I clicked my tongue. It was annoying to be sitting in a dark box in the middle of the day, using up good lamp oil. In fact it was worse than annoying. I felt my spirits plunge as I took stock of the bare insides of our shack. “Shit,” I muttered with disgust.
“What’s that?”
“I said, shit.”
“Why?”
“Ah.…” How could I explain it to him, without making him feel bad too? He accepted our degraded conditions without a thought, always had. I shook my head. He peered at me curiously.
Suddenly I had an idea. I jerked in my chair. “What?” said Pa, watching me.
“I got an idea.” I got my boots on, put on my coat.
“It’s raining pretty hard,” Pa said dubiously.
“I won’t go far.”
“Okay. Be careful?”
I turned from the open door, went back and punched him lightly on the arm. “Yeah. I’ll be back soon, keep sewing.”
I crossed the bridge and went up Basilone to the Shankses’, and kicked around in the piles of burnt wood. Sure enough, buried in soggy ash inside the north wall was a rectangular piece of glass, as wide as my outstretched arms, and nearly that tall. One of their many windows. A corner of it was very wavy near the bottom, and a little pocked—it looked like it had melted some in the fire—but I didn’t care. I crowed at the sky, licked down raindrops, and very carefully returned to the valley, window held before me, dripping. Like a car’s windshield, eh? I stopped and knocked on the door of Rafael’s shop. He was at home; black with grease and hammering like Vulcan. “Rafe, will you help me put this window in the side of our place?”
“Sure,” he said, and looked out at the rain. “You want to do it now?”
“Well…”
“Let’s wait for a good day. We’ll have to be tramping in and out a lot.”
Reluctantly I agreed.
“I always wondered why you didn’t put a window in that place,” he remarked.
“Never had glass to put in it!” I said happily, and was off. And two days later we had a window in our south wall, and the light streamed in over everything, turning every dust mote to silver. There was a lot of dust, too.
We even had good windowsills, thanks to Rafael. He peered at the wavy part of the bottom. “Yep, almost melted this one down, looks like.” He nodded his approval and left, toting his tools over his shoulder, whistling. Pa and I hopped around the house, cleaning up and staring out, going outside to stare in.
“This is wonderful,” Pa said with a blissful smile. “Henry, that was one great idea you had. I can always count on you for the good ideas.”
We shook on it. I felt the strength in his right hand, and it sent a glow right through me. You got to have your father’s approval. I kept pumping his hand up and down till he started to laugh.
It made me think of Steve. He never had that approval, never would have had it. It must have been like walking around with a thorn in your shoe. I feel it in my mind’s foot, Horatio. I began to think that I understood him more, at the same time I felt like I was losing him—the real, immediate Steve, I mean. I could only recall his face well in dreams, when it came back to me perfectly. And it was hard to get him down right in the book; the way he could make you laugh, make you sure you were really living. I sat down to work on it, under the light of our new window. “I’ll have to sew us some good curtains,” Pa said, eyeing the window thoughtfully, measuring it in his mind.
* * *
A while after that I joined the small group going to the last swap meet of the year. Winter swap meets weren’t much like the summer ones; there were fewer people there, and less stuff being traded. This time it was drizzling steadily, and everyone there was anxious to get their trading done and go home. Debates over prices quickly turned into arguments, and sometimes fights. The sheriffs had their hands full. Time after time I heard one of them bellowing, “Just make your deal and move on! Come on, what’s the fuss!”
I hurried from canopy to canopy, and in the shelter from the rain did my best to trade for some cloth or old clothing for Pa. All I had to offer were some abalone and a couple of baskets, and it was tough trading.
One of the scavenger camps had gotten a fire going by pouring gas over the wet wood, and a lot of folks congregated under the canopy. I joined them, and after a bit I finally found a scavenger woman willing to trade a pile of ragged clothing for what I had.
After we had counted it out piece for piece she said, “I hear you Onofreans really did it to that crew from down south.”
“What’s this?” I said, jerking slightly.
She laughed, revealing a mouthful of busted brown stumps, and drank from a jar. “Don’t play simpleton with me, grubber.”
“I’m not,” I said. She offered me the jar but I shook my head. “What’s this we’re supposed to have done to the San Diegans?”
“Ha! Supposed to done. See how that washes with them when they come asking why you killed their mayor.”
I felt the cold of that dim afternoon shiver into me, and I went from a crouch to sitting on my butt. I took the jar from her and drank some sour corn mash. “Come on, tell me what you’ve heard,” I said.
“Well,” she said, happy to gossip, “the back country folks say you all took that mayor and his men right up into a Jap ambush.”
I nodded so she’d go on.
