Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Read online

  “Why are most refusing it?”

  “They have what they need. It’s a method of growth control. If they don’t have the water, they can’t expand without special action. The Santa Barbara strategy, it’s called.”

  “But your mayor wants this water.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “But why?” Kevin said.

  Oscar pursed his lips. “Well, you know what I heard.”

  Suddenly he jerked to left and right, peering about in a gross caricature of a check for spies. Low conspirator’s voice: “I was dining at Le Boulangerie soon after my arrival in town, when I heard voices from the next booth—”

  “Eavesdropping!” Doris exclaimed.

  “Yes.” Oscar grimaced horribly at her. “I can’t help myself. Forgive me. Please.”

  Doris made a face.

  Oscar went on: “Later I discovered the voices were those of your mayor, and someone named Ed. They were discussing a new complex, one which would combine labs with offices and shops. Novagene and Heartech were mentioned as potential tenants.”

  “Alfredo and Ed Macey run Heartech,” Doris told him.

  “Ah. Well.”

  “Did they say where they wanted to build?” Kevin asked.

  “No, they didn’t mention location—although Mr. Blair did say ‘They want that view.’ Perhaps that means in the hills somewhere. But if one were contemplating a new development of any size in El Modena, it would be necessary to have more water. And so last night when I saw item twenty-seven, I wondered if this might not be a small first step.”

  “The underhanded weasel!” Doris said.

  “It all seemed fairly public to me,” Oscar pointed out.

  Doris glared at him. “I suppose you’re going to claim a lawyerly neutrality in all this?”

  Kevin winced. The truth was, Doris has a prejudice against lawyers. We’re suffocating in lawyers, she would say, they’re doing nothing but creating more excuses for themselves. We should make all of them train as ecologists before they’re let into law school, give them some decent values.

  They do take courses in ecology, Hank would tell her. It’s part of their training.

  Well they aren’t learning it, Doris would say. Damned parasites!

  Now, in Oscar’s presence, she was icily discreet; she only used the adjective “lawyerly” with a little twist to it, and left it at that.

  Though he certainly heard the inflection, Oscar eyed her impassively. “I am not a neutral man,” he said, “in any sense of the word.”

  “Do you want to see this development stopped?”

  “It is still only a matter of conjecture that one is proposed. I’d like to find out more about it.”

  “But if there is a large development, planned for the hills?”

  “It depends—”

  “It depends!”

  “Yes. It depends on where it is. I wouldn’t like to see any empty hilltops razed and built on. There are few of those left.”

  “Hardly any,” Kevin said. “Really, to get a view over the plain in El Modena, there’s only Rattlesnake Hill.…”

  He and Doris stared at each other.

  * * *

  Oscar served them a sumptuous breakfast of French toast and sausages, but Kevin had little appetite for it. His hill, his sandstone refuge …

  When they were done Nadezhda said, “Assuming that Rattlesnake Hill is Alfredo’s target, what can you do to stop him?”

  Oscar rose from his chair. “The law lies in our hands like a blackjack!” He took a few vicious swings at the air. “If we choose to use it.”

  “Champion shadow boxer, I see,” Doris muttered.

  Kevin said, “You bet we choose to use it!”

  “The water problem has potential,” Oscar said. “I’m no expert in it, but I do know California water law is a swamp. We could be the creature from the black lagoon.” He limped around the kitchen to illustrate this strategy. “And I have a friend in Bishop we should talk to, her name’s Sally Tallhawk and she teaches at the law school. She was on the State Water Resources Control Board until recently, and she knows more than anyone about the current state of water law. I’m going there soon—we could talk to her about it.”

  Nadezhda said, “We need to know more of the mayor’s plans.”

  “I don’t know how we’ll get them.”

  “I do,” Kevin said. “I’m just going to go up to Alfredo’s place and ask him!”

  “Direct,” Oscar noted.

  Doris said, “Alternatively, we could crawl under his windows and eavesdrop until we learn what we want to know.”

  Oscar blinked. “Nothing like a little confrontation,” he said to Kevin.

  “Doesn’t Thomas Barnard live in this area?” Nadezhda asked.

  “That’s my grandfather,” Kevin said, surprised. “He lives up in the hills.”

  “Perhaps he can help.”

  “Well, maybe. I mean, true, but…”

  Kevin’s grandfather had had an active career in law and politics, and had been a prominent figure in the economic reforms of the twenties and thirties.

  “He was a good lawyer,” Nadezhda said. “Powerful. He knew how to get things done.”

  “You’re right.” Kevin nodded. “It’s a good idea, really. It’s just that he’s a sort of hermit, now. I haven’t seen him myself in a long time.”

  Nadezhda shrugged. “We all get strange. I would like to see him anyway.”

  “You know him?”

  “We met once, long ago.”

  So Kevin agreed, a bit apprehensively, to take her up to see him.

  Before they left Oscar showed them his library, contained in scores of cardboard boxes; one whole room was full of them. Kevin glanced in a box and saw a biography of Lou Gehrig. “Hey Oscar, you ought to join our softball team!”

  “No thank you. I detest softball.”

  Doris snorted. “What?” Kevin said. “But why?”

