He didn’t answer me. I thought of all the times that Steve had called him a liar, and how often I had defended him. Ever since he had shown us the picture of the Earth taken from the moon, I had believed him, believed all his stories. I had decided he was telling the truth.
In a voice I could barely make out he said, “Sit down, boy. Sit down here.” I sat in my chair. “Now listen. I came down and saw it, see? See? I was in the mountains, like I said. That part of the story was true. All the lies were true. In the mountains on a hike to myself. I didn’t even know the bombs went off, can you believe it?” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it yet. And suddenly I realized he was telling me what he had never told anybody. “It was a fine day, I hiked over Pinchot Pass, but that night smoke blotted the stars. No stars. I didn’t know but I knew. And I came down and saw it. Every person in Owens Valley was crazy, and the first one I met told me why, and that moment—oh, Hank, thank God you won’t ever have to live that moment. I went crazy like the rest of them. I was just older than you and all of them were dead, everyone I knew. I was mad with grief and my heart broke and sometimes I think it never did get mended.…”
He swallowed hard. “Now I see why I don’t talk about it.” He bonged the oil drum with his head, blinked to clear his eyes. In a fierce whisper he said, “But I got to, I got to, I got to,” banging his head lightly, bong, bong, bong.
“Stop it, Tom.” I put my hand behind his head, against the resonant metal drum. His scalp was damp. “You don’t have to.”
“Got to,” he whispered. I leaned forward to hear him. “At first I didn’t believe it. But the greyhound wasn’t running and I knew. It took me a work of walking and hitching rides with madmen to get home, but when I came down five it was still burning pillars of smoke everywhere, the whole city. I knew it was true then and I was afraid of the radiation so I didn’t go on to see my home. Up into the mountains looting and scavenging for food. How long I don’t know, lost my mind and only really remember flashes like flames through smoke. Killing. I came to in a cabin in the mountains and knew I would have to see it to believe they were all dead. My family, see? I didn’t care about the radiation anymore, don’t think I even remembered it. So I went back to Orange County, and there, oh, oh,” he exclaimed; his hand was clutching at the sheet over and over, and I held it. It was feverish.
“I can’t tell that,” he whispered. “It was … evil. I ran and came here. Empty hills, I was sure the whole world was destroyed, world of insects and people dying on the beaches. When I hoped, I thought it might be just us and Russia, Europe and China. That the other countries would get help to us eventually, ha ha.” He nearly choked, and held onto my hand hard. “But no one knew. No one knew anything beyond what they could see. I saw empty hills. That was all I knew. Marines had kept them clear. I saw I could live in these hills without going mad, if I could avoid getting killed by someone or starving. It could be done. See up to that point I didn’t know if it could be done. But here was the valley and I knew it could be done. And I never set foot in Orange County again.”
I squeezed his hand; I knew that he had been up there since.
As if to contradict me he said, “Never, not to this day.” He tugged my hand and whispered rapidly, “It’s evil, evil. You’ve seen them at the swap meets, scavengers, there’s something wrong with them, wall-eyed or something burst inside—there’s something wrong in their eyes, you can see it’s driven them crazy to live in those ruins. Insanity’s horse. And no surprise either. You got to stay out of that place, Henry. I know you’ve been up there at night. But listen to me, now, don’t go up there, it’s bad, bad.” He was leaning off the pillow toward me, both hands on my side of the bed to prop himself up, his face intense and sweaty. “Promise me you won’t go up there, boy.”
“Ah, Tom—”
“You can’t go up there,” he said desperately. “Tell me you won’t, not ever.”
“Tom, I mean sometime I’m gonna have to—”
“No! What for? You get what you need out of there from scavengers, that’s what they’re for, please, Henry, promise me. There’s evil up there so bad it can’t be spoken of please I’m asking you not to go up there—”
“All right!” I said. “I won’t go up there. I promise.” I had to say it to calm him down, you see. But the knot tightened across my stomach until I had to hold my left arm over my ribs, and I knew I had done wrong. Done wrong again.