“Ah ha! Now he fesses up. So most of them were killed, including that mayor. And they’re pretty hot about it. If they weren’t fighting among themselves so hard to see who takes his place, they’d likely be on you pretty hard. But every man in San Diego wants to be mayor now, or so the back country folk say, and I believe them. Apparently things down there are wild these days.”
I took another gulp of her terrible liquor. It went to my stomach like a big lead sinker. Around us drizzle misted down through the trees, and bigger drops fell from the edge of the canopy.
“Say, grubber, you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I bundled up the rags, thanked her and left, in a hurry to get back to Onofre and give Tom the news.
* * *
Another rainy afternoon I sat in Rafael’s workshop, relaxing. I had told Tom what I had heard at the swap meet, and he had told John Nicolin and Rafael, and none of them had seemed overly concerned, which was a relief to me. Now the matter was out of my hands, and I was just passing the time. Kristen and Rebel sat crosslegged before Rafael’s set of double windows, making baskets and gossiping. Rafael sat on a short stool and tinkered with a battery. Tools and machine parts littered the stained floor, and around us stood products of Rafael’s invention and industry: pipes to carry a stove’s heat to another room, a small kiln, an electric generator connected to a bicycle on blocks, and so on.
“The fluids go bad,” Rafael said, answering a question of mine. “All the batteries that were full on the day are long gone. Corroded. But lucky for us, there were some sitting empty in warehouses. There’s no use for them, so it’s easy to trade for one. Some scavengers I know use batteries, and they’ll bring the acids to the meet if I ask them. Only a few people want them, so I get a good deal.”
“And that’s how you got your cart out there running?”
“That’s right. No use for it, though. Not usually.”
We sat quiet for a while, remembering. “So you heard us that night?” I asked.
“Not at first. I was on Basilone and I saw the lights. Then I heard the shooting.”
After a bit I shook my head to clear it, and changed the subject. “What about a radio, Rafe? Have you ever tried to repair one of those?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. They’re too complicated, I guess. And the scavengers ask a lot for them, and they always look an awful wreck.”
“So does most of the stuff you bring back.”
“I guess.”
I said, “You could read how they work in a manual, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t read much, H
ank, you know that.”
“But we could help you read. I’d read, and you could figure out what it meant.”
“Maybe so. But we’d have to have a radio, and lots of parts, and I still wouldn’t be sure at all that I could do anything with them.”
“But you would be up for trying it?”
“Oh sure, sure.” He laughed. “You run across a silver mine out there on that beach you been inspecting so close?”
I blushed. “Nah.”
Rafael got up and rooted around in the big wall cupboard. I sat back lazily against the floor pillow behind me. Under the window Kristen and Rebel worked. The baskets they were weaving were made of old brown torrey pine needles, soaked in water so they were flexible again. Rebel took a needle and carefully bunched together the five individual slices of it, so that they made a neat cylinder. Then she curled the needle till it made a flat little wheel, and knotted several pieces of fishing line to it, splaying them out like spokes. Another pine needle was neatened up and tied around the outside of the first one. The first several needles were tied outside the ones before them, to make a flat bottom. It took two needles to make it around the circumference, then three. After that the nubs were set directly on top of each other, and the sides of the basket began to appear.
I picked up a finished basket and inspected it while Rebel continued to whip the line around the needles. The basket was solid. Each needle looked like a miniature piece of rope, the five splits fit together so well. The four rows of nubs studding the sides of this particular basket rose in S shapes, showing just how much the basket bulged out and then back in. Such patience, arranging all the needles! Such skill, whipping all of them into place! I whapped the basket on the floor and it rebounded nicely, showing its flex and strength. Watching Rebel coax the line between two needles and through a complicated little loop of line waiting for it, it occurred to me that I had a task somewhat like hers. When I penciled in my book, I tied together words like she tied together pine needles, hoping to make a certain shape with them. Briefly I wished I could make a book as neat and solid and beautiful as the basket Rebel wove. But it was beyond hope, and I knew it.
Rebel looked up and saw me watching her, and she laughed, embarrassed.
* * *
Another day the clouds would have given us a few hours for fishing, but the seas were running so high it was impossible to get the boats out. When I was done writing I walked to the cliffs, and there was the old man, sitting on a shelf under the cliff’s lip, where he was protected from the wind.
“Hey!” I greeted him. “What you doing down here?”
“Looking at the waves, of course, like any other sensible person.”
“So you think it takes sense to come down here and gawk at waves, eh?” I sat beside him.
“Sense or sensibility, yuk, yuk.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Never mind. Look at that one!”
