The Wild Shore

  Wentworth and I watched Tom pull out book after book. “Practical Uses of the Timing Device From Westinghouse Washer-Dryers, by Bill Dangerfield,” Tom read aloud, and laughed.

  “It looks like your friend might take a while,” Wentworth said to me. “Would you like to see our gallery of illustrations?”

  What I really wanted to do was look at the books along with Tom, but I saw Wentworth was being polite so I said yes sir. We went back into the hall. Before a long window made of several large panes of glass the hall widened, and against the wall opposite the window were pictures of all sorts of animals, drawn in bold strokes of black ink.

  “These are the originals of illustrations for a book describing all the animals seen in the back country of San Diego.” I must have looked surprised, for the pictures included some animals I had seen only in Tom’s tatty encyclopedia: monkeys, antelopes, elephants.… “There were very extensive zoos in San Diego before the war. We assume that all the animals in the main zoo were killed in the downtown blast, but there was an annex to the zoo in the hills, and those animals escaped, or were freed. Those who survived the subsequent climatic changes have prospered. I myself have seen bears and wildebeest, baboons and reindeer.”

  “I like the tiger here,” I said.

  “I did that one myself, thanks. That was quite an encounter. Shall I tell you about it?”

  “Sure.”

  We sat down in wicker chairs placed before the windows.

  “We were on a trek beyond Mount Laguna. Do you know Mount Laguna? It is a considerable peak twenty miles inland, and the snowpack lies heavy on it nearly all the year round. In the spring the streams in the surrounding hills gush with the melt, and in their steeper sections they can be quite impassable.

  “Our expedition to Julian was dogged by bad luck every step of the way. The radio equipment we had been told of was demolished. The library of Western literature I had hoped to relocate was nowhere to be found. One of the members of our expedition broke an ankle in the ruins of the town. Lastly, worst of all, on our return we were discovered by the Cuyamuca Indians. These Indians are exceedingly jealous of their territory, and parties traveling in the area have reported fierce attacks at night, when the Indians are least afraid of firearms. All in all, it was a bad day’s march, our injured friend between us in a sling, and Cuyamucans on horseback observing us from every open hilltop.

  “As nightfall approached I struck out ahead of my party, to scout possible camps, for our slow progress meant we would be spending the night in Indian territory. I found nothing very suitable for night defense, and as it was getting near sundown I retraced my path. When I got to the small clearing where I had left my friends, however, they were not there. Their tracks were confusing, but seemed to lead north, and over the sounds of the rushing streams in the area I imagined I heard gunfire in that direction as well.

  “While I was pursuing my friends the sun went down, and as you know the forest begins immediately upon that departure to get very dark. I came to a steep creek; I had no idea where my party had gotten to; I looked at the creek, momentarily at a loss. Staring through the dusk at the tumbling water I became aware of the presence of another pair of eyes, across the creek from me. They were huge eyes, the color of topazes.”

  “What are topazes?” I asked.

  “Yellow diamonds, I should have said. As I met the gaze of those unblinking eyes, the tiger who owned them stalked out of a clump of torrey pine to the bank of the stream directly across from me.”

  “You’re kidding!” I exclaimed.

  “No. He was a fully grown Bengal tiger, at least eight feet long, and four feet high at the shoulders. In the dim light of that glade his winter fur seemed green to me, a dull green banded by dark stripes.

  “He appeared from the clump so suddenly that at first I was merely appalled at the catastrophic proportions my bad luck had reached. I was sure I was living out the last moments of my existence, and yet I could not move, or even take my eyes from the unblinking gaze of that beautiful but most deadly beast. I have no notion of exactly how long we stood there staring at each other. I know it was one of the central minutes of my life.

