The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Read online

  “My hand hurts,” Mando said. His shovel stock was a branch, and his hands weren’t very tough.

  “‘My hand hurts’,” Nicolin whined. “Well get out of there, then.”

  Mando climbed out, and Steve hopped into the hole to replace him, attacking the floor of the hole until the dirt flew into the mist.

  I looked for the stars, but there wasn’t a one out. It felt late. I was cold, and ravenous. The fog was thickening; the area wrapped around us looked clear, but quickly the mist became more visible, until several yards away it was all we could see—blank white. We were in a bubble of white, and at the edges of the bubble were shapes: long arms, heads with winking eyes, quick sets of legs …

  Thunk. One of Nicolin’s stabs had hit something. He stood with both hands on the stock, looking down. He jabbed tentatively, tunk tunk tunk. “Got it,” he said, and began to scrape dirt up again. After a bit he said, “Move the lantern down to this end.” Mando picked it up and held it over the grave. By its light I saw the faces of my companions, sweaty and streaked with dirt, the whites of their eyes large.

  Nicolin started to curse. Our hole, a good five feet long by three feet wide, had just nicked the end of the coffin. “The damn thing’s buried under the headstone!” It was still solidly stuck in the clay.

  We argued a while about what to do, and the final plan—Nicolin’s—was to scrape dirt away from the top and sides of the coffin, and haul it out into the hole we had made. After we had scraped away to the full reach of our arms, Nicolin said, “Henry, you’ve done the least digging so far, and you’re long and skinny, so crawl down there and start pushing the dirt back to us.”

  I protested, but the others agreed I was the man for the job, so pretty soon I found myself lying on top of that coffin, with dripping clay an inch over my back and butt, tearing at the dirt with my fingers and slinging it out behind me. Only continuous cursing kept my mind off what was lying underneath the wood I was on, exactly parallel to my own body. The others yelled in encouragements, like “Well, we’re going home now,” or “Oh, who’s that coming?” or “Did you feel the coffin shake just then?” Finally I got my fingers over the far edge of the box, and I shimmied back out the hole, brushing the mud off me and muttering with disgust and fear. “Henry, I can always count on you,” Steve said as he leaped into the grave. Then it was his and Del’s turn to crawl around down there, tugging and grunting; and with a final jerk the coffin burst back into our hole, while Steve and Del fell down beside it.

  It was made of black wood, with a greenish film on it that gleamed like peacock feathers in the lantern light. Gabby knocked the dirt off the handles, and then cleaned the gunk off the stripping around the coffin’s lid: silver, all of it.

  “Look at those handles,” Del said reverently. There were six of them, three to a side, as bright and shiny as if they’d been buried the day before, instead of sixty years. I noticed the gash in the wood where Nicolin had first struck.

  “Man,” said Mando. “Will you look at all that silver.”

  We did look at it. I thought of us at the next swap meet, decked out like scavengers in fur coats and boots and feather hats, walking around with our pants almost falling off from the weight of all those big chips of silver. We shouted and yipped and yowled, and pounded each other on the back. Gabby rubbed a handle with his thumb; his nose wrinkled.

  “Hey,” he said. “Uh…” He grabbed the shovel leaning against the side of the hole, and poked the handle. Thud, it went. Not like metal on metal. And the blow left a gash in the handle. Gabby looked at Del and Steve, and crouched down to look close. He hit the handle again. Thud thud thud. He ran his hand over it.

  “This ain’t silver,” he said. “It’s cut. It’s some kind of … some kind of plastic, I guess.”

  “God damn,” said Nicolin. He jumped in the hole and grabbed the shovel, jabbed the stripping on the coffin lid, and cut it right in half.

  Well, we stared at that box again, but nobody did any shouting this time.

  “God damn that old liar,” Nicolin said. He threw the shovel down. “He told us that every single one of those funerals cost a fortune. He said—” He paused; we all knew what the old man had said. “He told us there’d be silver.”

  He and Gabby and Del stood in the grave. Mando took the lantern to the headstone and put it down. “Should call this headstone a kneestone,” he said, trying to lighten the mood a bit.

  Nicolin heard him and scowled. “Should we go for his ring?”

  “No!” Mando cried, and we all laughed at him.

