“I have five grandchildren now, and a sixth is coming in a month.” She laughed. “I don’t see them enough.”
Tom grunted. He hadn’t seen Jill in a year, his daughter in five. People moved around too much, and thought that TV phones made up for it. He looked up at the sun, blinking through leaves. So she had had two husbands die on her. And here she was laughing in the sunlight, making patterns with dead leaves and twigs, like a girl. Life was strange.
* * *
Back down the hill, in the sunset’s apricot light. Tuscany in California. Kevin and Doris’s house glowed in its garden, the clear panels and domes gleaming like a lamp lighting the surrounding trees. They went inside and joined the chaos of dinnertime. The kids dashed around shrieking. Sixteen people lived in the building, and at dinner time it seemed most of them were kids. Actually only five. Rafael and Andrea were clearly delighted to see him; they had worked together on El Modena’s town charter, and yet it had been years.… They embarrassed Tom by getting out the good china and trying to get the whole house down to the table. Tomas, however, wouldn’t leave his work screen. Tom knew Yoshi and Bob, they had been teachers when Kevin was in school. And he was acquainted with Sylvia and Sam, Donna and Cindy. But what a crowd! Even before the great solitude had descended, he couldn’t have lived in such a constant gathering. Of course it was a big place, and they seldom got together like this. But still …
After dinner Tom poured cups of coffee for him and Nadezhda, and they went out to the atrium, where chairs were set around the fishpond. Overhead the skylight’s cloudgel fluttered a bit in the breeze, and from the kitchen voices chattered, dishes clattered. The atrium was dark and cool, the cloudgel clear enough to reveal the stars. The open end of the old horseshoe shape of the apartment complex gave them a view west, and they were just enough up the side of the hill that the lights from the town bobbed below, like the lamps of night fishermen on a sea. They sipped coffee.
Doris rushed in, slammed the door, stomped off to the kitchen. “Where’s my dinner?” she shouted.
About fifteen minutes later Kevin came in, looking pleased. He had been flying with Ramona, he said, and they had gone out to dinner afterward.
Doris brought him right back to earth with her news of the zoning proposal. “It’s definitely Rattlesnake Hill they’re after.”
“You’re kidding,” Kevin said feebly. He collapsed onto one of the atrium chairs. “That bastard.”
“We’re going to have a fight on our hands,” Doris predicted grimly.
“We knew that already.”
“It’s worse now.”
“Okay, okay, it’s worse now. Great.”
“I’m just trying to be realistic.”
“I know, I know.” They went into the kitchen still discussing it. “Who the fuck ate everything?” Doris roared.
Nadezhda laughed, said quietly to Tom, “Sometimes I am thinking perhaps my Doris would not be unhappy if those two got back together.”
“Back together?”
“Oh yes. They have had their moments, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Nothing very much. And a long time ago. When they first moved into this house, apparently. They almost moved into a room together, but then they didn’t. And then Doris came over to work for me for a time. She told me about it then, when she was really feeling it. Then when she returned things were not working out so much, I guess. But I think she is still a bit in love with him.”
Tom considered it. “I guess I hadn’t noticed.” How could he, up in the hills? “She does watch him a lot.”
“But then there is this Ramona.”
“Yeah, that’s what Kevin just said. But I thought she lived with Alfredo.”
Nadezhda filled him in on the latest. Telling him about the affairs of his own townspeople, and with a buoyant, lively curiosity. With pleasure. And she made it all so … suddenly he wanted to feel like she did, he wanted that engagement with things.
“Ah,” he said, confused at himself. Hawk-nosed Asian beauty, gossiping to him in the dark atrium.…
They sat and watched stars bouncing on the other side of the cloudgel. Time passed.
“Will you be staying here tonight?” she asked.
The house had several spare rooms, but Tom shook his head. “It’s an easy ride home, and I prefer sleeping there.”
“Of course. But if you’ll excuse me, I think I will be going to bed.”
“Sure, sure. Don’t mind me. I’ll be setting off in a while.”
