Pacific Edge

  “Jesus, Kevin, that’s prickly pear,” Jody said. “You can get that stuff pickled down at the Mexican deli.”

  “That’s it!” Gabriela cried. “Pickled cactus gets so popular that they’re cutting it down everywhere to supply the market, and so suddenly it’s endangered up here, yeah!”

  “Ah shut up,” Kevin said.

  “Hey, here’s some wildlife,” Hank said from some distance away. He was on his hands and knees, his face inches from the dirt.

  “Ants,” Gabriela said as they walked over. “Chocolate covered ants get popular, and so suddenly—”

  “No, it’s a newt.”

  So it was; a small brown newt, crawling across an opening between sage bushes.

  “It looks like rubber. Look how slow it moves.”

  “That’s obviously a rare fake newt, put here to get Kevin’s hopes up.”

  “It does look fake.”

  “They should be endangered, look how slow they are.” The newt was moving each leg in turn, very slowly. Even blinking its little yellow eyes took time.

  “The battery’s running down.”

  “All right, all right,” Kevin said, walking away angrily.

  They followed him down the hill.

  * * *

  “That’s all right, Kevin,” Ramona said. “We’ve got a softball game tonight, remember?”

  “True,” Kevin said, perking up.

  “Hey, are you still hitting a thousand?”

  “Come on, Gabby, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You are, you are! What is it, thirty for thirty?”

  “Thirty-six for thirty-six,” Ramona said. “But it is bad luck to talk about it.”

  “That’s all right,” Kevin said. “I’m not gonna mind when it ends anyway, it’s making me nervous.”

  And this was true. Batting a thousand was not natural. Hit as well as possible, some line drives should still be caught. To keep firing them into empty places on the field was just plain weird, and Kevin was not comfortable with it. People were razzing him, too, both opponents and his own teammates. Mr. Thousand. Mr. Perfect. Heaven Kevin. It was embarrassing.

  “Strike out on purpose, then,” Hank suggested. “Get it over with. That’s what I’d do.”

  “Damned if I will!”

  They laughed at him.

  Besides, each time he walked to the plate, that night or any other, and stood there half-swinging his bat, and the pitcher lofted up the ball, big and white and round against the black and the skittering moths, like a full moon falling out of the sky—then all thought would fly from his mind, he became an utter blank; and would come to standing on first or second or third, grinning and feeling the hit still in his hands and wrists. He couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to.

  * * *

  Another day as they were finishing work Ramona cruised by and said to Kevin, “Want to go to the beach?”

  His heartbeat tocked at the back of his throat. “Sure.”

  Biking down the Newport Freeway the wind cut through him, and with clear road ahead he shifted into high gear and started pumping hard. Ramona drafted him and after a while took the lead, and they zipped down the gentle slope of the coastal basin pumping so hard that they passed the cars in the next lane, and all for the fun of going fast. On the narrow streets of Costa Mesa and Newport Beach they had to slow and negotiate the traffic, following it out to the end of Balboa Peninsula. Here apartment blocks jumbled high on both sides of the street. Nothing could be done to reduce the population along such a fine beach, and besides the ocean-mad residents seemed to enjoy the crowd. Many of the old crackerbox apartments had been joined and reworked, and now big tentlike complexes quivered like flags in the wind, sheltering co-ops, tribes, big families, vacation groups, complete strangers—every social unit ever imagined was housed there, behind fabric walls bright with the traditional Newport Beach pastels.

  They coasted to the end of the peninsula, under rows of palm trees. Scraps of green tossed overhead in the strong onshore breeze. They came to the Wedge and stopped. This was the world’s most famous body surfing beach. Here waves from the west came in at an angle to the long jetty at the Newport Harbor channel, and as the waves approached the beach, masses of water built up against the rocks. Eventually these masses surged back out to sea in a huge backwash, a counterwave which crossed subsequent incoming swells at an angle, creating peaks, fast powerful cusps that moved across the waves very rapidly, often just at the point they were breaking. It was like something out of a physics class wave tank, and it was tremendously popular with body surfers, because the secondary wave could propel a body across the face of the primary wave with heartstopping speed. Add an element of danger—the water was often only three feet deep at the break, and tales of paralysis and death were common—and the result was a perfect adrenalin rush for the OC ocean maniac.