  “Then the tiger stepped over the creek with a fluid little jump, as easy as you would step over that crack in the floor. I braced myself as he approached—he lifted a paw as wide as my thigh, and pressed it down on my left shoulder—right here. He sniffed me, so close I could see the crystalline coloring of his irises, and smell blood on his muzzle. Then he took his paw from me and with a nudge of his massive head pushed me to my right, upstream. I stumbled, caught my balance. The tiger padded past me, turned to look, as if to see if I were following. I heard a rasp from its chest—if it was a purr, it was to a cat’s purr as thunder is to a doorslam. I followed it. My astonishment had gone outside itself, and prevented all other thought. I kept my hand on the tiger’s shoulder, where I could feel the big muscles bunch and give as it walked, and I stayed at its side as it wound between trees on a path of its own. Every minute or two it would turn its head to look into my eyes, and each time I was mesmerized anew by its calm gaze.

  “Much later the moon rose, and still we walked through the forest together. Then I heard gunshots ahead, and the beast’s purring stopped, its shoulder muscles tensed. In a clearing illumined by moonlight I made out several horses, and around them men—Indians, I guessed, for my party had no horses with it. More gunshots sounded from trees on the other side of the clearing, and I surmised that my friends were there, for just as we had no horses, the Cuyamuca Indians had no guns. The tiger shrugged off my hand with a twitch of his fur, a twitch that no doubt usually removed flies, and strode ahead of me, down toward the clearing.”

  “Hey!” Tom cried, hurrying around the corner of the hallway. He held one of the books printed on the hand letter press firmly before him, and gestured with it at Wentworth.

  “Which one have you found?” Wentworth inquired. He didn’t seem disturbed by the interruption of his story, but I was squirming.

  “An American Around the World,” Tom read. “Being an Account of a Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 2030 to 2039. By Glen Baum.”

  Wentworth uttered his sharp, spontaneous laugh. “Very good. You have found the masterpiece of our line, I believe. Besides being an intrepid adventurer, Glen can tell a tale.”

  “But is it true? An American went around the world and returned just eight years ago?” Put that way, I understood why Tom was so flabbergasted—I had been stuck with the tiger in the back country—and I got out of my chair to have a look at this book. Sure enough, there it was: An American Around the World, right there on the cover.

  Wentworth was smiling at Tom. “Glen sailed to Catalina in 2030, that is certain. And he reappeared in San Diego one night in the fall of 2039.” His egg eyes flickered and something passed between the two men that I didn’t catch, for Tom laughed out loud. “The rest you have between those covers.”

  “I had no idea this kind of stuff was still being written,” Tom said. “How wonderful.”

  “It is, isn’t it.”

  “Where is this Glen Baum now?”

  “He took off for the Salton Sea last fall. Before he left he told me the title of his next book: Overland to Boston. I expect it will be as interesting as the one you hold.” He stood up. Down the hall I could hear Jennings, joking with the woman in the mimeograph room. Wentworth led us back into the library.

  “So what happened to you and the tiger?” I asked.

  But he was rooting in a box on the bottom shelf of one case. “We have a lot of copies of that book. Take one with you back to San Onofre, courtesy of the New Green Tiger Press.” He offered one of the leather-bound books to Tom.

  Tom said, “Thank you sir. This means a lot to me.”

  “Always glad to get new readers, I assure you.”

  “I’ll make all my students read it,” said Tom, grinning as if he’d just been handed a block of silver.

  “You won’t
have to make us,” I said. “But what about the tiger that time—”

  Jennings and Lee entered the room. “Lunch time,” Jennings cried. Apparently it was the habit in San Diego to eat a meal in the middle of the day. “Have a good tour?” Tom and I told him that we had, and showed him our book.

  “Another thing,” Wentworth said, groping in a different box. “Here is a blank book, in case you decide to write that memoir.” He riffled the pages of a bound book, showing them to be blank. “Give it back to us full, and we will set about the task of reproducing it.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” said Tom. “You’ve given us enough already.”

  “Please, take it.” Wentworth held it out to him. “We have plenty of these. No obligation to write—but if you decide to, then the materials will be at hand.”

  “Well, thanks,” Tom said. After a moment’s hesitation he put the two volumes in his shoulder bag.

  “Shall we have lunch out on their lawn?” Jennings asked, holding aloft a long loaf of bread.

  “I must return to my class,” Wentworth said. “But feel free to enjoy the courtyard.” And to Tom, as he led us to the door: “Remember what I said about that memoir, sir.”