  Oscar shifted into a martial arts stance. Low growl: “The world plays hardball, Claiborne.”

  * * *

  The world plays hardball. Sure, and he could handle it. But not his hill, not Rattlesnake Hill!

  It was not just that it stood behind his house, which was true, and important; but that it was his place. It was an insignificant little round top at the end of the El Modena hills, broken dirty sandstone covered with scrub, and a small grove of trees which had been planted by his grandfather’s grade school class, many years before. It stood there, the only empty hilltop in the area, because it had been owned for decades by the Orange County Water District, who left it alone.

  And no one seemed to go up there but him. Oh, occasionally he’d find an empty beer dumpie or the like, thrown away on the summit. But the hill was always empty when he was there—quiet except for insect creaks, hot, dusty, and somehow filled with a sunny, calm presence, as if inhabited by an old Indian hill spirit, small but powerful.

  He went up there when he wanted to work outdoors. He took his sketchpad, up to his favorite spot on the western edge of the copse of trees, and he’d sit and look out over the plain and sketch rooms, plans, interiors, exteriors. He’d done that for most of his life, had done a fair amount of homework there in his schooldays. He had scrambled up the dry ravines on the western side, he had thrown rocks off the top, he had followed the track of an old dirt road that had once spiraled up it. He went there when he was feeling lazy, when he only wanted to sit in the sun and feel the earth turning under him. He went there with women friends, at night, when he was feeling romantic.

  Now he went up there and sat in the dirt, in his spot. Midday, the air hot, filled with dust and sage oils. He brushed his hands over the soil, over the sharp-edged nondescript sandstone pebbles. Picked them up, rubbed them together in his hands. He couldn’t seem to achieve his usual feeling of peace, however, his feeling of connection with the ground beneath him; and the ballooning sense of lightness, the kind of epiphany he had felt while bicycling home the other
night, eluded him completely. He was too worried. He could only sit and touch the earth, and worry.

  * * *

  At work he thought about it, worried about it. He and Hank and Gabriela were busy finishing up two jobs, one down in Costa Mesa, and he worked on the trim and clean-up in a state of distraction. Could they really want to develop Rattlesnake Hill? “It’s that view they’re after.” If they were going to build, they would need more water. If they were going to have a view, in El Modena … there really wasn’t any other choice! Rattlesnake Hill. A place where—he realized this one morning, scraping caulking off of tile—where when you were there, you felt quite certain it would never change. And that was part of its appeal.

  Usually when Kevin was working he was happy. He enjoyed most of the labor involved in construction, especially the carpentry. All of it, really. The direct continual results of his efforts, popping into existence before his eyes: framing, wiring, stucco, painting, tilework, trim, they all had their pleasures for him. And as he did the designs for their little team’s work, he also had the architect’s pleasure of seeing his ideas realized. With this Costa Mesa condo rehab, for instance, a lot of things had been uncertain: would you really be able to see the entire length of the structure, rooms opening on rooms? Would the atrium give enough light to that west wing? No way to be sure until it was done; and so the pleasure of work, bringing the vision into material being, finding out whether the calculations had been correct. Solving the mystery. Not much delayed gratification in construction. Immediate gratification, little problem after little problem, faced and solved, until the big problem was solved as well. And all through the process, the childlike joys of hammering, cutting, measuring. Bang bang bang, out in the sun and the wind, with clouds as his constant companions.

  Usually. But this week he was too worried about the hill. Touch-up work, usually one of his favorite parts, seemed pale diversion, finicky and boring. He hardly even noticed it. And his town work was positively irritating. They would be digging out that street forever at their pace!

  He had to get some answers. He had to go up and confront Alfredo, like he had said he would that morning at Oscar’s. No way around it.

  * * *

  So one afternoon after town work he pedaled up into the hills, to the house on Redhill where a big group of Heartech people lived. Alfredo’s new home.

  The house was set on a terrace, cut high on the side of the hill above Tustin and Foothill. It was a huge white lump of Mission Revival, a style Kevin detested. To him the California Indians were noble savages, devastated by Junípero Serra’s mission system. Thus Mission Revival, which every thirty years or so swept through southern California architecture in a great nostalgic wave, seemed to Kevin no more than a kind of homage to genocide. Any time he got the chance to renovate an example of the style he loved to obliterate it.

  One small advantage to Mission Revival was it was always easy to find the front door—in this case a huge pair of oak monsters, standing in the center of a massive wall of whitewashed adobe, under a tile-roofed portico. Kevin stalked up the gravel drive and yanked on a thick rope bellpull.

  Alfredo himself answered, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. “Kevin, what a surprise. Come on in, man.”

  “I’d rather talk out here, if you don’t mind. Do you have time?”

  “Sure, sure.” Alfredo stepped out, leaving the door open. “What is it?”

  No really indirect approach to the issue had suggested itself to Kevin, and so he said, “Is it true that you and Ed and John are planning to build an industrial park on Rattlesnake Hill?”

  Alfredo raised his eyebrows. Kevin had expected him to flinch, or in some other way look obviously guilty. The fact that he didn’t made Kevin uneasy, nervous—a little bit guilty himself. Perhaps Oscar had misoverheard.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Never mind who—I just heard it. Is it true?”