  “Go for his ring and belt buckle and dental work?” Nicolin said harshly, slipping a glance at Gabby. Mando shook his head furiously, looking like he was about to cry. Del and I laughed; Gabby climbed out of the hole, looking disgusted. Nicolin tilted his head back and laughed, short and sharp. “Let’s bury this guy and then go bury the old man.”

  We shoveled dirt back in. The first clods hit the coffin with an awful hollow sound, bonk bonk bonk. It didn’t take long to fill the hole. Mando and I put the grass back in place as best we could. When we were done it looked terrible. “Appears he’s been bucking around down there,” Gabby said.

  We killed the lantern flame and took off. Fog flowed through the empty streets like water up a steambed, with us under the surface, down among drowned ruins and black seaweed. Back on the freeway it felt less submerged, but the fog swept hard across the road, and it was colder. We hiked south as fast as we could walk, none of us saying a word. When we warmed up we slowed down a little, and Nicolin began to talk. “You know, since they had those plastic handles colored silver, it must mean that some time before that people were buried with real silver handles—richer people, or people buried before 1984, or whatever.” We all understood this as a roundabout way of proposing another dig, and so no one agreed, although it appeared to make sense. Steve took offense at our silence and gained ground on us till he was just a mark in the mist. We were almost out of San Clemente.

  “Some sort of God damned plastic,” Gabby was saying to Del. He started to laugh, harder and harder, until he was leaning an elbow on Del’s shoulder. “Whoo, hoo hoo hoo … we just spent all night digging up five pounds of plastic. Plastic!”

  All of a sudden a noise pierced the air—a howl, a singing screech that started low and got ever higher and louder. No living creature was behind that sound. It reached a peak of height and loudness, and wavered there between two tones, rising and falling, oooooo-eeeeee-oooooo-eeeeee-oooooo, on and on and on, like the scream of the ghosts of every dead person ever buried in Orange County, or the final shrieks of all those killed by the bombs.

  We all unstuck ourselves from our tracks and took off running. The noise continued, and appeared to follow us.

  “What is it?” Mando cried.

  “Scavengers!” Nicolin hissed. And the sound cranked up and down, closer to us than before. “Run faster!” Nicolin called over it. The breaks in the road surface gave us no trouble at all; we flew over them. Rocks began clattering off the concrete behind us, and over the embankment that the freeway ran on. “Keep the shovels,” I heard Del exclaim. I picked up a good-sized rock by the road, relieved in a way that it was only scavengers after us. Nothing but fog behind me, fog and the howl, but rocks came out of the whiteness at a good rate. I threw my rock at a dark shape and ran after the others, chased by some howls that were at least animal, and could have been human. But over them was the blast, rising and falling and rising. “Henry!” Steve shouted. The others were down the embankment with him. I jumped down and traversed through weeds, behind the rest. “Get rocks,” Nicolin ordered. We picked up rocks, then turned and threw them onto the freeway behind us all at once. We got screams for a reply. “We got one!” Nicolin said. But there was no way of knowing. We rolled onto the freeway and ran again. The screech lost ground on us, and eventually we were into San Mateo Valley, and on the way to Basilone Ridge, above our own valley. Behind us the noise continued, fainter with distance and the
muffling fog.

  “That must be a siren,” Nicolin said. “What they call a siren. Noise machine. We’ll have to ask Rafael.” We threw the rocks we had left in the general direction of the sound, and jogged over the ridge into Onofre.

  “Those dirty scavengers,” Nicolin said, when we were onto the river path, and had caught our breath. “I wonder how they found us.”

  “Maybe they were out wandering, and stumbled across us,” I suggested.

  “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  “No.” But I couldn’t think of a likelier explanation, and I didn’t hear Steve offering one.

  “I’m going home,” Mando said, a touch of relief in his voice. He sounded odd somehow—scared maybe—and I felt a chill run down me.

  “Okay, you do that. We’ll get those wreckrats another time.”

  Five minutes later we were at the bridge. Gabby and Del went upriver. Steve and I stood in the fork of the path. He started to discuss the night, cursing the scavengers, the old man, and John Appleby alike, and it was clear his blood was high. He was ready to talk till dawn, but I was tired. I didn’t have his stamina, and I was still shaken by that noise. Siren or no, it had sounded deadly inhuman. So I said goodnight to Steve and slipped in the door of my cabin. Pa’s snoring broke rhythm, resumed. I tore a piece of bread from the next day’s loaf and stuffed it down, tasting dirt. I dipped my hands in the wash bucket and wiped them off, but they still felt grimy, and they stank of the grave. I gave up and lay on my bed, feeling gritty, and was asleep before I even warmed up.

