The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (7 page)

“Why, I don’t doubt we would be the strongest nation on Earth again, by God,” Leonard went on.

“Now wait a second,” Tom said. “There aren’t enough Americans left alive to add up to a nation at all, much less the strongest on Earth. And what good would it do if we had blown the rest of the world into the same fix?”

Doc was so outraged he cut Leonard off and answered for him: “What good would it do?” he said. “It would mean there wouldn’t be any God damned Chinese boating off the coast, watching us all the time and
bombing
every attempt we make to rebuild! That’s what good it would do. That coward Eliot put America in a hole for good. We’re the bottom of the world now, Tom Barnard, we’re bears in the pit.”

“Raarrrr,” Steve growled, and took another drink. I took the next one.

“We were goners as soon as the bombs went off,” Tom said. “Makes no difference what happened to the rest of the world. If Eliot had decided to push the button, that just would’ve killed more people and wrecked more countries. It wouldn’t have done a thing for us. Besides, it wasn’t the Russians or the Chinese that planted the bombs—”

“You don’t think,” Doc said.

“You know it wasn’t! It was the God damned South Africans.”

“The French!” George cried. “It was the French!”

“It was the Vietnamese,” Leonard said.

“No it wasn’t,” Tom replied. “That poor country didn’t even own a firecracker when we were done with it. And Eliot probably wasn’t the man who decided not to retaliate, either. He probably died in the first moments of the day, like everyone else. It was some general in a plane who made the decision, you can bet your wooden teeth. And quite a surprise it must have been, too, even to him. Especially to him. Makes me wonder who he was.”

Doc said, “Whoever it was, he was a coward and a traitor.”

“He was a decent human being,” said Tom. “If we had struck back at Russia and China, we’d be criminals and murderers. Anyway if we had done that the Russians would’ve sent their whole stockpile over here to answer ours, and then there wouldn’t be a single damn
ant
left alive on North America today.”

“Ants would still be alive,” George said. Steve and I bent our heads to the table, giggling and pushing our fingers in each others’ sides—“pushing the button,” as the old men said. Tom was giving us a mean look, so we straightened up and drank some more to calm ourselves.

“—over five thousand nuclear blasts and survived,” Doc was saying. Every meet the number went up. “We could have taken a few more. Our enemies deserved a few of them too, that’s all I’m saying.” Even though they had this argument every time they joined the other antiques, almost, Doc was still getting angry at Tom. Bitterly he cried, “If Eliot had pushed the button we’d all be in the same boat, and then we’d have a chance to rebuild. They won’t let us rebuild, God damn it!”

“We are rebuilding, Ernest,” Tom said jovially, trying to put the fun back in their argument. He waved at the surrounding scene.

“Get serious,” Doc said. “I mean back to the way we were.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” said Tom. “They’d likely blow us up again.”

Leonard, however, was only listening to Doc: “We’d be in a race with the Communists to rebuild, and you know who would win that one. We would!”

“Yeah!” said George. “Or maybe the French.…”

Barnard just shook his head and grabbed the jar from Steve, who gave him a struggle for it. “As a doctor you should never wish such destruction on others, Ernest.”

“As a doctor I know best what they did to us, and where they’re keeping us,” Doc replied fiercely. “We’re bears in the pit.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Steve said to me. “They’re going to start deciding whether we belong to the Russians or the Chinese.”

“Or the French,” I said, and we slithered off the bench. I took a last gulp of the old man’s liquor and he whacked me. “Out of here, you ungrateful wretches,” he cried. “Not willing to listen to history without poking fun.”

“We’ll read the books,” Steve said. “They don’t get drunk.”

“Listen to him,” said Tom, as his cronies laughed. “I taught him to read, and he calls me a drunk.”

“No wonder they’re so mixed up, with you teaching them to read,” Leonard said. “You sure you got the books turned right way up?”

