Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  “The outside is redwood and brick. Lots of window space.”

  “Is Luis coming down with us?”

  “Becky and Luis plan to live in Palo Alto. That’s seven miles north.” Raoul put his arm around Miguel’s shoulders. “You’ll like it down there, son. We have five acres of ground and a view of the valley—”

  “Is there enough room for a swimming pool?”

  “Maybe. There’s a country club nearby. Luis is checking into it. And it is just five miles to Roslyn School, where you’ll be going to high school.”

  It was the first Miguel had heard of any plan to send him to a private preparatory school. He knew about Roslyn from Junior Freeborne who went there. It was a small school, with an enrollment held at thirty to forty students. It aimed at preparing you for the College Board examinations. He had heard it cost a great deal of money to go there.

  “Are we rich, Dad?” he asked.

  Raoul laughed. “I wouldn’t say we’re rich, son. We have enough. Let’s put it that way.”

  The thought of having “enough” was curiously satisfying. “I’m only in the high sixth,” Miguel said. “I won’t be ready for high school for a while yet.”

  “Roslyn will take you from the eighth grade. I investigated this school thing and Roslyn is absolutely the best. I called that teacher of yours—Mrs. Meacham. She recommends it very highly. And Oliver Eubanks is sending Tom there—if he can get him in.”

  “Golly, Dad. Old Tom. That’s marvelous.”

  “Mel Guthrie is planning on sending his boy. You’ll have lots of friends. I want you to have, hijo. You’ve always kept to yourself too much. Remember, a man’s friends are his most valuable possessions.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Raoul began rolling up the house plans. Miguel, not wanting to be dismissed yet, asked, “What about the Nereid?”

  “We’ll leave her where she is. San Francisco is only an hour’s drive on the Bayshore Highway.”

  “When do we go, Dad? Soon now?”

  “Anxious? Well, so am I, hijo. We’ll go as soon as I’m on my feet again. Dr. Winthrop says in about two weeks. But I have to be careful, you understand that, don’t you?”

  “Oh, sure, Dad,” Miguel said earnestly.

  Raoul’s hand tightened on Miguel’s shoulder. “Your old father was a pretty sick man, son. It looked bad there for a while.”

  Miguel felt a tiny knot of fear inside him. Nothing seemed quite secure any more. Concha and Essie gone, and Maria—Raoul said in a heavy voice: “Hijo, you and I have got to stick together. I need you. Luis is my son, too, but it’s never been quite right. We’ve always been more like brothers than like father and son. I suppose when Luis and Esther were born I was still too young and too busy to be a father to them. In Esther’s case, I’m paying for it now. The Sisters have her for good and that’s all right if that’s what she wants. But with you, I want it to be different.” He cleared his throat and took off his glasses, so that he had to squint against the light from the window. “That awful thing with your mother—”

  Miguel’s entrails griped suddenly and a hot wetness sprang into his eyes. He bit his lip so he would not cry. It was a sudden and a painful thing, this attack of bitter hurt and melancholy that descended out of a misty memory to engulf him.

  “—that terrible accident—“ Raoul broke off, his voice choked with emotion. “We must do everything we can to forget it. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. You must always remember that. It was an accident and we have to wipe it right out of our minds. It’s the only healthy way.” He stopped to look away, rubbing his glasses. After a moment, he went on. “We are going to make a new life, hijo. A whole, new, wonderful life.”

  Three weeks before the house in Los Altos was ready for occupancy, Raoul allowed Miguel to accept an invitation from the Freebornes to spend ten days on the river.

  Miguel had looked forward to going back, but nothing was the same. The dusty gravel road hadn’t changed, nor had the madrona forest or the slow, green river. But the feel of it was all different. Strange to him.

  Tom couldn’t come up, and Billy Alberg and Sandy were running with a different group. Miguel felt like an outsider and he avoided them after one or two encounters.

  Junior Freeborne, a tall and sallow adolescent with red eyes and acne, was more interested in gathering specimens for his insect collections than in being a host to Miguel, and after three or four days grubbing under logs for beetles, Miguel took to avoiding him, too.

