was at slack tide, but, still, they had to be careful, as the surge was deceptively strong. The differential between the water when it heaved up and when it was hove down could be as much as three or four feet, and it could sweep your legs right out from under you.

  But oh, it was exhilarating! Neither boy had ever been in water outside a municipal pool, and this was a completely different experience. It was colder for sure, and when Crowder came back onto the beach he consulted his shoes, to discover the water temperature was a mere 65 degrees, warmer than it had ever been, according to the profile his shoes had been sufficiently prescient to flash-load before they walked out of the satellite penumbra, but chilly enough to turn his lips blue.

  “That’s still plenty cold,” Huandyai stuttered through chattering teeth. “Boy.” He scrubbed his face with his t-shirt and looked out over the water. “We should come back here once a week.”

  “We come back out here that often, we’ll find out whether there’s Audubon’s warblers for sure,” Crowder said, by way of agreeing with him.

  “Is that what we’re going to have to tell the Charley every time?”

  “Sure. Why not? He’ll think we’re a coupla budding ornithologists.”

  “I thought it was botanists that budded.”

  Huandyai was big on bad puns. That was another reason Crowder let him hang out with him. “That’s funny,” he declared without mirth. “Hey.”

  “Hey what?”

  “Let’s climb that rock.”

  Huandyai squinted up at it. “Do you think we can?”

  “Sure. Why not? First, let’s do our vitamins.”

  Even though Crowder had no parents to speak of, he was disciplined about his health. Maybe, Huandyai reflected, as he swallowed, regurgitated, and swallowed three times, it was because he had no parents.

  Crowder waded into the water on the beach side of the rock. Despite being in the lee of the swell, the surge lifted from Crowder’s knees all the way up to his shoulders before it fell back down again. Crowder had nerve and was a quick study, too, however. He waved Huandyai over and, with the trusting innocence of a younger brother, Huandyai let Crowder boost him higher than his shoulders, buoyed by the next surge. “There’s got to be handholds up there somewhere,” he shouted over the clatter of rocks rolling in the surf, with Huandyai’s feet on his shoulders. The next surge came up to his chin.

  “There’s a root. …”

  “Go for it!”

  Huandyai went for it. His weight departed Crowder’s shoulders just as the next surge peaked, lifting him almost as high as the younger boy’s knees. But Crowder’s hands were wet, they found nothing to grasp, and down he went, out of sync. The next swell swept over him. This is no joke, Crowder thought to himself as he surfaced, spouting brine.

  Huandyai hadn’t given Crowder another thought. He scrambled up the steep slope with a graceful agility he didn’t often get a chance to employ. These kinds of adventures were few and far between in these times of forty-eight-week school years and parenting algorithms of vast scope, and so, soon enough, he disappeared over the upper edge of the formation. “Come on!” Huandyai yelled over his shoulder. “You can see Japan from up here!”

  Japan must be closer to California now, Crowder thought sardonically, than it once was. The next surge lifted him easily within reach of the root, and when it receded it left him almost entirely out of the water.

  Above it for the time being, he thought seriously. Pulling himself up into a rocky declivity, teeming with fat-leafed ice plant and other echeveria, he took a moment to survey the cliff faces that loomed above the cove on three sides. Though the driftwood they’d been scavenging had all pretty much been a mere ten or twenty feet above the present tide line, right at the base of the cliff, by their ripple marks he could see that some high tides, at least, rose three or four feet up the base of the cliffs. The chimney-shaped rock stood off the south end of the beach. The trailhead, which was the only way to reasonably get out of the cove, as the scrub and rock were otherwise poison oak and practically vertical, descended through a dry wash at the north end of the beach, just beyond what his shoes had tutored him to call a century plant or maguey (agave americana). But his shoes couldn’t tell him hecka at the moment because he didn’t have them on. And there, come to focus on it, they were, along with Huandyai’s shoes and two sets of clothes, not two meters from the tide line. It used to be five meters. So the tide is incoming. Nice. Maybe he could write an applet for the next generation of shoes, whereby they’ll respond to hand signals. We need to rethinking our logist—

  “Crowder! Hey, Crowder! Crowder!”

  Crowder looked up. Huandyai’s bare feet appeared, five or six meters above him, and along with them came a shower of stones and plant material.

  “Hey, hey!” Crowder yelled, looking down as the detritus cascaded over his head and shoulders and past him, into the water below. “The heckaheck!”

  “Crowder!”

  “What!”

  “Crowder, Crowder!”

  The kid sounded panicky. Was it too high up there? Maybe he’d come face to face with an Audubon’s warbler?

  Either way, Huandyai kept repeating his friend’s name, much as he might have wailed for his departing mother over a baby-minder’s prothorax.

  And when Crowder had clambered over the rim, he saw why.

  “Heckaheck, Crowder.” Huandyai was indeed scared. “What the heck.” On the verge of tears, but angry too, he looked at Crowder accusingly. “Did you know this was here? Is that why I got up here first?” Crowder shook his head. “No, kid. No …”

  The skull and what bones he could see or recognize as bones lay scattered across the uneven dome of the rock, interspersed among guano-whitened stones and spiculate succulents. They were picked absolutely clean of flesh, and maybe bleached, too. Crowder wasn’t sure, for he’d never seen human bones before. They appeared to be as evenly populated with lichens and guano as the rocks around them, however, so they must have been there for a while.

  “That’s hu
man,” Huandyai asked shakily, “right?”

  Here and there, scraps of cloth, some with plants grown right through them, fluttered in the breeze.

  “It looks human to me,” Crowder said.

  “Y-You th-think it’s a k-kid?”

  “You mean like us?” Crowder crawled past Huandyai and approached the skull. “What difference would that make?”

  “I don’t know. M-maybe this rock has, uh, preferences.”

  “You mean, maybe this rock demands a sacrifice from the humans that come here?”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “How do you know he got killed? Maybe he died somewhere else and a turkey vulture brought him here to eat him.”

  “Y-you gonna touch it?”

  “Sure.” Crowder sounded more confident than he felt. “Why not?”

  “Oh now that’s hecka nice,” Huandyai said. “Hecka.”

  “Look at this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a watch. I think.”

  “How do you tell time with it?”

  “It used to have arrows that pointed to the numbers. Hands, they called them.”

  “H-hands? Like this p-p-person used to have?” Huandyai giggled.

  A pun in the clutch, yet, Crowder thought. The kid’s all right.

  “D-Does that mean that that p-part,” Huandyai pointed, “is a wrist?”

  Crowder dropped the watch.

  “Gotcha,” Huandyai pronounced incontrovertibly.

  “Was not that you,” Crowder scowled, “caterwauling but a moment or two ago?”

  “Caterwauling?” Huandyai drew himself up to his full one point two meter height, minus the fact that he was kneeling, “I do not caterwaul.”

  “Maybe it was a recording,” Crowder allowed.

  “Still,” Huandyai allowed back. “You got to admit …”

  “Unnerving,” Crowder kindly supplied, as he rummaged among the rocks and bones.