“I’m not against the town shares growing!”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”
Kevin exhaled noisily, frustrated. Feeling completely dizzy, he said, “Well—still—”
“So we should do what we can, right?”
“Yeah, sure—”
“I think we’re more in agreement than you realize, Kevin. You build things, I build things. It’s really the same thing.”
“Yeah, but, but if you’re tearing up wilderness!”
“Don’t worry about that. There isn’t any wilderness in El Modena in the first place, so don’t get too romantic about it. Besides, we’ll all be working out anything that happens here in the next couple of years, so we’ll bang out a consensus just like always. Don’t let your friends make you too paranoid about it.”
“My friends don’t make me paranoid. You make me paranoid.”
“I don’t appreciate that, Kevin. And it won’t help in the long run. Look, I build things to make money, and so do you. We’re in the same business, aren’t we? I mean, aren’t you in the construction business?”
“Yeah!”
Alfredo smiled. “Well, there you have it. We’ll work it out. Hey, I’ve got to get going—I’ve got a date—down in Irvine, in fact.” He winked, went into the house.
Ka … CHUNK.
Kevin faced the door, and after a moment’s thought he slammed his fist into his palm. “It’s completely different!” he shouted. “I do renovation!” Or else we tear down a structure and put another one in its place. And it always fits the land better. It’s entirely different!
But there was no one there to argue with.
He let out a long breath. “Shit.”
What had happened? Well, maybe Alfredo and his partners were planning a development. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe it was up in the hills. Maybe it wasn’t. He had learned that much.
He pulled his bike from the rack, observed his hands shaking. Alfredo was too much for him; try as he might, Alfredo could run rings around him. Chagrined at the realization, he turned the bike and headed downhill.
He needed help. Doris, Oscar, Oscar’s friend in Bishop; Jean and the Green party organization; Nadezhda. Perhaps even Ramona, somehow. He shied away from the thought—the implication that his dislike for Alfredo had non-political components—it was a political matter, nothing more!
And Tom.
Once home he went looking for Nadezhda. “Do you still want to meet my grandfather?”
* * *
Kevin’s grandfather lived in the back country, on a ridge in the broken hills north of Black Star Canyon. Kevin led Nadezhda and Doris up a poorly kept trail to his place, winding between sage and scrub oak and broken ribs of sandstone. Nadezhda was inquisitive about everything: plants, rocks, Tom’s livelihood. She had a beautiful low voice, and had learned her English in India, so that the musical lilt of the subcontinent filled all her sentences.
“Well, Tom takes his ten thousand and lets it go at that. He’s got a garden and some chickens, and he does some trapping and beekeeping and I don’t know what all. He really does keep to himself these days. Didn’t used to be that way.”
“I wonder what happened.”
“Well, he retired. And then my grandma died, about ten years ago.”
“Ten years.”
A switchback, and Kevin looked down at her. Next to Doris she seemed slight as a bird, graceful, cool, fit. No wonder Doris admired her. Ex-head of the Soviet State Planning Commission, currently lecturer in history on a school freighter, which was up in Seattle—
“He can get ten thousand dollars a year without working?”
“At his age he can. You know about the income magnitude thing?”
“A legal floor and ceiling on personal income, yes?”
“Yeah. Tom takes the floor.”
She laughed. “We have a similar system. Your grandfather was a big advocate of those laws when they were introduced. He must have had a plan.”
“No doubt. In fact he told me that once, when I was a kid.”
* * *
Hiking with Grandpa, up the back canyons. Up Harding Canyon to the little waterfall, bushwhacking up crazy steep slopes to the ridge of Saddleback, up the dirt road to the double summit. Birds, lizards, dusty plants, endless streams of talk. Stories. Sandstone. The overwhelming smell of sage.
* * *
They topped a rise, and saw Tom’s house. It was a small weather-beaten cabin, perched on the ridge that boxed the little canyon they had ascended. A big front window looked down at them, reflecting clouds like a monocle. Walls of cracked shingle were faded to the color of sand. Weeds grew waist high in an abandoned garden, and sticking out of the weeds were broken beehive flats, rain barrels, mountain bikes rusted or disassembled, a couple of grandfather clocks broken open to the sky.
