The Wild Shore Read online

  “See you again, now,” Tom said, pocketing the lighter eagerly and pulling me away with him. Under the next tree he stopped. “See that, Henry? See that? A lighter for two little jars of honey? Was that a trade? Here, watch this. Could you believe my dealing? Watch this.” He pulled out the lighter and held it before my face, pulled his thumb down the side. He let the flame stand for a second, then shut it off.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “But you’ve already got a lighter.”

  He put his wrinkled face close to mine. “Always get these things when you see them, Henry. Always. They’re about the most valuable thing the scavengers have to trade. They are the greatest invention of American technology, no question about it.” He reached over his shoulder and rooted in his pack. “Here, have a drink.” He offered me a small bottle of amber liquid.

  “You’ve been to the liquor traders already?”

  He grinned his gap-toothed grin. “First place I went to, of course. Have a drink of that. Hundred-year-old Scotch. Really fine.”

  I took a swallow, gasped.

  “Take another, now, that first one just opens the gates. Feel that warmth down there?”

  I traded swallows with him and pointed out Melissa, who looked like she wasn’t making much headway with the barrel woman. “Ahh,” said Tom, leering significantly. “Too bad she ain’t dealing with a man.”

  I agreed. “Say, can I borrow a jar of honey from you? I’ll work it off in the hives.”

  “Well, I don’t know…”

  “Ah come on, what else are you going to trade for today?”

  “Lots of stuff,” he protested.

  “You already have the most important thing the scavengers own, right?”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll give you the little one. Have another drink before you go.”

  I got back to Melissa with my stomach burning and my head spinning. Melissa was saying slowly, like for the fourth time, “We just pulled them out of the live pen this morning. That’s the way we always do it, everyone knows that. They all eat our crab and no one’s got sick yet. The meat’s good for a week if you keep it cool. It’s the tastiest meat there is, as you know if you’ve ever eaten any.”

  “I’ve eaten it,” the woman snapped. “But I’m sorry. Crab is good all right, but there’s never enough of it to make a difference. These barrel halves are hard to find. You’d have it forever, and I’d get a few tastes of crab for a week.”

  “But if you don’t sell them you’re going to have to cart them back north,” I interrupted in a friendly way. “Pushing them up all those hills and then making sure they don’t roll down the other side … why we’d be doing you a favor to take one of them off your hands for free!—not that we want to do that, of course. Here—we’ll throw in a jar of Barnard honey with these delicious pinchers, and really make it a steal for you.” Melissa had been glaring at me for butting in on her deal, but now she smiled hopefully at the woman. The woman stared at the honey jar, but looked unconvinced.

  “Blue Book says a barrel half is worth ten dollars,” I said. “And these sidewalks are worth two dollars apiece. We’ve got seven of them, so you’re already out-trading us four dollars’ worth, not counting the honey.”

  “Everyone knows the Blue Book is full of shit,” the woman said.

  “Since when? It was scavengers made it up.”

  “Was not—it was you grubs did.”

  “Well, whoever made it up, everyone uses it, and they only call it shit when they’re trying to deal someone dirty.”

  The woman hesitated. “Blue Book really says crabs are two dollars each?”

  “You bet,” I said, hoping there wasn’t a copy nearby.

  “Well,” said the woman, “I do like the way that meat tastes.”

  Rolling the barrel half back to our camp, Melissa forgot about my rudeness. “Oh Henry,” she sang, “how can I thank you?”

  “Ah,” I said, “no need, yuk yuk.” I stopped the barrel to let pass a crowd of shepherds with a giant table upside-down on their heads. Melissa wrapped her arms around me and gave me a good kiss. We stood there looking at each other before starting up again; her cheeks were flushed, her body warm against mine. As we started walking again she smacked her lips. “You been drinking, Henry?”

  “Ah—old Barnard gave me a few sips back there.”

  “Oh yeah?” She looked over her shoulder. “Wouldn’t mind some of that myself.”

