The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (13 page)

The tracks led to a village somewhat like ours, except there were more houses, and they were placed closer together, and many of them had been built in the old time. The screech of our brakes sent chickens cackling and dogs howling. Several men and women emerged from a big house across the clearing from the tracks. The San Diegans jumped off the cars and greeted the locals. In the light of day they looked filthy and red-eyed and whiskery, but no one seemed to mind.

“Welcome to San Diego!” Jennings said to us as he helped Tom off the car. “Or to University City, to be more exact. Care to join us for breakfast?”

We agreed heartily to that, and I realized I was as hungry as I was tired, or even more so. We were introduced to the group who had come from the big house to greet us, and we followed them into it.

Inside the front door was an entryway two stories tall, carpeted red, with red and gold wallpaper on the walls, and a glass candle holder hanging from the ceiling. The staircase against one wall was carpeted as well, and it had a bannister of carved and varnished oak. Wide-eyed, I said, “Is this the Mayor’s house?”

The San Diegans erupted with laughter. I felt my cheeks burn. Jennings put his arm around my shoulders with a whoop. “You’ve proved yourself tonight, Henry my boy. We aren’t laughing
at
you; it’s just … well, when you see the Mayor’s place, you’ll understand why. This here is my house. Come on in and clean up and meet the wife, and we’ll have a good meal to celebrate your arrival.”

7

After breakfast Tom and I slept for most of the day, on old couches in the Jennings’ front room. Late in the day Jennings bustled in and woke us, saying, “Quick now, quick. I’ve been to talk to the Mayor—he’s invited you to a dinner and a conference, and he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Shut up and let them get ready,” Jennings’ wife said as she looked over his shoulder at us. She looked remarkably like him, short, thick and cheerful. “When you’re ready I’ll show you to the bathroom.” Tom and I followed her to it, and relieved ourselves in a working water toilet. When we were done Jennings hustled us outside. Lee and the short man were already on one of the train cars. We joined them, and they pumped us south. Apparently in the light of day the tubby man felt more sociable, and he introduced himself as Abe Tonklin.

We rattled over tracks laid on the cracked concrete of another freeway, under a canopy of torrey pine and eucalyptus, redwood and oak. The car crunched swiftly through alternating shadows and slanted beams of sunlight, and now and then we passed a big clearing in the forest, packed with crops, usually corn. Once I waved at a man standing in one of these yellowy green expanses, and then realized he was a scarecrow.

Over the roar of wheel on rail Jennings shouted, “We’re almost there.” We topped a rise and below us was a narrow lake, stretching right to left in front of us. It was as if a marsh similar to the ones to the north had flooded. Scattered on the lake’s surface were towering buildings,
skyscrapers,
at least a dozen of them. One of them, to the left, was a giant circular wall. And in the middle of the lake stood a piece of freeway, up on concrete pilings above the water. A white house stood on this platform. Flying above this house I could make out a little American flag, snapping in the breeze. I looked at Tom, my mouth hanging open in amazement. Tom’s eyes were big. I took in the sight again. Flanked by forested hills, lit by the low sun, the long lake and its fantastic collection of drowned and ruined giants was the most impressive remnant of the old time I had ever laid eyes on. They were so big! Once again I had that feeling—like a hand squeezing my heart—that I
knew
what it had been like.…

“Now
that’s
the Mayor’s house,” Jennings said.

“By God, it’s Mission Valley,” Tom said.

“That’s right,” Jennings replied, as proudly as if he’d made it all himself. Tom laughed. The tracks came to an end, and Lee braked the car with the usual nerve-jangling screech. We got off and followed the San Diegans down the freeway. It led right into the lake and disappeared. The piece of freeway standing on stilts in the lake’s center was on a line with it, and in a notch of the hills forming the opposite shore I saw the gray concrete rising out of the lake again. All at once I understood that the section of freeway on stilts in the lake was all that was left of a bridge that had spanned the whole valley. Rather than have their road dip into the valley and rise again, they had placed it on towers for well over a mile, from hillside to hillside—just to avoid a drop and rise for their
cars!
I was stunned; I stared at it; I couldn’t get a grasp on the sort of thinking that would even imagine such a bridge.

“You okay?” Lee asked me.

“Huh? Yeah, sure. Just looking at the lake.”