We wandered off to the sound of this sort of thing, and made our way with some stumbling to the orange tree. This was a giant old oak, one of a half dozen or so in the park, that held in its branches gas lanterns wrapped in transparent orange plastic. It was the mark of the scavengers from central Orange County, and our gang used it as the meeting place later at night. We didn’t see anyone from Onofre, so we sat on the grass under the tree, arms around each other, and made ribald comments on the passing crowd. Steve waved down a man selling jars of liquor and gave him two dimes for a jar of tequila. “Jars back without a crack, else we put the crack in your back,” the man intoned as he moved on. On the other side of the orange tree a small bike-powered generator was humming and crackling; a group of scavengers was using it to operate a small instant oven, cooking slabs of meat or whole potatoes in seconds. “Heat it and eat it,” they cried. “See the miracle microwave, the super horno! Heat it and eat it!” I took a sip of the tequila; it was strong stuff, but I was drunk enough to want to get drunker. “I am
drunk,
” I told Steve. “I am
borracho.
I am aplastaaaa-do.”

“Yes you are,” Steve said. “Look at that silver.” He pointed at one of the scavenger women’s heavy necklaces. “Look at it!” He took a long swallow. “Hanker, those people are rich. Don’t you think they could do just about anything they pleased? Go anywhere they pleased? Be anything they pleased? We’ve got to get some of that silver. Somehow we’ve got to. Life isn’t just grunging for food in the same spot day after day, Henry. That’s how animals live. But we’re human beings, Hanker, that’s what we are and don’t you forget it, and Onofre ain’t big enough for us, we can’t live our whole lives in that valley like cows chewing cud. Chewing our cud and waiting to get tossed in some instant oven and
mi
crowaved, give me another swallow of that, Hanker my best buddy, a powerful thirst for more has suddenly afflicted me.”

“The mind is its own place,” I remarked solemnly as I gave him the jar. Neither of us needed any more liquor, but when Gabby and Rebel and Kathryn and Kristen showed up, we were quick to help drink another jar. Steve forgot about silver for a while in favor of a kiss; Kathryn’s red hair covered the sight. The band started again, a trumpet, a clarinet, two saxes, a drum and a bass fiddle, and we sang along with the tunes: “Waltzing Matilda,” or “Oh Susannah,” or “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” Melissa showed up and sat down beside me. She’d been drinking and smoking, I could see. I put an arm around her, and over her shoulder Kathryn winked at me. More and more people crowded around the orange tree as the band heated up, and soon we couldn’t see anything but legs. We played a game of guessing what town people were from by their legs alone, and then we danced around the tree with the rest of the crowd.

Much later we started our return to camp. I felt great. We staggered on the promenade, holding each other up and singing “High Hopes” all out of tune with the fading sound of the band. Halfway home we collided with a group coming out of the trees, and I was roughly shoved to the ground. “Chinga,” I said, and scrambled up. There were shouts and scufflings, a few others hit the ground and rolled back up swinging and shouting angrily. “What the—” The two groups separated and stood facing each other belligerently; by the light of a distant lantern we saw that it was the gang from San Clemente, decked out in identical red and white striped shirts.

“Oh,” said Nicolin, his voice dripping with disgust, “it’s them.”

One of the leaders of their gang stepped into a shaft of light and grinned unpleasantly. His earlobes were all torn up from having on earrings in fights, but that hadn’t stopped him; he still had two gold earrings in his left ear, and two silver ones in his right.

“Hello, Doll Grin,” Nicolin said.

“Little people shouldn’t come into Clemente at night,” said the scavenger.

“What’s Clemente?” Nicolin asked casually. “Nothing north of us but ruins.”

“Little people might get scared. They might hear a
sound,
” Doll Grin went on, and the guys behind him began to hum a rising tone, “uhnnnnnn-eeeeeehhhhhhh,” then falling, rising again: the sound of the siren we had heard that night. When they stopped their leader said, “We don’t like people like you in our town. Next time you won’t get away so easy.…”

Nicolin cracked his crazy smile. “Found any good dead bodies to eat lately?” he asked the scavengers innocently. With a rush they were on him, and Gabby and I had to come up on each side of him swinging hard, to keep him from being surrounded, although with his heavy boots he was doing quite well on their kneecaps. As the fight broke out in earnest he started shouting happily “Vultures! Buzzards! Wreckrats! Zopilotes!” and I had to look sharp because there were more of them than there were of us, and they seemed to have rings on every finger—

The sheriffs barged into us bellowing “What’s this? Stop this—HEY!” I found myself on the dirt again, as did most of us. I started the laborious process of standing. “You kids get the fuck out of here,” one of the sheriffs said. He was shaped like a barrel and was a foot taller than Steve, whom he held by the shirt. “We’ll ban you all from swap meets forever if we have to break up these fights again. Now get out of here before we cave your faces in to make you think about it.”

