The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (11 page)

“Anyway,” Tom was saying to me now, “John Nicolin did or directed everything that had to do with fishing, and doing it was what brought the people in this valley together, and made us a town. The second winter after he arrived was the first one no one died from hunger. Boy, you don’t know what that means. There’s been hard times since, but none to match those before Nicolin arrived. I admire him. So if he’s got fish on the brain, if he won’t let his son leave it for a week or even a day, then that’s too bad. That’s the way he is now, and you’ve got to understand it.”

“But it doesn’t matter how well fed he is, if he makes his son hate him.”

“Aye. But that’s not his intention. I know he doesn’t intend that. Remember John Junior. Could be, even if John himself doesn’t know it, he just wants to keep Steve where he can see him. To try and keep him safe. So that even the fishing is just a cover. I don’t know.”

I shook my head. It still wasn’t fair, keeping Steve at home. A wedge in a crack. I understood a little better what Tom had meant, but it seemed to me then that we were the wedges, stuck so far in history that we couldn’t move but one way when we were struck by events. How I wished we could be clear and free to move where we would!

We had walked to my home. Firelight shone through the cracks around the door. “Steve’ll make it another time,” said Tom. “But us—we’ll be off to San Diego on the next cloudy night.”

“Yeah.” Right then I couldn’t rouse much enthusiasm for it. Tom hit my shoulder and was off through the trees.

“Be ready!” he called as he disappeared in the forest gloom.

*   *   *

The next cloudy night didn’t come for a while. For once the warm current brought clear skies with it, and I spent my evenings impatiently cursing the stars. During the days I kept fishing. Steve was ordered by John to stay on the net boats, so off in my rowboat I wasn’t faced with him hour after hour, but I did feel lonesome, and odd—as if I was betraying him somehow. When we did work together, unloading fish or rolling nets, he just talked fishing, not meeting my eye, and I couldn’t find anything to say. I felt tremendously relieved when three days after the dinner he laughed and said, “Just when you don’t want clear days they come blaring down. Come on, let’s use this one for what it was meant to be used for.” Fishing was done, and with the hours of day left we walked out the wide beach to the rivermouth, where waves were slowly changing from blue lines to white lines. Gabby and Mando and Del joined us with the fins, and we waded out over the coarse tan sand of the shallows into the break. The water was as warm as it ever got. We took a fin each and swam out through the soup to the clear water outside the waves’ breaking point. Out there the water was like blue glass; I could see the smooth sheet of sand on the bottom perfectly. It was a pleasure just to tread water out there, to let the swells wash over my head and to look back at the tan cliffs and the green forest, edged by the sky and the eye-blue ocean under my chin. I drifted back in and rode the waves with the others, happy they didn’t resent me, too much, for getting the chance to go to San Diego.

When we got back on the beach, the others said goodbye to me, and left in a group. I sat in the sand, feeling strange.

A figure appeared walking down the riverside, in the narrow gap in the cliffs where the river rolled through to the sea. When it got closer I saw that it was Melissa Shanks. I stood and waved; she saw me and made her way around the pools on the beach to me.

“Hello, Henry,” she said. “Have you been out body surfing?”

“Yeah. What brings you down here?”

“Oh, I was looking for clams up on the flats.” It never occurred to me that she didn’t have any rake or bucket with her. “Henry, I hear you’re going down to San Diego with Tom?”

I nodded. Her eyes got wide with excitement.

“Why, you must be thrilled,” she said. “When are you going?”

“The next cloudy night. Seems like the weather doesn’t want me to go.”

She laughed, and leaned over to kiss my cheek. When I raised my eyebrows she kissed me again, and I turned and kissed back.

“I can’t believe you’re going,” she said dreamily, between kisses. “It’s just so—well, you’re the best man to do it.”

I began to feel better about going on this trip of mine.

“How many of you are going?”

“Just me and Tom.”

“But what about those San Diegans?”

“Oh they’re going too. They’re taking us down.”

“Just those two who came up here?”

“No, they have a whole crew of men waiting down the freeway where they stopped fixing up the tracks.” I explained to her how the San Diegans ran their operation. “So we have to go on a cloudy night, so the Japs won’t see us.”

“My God.” She shivered. “It sounds dangerous.”

