The Wild Shore

  We laughed, and the moment passed. I began thinking about our own disastrous trip into Orange County. “I can’t believe we did something that stupid,” I said, my voice shaking with anger and distress.

  “It was stupid,” he agreed. “You kids had the excuse of youth and bad teaching, but the Mayor and his men, why they were damned fools.”

  “But we can’t give up,” I said, pounding the sandstone, “we can’t just roll over and lie there like we’re dead.”

  “That’s true.” He considered it. “And maybe securing the land from intrusion is the first step.”

  I shook my head. “It can’t be done. Not with what they have and what we have.”

  “Well? I thought you said we don’t want to play possum?”

  “No, right.” I pulled my feet up from the cliffside so I could squat and rock back and forth. “I’m saying we’ve got to figure out some other way to resist, some way that will work. We either do something that works, or wait until we can. None of this shit in between. What I was thinking of was that all the towns that come to the swap meet, if they worked together, might be able to sail over and surprise Catalina. Take it over for a time.”

  Tom whistled his weak, toothless whistle.

  “For a while, I mean,” I said. The idea had come to me recently, and I was excited by it. “With the radio equipment there we could tell the whole world we’re here, and we don’t like being quarantined.”

  “You think big.”

  “But it’s not impossible. Not someday, anyway, when we know more about Catalina.”

  “It might not make any difference, you know. Broadcasting to the world, I mean. The world might be one big Finland now, and if it is all they’re going to be able to do is say, we hear you brother. We’re in the same boat. And then the Russians would sweep down on us.”

  “But it’s worth a try,” I insisted. “Like you say, we don’t really know what’s going on in the world. And we won’t until we try something like this.”

  He shook his head, looked at me. “That would cost a lot of lives, you know. Lives like Mando’s—people who could have lived their full span to make things better in our new towns.”

  “Their full spans,” I said scornfully. But he had jolted me, nevertheless. He had reminded me how grand military plans like mine translated into chaos and pain and meaningless death. So in an instant I was all uncertain again, and my bold idea struck me as stupidity compounded by size. Tom must have read this on my face, because he chuckled, and put his arm around my shoulders.

  “Don’t fret about it, Henry. We’re Americans; it ain’t been clear what we’re supposed to do for a long, long time.”

  One more white sea cliff smashed to spray and charged toward us. One more plan crumbled and swept away. “I guess not,” I said morosely. “Not since Shakespeare’s time, eh?”

  “Harumph-hmm!” He cleared his throat two or three more times, let his arm fall, shuffled down the cliff away from me a bit. “Um, by the way,” he said, looking anxiously at me, “while we’re on the subject of history lessons, and, um, lies, I should make a correction. Well! Um … Shakespeare wasn’t an American.”

  “Oh, no,” I breathed. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Um—”

  “But what about England?”

  “Well, it wasn’t the leader of the first thirteen states.”

  “But you showed me on a map!”

  “That was Martha’s Vineyard, I’m afraid.”

  I felt my mouth hanging open, and I snapped it shut. Tom was kicking his heels uncomfortably. He looked about as unhappy as I had ever seen him, and he wouldn’t meet my eye. Gazing beyond me he gestured, with an expression of relief.

  “Looks like John, doesn’t it?”

  I looked. Along the cliff edge above Concrete Bay I spotted a squat figure striding, hands in pockets. It was John Nicolin all right. He walked fast in our direction, looking out to sea. On the days when we were kept from going out, when he wasn’t working on the boats he was on the cliffs, most of the time, and never more than when the weather was good and we were kept in by the swell. Then he seemed particularly affronted, and he paced the cliff grimly watching the waves, acting irritable with anyone unfortunate enough to have business with him. The swell was going to keep us off the water for two days at least, maybe four, but he stared at the steaming white walls as if searching for a seam or a riptide that might offer a way outside. As he approached us his pantlegs flapped and his salt-and-pepper locks blew back over his shoulder like a mane. When he looked our way and noticed us he hesitated, then kept coming at his usual pace. Tom raised a hand and waved, so he was obliged to acknowledge us.