He collapsed back against the pillow, bong. “Good. Save you from that. But not me.”
I felt so awful I tried to change the subject. “But I guess it didn’t harm you, not in the long run. Here you are all these years later.”
“Neutron bombs. Short term radiation. So I guess, but I don’t know. Something like that, though. The earth will revenge us, but it’s no solace. Revenge is no solace. Their suffering won’t pay off ours, nothing will ever, we were murdered.” He squeezed my hand so hard my knuckles hurt. He sucked in air. “The ones of us left were so hungry, so hungry, we fought each other and finished the murder off for them, ah, that was the worst of it. So crazy. In the year after more people died than had been killed by the bombs, I’m sure, and more and more until it looked like every last one of us would die. Stupid Americans so far from the earth by then that we couldn’t figure out how to live off it, or those who could were swamped by those who couldn’t. It got so’s a friend you could trust was worth more than the world to you. Until there were so few left there was no need to fight anymore, no one to fight. All dead. I saw Death walking down the road more times than you’d care to imagine. Old man in a black coat, axe over his shoulder. Got so I waved to him and walked on by. Then out of the sky the storms, weather turned bad and the storms came. There was a winter that lasted ten years, good limerick. But the suffering was too much to bear. I live to show what a person can bear and die not, good poem, remember it? Did I give you that one? It got so when you saw a living human face that wasn’t insane you wanted to hug the person right then and there. So that when we settled here … it was a start. New. Weren’t more than a dozen of us. Every day a struggle. Food, we’re slaves to it, boy, I learned that: Grew up and didn’t learn a thing about it, not really. In that America was evil. The world was starving and we ate like pigs, people died of hunger and we ate their dead bodies and licked our chops. It’s true what I say to Ernest and George, we were a monster and we were eating up the world and they had reasons to do it to us, but still, still we didn’t deserve it. We were a good country.”
“Please, Tom. You’re going to hurt your voice going on so, you can’t!” He was sweating and his voice was so strained and torn up I really did think he would hurt it. I was scared, trembling. But now he was wound up; he took a few deep breaths, and went on again, squeezing my hand and ordering me with his eyes to let him talk, to let him speak at last:
“We were free then. Not perfectly so, you understand, but it was the best we could do, we were trying, it was the best so far. Nobody else had ever done it better, we … it was the best country in history,” he whispered, like he had to convince me or die. “I tell you true now, no baiting George or babbling, with all the flaws and stupidities we were still the leader, the focus of the world, and they killed us for it. Killed the best country the earth ever had, it was genocide boy do you know that word? Genocide, the murder of a whole people. Oh it had happened before, we did it ourselves to the Indians. Maybe that’s why this happened to us. I keep coming on reasons but they’re not enough. We were wrong in a million ways and had flaws big as our strengths but we didn’t deserve this.”
“Calm down, Tom, please calm down.”
“They’ll suffer for it,” he whispered. “Tornadoes, yes, and earthquakes and floods and droughts and fires, and murder for no good reason. See I went back to see. I had to see. And it was all smoking and blasted flat. Home. And just a few blocks away it still stood, blasted flat all around it but not it, ground zero is that still spot. It really was the magic kingdom when I wa
s a child.” Now his whispering got so rapid and desperate I could barely hear him, and what he said made no sense, and I held his forearm with both hands as he went on. “Main Street was all full of trash, dead people here and there, ruins, the smell of death. Around the corner the steamboat used to come, one time when I was a little boy my folks took me and as the steamboat rounded the corner we could hear that horn cutting across the water like Gabriel’s last call and the whole crowd knew it was him in an instant, Satchmo it was, Henry, Satchmo playing louder than the steamboat whistle, but now the lake was chock with corpses. I went to talk with Abraham Lincoln, leaned my head in his lap looked in his sad eyes and told him they killed his country like they killed him but he knew already and I cried on his shoulder. Went through the castle to the giant teacups, big blowsy woman and two men in the dead silence laughing drunk and trying to get the teacups to spin, she let a big green bottle go smash it went over the concrete and that instant I knew it was all true, and the man—the man he took his knife, oh—oh—”
“Please, Tom!”