“Thanks for taking me up on the hill. It’s a good place, it should be left alone.”
“We’ll see. I was glad to go up there again myself.”
She walked up the stairs to the second floor, then around the inner balcony to the southeast curve of the horseshoe, where the best guestroom was. Tom watched her disappear, thinking nothing. Feelings fluttered into him like moths banging into a light. Creak of wood. So long since he had done any of this! It was strange, strange. Long ago it had been like this, as if he slept years every night, and woke up in a new world every morning. That voice, laughing on the streets of Singapore—was it really them? Had it happened to him? Impossible, really. It must be. And yet … a disjuncture, again—between what he felt to be true, and what he knew to be fact. All those incarnations made his life.
He stood slowly. Tired. It would be a long ride home, but suddenly he wanted to be there. Needed to be there.
* * *
The next couple of weeks were warm and humid, and there was a dull feeling of tension in the air, as if more and more static electricity were building, as if any day a Santa Ana wind would come pouring over the hills and blow them all into the sea.
Tom didn’t come back down into town, and eventually Nadezhda got in the habit of going to see him. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasn’t. When she found him at home they talked, in fits and starts; when he wasn’t there she worked in his garden. Once she saw him slipping away as she hiked up the last stretch of trail, and realized he was having trouble adjusting to so much company. She stopped going, and spent her days with Doris or Kevin or Oscar, or Rafael and Andrea, or her other housemates. And then one evening Tom showed up at the house, to have a cup of coffee after dinner. Ready to talk for an hour or two, then slip away.
Kevin and Ramona fell into a pattern of a different sort; they got together in the late afternoon after work, every few days, to go flying, and then perhaps have dinner. While in the air they talked over the day’s work, or something equally inconsequential. Out of nowhere, it seemed, Kevin had found an instinct for avoiding certain topics—for letting Ramona choose what to talk about, and then following along. It was a sort of tact he had never had; he hadn’t cared enough, he hadn’t been paying enough attention to the people he was with. But on these flights he was really paying attention, with the same dreamlike intensity he had felt on their first flight. Every excursion aloft was a whole and distinct adventure, the most important part of his day by far. Just to soar around the sky like that, to feel the wind lift them like a gull … to see the land, lying below like a gift on a plate!
And there was something wonderful about working so hard in tandem, harnessed to the same chain, legs pumping in the same rhythm. The physicality of it, the things they learned about each other’s characters while at the edge of physical endurance—the constant reminder of their bodies, of their animal reality … add that to their softball games, and the swim workouts they sometimes joined in the mornings, and there wasn’t much they didn’t know about each other, as animals.
And so Kevin paid attention. And they pumped madly in the seats of the Ultralite, and soared through the air. And pointed out the sights below, and talked about nothing but the present moment. “Look at that flock of crows,” Kevin would say, pointing at a cloud of black-dot birds below.
“Gangsters,” Ramona would reply.
“No, no! I really like crows!” She would laugh. “I do, don’t you? They’re such powerfu
l flyers, they don’t look pretty but they do it with such efficiency.”
“Fullbacks of the air.”
“Exactly!” There were thousands of crows in Orange County, living in great flocks off the fruit of the groves. “I like their croaky voices and the sheen on their wings, and that smart look in their eye when they watch you”—he was discovering all this in himself only at the moment he spoke it, so that it felt marvelous to speak, to discover—“and the way they hop sideways all shaggy and awkward. I really love them!”
And Ramona would laugh harder at each declaration. And Kevin would never speak of other things, knowing it was what she wanted. And she would fly them around the sky, more graceful than the crows, as graceful as the gulls, and the sweat would dry white on their skins as they worked like dervishes in the sky. And Kevin’s heart … well, it was full. Brimming. But he had an instinct, now, telling him what to do. Telling him to bide his time.