  Back at camp Melissa went off to meet Kristen and I helped the end of the fish trading. Nicolin came by with a cigarette and under the sunbeams sparking the dust in the afternoon air we smoked it. Soon after that a fight started between a Pendleton cowboy and a scavenger, and it was broken up by a crowd of big angry men whose job was keeping things peaceful. These meet sheriffs didn’t like their authority ignored, and people fighting were always going to lose, slapped around hard by this gang. After that I nodded off for an hour or two, back with the sleeping dogs.

  Rafael woke me when he came back to feed scraps to the perros. Only the western sky was still blue; high clouds overhead still glowed with a bit of sunset light. I walked over to our fire, where a few people were still eating. I crouched beside Kathryn and ate some of the stew she offered me. “Where’s Steve?”

  “He’s already in the scavenger camps. He said he’d be in the Mission Viejo one for the next hour or two.”

  “Ah,” I said, wolfing down stew. “How come you aren’t with him?”

  “Well, Hanker, you know how it is. First of all, I had to stay here and help cook. But even if I could’ve gone, I can’t keep up with Steve for an entire night. You know what that’s like. I mean I could do it, but I wouldn’t have any fun at it. Besides, I think he likes being away from me at these things.”

  “Nah.”

  She shrugged. “I’m going to go hunt him down in a bit.”

  “How’d it go at the seed exchange?”

  “Pretty good. Not like in the spring, but I did get a good packet of barley seed. That was a coup—everyone’s interested in this barley ’cause it’s doing so well in Talega, so the trading was hot, but our good elote did the trick. I’m going to plant that whole upper field with this stuff next week, and see how it does. I hope it’s not too late.”

  “Your crew’ll be busy.”

  “They’re always busy.”

  “True.” I finished the stew. “I guess I’ll go look for Steve.”

  “It shouldn’t be hard to find him.” She laughed. “Just go for the biggest noise. I’ll see you over there.”

  Among the new town camps on the south side of the park it was dark and quiet, except for the eerie, piercing cries of the Trabuco peacocks, protesting their cages. Small fires here and there made the trees above them flicker and dance with reflected light, and voices floated from the dark shapes blocking off the tiny flames.

  In the northern half of the park it was different. Bonfires roared in three clearings, making the colored awnings flap in the branches. Lanterns casting a mean white glare hung from the trees. I stepped onto the promenade and was shoved in the back by a large woman in an orange dress. “Sorry, boy.” I walked over to the Mission Viejo camp. A jar flew past me, spilling liquid and smashing against a tree. The bright plastic colors of scavenged clothing wavered in the firelight, and every scavenger, man, woman and child, had gotten out their full collection of jewelry; they wore gold and silver necklaces, earrings, nose rings, ankle, belly, and wrist bracelets, and all of it studded with gems winking red and blue and green. They were beautiful.

  The Viejo camp had tables set end to end in long rows. The benches lining them were jammed with people drinking and talking and listening to the jazz band at one end of the camp. I stood and looked for a while, not seeing anyone I knew. Then Nicolin deliberately struck me in the arm, and with a grin said, “Let’s go hassle the old man, see he’s over with Doc and the rest of the antiques.”

  Tom was set up at the end table with a few other survivors from the old time: Doc Costa, L
eonard Sarowitz from Hemet, and George something from Cristianitos. The four of them were a familiar sight at swap meets, and were often joined by Odd Roger and other survivors old enough to remember what the old time was like. Tom was the senior member of this group by a long shot. He saw us and made a spot on the bench beside him. We had a drink from Leonard’s jar; I gagged and sent half my swallow down my shirt. This put the four ancients in hysterics. Old Leonard’s gums were as clear of teeth as a babe’s.

  “Is Fergie here?” Doc asked George, getting back to their conversation.

  George shook his head. “He went west.”

  “Ah. Too bad.”

  “You know how fast this boy is?” Tom said, slapping me on the shoulder. Leonard shook his head, frowning. “Once I threw him a pitch and he hit a line drive past my ear—I turned around and saw the ball hit him in the ass as he slid into second.”

  The others laughed, but Leonard shook his head again. “Don’t you distract me! You’re trying to distract me!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The point is—I was just telling him this, boys, and you should hear it too—the point is, if Eliot had fought back like an American, we wouldn’t be in this fix right now.”