“But I survived! I survived. Ran from evil I don’t know where or how, came to in the valley like I said. I ran all the way and learned what I had to survive. Didn’t learn a damned thing in the old time. Schoolbook rubbish, nothing more. Idiot America. Roger’s the model of reason next to it, I nearly died learning what I had to know, nearly died twenty times and more, Jesus I was lucky to live, he fell in the torrent and maybe I could have—or the time they took her, no Troy for us … harsh, harsh, harsh. Tiger justice, we’re Greek now boy, it’s as hard for us as it was for them, and if we can make something beautiful out of it it’ll be like what they made, that fine carved line pure and simple just to describe it the way it is. And Death’s fine curve sitting there always, skull under flesh in the sun, no wonder the tragedies, the harshness, verse rituals the vase, the curved line, they were just a way of talking about what’s real then and now, real as hunger, sometimes I can’t bear to think of it. We were the last of those plays, great pride a great flaw, the two the same and they killed us for it, blasted us to desolation struggling in the dirt to scratch out thirty years and die like Greeks, oh, Henry, can you see why I did it, why I lied to you, it was to keep you knowing it, to make us Greek ghosts on the land and make that something pure and simple so we can say we’re still people, Henry, Henry—”
“Yes, Tom. Tom! Calm down, please.” I was standing, holding him by the shoulders, leaning over him, shaking at his delirium. Twisting he started to speak again and I put my hand over his mouth, clamped it there. He struggled to breathe and I let my hand off him. “You’re not making any sense,” I told him. The lamp sputtered, our shadows wavered against the black circles of the wall, the wind shrieked around the corner. “You’re working yourself up too much, talking wild. Listen to me now, lie down here. Please. Doc would be furious at us if he came in. You haven’t got the strength for such carrying on.”
“Do too,” he whispered.
“Good, good. Simmer down some though, simmer down, simmer down.”
He seemed to hear me, finally. He leaned back. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and sat down again. I felt like I had been running for miles. “Jesus, Tom.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep it down. But you got to know.”
“I know you survived. Now we’re past that and that’s all I need to know. I don’t want to know any more,” I said, and I meant it.
He shook his head. “You got to.” He relaxed back into the pillow. Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.
“Stop that, Tom.”
He stopped. The wind picked up again, filling the silence. Whoooo, whooooo, whooooooooooo.
“Aye, I’ll be quiet,” he said softly, the strain gone from his voice. “Wouldn’t want Doc mad at me.”
“No you wouldn’t,” I said seriously. I was still scared; my heart still pumped hard. “Besides, you’ve got to save what energy you’ve got.”
He shook his head. “I’m tired.” The wind howled like it wanted to pick us up and knock us down. The old man eyed me. “You won’t go up there, will you? You promised.”
“Ah, Tom,” I said. “Some time I may have to, you know that.”
He slumped down onto the pillow, stared at the ceiling. After a time he spoke, very calmly. “When you learn things important enough that you feel like teaching them, it always seems possible. Everything’s so clear given what you’ve gone through—the images are there, even sometimes the words to convey them with. But it doesn’t work. You can’t teach what the world has taught you. All the tricks of rhetoric, the force of personality, the false authority of being teacher, or pretending to be immensely old … none of that’s enough to bridge the gap. And nothing else would be either.
“So I’ve failed. What I did end up teaching you was no doubt exactly backwards to my purpose. But there’s no help for it. I was trying to do the impossible, and so I got … confused.”
He slid down the pillow until he was flat on his back. Snuggled under the sheet, so that it looked like he would fall asleep right then, for his eyes were closed and he was breathing deep, in the way of an exhausted man. But then one brown eye opened and stared at me, pierced me. “You’ll be taught by something strong as this wind, boy, picking you up and blowing you into the sea.”