We rejoined the girls—Kristen and Rebel had been in the midst of the tussle, but the rest had stayed back—and trooped down the promenade. Behind us the Clemente gang started up the siren sound, “uhnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeee…”

“Damn!” Nicolin said, wrapping an arm around Kathryn. “We were going to pound those guys, too.”

“They had you two to one,” Kathryn pointed out.

“Oh Katie, don’t you know that’s just the way we wanted it?” We all agreed we had had them in a tight spot, and walked back to camp in a fine humor. Melissa found me and slipped under my arm. As we approached the camp she slowed down and we fell behind the others. Sensing something to this, I steered us off the promenade into the grove. I stopped and leaned back against a laurel.

“You looked good fighting,” she said, and then we were kissing. After some long kisses she sort of let her weight go on me, and I slid down the tree with her, scraping my back good on the bark. Once on the leaves I laid half on top, half beside her, a leg between hers, an awkward position, but it was making my blood pound. We were kissing without pause and I could feel her breathing fast, humming little gasps. I tried to get my hand down her pants but couldn’t get it far enough, so I pushed it up under her shirt and held her breast. She bit my neck and a jolt ran down that whole side of my body. Someone with a lantern walked by on the promenade, and for a second I could see her shoulder: dirty white cotton twisted against pale skin, the swell of her breast pushed up by my hand … back to kissing, with the image clear in my closed eyes.

She pulled back. “Ohh,” she sighed, “Henry. I told my dad I’d be right back. He’ll start looking for me if I don’t get back there pretty soon.” She made a pout that I could just see in the dark, and I laughed and kissed it.

“That’s okay. Some other time.” I was too drunk to feel balked, why five minutes before I hadn’t been expecting anything like this, and it was easy to slip back to that. Anything was easy. I helped her to her feet and took a piece of bark out of my back. And laughed.

I walked Melissa into camp and with a final quick kiss left her near her father’s set-up. I went back out in the grove to take a leak. Off through the treetrunks I could still see the scavengers’ camps, bouncing in the firelight, and faintly I could hear a group of them singing “America the Beautiful.” I sang along under my breath, a perfect harmony part that only I could hear, and the old tune filled my heart.

Back on the promenade in front of our camp I saw the old man, talking with two strangers dressed in dark coats. The old man asked them questions, but I couldn’t make out the words. Wondering who they were I stumbled back to my sleeping spot. I laid down, head spinning, and looked up at the black branches against the sky, every pine needle clear as an ink stroke. I figured I’d be out in a second. But when I settled down there was a noise; someone was crushing leaves over and over again,
crick, crick, crick, crick
 … from where Steve slept. I started listening and before long I heard breathing, and a soft, rhythmic expelling of breath. I knew it was Kathryn’s voice. My hard-on was back; I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep. After a minute’s listening I felt strange, and making some irritated noises, I got up and went out to the front of the camp, where the fire was a warm mass of coals. I sat watching them shift from gray to orange with every breath of wind, feeling horny and envious and drunk and happy.

All of a sudden the old man crashed into camp, looking drunker than I by a good deal. His scruff of hair flew around his head like smoke. He saw me and squatted by the fire. “Hank,” he said, his voice uncommonly excited. “I’ve just been talking with two men who were looking for me.”

“I saw you out there with them. Who were they?”

He looked at me, his bloodshot eyes gleaming with reflected firelight. “Hank, those men were from San Diego. And they came here—or up to just south of Onofre, actually—they talked to Recovery Simpson and followed us to the meet, to talk with me, ain’t that nice—word gets around, you know, who a village elder is. Anyway…”

“The men.”

“Yes! These men say they got from San Diego to Onofre
by train.
”

We sat there staring at each other over the fire, and some little flames popped up. Light danced on his wild eyes. “They came by train.”

4

A few days after we got back from the meet, Pa and I woke up to the sound of a hard rain drumming on the roof. We ate a loaf of bread and made a big fire, and sat down to needle clothes, but the rain fisted the roof harder and harder, and when we looked out the door we could scarcely see the big eucalyptus. It looked like the ocean had decided to jump up and wash us down to it, and the young crops would be the first to go. Plants, stakes, the soil itself; they’d all be ripped away.