  “What fix is that?” Tom asked. “I’m doing okay as far as I can tell.”

  “Don’t be facetious,” Doc put in.

  “Back at it again, I see,” Steve observed, rolling his eyes and going for the jar.

  “Why, I don’t doubt we would be the strongest nation on Earth again, by God,” Leonard went on.

  “Now wait a second,” Tom said. “There aren’t enough Americans left alive to add up to a nation at all, much less the strongest on Earth. And what good would it do if we had blown the rest of the world into the same fix?”

  Doc was so outraged he cut Leonard off and answered for him: “What good would it do?” he said. “It would mean there wouldn’t be any God damned Chinese boating off the coast, watching us all the time and bombing every attempt we make to rebuild! That’s what good it would do. That coward Eliot put America in a hole for good. We’re the bottom of the world now, Tom Barnard, we’re bears in the pit.”

  “Raarrrr,” Steve growled, and took another drink. I took the next one.

  “We were goners as soon as the bombs went off,” Tom said. “Makes no difference what happened to the rest of the world. If Eliot had decided to push the button, that just would’ve killed more people and wrecked more countries. It wouldn’t have done a thing for us. Besides, it wasn’t the Russians or the Chinese that planted the bombs—”

  “You don’t think,” Doc said.

  “You know it wasn’t! It was the God damned South Africans.”

  “The French!” George cried. “It was the French!”

  “It was the Vietnamese,” Leonard said.

  “No it wasn’t,” Tom replied. “That poor country didn’t even own a firecracker when we were done with it. And Eliot probably wasn’t the man who decided not to retaliate, either. He probably died in the first moments of the day, like everyone else. It was some general in a plane who made the decision, you can bet your wooden teeth. And quite a surprise it must have been, too, even to him. Especially to him. Makes me wonder who he was.”

  Doc said, “Whoever it was, he was a coward and a traitor.”

  “He was a decent human being,” said Tom. “If we had struck back at Russia and China, we’d be criminals and murderers. Anyway if we had done that the Russians would’ve sent their whole stockpile over here to answer ours, and then there wouldn’t be a single damn ant left alive on North America today.”

  “Ants would still be alive,” George said. Steve and I bent our heads to the table, giggling and pushing our fingers in each others’ sides—“pushing the button,” as the old men said. Tom was giving us a mean look, so we straightened up and drank some more to calm ourselves.

  “—over five thousand nuclear blasts and survived,” Doc was saying. Every meet the number went up. “We could have taken a few more. Our enemies deserved a few of them too, that’s all I’m saying.” Even though they had this argument every time they joined the other antiques, almost, Doc was still getting angry at Tom. Bitterly he cried, “If Eliot had pushed the button we’d all be in the same boat, and then we’d have a chance to rebuild. They won’t let us rebuild, God damn it!”

  “We are rebuilding, Ernest,” Tom said jovially, trying to put the fun back in their argument. He waved at the surrounding scene.

  “Get serious,” Doc said. “I mean back to the way we were.”

  “I wouldn’t want that,” said Tom. “They’d likely blow us up again.”

  Leonard, however, was only listening to Doc: “We’d be in a race with the Communists to rebuild, and you know who would win that one. We would!”

  “Yeah!” said George. “Or maybe the French.…”

  Barnard just shook his head and grabbed the jar from Steve, who gave him a struggle for it. “As a doctor you should never wish such destruction on others, Ernest.”

  “As a doctor I know best what they did to us, and where they’re keeping us,” Doc replied fiercely. “We’re bears in the pit.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Steve said to me. “They’re going to start deciding whether we belong to the Russians or the Chinese.”

  “Or the French,” I said, and we slithered off the bench. I took a last gulp of the old man’s liquor and he whacked me. “Out of here, you ungrateful wretches,” he cried. “Not willing to listen to history without poking fun.”

  “We’ll read the books,” Steve said. “They don’t get drunk.”

  “Listen to him,” said Tom, as his cronies laughed. “I taught him to read, and he calls me a drunk.”