The swells were surging up from the south, breaking in giant walls that extended from one end of the beach to the other. The swells were visible far out to sea; I could pick one out halfway to the horizon and follow it all the way in. Near the end they built up taller and taller, until they were gray cliffs rushing in to meet our tan one. A man standing at the foamy foot of one of those giants would have looked like a doll. When the towering top of a wave pitched out and the whole thing rolled over behind it, spray exploded in the air higher than the wave had stood, with a crack and a boom that distinctly vibrated the cliff under us. The tortured water dashed over itself in a boiling race to the beach. There floods of white water swept up the sand, and sucked back to crash into the next advance. Only a strip of sand against the cliff was left dry; it would have been worth your life to walk the beach that day. Tom and I sat in a haze of white salt mist, and we had to talk over the explosive roar of the surf. “Look at that one!” Tom shouted again and again. “Look at that one! That one must be thirty-five feet tall, I swear.”
Out beyond the swells the ocean stretched to the haze-fuzzed horizon. A low sheet of bumpy white and gray clouds covered the sky, barely clearing the hills behind us. Breaks in the clouds were marked by bright patches in the leaden surface of the water, like the trail of a drunken scavenger with a hole in his pocket, scattering silver coins from here to the edge of the world. There was something about it all—the presence of that expanse of water, the size of it, the power of the waves—that made me stand back up and pace the cliff behind Tom’s back, stop and stare as a particularly monstrous sea cliff collapsed, shake my head in wonder or dismay, pace and turn again, slapping my thighs and trying to think of a way to say it, to Tom or anybody. I failed. The world pours in and overflows the heart till speech is useless, and that’s a fact. I wish I could speak better. I started to say things—spoke syllables and choked off the words—strode back and forth, getting more and more agitated as I tried to think exactly what it was I felt, and how I could then say that.
It was impossible, and if I had really held out for precision I reckon I would have stood there staring at those sea avalanches all day, mute and amazed. But my mind shifted to another mystery, I struck my hand to my thigh, and Tom glanced at me curiously. I blurted out, “Tom, why did you tell us all those lies about America?”
He cleared his throat. “Harumph-hmm. Who says I lied?”
I stood before him and stared.
“All right.” He patted the sand beside him, but I refused to sit. “It was part of your history lessons. If your generation forgets the history of this country you’ll have no direction. You’ll have nothing to work back to. See, there was a lot about the old time we need to remember, that we have to get back.”
“You made it seem like it was the golden age. Like we’re just existing in the ruins.”
“Well … in a lot of ways that’s true. It’s best to know it—”
I snapped my fingers at him. “But no! No! You also said the old time was awful. That we live better lives now than they ever did. That was what you said, when you argued with Doc and Leonard at the meets, and sometimes when you talked with us too. You told us that.”
“We,” he admitted uneasily, “there’s truth to that too. I was trying to tell you the way it was. I didn’t lie—not much, I mean, and not about important things. Just once in a while to give you an idea what it was really like, what it felt like.”
“But you told us two different things,” I said. “Two contradictory things. Onofre was primitive and degraded, but we weren’t to want for the old time to come back either, because it was evil. We didn’t have anything left that was ours, that we could be proud of. You confused us!”
Abruptly he looked past me to the sea. “All right,” he said. “Maybe I did. Maybe I made a mistake.” His voice grew querulous: “I ain’t some kind of great wise man, boy. I’m just another fool like you.”
Awkwardly I turned and paced around a bit more. He didn’t have any good reason for lying to us like he did. He had done it for fun. To make the stories sound better. To entertain himself.
I went over and plopped down beside him. We watched the sandbars plow a few more swells to mush. It looked like the ocean wanted to wash the whole valley away. Tom threw a few pebbles down at the beach. Gloomily he sighed.
“You know where I’d like to be when I die?” he said.
“No.”
“I’d like to be on top of Mount Whitney.”
“What?”
“Yeah. When I feel the end coming I’d like to hike inland and up three-ninety-five, and then up to the top of Mount Whitney. It’s just a walk to the top, but it’s the tallest mountain in the United States. The second tallest, excuse me. There’s a little stone hut up there, and I could stay in that and watch the world till the end. Like the old Indians did.”
“Ah,” I said. “Sounds like a nice way to go.” I didn’t know what else to say. I looked at him—really looked at him, I mean. It was funny, but now that I knew he was eighty and not a hundred and five, he looked older.
Of course his illness had wasted him some. But I think it was mainly because living a hundred and five years was in the nature of a miracle, which could be extended indefinitely, while eighty was just old. He was an old man, a strange old man, that was all, and now I could see it. I was more impressed he had made it to eighty than I ever used to be that he had made it to one hundred and five. And that felt right.
So he was old, he would die soon. Or make his try for Whitney. One day I would go up the hill and the house would be empty. Maybe there would be a note on the table saying “Gone to Whitney,” more likely not. But I would know. I would have to imagine his progress from there. Would he even make it forty miles to the north, to his birthplace Orange?
The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 38