  When he stopped several feet away, hands still in pockets, we all nodded and mumbled hellos. He came a few steps closer. “Glad to see you’re doing better,” he said to Tom in an offhand way.

  “Thanks. I’m feeling fine. Good to be up and around.” Tom seemed as uncomfortable as John. “Magnificent day, ain’t it?”

  John shrugged. “I don’t like the swell.”

  A long pause. John shuffled one foot, as if he might be about to walk on. “I haven’t seen you in the last couple days,” Tom said. “I went by your house to say hello, and Mrs. N. said you were gone.”

  “That’s right,” John said. He crouched beside us, elbow on knee. “I wanted to talk to you about that. Henry, you too. I went down to take a look at those railroad tracks the San Diegans have been using.”

  Tom’s scraggly eyebrows climbed his forehead. “How come?”

  “Well, from what Gabby Mendez says, it appears they used our boys as a cover for their retreat after the ambush. And now it turns out that mayor got killed. I went and asked some of my Pendleton friends about it, and they say it’s true. They say there’s a real fight going on right now down there, between three or four groups who want the power that the mayor had. That in itself sounds bad, and if the wrong group ends up on top, we could be in trouble. So Rafe and I were thinking that the railroad tracks should be wrecked for good. I went down to look at that first river crossing, and it’s pretty clear Rafe could destroy the pilings with the explosives he’s got. And he says he can blast the track every hundred yards or so, easy.”

  “Wow,” said Tom.

  John nodded. “It’s drastic, but I think it’s the right move. If you ask me, those folks down there are crazy. Anyway, I wanted to know what you thought of the idea. I was going to just get Rafe and go do it, but…”

  Tom cleared his throat, said, “You don’t want to call a meeting about it?”

  “I guess. But first I want to know what some of you think.”

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Tom said. “If they think we were in on the ambush, and if that super-patriot crowd gets control … yeah, it’s a good idea.”

  John nodded, looking satisfied. “And you, Henry?”

  That took me aback. “I guess. We might want that track working for us someday. But we’ve got to worry about keeping them at a distance first. So I’m for it.”

  “Good,” said John. “We should probably try to talk with them at the swap meet, if we get a chance. And warn the others about them, too.”

  “Wait a bit, here,” Tom said. “You still have to get a meeting together, and get the vote. If we start deciding things like the boys here did, we’ll end up like the San Diegans.”

  “True,” John said.

  I felt myself blushing. John glanced at me and said, “I’m not blaming you.”

  I scratched the sandstone with a pebble. “You should. I’m as much to blame as anyone.”

  “No.” He straightened up, chewed his lower lip. “That was Steve’s plan; I can see his mark on it everywhere.” His voice tensed, pitched higher. “That boy wanted everything his way right from the start. Right out of his ma. How he cried if we didn’t jump to his wishes!” He shrugged it off, looked at me sullenly. “I suppose you think I’m to blame. That I drove him off.”

  I shook my head, though part of me
had been thinking that. And it was true, in a way. But not entirely. I couldn’t make it clear, even to myself.

  John shifted his gaze to Tom, but Tom only shrugged. “I don’t know, John, I really don’t. People are what they are, eh? Who made Henry here want to read books so bad? None of us. And who made Kathryn want to grow corn and make bread from it? None of us. And who made Steve want to see the world out there? No one. They were born with it.”

  “Mm,” John said, mouth tight. He wasn’t convinced, even if it absolved him, even if he had been saying the same thing a second ago. John was always going to believe his own actions had effects. And with his own son, who’d spent a lifetime in his care … I could read his face thinking of that as clear as you can read the face of a babe. A wave of pain crossed his features, and he shook himself, and with a somber click of tongue against teeth reminded himself that we were here. He closed up. “Well, it’s past,” he said. “I’m not much of a one for philosophy, you know that.”