  “No wonder they’re so mixed up, with you teaching them to read,” Leonard said. “You sure you got the books turned right way up?”

  We wandered off to the sound of this sort of thing, and made our way with some stumbling to the orange tree. This was a giant old oak, one of a half dozen or so in the park, that held in its branches gas lanterns wrapped in transparent orange plastic. It was the mark of the scavengers from central Orange County, and our gang used it as the meeting place later at night. We didn’t see anyone from Onofre, so we sat on the grass under the tree, arms around each other, and made ribald comments on the passing crowd. Steve waved down a man selling jars of liquor and gave him two dimes for a jar of tequila. “Jars back without a crack, else we put the crack in your back,” the man intoned as he moved on. On the other side of the orange tree a small bike-powered generator was humming and crackling; a group of scavengers was using it to operate a small instant oven, cooking slabs of meat or whole potatoes in seconds. “Heat it and eat it,” they cried. “See the miracle microwave, the super horno! Heat it and eat it!” I took a sip of the tequila; it was strong stuff, but I was drunk enough to want to get drunker. “I am drunk,” I told Steve. “I am borracho. I am aplastaaaa-do.”

  “Yes you are,” Steve said. “Look at that silver.” He pointed at one of the scavenger women’s heavy necklaces. “Look at it!” He took a long swallow. “Hanker, those people are rich. Don’t you think they could do just about anything they pleased? Go anywhere they pleased? Be anything they pleased? We’ve got to get some of that silver. Somehow we’ve got to. Life isn’t just grunging for food in the same spot day after day, Henry. That’s how animals live. But we’re human beings, Hanker, that’s what we are and don’t you forget it, and Onofre ain’t big enough for us, we can’t live our whole lives in that valley like cows chewing cud. Chewing our cud and waiting to get tossed in some instant oven and microwaved, give me another swallow of that, Hanker my best buddy, a powerful thirst for more has suddenly afflicted me.”

  “The mind is its own place,” I remarked solemnly as I gave him the jar. Neither of us needed any more liquor, but when Gabby and Rebel and Kathryn and Kristen showed up, we were quick to help drink another jar. Steve forgot about silver for a while in favor of a kiss;
Kathryn’s red hair covered the sight. The band started again, a trumpet, a clarinet, two saxes, a drum and a bass fiddle, and we sang along with the tunes: “Waltzing Matilda,” or “Oh Susannah,” or “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” Melissa showed up and sat down beside me. She’d been drinking and smoking, I could see. I put an arm around her, and over her shoulder Kathryn winked at me. More and more people crowded around the orange tree as the band heated up, and soon we couldn’t see anything but legs. We played a game of guessing what town people were from by their legs alone, and then we danced around the tree with the rest of the crowd.

  Much later we started our return to camp. I felt great. We staggered on the promenade, holding each other up and singing “High Hopes” all out of tune with the fading sound of the band. Halfway home we collided with a group coming out of the trees, and I was roughly shoved to the ground. “Chinga,” I said, and scrambled up. There were shouts and scufflings, a few others hit the ground and rolled back up swinging and shouting angrily. “What the—” The two groups separated and stood facing each other belligerently; by the light of a distant lantern we saw that it was the gang from San Clemente, decked out in identical red and white striped shirts.

  “Oh,” said Nicolin, his voice dripping with disgust, “it’s them.”

  One of the leaders of their gang stepped into a shaft of light and grinned unpleasantly. His earlobes were all torn up from having on earrings in fights, but that hadn’t stopped him; he still had two gold earrings in his left ear, and two silver ones in his right.

  “Hello, Doll Grin,” Nicolin said.

  “Little people shouldn’t come into Clemente at night,” said the scavenger.

  “What’s Clemente?” Nicolin asked casually. “Nothing north of us but ruins.”

  “Little people might get scared. They might hear a sound,” Doll Grin went on, and the guys behind him began to hum a rising tone, “uhnnnnnn-eeeeeehhhhhhh,” then falling, rising again: the sound of the siren we had heard that night. When they stopped their leader said, “We don’t like people like you in our town. Next time you won’t get away so easy.…”