We took bows and arrows out into the groves to shoot the jackrabbits we often saw bounding away from us. They could really run. We never even came close to them, happily, so we shot at oranges on trees instead. Perfect targets, quite difficult to hit and a wonderful triumph if you did, the oranges burst open and flew off or hung there punctured, it was great.
We ate the oranges too, choosing only the very best. The green and slightly acrid sweat that comes out of their skin as you peel them, the white pulpy inside of the peels, the sharp and fragrant smell, the wedges of inner fruit, perfectly rounded crescent wedges … odd things. Their taste never seemed quite real.
I spent a lot of time out there in the groves, wandering in the hot dusty silence with my bow and arrow in hand, talking to myself. It was a very private world.
But when they started to tear the groves down I don’t remember we ever cared all that much. No one could imagine that all the groves would be torn down. We played in the craters, and the piles of wood left when the trees were chopped up, and it was different, interesting. And the construction sites—new foundations, framing thrown up in hours—made great playgrounds. We swung from rafters and tested if newly poured concrete would melt if you held a candle under it, and jumped from new roofs down into piles of sand, and once Robert Keller stepped on a nail sticking up through a board. Fun.
And then when the houses were built, fences put up, roads all in—well—it was a different place. Then it wasn’t so much fun. But by then we weren’t kids anymore either, and we didn’t care.
14
When Stewart Lemon hears the bad news—direct from LSR president Donald Hereford in New York—he can scarcely believe it. All of his premonitions have come true in the worst way. While on the phone with Hereford he has to keep cool, take it calmly, make assurances that it’s all still under control, the contract virtually in the bag. In fact, Hereford’s brusque, icy questioning frightens him considerably. So that when the call is done and Lemon is alone, he gets so angry, so frightened, that he locks his office, shuts down all the systems, and runs amok—kicks the desk and chairs, throws the paperweights against the wall, punches the soft backing of his swivel chair until he’s thoroughly killed it.
Breathing heavily, he surveys the room, then very carefully puts everything back in order. He’s still angry, but physically he feels less like he’s going to explode. His health really can’t take the pressures of this job, he thinks; it’s a race between ulcers and heart attack, and both contestants are picking up the pace as they near the finish line.… He swallows a Tagamet and a Minipress, hits the intercom button, says to Ramona in his calmest voice, “Is McPherson back from White Sands yet?”
“Let me check.…” Ramona knows perfectly well that this dead-calm voice means he is furious. All the better, he likes people to know when he’s mad. She gets back to him quickly: “Yes, he’s just in.”
“Get him up here now.”
Actually it takes more like fifteen minutes for McPherson to show up. He looks annoyed in his usual minimalist way, mouth drawn tight, eyes staring an accusation. He’s angry? Lemon stands up the moment he walks in, feels the pressure in him rising again.
Nearly shouting, he says, “I asked you to hurry on the Storm-bee program, didn’t I! And you gave me that what’s-the-big-hurry look, there’s no deadline, and now I’ll tell you what the big hurry was, goddamn it!”
McPherson flinches under this immediate onslaught, then clams up completely. No expression on his face at all. Lemon hates this robot response, and he sets about cracking it open: “They’ve made your superblack program white, do you understand? If we’d gotten the proposal to the Pentagon when I wanted to they wouldn’t have been able to do this, but you had to hold on to it! And now it’s a white program and the RFP is out there for everyone to go after!”
That got him all right. McPherson has visibly paled, his mouth is nothing but a tight white line across his face. “When did you hear?” he manages to say, jaw bunching and unbunching.
“Just now! I’m not as slow as you are, I just got the call from New York. From Hereford himself.”
“But—” The man is really in shock, or else he wouldn’t deign to ask Lemon questions like this: “What happened? Why?”
“Why? I’ll tell you why! You were too fucking slow, that’s why!” Lemon pounds his desk hard. “Let me try to explain the Air Force to you again, McPherson. They like results! They don’t have the patience of a hummingbird, and when they ask for something they want it now! If they don’t get it they go somewhere else. So you didn’t produce as fast as they wanted! It’s been four months, for Christ’s sake! Four months! And so now the RFP for the Stormbee contract is coming out this Friday in Commercial Business Daily, and after that we’re just one of any number of bidders. If the Pentagon had already gotten our proposal and accepted it this couldn’t have happened, but as it is now, we’re fucked! We’re back to square one!”