“Oh no, I don’t think so.” I kissed her again, rolling her back onto the sand, and we kissed for so long that I had her half out of her clothes. Suddenly she looked around and laughed.

“Not here on the beach,” she said. “Why, anyone on the cliff could see us.”

“No they couldn’t.”

“Oh yes they could, you know they could. Tell you what.” She sat up and rearranged her blue cotton shirt. I looked through her black hair to the late afternoon sun, and felt a surge of happiness pulse through me. “When you get back from San Diego, maybe we could go up Swing Canyon and take some swings.”

Swing Canyon was a place where lovers went; I nodded eagerly, and reached for her, but she stood up.

“I have to be off now, really, my pa is going to be wondering where I got to.” She kissed her forefinger and put it to my lips, skipped off with a laugh. I watched her cross the wide beach, then stood up myself. I shook myself, laughed out loud. I looked out to sea; were those clouds, out there?

Just after sunset my question was answered. Clouds streamed in like broken waves, and the sky was blue-gray and starless when it got dark. I took my coat off its hook and got a thick sweater from our clothes bag, chattering with Pa. Late that night Tom rapped at the door. I was off to San Diego.

PART TWO

San Diego

6

Out by the big eucalyptus Jennings and Lee stood waiting. “Let’s be off,” Lee said roughly.

We went to the freeway and headed south. Soon we passed the steep bank at the back of Concrete Bay, and were out of the valley and onto the Pendleton shore. The freeway was in pretty good shape; though the surface was cracked a bit, it was clear of trees and shrubs, except for an occasional line of them filling a big crack like a fence. But most of the way the road was a light slash through dark, overhanging forest. The level country it crossed was a narrow strip between steep hills and the sea cliff, cut often by deep ravines. Usually the freeway spanned these ravines, but twice it fell into them, and we were forced to descend their sides and cross the gurgling black creeks at their bottoms, on big blocks of concrete. Lee led the way over these breaks without a word. He was anxious to be in San Diego, it seemed.

A short distance beyond the second break in the freeway Lee stopped. I looked past him and saw a cluster of ruined buildings in the trees. Lee raised his hands to his mouth and made a passable imitation of a gull cry three times in a row, then three again, and from the buildings a shrill whistle replied. We approached the largest of the buildings, and were met halfway there by a group of men who greeted us loudly. They led us into the building, where a small fire gave off little light and lots of smoke. The men from San Diego—seven of them—surveyed Tom and me.

“You sure took a piece of time to get two specimens no better than these,” a short man with a large belly said. He pulled on his beard and barked a laugh, but his little reddened eyes didn’t look amused.

“Ain’t San Onofre serious about talking to the Mayor?” the man next to him said. It was the first time I had ever heard
San
put in front of Onofre.

“Now enough of that,” Jennings said. “This here is Tom Barnard, one of the oldest living Americans—”

“Granted,” said the short man.

“
And
one of Onofre’s leaders. And this boy here is his most able assistant.”

Tom didn’t even flinch during all this; he stared calmly at the short man, head tilted to the side like he was contemplating a new sort of bug. Lee hadn’t stopped to listen. He was gathering rope under one arm, and he only paused to look up and say, “Get that fire out and get on the cars. I want to be in San Diego by sunup.”

The men got their gear together and doused the fire, and we left the building and the freeway, striking out into the forest behind Lee, in the direction of the ocean. We had only walked twenty or thirty paces when Lee stopped and lit a lantern.

In the gleam of light I saw their train: a platform on metal wheels, with a long bar set on a block in the middle of it. The men started throwing their stuff on the train, and behind the first I saw a second one. Approaching it I stepped over the rails. They were just like the rails that crossed our valley—bumpy and corroded, with spongy beams set every few feet under them. Tom and I stood watching as sledgehammers and axes, bundles of rope and bags of clanking metal stakes were stowed on the two platforms.

Quickly everything was aboard, and we climbed on the front train behind Lee and Jennings. Two of the men stood at the ends of the crossbar; one pulled on the high end, assisted by Lee, and with a crunch we were rolling over the rusty rails. When that end of the crossbar was low, the short man with the belly hauled down with all his weight on the other end. The two men traded pulls, and away we went, followed by the other car.