  Mr. and Mrs. Freeborne were very considerate, but they whispered about Maria all the time when Miguel was around, as though they derived some dreadful satisfaction from an endless recital of the circumstances surrounding her death.

  Miguel grew moody and restless. He found the secret beach again and noted that its configuration had changed like everything else. The winter rise of water had swept the fine sand away and transformed the quiet cove into a rocky lagoon.

  He swam alone, sketching, sunbathing and reading. He no longer kept a journal, but he had begun to write fanciful stories, most of which he tore into tiny pieces and scattered on the slow current.

  One evening he walked down the road to Patches and stood before the shuttered, silent house in the dusk, listening to the sound of the breeze in the treetops. He felt lonely and depressed, thinking of Maria and Concha and Anson and Essie.

  He was glad when the ten days were gone and he was returned home. His second summer on the river was, in a sense, a farewell. He never returned there.

  In the fall he started at the local Los Altos School. He made few friends. In what was essentially a rural community, he was a city kid. He knew without being told, with the preternatural awareness of his age, that this strangeness would wear off in time but that there was nothing he could do to speed the process.

  The new house was in every way satisfactory: on a hilltop with a view of the valley and a long gravel drive. From the window of his room he could see the great silver hive of the dirigible hangar at Moffett Field and the flat acres of orchard lands between Palo Alto and San Jose.

  Raoul’s heart mended slowly, but in the spring he and Miguel and Luis were able to sail the Nereid, taking trips as far up the river as Petaluma and Stockton.

  The day would begin with a drive up the new Bayshore Highway, into San Francisco and along the Embarcadero with its great gray piers and towering ships and the smell of roasting coffee and cocoa. They would drive past the tower of the Ferry Building where the orange-painted Key System ferryboats docked and Luis would tell Miguel of the day he was on the Peralta when too many passengers had rushed forward and the fat ship had plunged her open bow into the waters of the bay and people had been washed overboard. And after that came the short ride to the St. Francis Yacht Club where the Nereid lay moored in the basin with all the other clean-lined white boats with the gulls wheeling and cawing among the lines and pennons.

  Raoul always looked terrific in his white flannels and brass-buttoned blue coat and yachting cap.

  And then they would sail out of the anchorage with Raoul at the wheel and old Morgan, the crewman, just standing by and complimenting Raoul on the way he handled the boat. Sometimes they would cruise to Paradise Cove and visit some of Raoul’s friends on other boats, and other times they would sail up the river to Stockton, hailing the side-wheelers Delta King and Delta Queen as they thrashed by in a frenzy of white water.

  One weekend around Easter, Raoul had taken Tom and Ollie along on a trip to Sacramento and something went wrong with the Nereide’s engine and they had all taken the Delta Queen back to the city, leaving Morgan with the Nereid.

  With Tom, Miguel had roamed the ship, running races around the top decks and scrambling up and down the stairways—ladders, Oliver said you should call them—and finally ending up at the dutch doors made of steel where they could look down into the engine room where the great pistons turned the oily, glistening shafts with a steady, thrumming sound like the beat of tympani. There was always a rush of ho
t, oil-smelling air coming up out of those depths and Miguel and Tom could watch the sweaty, shining men moving about their incomprehensible tasks in the underwater bowels of the ship.

  The following July, Raoul and Luis took Miguel on a month’s stag trip into the high Sierra country. They fished Lake Tioga and the streams and creeks in the area, sleeping on the ground in down bags and drifting through the mountain counties in search of trout. Miguel loved the hissing light of the Coleman lanterns at night in a high camp, the leaping shadows of the cooking fire, and the clear, brilliant stars seen through the branches of the pines.

  Raoul said the mountains were good for his health, and it was true that Miguel had never seen him looking better—tall, bronzed by the sun. To see Raoul gracefully casting a dry fly into a white water pool was an almost sensual pleasure. And the sudden strike of a Rainbow on his own line was a tactile thrill Miguel never forgot.