Lemon has worked himself into a therapeutic frenzy with this outburst, and he can see McPherson is infuriated too, the man’s lips are going to fuse if he doesn’t watch out. If he were a normal kind of guy they’d shout it out, get it all off their chests and be able to go out afterward and drink it off and plan some strategy, the hard words forgotten as things spoken in the heat of anger. But McPherson? No, no, he just holds it all in with an almost frightening compression, till it metamorphoses into a hate for Lemon that Lemon can see just as sure as he can see the man’s face. And it makes Lemon mad. He hates that closemouthed supercilious style, it angers him personally and it loses them business. Disgusted, he waves the man away. He can’t stand to look at him. “Get out of here, McPherson. Get out of my sight.”
“I take it we’ll be making a bid?”
“Yes! For Christ’s sake, do you think I’m going to let all that work go to waste? You get this thing whipped into proper proposal shape and do it fast. Was the test at White Sands successful?”
“Yes.”
“Good! You get this proposal into the selection board first. With the head start we’ve had we should be able to make the strongest bid by a good margin.”
“Yeah.”
“You bet, yeah. I’ll tell you this, McPherson—your ass is on the line, this time. After all the stunts you’ve pulled—you’d better win this one. You’d better.”
Stiffly the man nods, stomps out. Goddamned robot. Lemon can’t believe he’s got such a tight-ass robot working for him still. It just isn’t his style, he can’t work with a man like that. Well—this is McPherson’s last chance, he has tinkered around in perfectionist dilettante style one time too many. Vengefully Lemon hits the intercom and tells Ramona to send a memo: “To Dennis McPherson. Tell him that along with program management for the Stormbee proposal, I want him co-directing the Ball Lightning program with Dan Houston. Tell him Houston remains head, but he is to render all assistance asked of him.”
That’ll give the bastard something to think about.
15
So Jim tracks up to his parents’ home that evening, to join them for dinner. Up the knob of Red Hill, the first rise off the big flat plain of the OC basin, a sort of lookout point sticking out from the hills behind it. Jim’s books say there was a mine there in the 1920s, the Red Hill mercury mine, with tailings that could be found decades later. And the soil of the hill had a reddish cast, because of the high amount of cinnabar in it.
Home is the same. Dennis is back from work, out in the garage working on his car’s motor, which is already in perfect factory condition. He doesn’t reply to Jim’s hello, and Jim goes on into their section of the house. Lucy is making dinner; happily she greets him, and he sits down comfortably at the kitchen table. Quickly enough he’s up on the latest developments at the little church: the minister still has some problem related to the death of his wife, the new vicar continues to vex the veteran membership, Lillian Keilbacher has started work as Lucy’s assistant in the minister’s office.
Then he hears about Lu
cy’s friends, and then Dennis’s work. This is the only way that Jim ever hears about his father’s work, perhaps because Dennis assumes, correctly, that Jim is a pacifist bleeding-heart pseudoradical who wouldn’t approve of any of it. So Dennis never speaks of it to Jim. Apparently he’s almost as bad with Lucy; her account is fragmented and incomplete, consisting mostly of her own judgments and opinions, generated by the minute bits of evidence Dennis mutters when he arrives home, disgruntled and closemouthed. “He hates this Lemon he’s working for,” Lucy opines, shaking her head in disapproval. It’s not Christian, it’s not good for his health, it’s not good for his career. “He should try to like him more. It’s not as if the man is the devil or something like that. He probably has troubles of his own.”
“I don’t know,” Jim says. “Some people can be pretty awful to work for.”
“It’s what you make of it that counts.” Sigh. “Dennis should have a hobby, something to take his mind off work.”
“He’s got the car, right? That’s a hobby.”
“Well, yes but it’s just more of the same, isn’t it. Trying to get some machine to work.”