  Today, however, the Pacific was pacific, almost lakelike, and the Wedge Effect was not working. This was fine with Ramona and Kevin, they were happy just to swim. Cool salt tang, the luxurious sensuality of immersion, flotation, the return to the sea. Kevin sharked over the rippled tawny sand on the bottom, looked up through silver bubbles at the surface, saw its rise and fall, its curious partial reflectivity, sky and sand both visible at once. Long graceful body in a dark red suit, swimming overhead with powerful strokes. Women are dolphins, he thought, and laughed a burst of silver at the sky. He ran out of air and shot to the surface, broke into blinding white air, eyes scored by salt and sun, delicious stinging. “Outside,” Ramona called, but she was fooling; no waves of any size out there, only flat glary blue, all the way to the horizon. Nothing but shore break. They grunioned around in that for a long time, mindless, lifted up and down by the moon. After that their suits were full of sand, they had to swim out again to flush them clean.

  Back on the beach. Sitting on sand, half dry. Salt crust on smooth brown skin. The smell of salt and seaweed, the cool wind.

  “Want to walk out the jetty?”

  Onto the mound of giant boulders, stepping carefully. Rough uneven surfaces of basalt and feldspar gleamed in the light, gray and black and white and red and brown. Between the rocks the swells rose and fell, sucking and slapping the barnacles.

  “We used to come out here all the time when we were kids.”

  “Us too,” Ramona said. “The whole house. Boulder ballet, we called it. Only on the other jetty, because my mom always took us to Corona del Mar.” Newport Harbor’s channel was flanked on both sides by jetties, the other one was some two hundred yards across the water.

  “It was always the Wedge for us. There was something magical about walking out this jetty when I was a kid. A big adventure, like going to the end of the world.”

  They stepped and balanced, hopped and teetered. Occasionally they bumped together, arm to arm. Their skin was warm in the sun. They talked about this and that, and Kevin felt certain boundaries disappearing. Ramona was willing to talk about anything, now, about things beyond the present moment. Childhoods in El Modena and at the beach. The boats offshore. Their work. The people they knew. The huge rocks jumbled under them: “Where did they come from, anyway?” They didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What do you talk about when you’re falling in love? It doesn’t matter. All the questions are, Who are you? How do you think? Are you like me? Will you love me? And all the answers are, I am like this, like this, like this. I am like you. I like you.

  “We used to race out to the end sometimes, running over these rocks! Crazy!”

  “Yeah, we’re a lot more sensible now,” Ramona said, and grinned.

  They came to the end, where the causeway of stone plunged into the sea. The horizon stood before them at eye level, a hazy white bar. Sunlight broke on the sea in a billion points, flickering like gold signal mirrors, sending a Morse of infinite complexity.

  They sat on a flat boulder, side by side. Ramona leaned back on both hands, jacking her elbows forward. Muscley brown forearms bulged side to side, mu
scley brown biceps bulged front to back. Triceps stood out like the swells between the jetties.

  “How’s things at your house?”

  “Okay,” Kevin said. “Andrea’s back is bothering her. Yoshi is sick of teaching English, Sylvia’s worried that the kids have chicken pox. Donna and Cindy are still drinking too much, and Tomas still spends all his time at the screen. The usual lunacy. I bet Nadezhda thinks we’re bedlam.”

  “She’s nice.”

  “Yeah. But sometimes the house is just howling, and the look on her face…”

  “It can’t be any worse than India.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it bothers me more than her. I tell you, some nights when the kids are wild I wonder if living in small families isn’t a good idea.”

  “Oh no,” Ramona said. “Do you think so? I mean, they’re so isolated.”

  “Quieter.”