  Raoul had acquired a new 1934 La Salle, and loaded with gear, Luis at the wheel, they drove through rock-strewn Hope Valley and over the narrow, winding road through Picketts and Markleeville to Carson’s Pass, eighty-six hundred feet above the sea.

  They camped that night at The Spur, and while Luis made the fire and pitched the tent, Raoul took Miguel out onto the great stone outcropping to watch the sun set into the murky valley to the west.

  From where they stood, a steep talus with granite striations fell away for almost a thousand feet into a deep river canyon. On the other side, the ground rose in a great, monolithic watershed eroded by a hundred streams and rivulets. The pines, looking like ming trees in the distance, grew starkly out of the rocks, their roots bedded in the gray stone. The deep green of the conifers, the purple tones of the evening shadows, the white of the rushing water and the red fire of the sky combined to make a panorama of breathtaking beauty.

  Miguel looked toward the sunset where the valley plains could be seen through the broad V of the canyon. They were hazy and distant, lost in the glare of the sinking sun, no part of the high mountain solitude. Out of the immense hollow below them came a continuing sound like the whispering of a thousand voices. It was the echo of the falling water and the murmur of the wind in the trees.

  “When your mother and I first came to California,” Raoul said, “we found this place.” Miguel thought he could detect a note of sadness in his voice. It was as though, Miguel thought, he were mourning for something vanished from his life. Presently, Raoul said, “I want a promise from you. I want you to tell me that some day you’ll stand right here and do something for me.

  Miguel waited. He felt protected and secure beside his father, feeling the rough cloth of his sleeve, the weight of his arm.

  “I want you to scatter my ashes here,” Raoul said.

  Miguel’s throat constricted and he wanted to protest, but Raoul wasn’t listening.

  “No one else can do it but you, Miguel. I want you to remember that always. No matter where you are, anywhere in the world—when I die I want you to come back here to this place and do this thing for me.”

  Miguel promised. He told himself that he would never really have to do it, because somehow, he would die first. But afterwards, when he had thought a great deal about it and could face the knowledge that surely, in the natural course of things, he must do what Raoul asked, he accepted the responsibility with a sad pride. By the time they had returned home, Miguel felt that Raoul had given him a man’s trust.

  Late that summer, Becky and Luis were married. They took an apartment in Palo Alto. Luis taught Miguel to drive on their Essex business coupé.

  Miguel found himself at home in the country around Los Altos. The hills lay sere and brown in the California sun and the sky over the Santa Clara Valley was clear for days on end. He found a favorite ridge not far from home: a ridge and a knoll crowned with a stand of white oaks. He could stand there and see the valley floor from Milipitas to San Jose and north as far as South San Francisco. He learned the place had a name, Frenchman’s Tor. He liked the familiar sound of it. There was a rutted dirt road winding up the hillside, traversing until it reached the crest and climbing straight up to the rounded knoll five hundred feet above the prime and apricot orchards.

  He often went there with Aldyth Wylie, who went to the Grammar School down on San Antonio Road. Allie was a rather large, rangy girl with perpetually skinned knees and a funny way of wrinkling her nose when she laughed. It was the laugh, Miguel often thought, that made Allie a better companion than any of the others he had met during spring term. It was a gay sound, but never silly. When Allie laughed you wanted to laugh with her and not at her the way you did when some of the other girls laughed and giggled.

  He took considerable teasing because of his friendship with Allie Wylie, but he didn’t really care. Allie had an Iver Johnson bicycle like his own, except that it was a girls model and had a guard over the sprocket. And she could ride it better than any of the boys at school. She didn’t get herself all painted up with lipstick the way so many of the seventh-graders were doing now, and she didn’t make you uncomfortable by acting silly when adults were around.