Jim has begun a radically censored account of his week, when Dennis comes in and washes up for dinner. Lucy sets out the salad and casserole and they sit down; she says grace and they eat. Dennis eats in silence, gets up and goes back out to continue his work.
Lucy gets up and goes to the sink. “So how is Sheila?” she asks.
“Well, um…” Jim fumbles, feeling sudden guilt. He hasn’t even thought of Sheila for a long time. “Actually, we aren’t seeing each other as much these days.”
A quick tkh of disapproval. Lucy doesn’t like it. Jim gets up to help clean the table. Of course she’s ambivalent about it; Sheila wasn’t a Christian, and she’d really like Jim to settle down with a Christian girl, even get married—in fact she knows some candidates down at the church. On the other hand, she met Sheila many times and liked her, and the real and actual always count more for Lucy than the theoretical. “What’s wrong?” she complains.
“Well … we’re just not on the same track.” It’s a phrase of Lucy’s.
She shakes her head. “She’s nice. I like her. You should call her and talk to her. You’ve got to communicate.” This is a sacred tenet with Lucy: talking will cure everything. Jim supposes she believes it because Dennis doesn’t talk much. If he did, she’d know better that the tenet wasn’t true.
“Yeah, I’ll call her.” And really he should. Have to tell her that he’s, um, seeing other people. A difficult call at best. And so a part of him is already busy forgetting the resolution. Sheila will get the idea. “I will.”
“Did you go see Tom?”
“Yeah.”
“How was he?”
“Same as always.”
She sighs. “He should be living here.”
Jim shakes his head. “I don’t know where you’d put him. Or how you’d take care of him, either.”
“I know.” There’s a slight quiver at Lucy’s jaw, and suddenly Jim perceives that she’s upset. He doesn’t have the faintest idea why. “But it isn’t right.”
Maybe that’s it. “I’ll go down there more often.” This too he instantly begins to forget.
“Dennis has got to go to Washington again this week.”
“He’s been going a lot this year.”
“Yes.” She’s still upset, throwing dishes into the dishwasher almost blindly. Jim doesn’t want to ask her why, she’ll start crying and he doesn’t want to deal with it. He ignores the signs and tells her cheerily of his week, his classes and what he’s been reading, while she pulls it together. Is she angry at Dennis about something? he wonders. He can’t tell; there’s lots he doesn’t know or understand about his parents’ relationship. He’s more comfortable with it that way.
Dishes finished, the talk continues desultorily. Jim’s mind wanders to his various problems and he doesn’t catch one of his mom’s questions. “What’s that?”
“Jim. You don’t listen.” A cardinal sin, in this household where it happens so often.…
“Sorry.” But at the same time he’s glancing at a newsheet headline that’s grabbed his eye. “I can’t believe this famine in India.”
“Why, what’s it say?”
“Same old thing. Third major famine of the year in Asia, kills another million. And look at this! Fight in Mozambique killed a hundred!” From their kitchen window they can see the two giant hangars down at El Toro Marine Base, the helicopters rising and dropping like bees around a hive.
“They should learn to talk.”
Jim nods, absorbed in the details of the second article. When he’s done he says, “I’m off. Gotta go teach my class.”
“Good. Don’t forget about visiting Tom more often, now.” She is serious, scolding, insistent: still upset about something.
“I won’t, but remember I just saw him today. I’ll go again next Thursday.”
“Tuesday would be better.”
Jim goes out to the garage. He doesn’t notice the intensity of Dennis’s silence, hasn’t noticed the tension in him all evening long. Dennis is quiet a lot; and Jim hasn’t really been paying attention.
He clears his throat; Dennis looks up from a bundle of colored wires running over the motor block of his car. “Um, Dad, my car’s having some power troubles going uptrack.”
Dennis pokes his glasses up his nose, glares at Jim. “How does it start?” he asks after a long pause.
“Not so well.”
“Have you cleaned the track contacts lately?”
“Um…”
Angrily Dennis grabs up some tools, rags, leads Jim out to his car. It looks shabby and unkempt under the streetlight. Dennis pulls up the hood wordlessly, reaches down to shift the contact rod up into maintenance position. His back says he’s sick of doing work on Jim’s car.