  So the matter was closed. I thought about how this conversation would have taken place at the ovens among the women: the chewing over every detail of event and motivation, the arguing it out, the yelling and crying and all; and I almost laughed. We men were a pretty tight-lipped crowd when it came to important things. John was walking in a circle like I had earlier, and quickly his nervous striding got to us, so that Tom and I stood to stretch out. Pretty soon the three of us were meandering in place like gulls, hands in pockets, observing the swells and pointing out to each other any particularly big ones.

  Looking back at the valley, now filled with trees yellow among the evergreens, I stopped pacing and said, “What we need is a radio. Like the one we saw in San Diego. A working radio. Those things can hear other radios from hundreds of miles away, right?”

  Tom said, “Some of them can, yes.” He and John stopped walking to listen to me.

  “If we had one of them we could listen to the Japanese ships. Even if we didn’t understand them we’d know where they were. And we could listen to Catalina, maybe, and maybe other parts of the country, other towns.”

  “The big radios will receive and transmit halfway around the world,” Tom commented.

  “Or a long way, anyway,” I corrected him. He grinned. “It would give us ears, don’t you see, and after that we could begin to figure out what’s going on out there.”

  “I would love to have something like that,” John admitted. “I don’t know how we’d get one, though,” he added dubiously.

  “I talked to Rafael about it,” I said. “He told me that the scavengers have radios and radio parts at the swap meets all the time. He doesn’t know anything about radios right now, but he does think he can generate the power to run one.”

  “He does?” Tom said.

  “Yeah. He’s been working on batteries a lot. I told him we’d get him a radio manual and help him read it, and give him stuff to trade for radio parts at the swap meets this summer, and he was all excited by the idea.”

  John and Tom looked at each other, sharing something I couldn’t read. John nodded. “We should do that. We can’t trade fish for this kind of stuff, of course, but we can find something—shellfish, maybe, or those baskets.”

  Another huge set rolled in, washing all the way to the base of the cliff, and our attention was forced back to the waves. “Those must be thirty-five feet high at least,” Tom repeated.

  “You think so?” said John. “I thought this cliff was only forty feet.”

  “Forty feet above the beach, but those wave troughs are lower. And the crests are nearly as high as we are!” It was true.

  John mentioned that he wanted to get the boats out on days like this.

  “So you were thinking about that when you walked down here,” I said.

  “Sure. See, follow the river current at high tide—”

  “No way!” Tom cried.

  “Look at the turbulance in the rivermouth,” I pointed out. “Even those broken waves must be ten or fifteen feet tall.”

  “You’d be capsized and drowned by the first wave that hit you,” Tom said.

  “Hmm,” said John reluctantly—with perhaps a gleam of humor in his eye. “You may be right.”

  We meandered around our shelf again, talked about currents and the possibility of a mild winter. Out to sea shafts of light still speared the clouds to gild the lined ocean surface. Tom pointed out there. “What you should try doing is fishing the whales again. They’re due through soon.”

  John and I groaned.

  “No, really, you guys gave up on that one too fast. You either harpooned an extra tough one, or Rafael didn’t put the harpoon in a place that would do the beast much harm.”

  John said, “Easy to say, but he’s never going to be able to place the harpoon right where he wants to.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying, it’s just that most of the time a harpoon will do them more damage, and they won’t be able to dive so deep.”

  “If that’s true,” I said, “and if we added more rope to the end of the line—”

  “There’s not room for it in our boats,” John told me.

  But I was remembering the time Steve and I had discussed it. “We could tie the bottom end to line that runs over to a tub in another boat, and have twice as much.”

  “That’s true,” John said, cocking his head.

  “If we were to get into the whale business we could really make a killing at the swap meet,” said Tom. “We’d have oil to spare, and animal feed, and tons of meat.”

  “If we could keep it from going bad,” John said. But he liked the idea; what was it but fishing, after all? “Could you really get the line set so that it went from boat to boat?”

  “Easy!” Tom said. He knelt and picked up a pebble to draw in the dirt. He started to scratch a plan, and John crouched at his side. I looked out at the horizon, and this is what I saw: three sunbeams standing like thick white pillars, slanting each its own way, measuring the distance between the grey clouds and the gray sea.