Kevin thought of homes as windows to the soul, and so Tom’s place left him baffled. The way it fit the ridge, disappeared into the sandstone and sage, was nice. A good sign. But the disarray, the lack of care, the piles of refuse. It looked like the area around an animal’s hole in the ground.
Nadezhda merely looked at the place, black eyes bright. They walked through a weedy garden to the front door, and Kevin knocked. No answer. They stepped around back to the kitchen door, which was open. Looked in; no one there.
“Well, we might as well sit and wait a while,” Kevin said. “I’ll try calling him.” He went to the other side of the ridge, put both hands to his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle.
There was a tall black walnut up the ridge, with a bench made of logs underneath it; Doris and Nadezhda sat there. Kevin wandered the yard, checking the little set of solar panels in back, the connections to the satellite dish. All in order. He pulled some weeds away from the overrun tomatoes and zucchini. Long black and orange bugs flew noisily away; other than that there was a complete, somehow audible silence. Ah: bees in the distance, defining the silence they buzzed in.
“Hey.”
“Jesus, Grandpa!”
“What’s happening, boy.”
“You frightened me!”
“Apparently so.”
He had come up the same trail they had. Bent over, humping some small iron traps and four dead rabbits. He’d been only feet from Kevin’s back when he announced his presence, and not a sound of approach.
“Up here to weed?”
“Well, no. I brought Doris and a friend. We wanted to talk with you.”
Tom just stared at him, bright-eyed. Stepped past and ducked into his cabin. Clatter of traps on the floor. When he re-emerged Doris and Nadezhda had come over from the bench and were standing beside Kevin. Tom stopped and stared at them. He was wearing pants worn to the color of the hillsides, and a blue T-shirt torn enough to reveal a bony white-haired chest. The hair edging his bald pate was a tangle, and his uncut beard was gray and white and brown and auburn, stained around his mouth. A dust-colored old man. He always looked like this, Kevin was used to it; it was, he had thought, a part of aging. But now Nadezhda stood before them neat as a bird after a bath, her silvery hair cut so that even when windblown it fell perfectly into place. One of her enamel earrings flashed turquoise and cream in the sun.
“Well?”
“Grandpa, this is a friend of Doris’s—”
But Nadezhda stepped past him and extended a hand. “Nadezhda Katayev,” she said. “We met a long time ago, at the Singapore Conference.”
For an instant Tom’s eyebrows shot up. Then he took her hand, dropped it. “You look much the same.”
“And you too.”
He smiled briefly, slipped past them with a neat, skittish movement. “Water,” he said over his shoulder, and took off down a trail into a copse of live oak. His three guests looked at each other. Kevin shrugged, led the women down the trail. There in the shade Tom was attaching a pump handle to a skinny black pump, then pumping, slowly and steadily, his back to them. After quite a while water spurted from the pump into a tin trough,
and through an open spigot into a five-gallon bucket. Kevin adjusted the bucket under the spigot, and then the three of them stood there and watched Tom pump. It was as if he were mute. Feeling uncomfortable, Kevin said, “We came up to talk to you about a problem we’re having. You know I’m on the town council now?”
Tom nodded.
Kevin described what had happened so far, then said, “We don’t really know for sure, but if Alfredo is interested in Rattlesnake Hill, it would be a disaster—there just aren’t that many empty hills left.”
Tom squinted, looked around briefly.
“I mean in El Modena, Tom! Overlooking the plain! You know what I mean. Shit, you planted the trees on top of Rattlesnake Hill, didn’t you?”
“I helped.”
“So don’t you care what happens to it?”
“It’s your backyard now.”
“Yeah, but—”
“And you’re on the council?”
“Yeah.”
“Stop him, then. You know what to do, you don’t need me.”
“We do too! Man, when I talk to Alfredo I end up saying black is white!”