  2

  I was dreaming of the moment when we had started to fill in the open grave. Dirt clods were hitting the coffin with that terrible sound, bonk bonk bonk; but in the dream the sound was a knocking from inside the coffin, getting louder and more desperate the faster we filled in the hole.

  Pa woke me in the middle of this nightmare: “They found a dead man washed up on the beach this morning.”

  “Huh?” I cried, and jumped out of bed all confused. Pa backed off, startled. I leaned over the wash bucket and splashed my face. “What’s this you say?”

  “I say, they found one of those Chinamen. You’re all covered with dirt. What’s with you? You out again last night?”

  I nodded. “We’re building a hideout.”

  Pa shook his head, baffled and disapproving.

  “I’m hungry,” I added, going for the loaf of bread. I took a cup from the shelf and dipped it in the water bucket.

  “We don’t have anything but bread left.”

  “I know.” I pulled some chunks from the loaf. Kathryn’s bread was good even when a bit stale. I went to the door and opened it, and the gloom of our windowless cabin was split by a wedge of muted sunlight. I stuck my head out into the air: dull sun, trees along the river sopping wet. Inside the light fell on Pa’s sewing table, the old machine burnished by years of handling. Beside it was the stove, and over that, next to the stovepipe that punctured the roof, the utensil shelf. That, along with table, chairs, wardrobe and beds, made up the whole of our belongings—the simple possessions of a simpleton in a simple trade. Why, folks didn’t even really need to have Pa sew their clothes.…

  “You better get down to the boats,” Pa said sternly. “It’s late, they’ll be putting out.”

  “Umph.” Still swallowing bread, I put on shirt and shoes. “Good luck!” Pa called as I ran out the door.

  Crossing the freeway I was stopped by Mando, coming the other way. “Did you hear about the Chinaman washed up?” he called.

  “Yeah! Did you see him?”

  “Yes. Pa went down to look at him, and I tagged along.”

  “Was he shot?”

  “Oh yeah. Four bullet holes, right in the chest.”

  “Man.” A lot of them washed up like that. “I wonder what they’re fighting about so hard out there.”

  Mando shrugged. In the potato patch across the road Rebel Simpson was chasing a dog with a spud in its mouth, yelling at it, her face red. “Pa says there’s a coast guard offshore, keeping people out.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just wonder if that’s it.” Big ships ghosted up and down the long coast, usually out near the horizon, sometimes nearer; and bodies washed ashore from time to time, riddled with bullets. But that was the extent of what we could say for sure about the world offshore, in my opinion. When I thought about it my curiosity sometimes became so intense that it shaded into something like fury. Mando, on the other hand, was confident that his father (who was only echoing the old man) had the explanation. He accompanied me out to the cliff. Out to sea was a bar of white cloud, lying on the horizon: the fog bank, which would roll in later when the onshore wind got going. Down on the river flat they were loading nets onto the boats. “I’ve got to get on board,” I said to Mando. “See you later.”

  By the time I had descended the cliff they were launching the boats. I joined Steve by the smallest of them, which was still on the sand. John Nicolin, Steve’s father, walked by and glared at me. “You two take the rods today. You won’t be good for anything else.” I kept my face wooden. He walked on to growl a command at the boat shoving off.

  “He knows we were out?”

  “Yeah.” Steve’s lip curled. “I fell over a drying rack when I snuck in.”

  “Did you get in trouble?”

  He turned his head to show me a bruise in front of his ear. “What do you think?” He was in no mood to talk, and I went to help the men hauling the next boat over the flat. The cold water sluicing over my feet woke me up good for the first time that day. Out to sea the quiet krrr, krrrrrr of breaking waves indicated a small swell. The little boat’s turn came and Steve and I hopped in as it was shoved into the channel. We rowed lazily, relying on the current, and got over the breakers at the rivermouth without any trouble.