  “I will. You’re doing great work here.”

  “Thank you. Keep teaching people to read, or it will all go to naught. Now I must get back. Goodbye, thank you for visiting, goodbye.” He turned and went into the front room, where his students were still kneading the paper pulp.

  After lunch in the sun-filled salt air of the courtyard, we hiked back over Mount Soledad to the tracks, and pumped the car northward up and down steep hills. A few miles up the tracks Tom had Lee apply the brakes. “Mind if we go out to the cliffs for a look around?”

  Jennings looked doubtful, and I said, “Tom, we can look off cliffs when we get home.”

  “Not like these.” Tom looked at Jennings. “I want to show him.”

  “Sure,” Jennings said. “I told the wife we’d be back for supper, but she won’t have that ready till after dark anyway.”

  So we got off the car again, and made our way westward to the coast, through a dense forest of torrey pine and brambleberry. Pretty soon we came upon an outcropping of tall stone crags. When we got in among them I saw they were concrete. They were buildings. The walls that remained—some of them as high as our beach cliff—were surrounded by piles of concrete rubble. Blocks as big as my house rose out of the ferns and brambleberries. Jennings was talking a streak about the place, and Tom held me by the arm and told the two San Diegans to go on ahead of us to the cliff. “He’s got it all wrong,” he said sourly when Jennings was out of earshot.

  After they were gone I wandered in the ruins. A bomb had gone off nearby, I reckoned; the north side of every standing wall was black, and as soft and crumbly as sandstone. In the rubble and weeds I saw shards of glass, angled bits of metal both rusty and shiny, strips of plastic, a ribcage from a skeleton, melted glass tubes, metal boxes, slate boards.… Rafael would have loved it. But after a time I felt oppressed, like I had in San Clemente. This was no different from that: the ruins of the old time, the signs of a giant past that was now shattered bits of rock covered by weeds, a past so big that not all our efforts would ever get us back to it, or to anything like it. Ruins like these told us how little our lives were, and I hated them.

  I saw Tom in the outbreak of concrete crags to the north, wandering aimlessly from ruin to ruin, tripping over blocks and then staring down at them like they’d jumped into his path. He was tugging on his beard as if he wanted to pull it out. Unaware of my presence, he was talking to himself, uttering short violent phrases that all ended with a sharp tug on the beard. As I got closer I saw that all the thousand lines in his face drooped down. I’d never seen him look so desolate.

  “What was this place, Tom?”

  I thought he wouldn’t answer. He looked away, pulled his beard. “It was a school. My school.”

  One time a couple of summers before, we had all gathered under the torrey pine in Tom’s junkyard, Steve and Kathryn, Gabby and Mando and Kristen, Del and little Teddy Nicolin, all talking at once under sunny skies, we were, and fighting over who got to read Tom Sawyer next, and plotting to tickle Kristen till she cried, and the old man sitting with his back against the treetrunk, laughing and laughing. “All right, shut up you kids, shut up now, school’s in session.”

  I let Tom be and walked west across the faint remains of a road, into trees where little tangles of rotted beams marked the sites of old buildings. Buildings you could believe people had once put up, had once inhabited. I sat at the edge of a canyon that dropped to the sea. I could tell that the cliffs were going to be big ones, because I was still far above the water, and the canyon was short. The sun got lower. I wished I was home.

  Tom walked through the trees a distance away, looking for me. I stood and called out, walked over to him. “Let’s go out to the cliff and find those guys,” he said. He still looked low, and I fell in beside him without a word. “Here, around this way,” he said, and led me to the south rim of the canyon.

  The trees gave way to shrubs, then to knee high weeds, and then we were on the cliff’s edge. Far below lay the ocean, flat and silvery. The horizon was really out there—it must have been a hundred miles away. So much water! A stiff wind hit me in the face as I looked down the pocked tan cliff, which fell down and down and down in nearly vertical ravines, to a very broad beach, strewn with seaweed. Jennings and Lee were a few hundred yards along the cliff edge, just tiny figures on top of that cliff, throwing rocks down at the beach, though they hit the middle of the cliff instead. Looking at the rocks fall I suddenly knew what the gulls saw, and I felt I was soaring in the sky, high above the world.