Tom shrugged, moved the full bucket from under the spigot and replaced it with an empty one. Stymied, Kevin moved the full bucket onto flat ground and sat beside it.
“You don’t want to help?”
“I’m done with that stuff, Kevin. It’s your job now.” He said this with a friendly, birdlike glance.
Second bucket filled, Tom pulled out the pump handle and put it in a slot on the pump’s side. He lifted the two buckets and started back toward the cabin.
“Here, let me take one of those.”
“That’s okay, thanks. I need the two for balance.”
* * *
Following Tom up the trail to his cabin, Kevin looked at the old man’s bowed back and shook his head, exasperated. This just was not the Grandpa he had grown up with. In those years there had been no more social animal than Tom Barnard; he was always talking, he organized camping trips for groups from town constantly, and he had taken his grandson up into the canyons and over the Santa Ana Mountains, and the San Jacintos, and back into Anza Borrego and Joshua Tree, and over to Catalina and down into Baja and up into the southern Sierras—and talking the whole way, for hours at a time every day, about everything you could possibly imagine! Much of Kevin’s education—the parts he really remembered—had come from Tom on their hikes together, from asking questions and listening to Tom ramble. “I hated capitalism because it was a lie!” Tom would say, fording Harding Canyon stream with abandon. “It said that everyone exercising their self-interest would make a decent community! Such a lie!” Splash, splash! “It was government as protection agency, a belief system for the rich. Why, even when it seemed to work, where did it leave them? Holed up in mansions and crazy as loons.”
“But some people like to be alone.”
“Yeah, yeah. And self-interest exists, no one can say it doesn’t—the governments that tried got in deep trouble, because that’s a lie of a different kind. But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money.”
“But you changed that,” Kevin would say, watching his footwork.
“Yes, we did. We gave self-interest some room to work in, but we limited it. Channeled it toward the common good. That’s the job of the law, as we saw it then.” He laughed. “Legislation is a revolutionary power, boy, though it’s seldom seen as such. We used it for all it was worth, and most liked the results, except for some of the rich, who fought like wolverines to hold on to what they had. In fact that’s a fight that’s still going on. I don’t think it will ever end.”
* * *
Exactly! Kevin thought, watching his strangely silent grandfather toil up the trail. The fight will go on forever, and yet you’ve stepped out of it, left it to us. Well, maybe that was fair, maybe it was their turn. But he needed the old man’s help!
He sighed. They got to the cabin and Tom ducked inside. One bucket of water went into a holding tank. The other was brought out into the sun, along with the four dead rabbits. Big knife, slab of wood, tub for the blood and guts. Great. Tom began the grisly task of skinning and cleaning the little beasts. Hardly any meat on them; hardly any meat on Tom. Kevin went around the side and fed the chickens. When he returned Tom was still at it. Doris and Nadezhda were seated on the ground under the kitchen window. Kevin didn’t know what to say.
* * *
“This conference in Singapore you met at—what was it about?” Doris finally said, breaking a long silence.
“Conversion strategies,” Nadezhda said.
“What’s that?”
Nadezhda looked up at Tom. “Maybe you can explain it more clearly,” she said. “My English is not so good to be explaining such a thing.”
Tom glanced at her. “Uh huh.” He went into the kitchen with the skinned rabbits; they heard a freezer door open and shut. He came back out and took the tub of entrails over the Emerson septic tank, dumped them in, shut the lid and clamped it down.
Nadezhda shrugged at Doris, said, “We were finding ways to convert the military parts of the economy. The big countries had essentially war economies, and switching to a civilian economy without causing a depression was no easy thing. In fact, no one could afford to change. So strategies had to be conceived. We had a big crowd in Singapore, though some there opposed the idea. Do you remember General Larsen?” she said to Tom. “U.S. Air Force, head of strategic defense?”
“I think so,” Tom said as he walked by her. He went out into his garden and started plucking tomatoes.