  Chapter the Last

  As the year fell away to its death the storms came more frequently, until every week or so one barreled in over the whitecaps and thrashed us, leaving the valley tattered and the sea a foamy pale brown from all the dirt sluiced into it. When we did get the boats out the fishing was miserably cold, and we didn’t catch much. Most days I spent at the table under the window, where I read or wrote or watched black clouds bluster in. The clouds were the vanguard; after them a smack of the wind’s hand, and maybe a low rumble of thunder, announced the arrival of the storm’s main force. Raindrops slid down the windowpane in a thousand tributaries that met and divided again and again as they wandered down the glass. The roof ticked or tapped or drummed under the onslaught. Behind me Pa labored away on his new sewing machine, and its rn, rn, rn rn rnnnn! rebuked my idleness, sometimes so successfully that I buckled down and wrote a sentence or two. But it was hard going, and there were lots of hours when I was content to chew my pencils (writing epics on my teeth) and think about it, and watch it rain, lulled by wind, and roof patter, and the tea kettle’s whistle, and Pa’s rn rn, snip snip.

  The first storm of December, it snowed. It was a real pleasure to sit in our warm house and look out the window at the flakes drifting silently through the trees. Pa looked over my shoulder. “It’s going to be a hard winter.” I didn’t agree. We had enough food, even if it was fish, and more firewood was being dried in the bathhouse every day. After all the rain I was happy to see snow just for the way it looked, for the way it fell!—so slowly it didn’t seem real, at first. Then to run outside, and hop white drifts, and slap snowballs together to throw at neighbors.… I loved the snow. The day after, the sun came out under a high pale blue sky (fishbone clouds smack against the highest part of it), and the snow melted before midday. But the next storm brought more snow, and colder air, and a thicker tail of high clouds, and it was four days before the harsh sun came out and the white dusting melted and ran into the ri
ver. That got to be the pattern: valley first white-green under black skies, then black-green under white skies. Week by week it got colder.

  Week by week my story got harder to write. I got lost in it—I stopped believing it—I wrote chapters and had to take a walk over the soggy leaf carpets in the woods, distressed and angry at myself. Still, I wrote it. The solstice passed, and Christmas passed, and New Year’s passed, and I went to all the parties and such, but it was like I was in fog, and afterwards I couldn’t remember who I had talked to or what I had said. The book was the only thing for me—and yet it was so hard! Sometimes I wore out pencils faster biting than writing.

  But the day came when the tale was on the page, pretty much. All the action done, Mando and Steve gone. I stopped then, and took one still day to read what I had said. It made me so mad I damn near burned the thing. Here all those things had happened, they had changed us for life, and yet the miserable string of words sitting on the table didn’t hold the half of it—the way it had looked, the thoughts it had engendered, the way I felt about it all. There was no more of last summer in that book than there is of the tree in an old scrap of driftwood. And the work I had put in on it—well, it was discouraging.

  I went out for a walk to try and recover. A few tall white clouds sailed above like galleons, but mostly it was a sunny day, and dead still, though the air had a bite to it. Wet snow lay on everything. Cakes of it were balanced on every branch, dripping and sparking the various colors of the rainbow. On the ground the snow crumbled to big clear grains under the sun’s glare, and the grains turned to drops of water that beaded the white blanket. Suncones melted through to tufts of grass, and snowbridges over the streams filling the paths collapsed, leaving dirty chunks of ice in the mud, and snow hummocks to each side, black with pine needles. I walked between these hummocks and over the remaining bridges (the ones in shadow) to the cliffs, thumping my boots in puddles and knocking snowcakes on branches into much and spray.

  Out on the point of the cliff overlooking the river I sat down. No swell whatsoever: tiny waves lapped the strand as if the whole ocean was shifting a hand’s breadth up and down. There wasn’t any snow left on the beach, but it was wet and bedraggled, with blue-and-white puddles dotting it everywhere. The scattered galleon clouds didn’t hinder the sun much, but gave its light a tint so that the long stretch of cliff was the color of ironwood bark. No swell, still air, the ocean like a plate of blue glass, the galleons hovering over it, holding their positions.