  To the left Mount Soledad and La Jolla stuck out into the sea, blocking the view farther south. To the north the cliff curved away, until in the distance little cliffs alternated with blank bluish spots, which were marshes. The tiny cliffs and marshes extended in a curve all the way up to the green hills of Pendleton, and up there where the hills met the sea and sky was our valley, our home. It was hard to believe I could see that far. The waves below broke in long curves, leaving their white tracery on the water with just a whisper, a faint kkkkkkkkkkk, kkkkkkkkkkk. Tom was sitting down, his feet swinging over the edge. “The beach is at least twice as wide,” he said in a strangled voice. Talking to himself. “They shouldn’t let the world change so much in one life. It’s too hard.” I moved to get out of earshot, so he could talk without being overheard. But he looked up at me; he was talking to me: “I spent hours down there when time could have stopped, and I wouldn’t have minded.” He tugged his beard. “These cliffs are all different now.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. The setting sun lit the cliffs, so that they threw off an orange light that filled the air. Our shadows stretched far across the field behind us, and the wind was cold. The world seemed a big place, a big, windy, dusky place. Uneasily I paced up and down the cliff edge. The old man stayed where he sat, a little bump on the cliff. The sun sank into the water, drowning bit by bit, paring away until only the emerald wink of the green flash was left. The wind picked up. Jennings and Lee came along the cliff toward us, tiny figures waving their arms.

  “Better be getting back,” Jennings called when they got closer. “Elma will be having dinner on the table.”

  “Give the old man a minute more,” I said.

  “She’ll be mad if dinner has to wait too long,” Jennings said more quietly. But Lee said “Let him be,” and Jennings stood quietly, looking down at the tapestry left by broken waves.

  Eventually Tom stirred, walked down to us as if he’d just woken up. The evening star glowed like a lantern in the ocean sky.

  “Thanks for bringing us out here,” Tom said.

  “Our pleasure,” Jennings replied. “But we’d better head back now. It’s going to be a hell of a walk through those ruins in the dark.”

  “We’ll skirt them to the south,” Lee sai
d, “down that road that…” He sucked in his breath hard.

  “What’s wrong?” Jennings exclaimed.

  Lee pointed north, toward Pendleton.

  We all looked, saw nothing but the dark curve of the coast, the first faint stars above—

  A white streak fell out of the sky, plunged into the hills far to the north and disappeared.

  “Oh, no,” Jennings whispered.

  Another streak from the sky. It fell just like a shooting star, except it didn’t slow down or break into pieces; it fell in a straight line, like lightning set against a straightedge, taking no more than three blinks of the eye from the time it appeared high above to the time it silently disappeared into the coastline.

  “Pendleton,” Lee said. “They’re busting up our track.” He began to curse in a heavy, furious low voice.

  “Shit!” Jennings shouted. “Shit! God damn those people, God damn them. Why can’t they leave us alone—”

  Three more streaks fell from the sky, one after another, landing farther and farther north, defining the curve of the coast. I closed my eyes and red bars swam around in the black. I opened them to see another streak burst into the world up there among the stars, plummeting down instantly onto the land.

  “Where are they coming from?” I asked, and was surprised to hear my voice shake. I was afraid, I think, that they would be bombs like those that had fallen on the day.

  “Airplane,” Jennings said grimly. “Or satellite, or Catalina, or halfway around the world. How the fuck would we know?”

  “They’re hitting all over Pendleton,” Lee said in a bitter voice.

  “They’ve stopped,” Tom pointed out. In the dark I couldn’t read his expression, and after Lee’s and Jennings’ shouts his voice was calm. We watched the sky for another one. Nothing.

  “Let’s go,” Lee finally croaked. Slowly we crossed the weed field on the edge of the cliff in single file. Then into the forest. Halfway back to the train Jennings, walking ahead of me, said, “The Mayor ain’t going to like this one little bit.”