Nadezhda followed him. She picked up his basket, followed him around as he shifted. “I am thinking people like him made aerospace industries the hardest to change.”
“Nah.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Nah.”
“But why?”
Long silence.
Then Tom said, “Aerospace could be sicced on the energy problem. But who needs tanks? Who needs artillery shells?”
He lapsed back into silence, rooted under weeds in search of another tomato. He glanced at Nadezhda resentfully, as if she had tricked him into speaking. Which, Kevin thought, she had.
“Yes,” Nadezhda said, “conventional weapons were hard. Remember those Swiss plans, for cars built like troop movers?” She laughed, a low clear chuckle, and even elbowed Tom in the arm. He smiled, nodded. She said, “What about those prefab schoolrooms, made by the helmet and armor plants!”
Tom smiled politely, got up and went into the kitchen.
Nadezhda followed him, talking, taking down a second cutting board and cutting tomatoes with him, going through his shelves to find spices to add to oil and vinegar. Talking all the while. Occasionally in passing she put a hand to his arm, or while cutting she would elbow him gently, as old friends might: “Do you remember? Don’t you remember?”
“I remember,” he said, with that small smile. He glanced at her.
“When the engineers got the idea of it,” she said to Doris and Kevin, “their eyes lit up. It was the best problems they were ever having, you could hear it in their voices! Because everything helped, you see? With all that military work redirected to survival problems, conflicts caused by the problems were eased, which reduced the demand for weapons. So it was a feedback spiral, and once in it, things changed very quickly.” She laughed again, suffused with nervous energy, doing her best, Kevin saw, to arc that energy into Tom; to charm him, cajole him—seduce him.…
Tom merely smiled that brief glancing smile, and offered them a lunch of tomato salad. “All there is.” But he was watching her, out of the corner of his eye; it seemed to Kevin that he couldn’t help it.
They ate in silence. Tom wandered off to the pump with his buckets. Nadezhda went with him, talking about people they had known in Singapore.
Doris and Kevin sat in the sun. They could hear voices down at the pump. At one
point Nadezhda exclaimed “But we acted!” so sharply they could make it out.
Muttered response, no response.
When they returned she was laughing again, helping with one bucket and telling a story. Tom was as silent as before. He still seemed friendly—but remote, watching them as if from a distance. Glancing frequently at Nadezhda. He took one bucket down to the Emerson tank, began working there.
* * *
Eventually Kevin shrugged, and indicated to the women that he thought it was time to leave. Tom wandered back as they stood. “You sure you won’t help us?” Kevin asked, catching Tom’s gaze and holding it.
Tom smiled. “You get ’em this time,” he said. And to Nadezhda: “Nice to see you again.”
Nadezhda looked him in the eye. “It was my pleasure,” she said. She smiled at him, and something in it was so appealing, so intimate, that Kevin looked away. He noticed Tom did the same. Then Nadezhda led them down the trail.
3
23 March. There is no such thing as a pocket utopia.
Consider the French aristocracy before the revolution—well fed, well clothed, well housed, well educated—brilliant lives. One could say they lived in a little utopia of their own. But we don’t say that, because we know their lives rested on a base of human misery, peasants toiling in ignorance and suffering. And we think of the French aristocracy as parasites, brutal, stupid, tyrannical.
But now the world is a single economy. Global village, made in Thailand! And we stand on little islands of luxury, while the rest—great oceans of abject misery, bitter war, endless hunger. We say, But they are none of our affair! We have our island.
The Swiss have theirs. Mountain island with its banks and its bomb shelters—as fast as some Swiss take refugees in, other Swiss kick others out. Schizoid response, like all the rest of us.
Spent the morning at the Fremdenkontrolle, one office of the police station on Gemeinderstrasse. Clean, hushed. Marble floors and desktops. Polite official. But, he explains slowly in high German so I will understand, the new laws. As you don’t have a job. Tourist visa only. And as you have been here over a year already, this no longer possible is. No Ausweis. Yes, wife can stay till end of employment. Daughter too, yes.
Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 6