  Sometimes Miguel took Allie to the movies in Palo Alto in the evening. Of course, Raoul wouldn’t let him take a car, but Avery, the colored man Raoul had hired to do odd jobs around the house, would put on his dark suit and a cap and drive them in the La Salle. Luis liked to joke about “Miguelito’s dates” but

  Miguel didn’t mind. Taking Allie to the movies wasn’t like having a real date. It was just going with somebody you liked and could talk to and feel at ease with. That was the best part of being with her. He sometimes would explain to Luis that it wasn’t like going out with a girl at all, but that wasn’t exactly right. You didn’t ever forget Allie was a girl. You just didn’t hold it against her.

  One day, some weeks before Miguel was scheduled to start at Roslyn, he and Allie rode up to the Tor. It was hot and dry, with the star thistles and wild oat spores thick in the dry grass. They hid their bicycles in the brush at the base of the hill and climbed to the knoll, where a cool breeze was blowing.

  Miguel had stolen six cigarettes from Raoul’s desk and he offered one to Allie. She sat beside him under one of the oaks and smoked it, making a face each time she drew smoke into her mouth. Finally, she put it out and said, “I don’t think much of that habit. Why do you suppose people do it all the time?” Miguel put his own cigarette out carefully and sighed. “I don’t know. You want some gum, Allie? To take the smell of cigarette off your breath?”

  Allie peeled a stick and popped it into her mouth. Her face was tanned. It was broad through the cheekbones and the golden skin framed a full well-shaped mouth. She wore her sunburned blond hair tied back with a black ribbon.

  “Does your father know you smoke, Mike?” Allie asked. Miguel shook his head. “I could tell him, though, I’ll bet. And he wouldn’t get mad about it.”

  Allie laughed and pulled her skirt over her knees. “My folks would be furious.”

  “You don’t smoke so much,” Miguel said condescendingly.

  “I don’t really smoke at all,” Allie said. “Only a couple of times with you.”

  Miguel pointed up into the flat expanse of blue skies. “Look, Allie.”

  A great silver dirigible whirred in lazy flight over the valley. Miguel could see the red, white and blue star on its flank and the broad Navy strips on the tail surfaces.

  “It’s the Macon,” he said. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

  They leaned far back against the tree holding their hands high to frame the slowly cruising airship.

  “Would you like to fly in her?” Allie asked.

  “That’s lighter-than-air. I’d rather fly heavier-than-air planes.”

  “That sounds so funny.”

  “What does?”

  “Lighter-than-air. It sounds like a kind of dance.”

  “It only means the ship is lighter than the volume of air it displaces. When it’s full of helium gas, that is. You know we have the only helium
wells in the whole world? And we won’t let the Germans have any for their dirigibles?”

  “I think that’s mean,” Allie said. “It wouldn’t hurt us to let them have some.”

  Miguel sighed comfortably and closed his eyes. Presently, Allie asked, “Is it true you’re going to Roslyn School next year?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to Miss Harlow’s in Palo Alto.”

  “I thought you were going to Castilleja,” Miguel said.

  “No. I have to go to Miss Harlow’s because Mother went there.”

  They fell silent for a time. An ant crawled slowly up the seam of Miguel’s corduroy trousers. He flicked it away with a finger.

  “I’m going to miss you, Allie,” he said. He felt the blood come into his cheeks as he said it.

  Allie regarded him with grave, dark eyes. “Well still go on seeing one another, won’t we?”

  “Well, I guess so. If you want to, that is.”

  “Of course I want to. Didn’t you think I would?”

  Miguel dug at the earth with his heels. “I wasn’t so sure,” he said, not looking at her.

  “We’re friends,” she said in a slightly aggrieved voice.

  Miguel turned to look at her. He felt uncomfortably warm. He moved his hand over until it touched hers lightly. She did not take her hand away.

  “We’ll always be friends, Allie,” he said. “I would be very sorry if we weren’t.”

  She was smiling again and everything was all right. Moved by a sudden impulse, he kissed her lightly on the cheek. She put her hand to the spot his lips had touched and looked at him, surprised. He felt his heart pounding in his throat. He leaned forward again and kissed her on the lips. He swallowed hard and said, “Allie—?”

  “Why did you do that?”

  He looked away and said clumsily, “I guess I want you to be my girl.”