  Once all the boats were out around the buoy marking the main reef, it was business as usual. The three big boats started their circling, spreading the purse net; Steve and I rowed south, the other rod boats rowed north. At the south end of the valley there is a small inlet, nearly filled by a reef made of concrete. Between the concrete reef and the larger reef offshore is a channel, one used by faster fish when the nets are dropped; rod fishing usually gets results when the nets are being worked. Steve and I dropped our anchor onto the main reef, and let the swell carry us in over the channel, almost to the curved white segments of the concrete reef. Then it was out with the rods. I knotted the shiny metal bar that was my lure onto the line. “Casket handle,” I said to Steve, holding it up before I threw it over. He didn’t laugh. I let it sink to the bottom, then started the slow reel up.

  We fished. Lure to the bottom, reel it back up; throw it in again. Occasionally the rods would arc down, and a few minutes of struggling ended with the gaff work. Then it was back to it. To the north the netters were pulling up nets silver with fish flopping after their lost freedom; the boats tilted in under the weight, until sometimes it seemed their keels would show and they would turn turtle. Inland the hills seemed to rise and fall, rise and fall. Under the cloud-filmed sun the forest was a rich green, the cliff and the bare hilltops dull and gray.

  Now five years before, when I was twelve and Pa had first hired me out to John Nicolin, fishing had been a big deal. I had been excited by everything about it—the fishing itself, the moods of the ocean, the teamwork of the men, the entrancing view of the land from the sea. But a lot of days on the water had passed since then, a lot of fish hauled over the gunwale: big fish and small, no fish or so many fish that we exhausted our arms and wore our hands ragged; over steep slow swells, or wind-blown chop, or on water flat as a plate; and under skies hot and clear, or in rain that made the hills a gray mirage, or when it was stormy, with clouds scudding overhead like horses … mostly days like this day, however, moderate swell, sun fighting high clouds, medium number of fish. There had been a thousand days like this one, it seemed, and the thrill was long gone. It was just work to me now.

  In between catches I
dozed, lulled by the swell, waking up when my rod jerked into my stomach. Then I reeled the fish in, gaffed it, pulled it over the side, smacked its head, got the lure out and tossed it over again, and went back to sleep.

  “Henry!”

  “Yeah!” I said, sitting up and checking my rod automatically.

  “We got quite a few fish here.”

  I glanced at the bonita and rock bass in the boat. “About a dozen.”

  “Good fishing. Maybe I’ll be able to get away this afternoon,” Steve said wistfully.

  I doubted it, but I didn’t say anything. The sun was obscured, and the water was gray; it was getting chill. The fog bank had started its roll in. “Looks like we’ll spend it on shore,” I said.

  “Yeah. We’ve got to go up and see Barnard; I want to beat the shit out of that old liar.”

  “Sure.”

  Then we both hooked big ones, and we had a time of it keeping our lines clear. We were still working them when the blare of Rafael’s bugle floated over the water from the netters. We whooped and got our fish aboard without delay, slapped our oars into the oarlocks and beat it back to Rafael’s boat. They parceled some fish out to us, as some of the boats were about foundering under their load, and we rowed into the rivermouth.

  With the help of the Nicolin family and the others on the beach, we pulled the boat up onto the sand and took our fish over to the cleaning tables. Gulls soused us repeatedly, screeching and flapping. When the boat was empty and pulled up to the cliff, Steve approached his father, who was shaking a finger at Rafael and lecturing him about some twists in the line.

  “Can I go now, Pa?” Steve asked. “Hanker and I need to do our lessons with Tom.” Which was true.

  “Nope,” old Nicolin said, bent over and still inspecting the net. “You’re going to help us fix this net. And then you’re going to help your ma and sisters clean fish.”

  At first John had made Steve go to learn to read from the old man, because he figured it was a sign of family prosperity and distinction. Then when Steve got to liking it (which took a long time), his father took to keeping him from it. John straightened, looked at Steve; a bit shorter than his son, but a lot thicker; both of them with the same squarish jaw, brown shock of hair, light blue eyes, straight strong nose.… They glared at each other, John daring Steve to talk back to him with all the men wandering around. For a second I thought it was going to happen, that Steve was going to defy him and begin who knows what kind of bloody dispute. But Steve turned away and stalked over to the cleaning tables. After a short wait to allow his anger to lose its first bloom, I followed him.