We rolled out of the copse of trees that had hidden the trains, onto a brush-covered plain. Here the hills lifted a few miles inland, rather than directly from the coast, and what trees there were grew mostly in the ravines. The rails ran just to the sea side of the freeway, and I could see the ocean from time to time when we topped a rise, silvered gray under low clouds. We passed a headland that had taken Nicolin and me half a day to walk to; it was as far south as I had ever been. From there on I was in new territory.

The car’s wheels ground over the tracks with a sound like a rasp cutting metal, and we picked up speed until we were going faster than a man could run. Rolling down a slope we moved even faster, and a cold wind struck me; the rotten ties flashed under the car so fast I couldn’t make out any individual ties! Tom’s beard was blowing back over his shoulders like a flag, and he grinned at me. “The only way to travel, eh?” I nodded vigorously, too excited to speak. It felt like we were flying, no matter the crunch and rattle from below. “How f-fast are we going?” I stammered out.

Tom looked over the side, put his hand up to the wind. “About thirty miles an hour,” he said. “Maybe thirty-five. It’s been a good long while since I’ve gone this fast, I’ll tell you.”

“Thirty miles an hour!” I cried. “Yeee-
ow!
”

The men laughed at me, but I didn’t care. So far as I was concerned, they were the fools; we were going thirty miles an hour, and they sat there trying to avoid the wind!

“Want to pull?” Jennings said from the back end of the crossbar. At that the men laughed again.

“Do I!” I said. Jennings stepped aside and I took the T at the end of the pole on its upswing. When I pulled down on it I could feel the car surge forward, all out of proportion to the force I had exerted, and I whooped again. I pulled hard, and saw the white grin of the man pulling across from me. He pulled just as hard, and we made that car fly down Pendleton like we were in a dream. All of a sudden I
knew
what it had been like to live in the old time, I
knew
that power they had wielded. All Tom’s stories and all his books had told me of it, but now I felt it in my muscles and my skin, I could see it flying all by me, and it was exhilarating. We
pumped
that car down those tracks. Behind us the men on the following car hooted and hollered: “Hey up there! Who you got on the bar?” “We know it ain’t Jennings doing that!” The men on both cars laughed at that. “It
is
Jennings,” one of them said. “I didn’t know you missed your wife that much!” “What are you worried she’s up to?” “Better not waste all your
pumping
up here!” “Throw us a tow rope if you feel that good!”

“Slow it down some,” Lee said after a while. “We got a ways to go, don’t want to tire out those poor men back there.”

So we slowed a bit. Still, when one of the men took my place, I was sweating from the effort, and standing there I chilled fast. I sat down and huddled in my coat. The land got hillier. On the up slopes we all had to get up and help pump the bar; on the downs we rolled so fast I wouldn’t have stood up for silver.

We passed a bit of white cloth, hanging from a pole. Lee stood and pulled the brake lever, and we came to a halt blasting red sparks over the trackbed, with a screech that made me shudder, it hurt my ears so.

“Now comes the complicated part,” Jennings said, and jumped off the car. In the sudden silence I could hear running water ahead of us. Tom and I got off the train and followed the rest of the men down the tracks. There in a dip lay a considerable stream, about half the width of our valley’s river. Black posts stuck out of the surface in a double line, all the way across. Beams and planks connected some of the posts, and extended to the banks on either side, but there were big gaps as well, and all in all it was a wreck. Each post knocked up a little circle of foam from the river, showing it was a fast stream.

“That’s our bridge foundation,” Jennings said to Tom and me, while Lee directed the men on the bank. “The pilings are in pretty good shape. We leveled them, and brought up some beams that sit over the pilings sideways, like lintels. Then we set rail over the beams at the right gauge, and roll the cars over, and haul all the beams and rail to the other bank after us. It’s a lot of work, but with the material hidden no one can tell we’re crossing this bridge.”

“Very ingenious,” Tom said.

Three or four more lanterns had been lit, and their light was directed at the pilings by metal reflectors. The men hustled about in the dark, cursing at manzanita and brambleberry, and pulling the beams out of the brush down to the bank. They hooked these beams onto a thick length of rope that they had fished out of the shallows. This rope extended across the river under the water, was threaded through a large pulley, and came back under the stream to our side. The ten crossbeams, or ties, were hauled out into the river upstream from the pilings, and then the rope was slackened till the ties floated between the pilings. Men balancing on the pilings—they got out to them on narrow planks—would then fish the ties up and secure them atop the pilings.