Thus the most important part of his life, these days, was taking place two or three hundred feet in the air. Of course he was concerned about the workings of the town council, and it took up a fair amount of time, but from week to week he didn’t worry about it much. They were waiting for Alfredo to make his next move, and doing what they could to find out more about his intentions. Doris had a friend in the financial offices of her company, who had a friend in a similar job with Heartech, and she was digging carefully there to find out what the rumors were in Alfredo’s base of operations. There were rumors of a move, in fact. Perhaps they could get more details out of this friend of a friend; Doris was excited by the possibility, and put a lot of work into it, talking, acting innocent and ignorant, asking questions over lunches.
Then the re-zoning proposal appeared on the agenda, and it included the re-zoning of the old OCWD tract. Doris and Kevin walked into the council meeting like hunters settling into a blind.
It was a much more modest affair than the inaugural meeting; the people who had to be there were there, and that was it. The long room was mostly empty and dark, with all the light and people crowded into the business end of things. Alfredo ran the meeting through its paces with his usual efficiency, only lightly peppering things with jokes and asides. Then he came to item twelve. “Okay, let’s get to the big stuff—re-zoning proposals.”
Petitioners in the audience laughed as if that were another of his jokes. Kevin hunched forward in his seat, put his elbows on the table.
Doris, seeing the way Kevin’s hands were clenched, decided she had better do the talking. “What about this change for the Crawford Canyon lots, Alfredo?”
“They’re the lots that OCWD used to own. And the land up above it, across from Orange Hill.”
“That’s called Rattlesnake Hill,” she said sharply.
“Not on the maps.”
“Why a zoning change? That land was supposed to be added to Santiago Park.”
“No, nothing’s been decided about that land, actually.”
“If you go back to the minutes of the meeting where those Crawford Canyon condos were condemned, I think you’ll find that was the plan.”
“I don’t recall what was discussed then, but nothing was ever done about it.”
“Going from five point four to three point two is a big change,” Jerry Geiger noted.
“It sure is!” Kevin said loudly. “It means you could do major commercial building. What’s the story, Alfredo?”
“The planning commission wanted to be able to consider that land as a possibility for various projects, isn’t that right, Mary?”
Mary looked down at her notes. “Three point two is a general purpose classification.”
“Meaning you could do almost anything up there!” Kevin exclaimed.
He was losing his temper already. Doris scowled at him, tried to take back their side of the argument. “It’s actually commercial zoning, isn’t it, Mary?”
“It allows commercial development, yes, but doesn’t mandate it—”
Face red with emotion, Kevin said, “That is the last empty hill in El Modena!”
“Well,” Alfredo said calmly. “No need to get upset. I know it’s more or less in your backyard, but still, for the good of the town—”
“Where I live has nothing to do with it!” Kevin exclaimed, sliding his chair back as if he might stand. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
A shocked silence, a titter. Doris elbowed Kevin in the side and then stepped hard on his foot. He glanced at her, startled.
“Don’t you need an EIS for a change like that?” she said quickly.
“Zoning changes in themselves don’t require impact statements,” Alfredo said.
“Oscar, is that right?” Doris asked.
Oscar nodded slowly, doing his sleeping Buddha routine. “They are not required, but they can be requested.”
“Well I request one!” Kevin said. “Anything could be done up there!”
“I second the request,” Doris said. “Meanwhile, I want to have some things on record. Who made this re-zoning proposal, and why?”
An odd, expectant silence. Finally Alfredo said, gently, “As Kevin pointed out, this land includes one of the last empty hilltops in the area. As such, the land is extremely valuable. Extremely valuable. When we condemned those condos under the hill, I thought it was so we would be able to put the land to use that would better serve the whole town. That’s what I said at the time. Now, if the land is made part of Santiago Park, that’s nice for the park, and for the people living in the immediate area—”
Kevin’s chair scraped the floor.
“We all live in the immediate area,” Doris said, smacking her knee into Kevin’s and wishing she had a cattle prod.
“Okay, okay,” Alfredo said. “Some people are closer than others, but we’re all in the neighorhood. And that’s the point. That land is valuable to all of us, and Matt and I think all of us are concerned to see that it is used in the best way possible for the good of the town.”