“Quite a sight. Maybe we can take a sail around it in the morning.” This was as friendly as Lee had been to me, and I saw that he appreciated my astonishment.

Where the road plunged into the lake a large floating dock moored a score of rowboats and small catboats. Lee and Abe led us to one of the larger rowboats. We got in, and Abe rowed us toward the freeway island. As we got closer Jennings answered Tom’s questions: “The rains washed mountains of dirt down to the rivermouth, which was bracketed by a pair of long jetties and crossed by several roads—just generally obstructed. So the dirt stuck there and formed a plug. A big dam. What? There’s still a channel through to the ocean, but it’s on top of the plug, so we got the lake back here. It’s well above sea level. Runs all the way to El Cajon.”

Tom laughed. “Ha! We always said a good rain would flood this valley, but
this.…
What about the overpass out here?”

“The first floods were pretty violent, they say, and the sides of the hills got ripped away, so the towers holding the road fell. Only the center ones held. We blasted the wreckage hanging from the center section so it would look cleaner. More planned, you know.”

“Sure.”

As we rowed under it I could see the broken end of the freeway, yellow in the late sun. Rusted metal rods stuck out from the pocked concrete, twisting down at their ends. The platform was about fifteen feet thick, and its bottom was twenty feet or so above the sunbeaten lake surface. The platform had been part of an intersection, and narrow ramps branched from the main north-south fragment to descend to the valley floor. Now these curving side roads served as convenient boat ramps for us. We glided to the eastern ramp, and were moored by a few men who were there to greet us. We stepped from the front of the boat onto the concrete ramp. The red sun gleamed between two towers, and the breeze ruffled our hair. From the dwellings above we heard laughter and voices, and a tinkling of crockery.

“We’re late,” Lee said. “Let’s go.” As we ascended the ramp I noticed that it tilted side to side, as well as up. Tom told me, when I mentioned it, that this had been done to keep the cars coming down the ramp at high speed from skidding off the side. I looked over the edge at the water below and thought that the old Americans must have been fools.

Up on the wide and level north-south platform we could see the houses built on it. The big house stood at the north end, and the cluster of smaller buildings, each about the size of my home, were arranged in a horseshoe at the south end. Half of the big house was only one story tall, and on the roof of this part, facing us, was a porch with a blue railing. Over the railing leaned several men, watching us. Jennings waved to them as we approached. I walked next to Tom, suddenly nervous.

Lee and Jennings led Tom and me into the big house. Once inside Jennings took a comb from a pocket and ran it through his hair. Lee grinned sardonically at this grooming, and pushed past Jennings to lead us up a broad staircase. On the upper floor we walked down a dim hallway to a room containing a lot of chairs and a piano. Large glass doors in the south wall of this room opened onto the roof porch, and we walked through them.

The Mayor stood in a group of men by the railing, watching us approach. He was a big man, tall, wide-shouldered and deep-chested. His forearms were thick with muscle, and under his plaid wool pants I could see his thighs were the same. One of his men helped him to shrug into a plain blue coat. His head looked too small for his body. “Jennings, who are these men?” he said in a high, scratchy voice. Underneath his black moustache was a small mouth, a weak chin. But as he adjusted his collar he looked us over with sharply intelligent, pale blue eyes.

Jennings introduced Tom and me.

“Timothy Danforth,” the Mayor said in reply. “Mayor of this fine town.” There was a little American flag in the lapel of his jacket. He shook hands with each of us; when I shook I squeezed as hard as I could, but I might as well have been squeezing rock. He could have squashed my hand like bread dough. As Tom said later, his handshake alone could have made him mayor. He said to Tom, “I am told you are not the elected leader of San Onofre?”

“Onofre doesn’t have an elected leader,” Tom said.

“But you hold some sort of authority?” the Mayor suggested.

Tom shrugged and walked past him to the porch rail. “Nice view you’ve got here,” he said, looking west, where the sun had been halved by the darkening hills. I was shocked at Tom’s rudeness; I wanted to speak up and tell the Mayor that Tom had as much authority as anyone in Onofre. But I kept my mouth shut. Tom kept looking at the sunset. The Mayor watched him out of narrowed eyes.