  Alfredo paused, shrugged. “There’re always plans being talked around—”

  Ah ha!

  “—but I don’t know of anything in particular. You would know if there was something up, being on the council.”

  Anger fired through Kevin, quick and hot. “So that’s why you tried to slip that water stuff past us!”

  Alfredo looked puzzled. “I didn’t try to slip anything past anyone. Some business was taken care of—or we tried—in front of the whole council, in the ordinary course of a meeting. Right?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s right. But it was late, everyone was tired, I was new. No one was watching anymore. It was as close to slipping the thing under the door as you could get.”

  “A council meeting is a council meeting, Kevin. Things go on right till the last moment. You’re going to have to get used to that.” Alfredo looked amused at Kevin’s naïveté. “If someone wanted to slip something by, it could have been shoved in among a bunch of other changes, it could have been done in the town planner’s office and presented as boilerplate—”

  “I guess you wish you had done it that way, now.”

  “Not at all. I’m just saying we didn’t try to slip one by you.” Alfredo spoke slowly, as if doing his best to explain a difficult matter to a child. He moved out onto the gravel drive.

  “I think you did,” Kevin said. “Obviously it isn’t something you’d admit now. Anyway, what are you doing trying to turn some of our open land into a mall?”

  “What mall? Look here, what are you talking about? We’re making an inquiry about the extra water MWD is offering, because it makes sense, it saves us money. That’s part of our job on the council. Now as to this other thing, if someone is exploring the possibilities of a multi-use center, what’s the problem? Are you saying we shouldn’t try to create jobs here in El Modena?”

  “No!”

  “Of course not. We need more jobs—El Modena is small, we don’t generate much income. If some businesses moved here everyone would benefit. You might not need your share increased, but other people do.”

  “We already make enough from town shares.”

  “Is that the Green position?”

  “Well…”

  “I didn’t think so. As I recall, you said increased efficiency would increase the shares.”

  “So it would!”

  Alfredo walked further down the drive, to the low mounds of an extensive cactus garden. Standing there they had a view over all of Orange County’s treetopped plain. “It gets to be a question of how we can become more efficient, doesn’t it. I don’t think we can do it without businesses to be efficient. But you—sometimes I think if you had your way you’d empty out the town and tear it down entirely.” He gestured at the cacti. “Back to mustard fields and scrub hills, and maybe a couple of camps down on the creek.”

  “Come on,” Kevin said scornfully. In fact, he had quite often daydreamed about just such a return to nature when tearing old structures down. But he knew it was just a fantasy, a wish to live the Indians’ life, and he never mentioned it to others. It was disconcerting to hear Alfredo read his mind like that.

  Alfredo saw his confusion. “You can only go so far with negative growth before it becomes harmful, Kevin. I realize there’s a lot of momentum in your direction these days, and believe me, I think it’s been a good thing. We needed it, and things are better now because of it. But any pendulum can swing too far, and you’re one of those trying to hold it out there when it wants to swing back. Now that you’re in a position of responsibility you’ve got to face it—the people who talked you into joining the council are extremists.”

  “We’re talking about your company here,” Kevin said feebly.

  “We are? Well heck, say that we are. At Heartech we make cardiovascular equipment and blood substitutes and related material. It helps everyone, especially the regions still dealing with hepatitis and malaria. You were in Tanzania for your work abroad, you’ve got to know the kind of help it does!”

  “I know, I know.” Heartech was an important part of Orange Cou
nty’s booming medtech industry, doing state-of-the-art work. It was right at the legal limits on company size; most of its long-time workers were hundreds, which meant that the company paid an enormous amount of money into Tustin’s town shares, which were then redistributed out among the town’s citizens, as part of their personal income. And Heartech helped a lot of liaison companies in Africa and Indonesia as well. No doubt about it, it was a good company, and Alfredo believed in it passionately. “Listen,” he said, “let’s follow this through. Don’t you think biotechnology is valuable work?”

  “Of course,” Kevin said. “I use it every day.”

  “And the medical aspects of it save lives every day.” “That’s true. Sure.”

  “Now wouldn’t it be a good thing if El Modena contributed to that?”

  “Yeah, it would. That would be great.”

  Alfredo spread his hands, palms up.

  They looked at cacti.

  Kevin, beginning to feel the way he did when he rode the Mad Hatter’s Teacups in Disneyland, tried to gather his thoughts. “Actually, it seems to me it isn’t so important where it happens…” Ah yes: where. “I mean where exactly do you have in mind, Alfredo?”

  “Where what? Sorry, I’ve lost track of what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, if you’re thinking of building in the hills. Are you?”

  “If there were people thinking about a development in the El Modena Hills, it would be a matter of attracting the best tenants possible. Things like that are important when you’re competing with places like Irvine.”

  So he was thinking of the hills! “You should be mayor of Irvine,” Kevin said bitterly. “Irvine is just your style.”

  “You mean they make money there? They attract business, they have big town shares?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s what our town council is for, right? I mean, there are people in this town who could use it, even if you can’t.”