PART FOUR
Orange County
19
Outside it was dark, and the wind howled. I stood at the log bench in the garden and watched wind tear at the potato tops, felt it tear at me. To the west Cuchillo poked into the last blue before night’s black. It all looked different, as if I had walked out of the drum house into another time. Wind tore my breath from me, shoved it back in. I tried to collect myself.
“Ready?” Steve said sharply, and I jumped. He and Mando and Gabby were behind me. Impossible in the wind to hear anybody come up on you.
“Very funny,” I said.
“Let’s go.”
Mando said, “I have to make sure Pa’s awake to look after Tom.”
“Tom’s up,” I said. “He can call your pa if he wants him. If you wake him up, what will you tell him you’re going to do?”
In the dark Mando’s blurred, uneasy face.
“Let’s go,” Steve insisted. “If you want to come along, that is.”
Without a word Mando took off down the trail, back into the valley. We followed him. In the woods the wind became no more than a gust here and there. Trees creaked, moaned, hummed. Over Basilone we hiked, steering clear of the Shankses’ house. Through overgrown foundations to the freeway, where we picked up the pace. Quickly enough we were in San Mateo Valley, and past the spot where I had confronted Add. Steve stopped, and we waited for him to decide what to do.
He said, “We’re supposed to meet them where the freeway crosses the river.”
“We’d best keep going, then,” Gabby said. “It’s ahead a bit.”
“I know, but … seems to me we shouldn’t walk right down there. That doesn’t seem like the right way to do it.”
“Let’s get down there,” I put in. “They might be waiting, and we’ve got a long way to go.”
“Okay.…”
We walked close together so we could hear each other in the wind. A ball of tumbleweed bounced across the freeway and Mando shied. Steve and Gabby laughed. Mando pressed on ahead. We followed him to the San Mateo River. Nobody was there.
“They’ll see us and let us know where they are,” I guessed. “They need us, and they know we’ll be on the freeway. They can hide.”
“That’s true,” said Steve. “Maybe we should cross—”
A bright light flashed on us from below the freeway’s shoulder, and a voice from the trees said “Don’t move!”
We squinted into the glare. It reminded me of the Japanese surprising us in the fog at sea, and my heart hammered like it wanted to bound off by itself.
“It’s us!” Steve called. Gabby snickered disgustedly. “From Onofre.”
The light
went out, leaving me blind. Under the sound of the wind, some rustling.
“Good.” A shape loomed on the sea side of the freeway. “Get on down here.”
We felt our way down the slope, bumping together in a clump. There were a lot of men around us. When we got to the bottom of the slope we stood in bushes that came to our waists. A dozen or more men surrounded us. One of them bent over and opened the shade on a gas lantern; most of its light was caught in the lower branches of the brush, but standing in one dim beam in front of the lantern was Timothy Danforth, Mayor of San Diego. His trousers were muddy.
“Four of you, are there?” he said in his loud bray. His voice brought back every detail of my night at his house on the freeway island, and it was Nicolin who answered, “Yes, sir.”
More men joined us, dark shapes coming up through the brush from the river. “That’s all of you?” the Mayor said.
“Yes, sir,” Steve said.
“That’s all right. Jennings, get these men guns.”
One of the men, looking like Jennings now that he had been named, crouched over a large canvas bag on the ground.
“Is Lee here?” I asked.
“Lee doesn’t like this sort of thing,” Danforth said. “He’s no good at it, either. Why do you want to know?”
“He’s someone I know.”
“You know me, right? And Jennings here?”
“Sure. I was just wondering, that’s all.”
Jennings gave a pistol to each of us. Mine was big, and heavy. I crouched and looked at it in the lantern’s light, holding it in both hands. Black metal business end, black plastic handle. It was the first time I had held a gun outside a swap meet. Jennings handed me a leather pouch filled with bullets, and kneeled beside me. “Here’s the safety catch; you have to push it to here before it will shoot. Here’s how you reload.” He spun the cylinder to show me where the bullets fit in. The others were getting instructions around me. I straightened and blinked to help my night sight return, hefting the pistol in my hand. “You got a pocket it’ll fit in?”
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