  “Sure, but so what? I mean, you’ve always got your room. But if it were only you and a partner and kids! Try to imagine Rosa and Josh doing that! Rosa doesn’t do a thing to take care of Doug and Ginger, she’s always working or down here surfing. So those kids are there and they’re really into being entertained constantly, and sometime I know Josh would just go crazy if he were in a little house all by himself. He almost does already.”

  “A lot of them did, I guess. Mothers.”

  “Yeah. But at our place Josh can get me or my mom to take the kids while he goes out to swim or something, and we can talk with him, and he tells us about it and feels better, and by the time Rosa’s back he’s having a good time and he doesn’t care. Unless he’s really pissed at her. But they manage. I don’t think their marriage would survive if they lived by themselves.”

  Kevin nodded. “But what about other couples who’re different? What you’re saying is that marriages are less intense now because people tend to live in groups. But what about the really good marriages? Then reducing the intensity is just diffusing something good.”

  “Diffusing it, yeah, spreading it around. Maybe we need to have that kind of good diffused out. The couple won’t suffer.”

  “No? Well. Maybe not.” What about us, then? Kevin wanted to say. He had never even found someone he felt like trying with. And she and Alfredo, fifteen years? What went wrong? “But … something is gone, I think. Something I think I’d like.”

  Ramona frowned, considering it. They watched swells run up and down the seaweedy, mussel-crusted band of rock at sea level. Talked about other things. Felt light crash into their skin.

  Ramona pointed north. “Couple of big ships coming.”

  “Oh, I love to watch those.” He sat up, shaded his eyes with a hand. Two tall ships had risen over the horizon, converging on the harbor from slightly different angles, one from San Pedro, and the other rounding Catalina from the north. Both were combinations of square rigged and fore-and-aft rigged, the current favorite of ship designers. They resembled the giant barkentines built in the last years of sailing’s classic age, only the fore-and-aft sails were rigid, and bulged around the masts in an airfoil shape. Each ship had five masts, and the one rounding Catalina had an isosceles mast for its foremast, two spars rising from the hull to meet overhead.

  Suddenly all the yards on both ships bloomed white with sail, and the little bones of white water chewed by their sharp bows got larger. “Hey they’re racing!” Kevin said. “They’re racing!”

  Ramona stood to watch. The onshore breeze was strengthening, and the two ships were on a reach across it, so their sails bulged toward shore. Stunsails bloomed to each side of the highest yards, and from a distance it seemed the ships flew over the water, gliding like pelicans. Working freighters only, so big they could never be really fast, but those stacks of white sail, full-bellied with the wind! Complex as jets, simple as kites, the two craft cut through the swells and converged on the harbor, on each other. It seemed possible the windward ship might try to steal the other’s wind, and sure enough the leeward ship began to luff off a bit, toward the beach. Perhaps the pilot would have to try swinging behind the windward ship, to trade places and reverse the tactic; a dangerous maneuver, however, as they might never catch up. “Isosceles is trying to push them into the beach,” Ramona observed.

  “Yeah, they’re caught inside. I say Isosceles has them.”

  “No, I say Leeward’s closer, they’ll slip right around the jetty here, we’ll probably be able to step aboard.”

  “Bet.”

  “Okay.”

  On the end of the other jetty a group of kids were standing and shouting at the sight. The wind pushed at them, Kevin raised his arms to feel it. That something so free and wild should be harnessed to the will: the ancient elegance of it made him laugh.