“Always good to meet another neighbor,” the Mayor said, in a hearty voice. “We’ll celebrate with a meal out here, if you like. It should be a warm enough evening.” He smiled and his moustache waggled. “Tell me, are you one who lived in the old time?” His tone seemed to say, are you one of those who used to live in Paradise?

“How did you guess?” Tom said.

The dozen men on the porch laughed, but Danforth just stared at Tom. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. There aren’t many of you left, especially in such good health. You’re an inspiration to all of us.”

Tom lifted his bushy eyebrows. “Really?”

“An inspiration,” the Mayor repeated firmly. “A monument, so to speak. A reminder of what we’re striving for in these most difficult of times. I find that old timers like you understand better what we’re striving for.”

“Which is?” said Tom.

Luckily, or perhaps deliberately, the Mayor didn’t hear Tom’s question. “Well, come sit down,” he said, as if we had been refusing to. There were several round tables on the porch, among small trees in big buckets. As we sat around one next to the rail Danforth’s little eyes peered at Tom. Tom innocently stared at the flag, which ruffled limply from a pole sticking out of the roof.

Twenty-five or thirty tables were set up on the freeway below, and more boats were arriving in the gloom of the early evening. The hills to the south were a brilliant green at their very tops, but that was the last of the light. From somewhere in the house a generator started to hum, and electric lights snapped on all over the island. The little buildings at the south end, the freeway railings, the rooms of the house behind us: all blazed with a white light. Girls my age or younger moved around the porch, bringing plates and silverware out from inside. One of the girls set my plate before me and gave me a smile. Her hair shone gold under the glare of the lights, and I smiled back. Men and women appeared at the top of the east ramp, dressed like scavengers in bright coats and colorful dresses, but I didn’t care. In San Diego things were obviously not the same. Down here they combined the best of scavenger and newtowner, I thought. One of the brighter lights shone on the flag, and everyone on the island stood at attention as the limp folds of red, white, and blue were lowered. Tom and I stood with them, and I felt a peculiar glow flushing my face and the chinks of my spine.…

Around our table were Tom and me, Jennings, Lee, the Mayor, and three of his men, who were quickly introduced to us. Ben was the only name I remembered. Jennings told the Mayor about their trip north, describing the two bridges and all the major breaks in the track. He made the repair work sound difficult, and I guessed that they had come home behind schedule. Or maybe Jennings just exaggerated out of habit. He certainly did when telling them about my swim across the creek, and I blushed, pleased that the blond serving girl was hovering between our table and the next to hear the tale. Jennings made it a tall tale indeed, and as the San Diegans congratulated me Tom nudged me under the table. “It was nothing,” I told them. “I was anxious to get down here and see this town.” The Mayor nodded his approval of the sentiment, sinking his chin into his neck until it looked like there was nothing but folds of skin between his Adam’s apple and his mouth.

“What’s the shortest time it would take you to train up to Onofre?” the Mayor asked Lee. Tom and I nudged each other again: he knew which of his men to ask when he wanted a straight answer. Of course if he couldn’t figure out Lee and Jennings he’d scarcely be able to mayor a doghouse. But it was a sign.

Lee cleared his throat. “Last night it took about eight hours, from our stopping point up there to University City. That’s about as fast as it could be done, unless we left the bridges up.”

“We can’t do that.” Danforth’s mobile face was grim.

“I guess not. Anyway, another fifteen minutes to Onofre. The track’s in good shape to there.”

“And beyond as well,” Jennings added, which made Tom look up. The Mayor scowled.

“Let’s talk about that after dinner,” he said.

After the girls had set the tables, with plates and glasses and cloth napkins and silverware that looked like real silver, they brought out big glass bowls filled with salads made of lettuce and shrimp. Tom examined the shrimp with interest, forking one to get it closer to his eyes. “Where do you get these?” he inquired.

The Mayor laughed. “Wait till after the grace, and Ben here will tell you.”

All the serving girls came out and stood still, and the Mayor stood and walked to the rail, so he could be seen from below. He had a limp, I noticed; his left foot wouldn’t bend. We all bowed our heads. The Mayor declaimed the prayer: “Dear Lord, we eat this food you have provided us in order to make us strong in the service of you and of the United States of America. Amen.” Everyone joined in on the amen, which covered the little sounds Tom was making beside me. I ribbed him hard.