“Do you have a specific plan for it?” Jerry Geiger asked suddenly.
“Well, no. We only want the possibility to be there.”
“Does this explain the request to buy more water from MWD?” Jerry asked, looking interested.
“Well, if we had the water…” Alfredo said, and Matt picked up the thought:
“If we had the water and the land was zoned for commercial use, then we could begin to look seriously at how to make use of the situation.”
“You haven’t looked seriously up till this point,” Jerry said, sounding sardonic—though with Jerry it was hard to be sure.
“No, no. We’ve talked ideas, sure. But…”
Alfredo said, “Of course nothing can done unless the infrastructural possibility is there. But that’s what our job is, to make sure the possibilities are there.”
“Possibilities for what?” Kevin said, his voice rising. Doris attempted to step on his foot again, but he moved it. “First you’re thinking about upping the water from MWD, supposedly because it saves us money. Then we’re given a zoning change with no explanation, and when we ask for an explanation we get vague statements about possibilities. I want to know what exactly you have in mind, Alfredo, and why you’re going about all this in such an underhanded manner.”
For a split second Alfredo glared at him. Then he turned away and said in a relaxed, humorous voice, “To repeat this proposal, made before the full council in the course of a normal council meeting, we are interested in re-zoning these lots so that we can then discuss using them in some way. Currently they are zoned five point four, which is open land and only open land—”
“That’s what they should be zoned!” Kevin said, nearly shouting.
“That’s your opinion, Kevin, but I don’t believe it’s generally shared, and I have the right to express my belief by proposing a change of this sort. Don’t you agree?”
Kevin waved a hand in disgust. “You can propose all you want, but until you explain what you mean to
do you haven’t made a full proposal. You’ve only just tried to slip one by. The question is, what do you have in mind to do on that land? And you haven’t answered it.”
Doris tightened the corners of her mouth so she wouldn’t smile. There was something to be said for the mad dog approach, after all. Kevin’s bluntness had taken Alfredo aback, if only for a moment. He was searching for an answer, and everyone could see it.
Finally Alfredo said, “I haven’t answered that question because there is no answer to it. We have no specific plans for that land. We only want to make it possible to think about it with some expectation that the thought could bear fruit. It’s useless to think about it unless we zone the land in a way that would make development legal. That’s what we’re proposing to do.”
“We want an EIS,” Doris said. “It’s obvious we’ll need one, since as you say the re-zoning would mean a great deal for that land. Can we vote on that?”
They voted on it, and found they were unanimously in favor of an environmental impact statement on the proposed zoning change. “Of course,” Alfredo said easily. “These are facts we need to know.”
But the look he gave them as they got up at the end of the meeting, Doris thought, was not a friendly one. Not friendly at all. She couldn’t help smiling back. They had gotten to him.
* * *
Not long after that the Lobos had their first game of the season with the Vanguards, and from the moment Kevin stepped into the batter’s box and looked out at Alfredo standing on the pitcher’s mound, he could see that Alfredo was going to pitch him tough. The council meetings, Kevin and Ramona’s flights over the town—if Alfredo had not seen them himself, he had surely heard of them, and what did he think of that? Kevin had his suspicions.… Even the fact that Kevin was still batting a thousand, a perfect seventeen for seventeen—oh, yes. Alfredo had his reasons, all right.
And he was a good pitcher. Now softball is a hitter’s game, and a pitcher isn’t going to strike a batter out; but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing he can do but serve it up. If the pitcher hits the back of the square of carpet that marks the strike zone with a high-arced pitch, it becomes damned difficult to hit the ball hard. Alfredo was good at this kind of pitch. And he had honed the psychological factor, he had the look of a power pitcher, that Don Drysdale sneer of confident disdain, saying you can’t hit me. This was a ludicrous look for a softball pitcher to have, given the nature of the game, but somehow on Alfredo it had its effect.