  “Go, Isosceles!” “Go, Leeward!” And they shouted and bumped shoulders like the kids on the other jetty. As the ships got closer they could see better how big they were. The channel couldn’t take any larger, it looked as if the mainyards would stretch from one jetty to the other, great silver condor wings of alloy. The crews of the two ships were standing on the windward rails as ballast, and someone on each ship hurled amplified insults across the ever-narrowing gap of water between them. It really did look as though they would reach the channel mouth in a dead heat, in which case Isosceles would be forced to luff off, according to race protocol. Ramona was gleefully pointing this out to Kevin when a long silver spar telescoped out from the windward side of Isosceles’ bow, and an immense rainbow-striped balloon spinnaker whooshed into existence like a parachute, dragging the whole great ship behind it. Swells exploded under the bow. “Coming through!” they heard the tinny loudspeaker from Isosceles cry, and with a faint Bronx cheer the Leeward sloughed off. Its stunsails rolled up into their spars, and the spars telescoped back in under the yards. Sail was taken in everywhere, without a single sailor aloft, and the ship settled down into the water like a motorboat with the throttle cut. When Isosceles turned into the channel entrance, to the cheers of spectators on both jetties, its sails too disappeared, rolling up with the faint hum of automated rigging and tackle blocks. Three of the five topsails and the isosceles top section served to propel it down the channel at a stately five miles an hour, and the bare spars stood high against the hills of Corona del Mar. Leeward followed it in, looking much the same. The crews waved back at them.

  “They’re so beautiful,” Kevin said.

  “I wonder if one of them is Nadezhda’s ship,” Ramona said. “It’s due soon.”

  They sat down again, leaned back against the warm rock side by side, arms touching. A thick rain of light poured down on them, knitting tightly with the onshore wind. Photon by photon, striking and flaking off, filling the air so that everything—the sea, the tall ships, the stone of the jetties, the green light tower at the other jetty’s end, the buoys clanging on the groundswell, the long sand reach of the beach, the lifeguard stands and their streaming flags, the pastel wrack of apartments, the palm fronds swaying over it all—everything floated in a white light, an aura of salt mist, ethereal in the photon rain. In every particulate jot of being … Kevin settled back like a sleepy cat. “What a day.”

  And Ramona leaned over, black hair blinding as a crow’s wing, and kissed him.

  * * *

  Over the next weeks matters progressed on the Rattlesnake Hill issue, but slowly and amorphously, so that it was hard to keep a sense of what was happening. A letter came back from LA’s Metropolitan Water District, outlining their offer of more water. What it came down to was a reduced rate if they purchased more. Mary and the town planner’s office immediately made inquiries with the OCWD concerning sell-through rates. Clearly they were hoping that El Modena could buy the extra water from LA, and then give what they didn’t use to OCWD by pouring it into the groundwater basin. This would get them credits from OCWD that they could use against pump taxes, and the net result might be a considerable savings, with a lot of water in reserve.

  Oscar shook his head when he heard about it. “I believe I’d like to l
ook into this one a little more,” he murmured. First of all, he told Kevin, town resolution 2022 would have to be overthrown or some sort of special dispensation made, which would take council action or a town vote. And then the whole maneuver would tend to put the town in the water business, buying it here and selling it there, and the State Water Resources Control Board was likely to have some thoughts about that, no matter what the district watermaster said. If it came to a town vote that superficially looked like it was only about saving money, Oscar wanted to talk to Sally Tallhawk about her suggestion concerning Inyo County’s water. Inyo now owned the water that used to belong to Los Angeles, and it was possible they could work out some kind of deal, and buy even cheaper water from Inyo than the MWD was offering, with some use stipulations included that would keep the water from fueling a big development. Certainly Inyo would appreciate the irony of altering the shape of development in southern California, after the years of manipulation they had suffered at the hands of LA.

  So Oscar was busy. Kevin for his part dropped by to talk with Hiroko, Susan, and Jerry, to see what they were thinking about the matter. Jerry had let his law practice lapse so that he could help run a small computer firm located down on Santiago Creek where it crossed Tustin Avenue, and Kevin found him there one day, eating lunch by the creek. He was a burly man in his early sixties, who looked as calm and sensible as you could ever want, until you noticed a glint in his eye, the only indication of a secret sense of humor, a sort of anarchist’s playfulness that the town had come to know all too well.

  He shrugged when Kevin asked him about the hill matter. “Depends what it is. I need to see Alfredo’s plans, what it would do for the town.”

  “Jerry, that’s the last empty hill in the whole area! Why should he take that hill? I notice you’re content to have your business down here on the flats.”

  Jerry swallowed a bit of sandwich. “Maybe I’m not content. Maybe I’d like to take some offices up there in Alfredo’s complex.”