“Look at these brushes, they’re caked!” A black paste of oily scum adheres to the contacts where they come closest to the road and the track. “Here, you clean them.”
Jim starts on it, fumbles with a screwdriver, gouges the side of one brush, propels a gob of the pasty black goo right past Dennis’s eye.
Dennis elbows him aside. “Watch out, you’re wrecking them. Watch how I do it.”
Jim watches, bored. Dennis’s hands move surely, economically. He gets every brush coppery clean, factory perfect. “I suppose you’ll just let all this go to hell again,” Dennis says bitterly as he finishes, gesturing at the car’s motor.
“No,” Jim protests. But he knows that after years of negligence and ineptitude with his car, there’s nothing he can do now to convince Dennis that he is really interested. It is interesting, of course, in a theoretical way; forces of entropy, resistance to it, a great metaphor for society, etc. But ten seconds after the hood is down the actual physical details fade for Jim, the words turn back into jargon and he’s as ignorant as he was when the lesson started. His memory is retentive, so maybe he truly isn’t interested.
“Have you done anything about getting another job?” Dennis demands.
“Yeah, I’ve been looking.”
Disgust twists Dennis’s features. “You know I’m still making the insurance payments on this car?” he says as he gathers his tools. “Do you remember that?”
“Yeah, I remember!” Jim squirms at this accusation, feeling the shame of it. Still supported by his parents: he can’t even make his own way in the world. He can see Dennis’s contempt and it makes him defensive, then angry. “I appreciate it, but I’ll take them over starting with the next one.” As if Dennis has been keeping him from paying on his own.
The pretense makes Dennis angry too. “You will not,” he snaps. “It’s illegal to be without that insurance, and you can’t afford it. If I gave it to you and you let it lapse and then got in an accident, then I’d be the one ended up paying the bills, wouldn’t I?”
Stung that his father would imagine him capable of that, Jim scowls at the ground.
“I wouldn’t let it lapse!”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Jim turns and walks off across the lawn, circling. He’s ashamed, hurt, furiously angry. There’s nothing he can say. If he starts to cry in front of his father he’ll … “I don’t do things like that! I keep my commitments!” he shouts.
“The hell you do,” Dennis says. “You don’t even support yourself! Isn’t that a commitment? Why don’t you get a job where you can afford all your own expenses? Or why don’t you budget what you make to pay for them? Are you going to tell me you don’t spend any of what you make on entertaining yourself?”
“No!”
“So here you are twenty-seven years old and I’m still paying your bills!”
“I don’t want you paying for them! I’m sick of that!”
“You’re sick of it! Fine, I won’t. That’s it for that. But you’d better find yourself a decent job.”
“I’m looking! At least the jobs I have are decent work!”
For a second it almost looks like Dennis is going to hit him; he even shifts all the tools to his left hand, instantly, without thinking.… Then he freezes, snarls, turns away and walks into the house. Jim runs to his car, jumps in, tracks off cursing wildly, blindly.
16
Inside the house Dennis hears Jim’s old car click over the street track and hum away. It almost makes him laugh. When he was a kid, sons angry at their fathers could rev a car up to seven thousand RPM and burn rubber in a roaring, screeching departure; now all they can do is go hum, hum.
“Is that Jim?” says Lucy. “He didn’t come in to say goodbye.”
Damn. Dennis goes to sit before the video wall without a word.
“I wish you two wouldn’t argue,” Lucy says in a small, determined voice. “There aren’t that many jobs to be had, you know. Half the kids Jim’s age are unemployed.”
“The hell they are.” Dennis is angrier than ever. Now the kid’s gotten Lucy upset too, and he doesn’t like arguing with his son and having him tear off with that look of hurt resentment on his face: who would? But what can you do? And after a day like he’s had … Remembering it just makes him feel worse. After a successful test like the one at White Sands, having the program jerked back out to the uncertainties of open competition … Lemon’s fierce tongue-lashing … hell. An awful day. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 10