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

  “You don’t want to get in any feud with those young scavengers,” Tom said.

  “We already are,” Steve replied.

  Now it was Tom’s turn to let out a sigh. “There’s been too much of that already. So few people alive these days, there’s no reason for it.”

  “They started it.”

  Big drops of rain hit the window. I watched them run down the glass, and wished my home had a window. Even with the door closed and dark clouds filling the sky, all the books and crockery and lanterns and even the walls gleamed silvery grey, as if they all contained a light of their own.

  “I don’t want you fighting at the swap meet,” Tom said.

  Steve shook his head. “We won’t if we don’t have to.”

  Tom frowned and changed the subject. “You got your lesson memorized?”

  Steve shook his head. “I’ve had to work too much.… I’m sorry.”

  After a bit I said, “You know what it looks like to me?”

  “What what looks like,” Tom asked.

  “The coastline here. It looks like one time there was nothing but hills and valleys, all the way out to the horizon. Then one day some giant drew a straight line down it all, and everything west of the line fell down and the ocean came rushing in. Where the line crossed a hill there’s a cliff, and where it crossed a valley there’s a marsh and a beach. But always a straight line, see? The hills don’t stick out into the ocean, and water doesn’t come and fill in the valleys.”

  “That’s a faultline,” Tom said dreamily, eyes closed as if he were consulting books in his head. “The earth’s surface is made up of big plates that are slowly sliding around. Truth! Very slowly—in your lifetime it might move an inch—in mine two, hee hee—and we’re next to a fault where the plates meet. The Pacific plate is sliding north, and the land here south. That’s why you get the straight line there. And earthquakes—you’ve felt them—those are the two plates slipping, grinding against each other. One time … one time in the old time, there was an earthquake that shattered every city on this coast. Buildings fell like they did on the day. Fires burned and there was no water to put them out. Freeways like that one down there pointed at the sky, and no one could get in to help, at first. For a lot of people it was the end. But when the fires were burned out … they came from everywhere. They brought in giant machines and material, and they used the rubble that was all that was left of the cities. A month later every one of those cities was built back up again, just as they had been before, so exactly that you couldn’t even tell there had been an earthquake.”

  “Ah come on,” said Steve.

  The old man shrugged. “That’s what it was like.”

  We sat and looked through the slant-lines of water at the valley below. Black brooms of rain swept the whitecapped sea. Despite the years of work done in the valley, despite the square fields by the river, and the little bridge over it, despite the rooftops here and there, wood or tile or telephone wire—despite all of that, it was the freeway that was the main sign that humans lived in the valley … the freeway, cracked and dead and half silted over and worthless. The huge strips of concrete changed from whitish to wet gray as we watched. Many was the time when we had sat in Tom’s house drinking tea and looking at it, Steve and me and Mando and Kathryn and Kristen, during our lessons or sitting out one shower or another, and many was the time that the old man had told us tales of America, pointing down at the freeway and describing the cars, until I could almost see them flashing back and forth, big metal machines of every color and shape just flying along, weaving in and out amongst each other and missing dreadful crashes by an inch as they hurried to do business in San Diego or Los Angeles, red and white headlights glaring off the wet concrete and winking out over the hill, plumes of spray spiraling back and enveloping the cars following so that no one could see properly, and Death sat in every passenger seat, waiting for mistakes—so Tom would tell it, until it would actually seem strange to me to look down and see the road so empty.

  But today Tom just sat there, letting out long breaths, looking over at Steve now and then and shaking his head. Sipping his tea in silence. It made me feel low; I wished he would tell another story. I would have to walk home in the rain, and Pa would have made the fire too small and our cabin would be chill, and long after our meal of bread and fish was done, I’d have to hunch over the coals to get warm, in the drafty dark.… Below us the freeway lay like a road of giants, gray in the wet green of the forest, and I wondered if cars would drive over it ever again.

  3

  Swap meets brought out most of the people in Onofre, to get the caravan ready to go. A score of us stood on the freeway at the takeoff point on Basilone Ridge, some piling fish onto the boat trailers, some still running down to the valley and back again with forgotten stuff, others yelling at the dogs, who were for once useful, as they pulled the boat trailers. Around the trailers folks bickered over space. The trailers, light metal racks on a pair of wheels, were good wains, but there was a shortage of room on them. So there was old Tom threatening anyone who tried to change the wasteful stowing of his honey jars, and Kathryn defending her loaves of bread with the same threats and curses, and Steve commandeering whole trailers for the fish. Mostly we took fish to the swap meet—nine or ten trailers of them, fresh and dried—and my task was to help Rafael and Steve and Doc and Gabby to load the racks. Fish were slapping and dogs were yapping, and Steve was giving orders right and left to everyone but Kathryn, who would have kicked him, and overhead a flock of gulls screeched at us as they realized they weren’t going to get a meal. It drove the dogs wild. It all reached a final pitch of excited yelling, and we were off.

  On the coast the sky was the color of sour milk, but as we turned off the freeway and moved inland up San Mateo Valley, the one just north of ours, the sun began to break through here and there, and splashes of sunlight made the green hills blaze. Our caravan stretched out as the road got thinner—it was an ancient asphalt thing, starred by potholes that we had filled with stones to make our travel easier.

  Steve and Kathryn walked at the end of the line of trailers, arms around each other. Sitting on the trailer end and letting one foot drag over asphalt, I watched them. I had known Kathryn Mariani for most of my life, and for most of my life I had been scared of her. The Marianis lived next to Pa and me, so I saw her all the time. She was the oldest of five girls, and when I was younger it seemed like she was always bossing us around, or giving someone a quick slap for trying to snatch bread or sneak through the cornfields. And she was big, too—after felling me with a kick of her heavy boot, as she had done more than once, her freckled ugly glare had inspected me from what seemed a tremendous height. I thought then that she was the meanest girl alive. It was only in the previous couple of years, when I grew as tall as her, that I got to the vantage point where I could see she was pretty. A snub nose doesn’t look so good from below (looks like a pig snout, to tell the truth), nor a big wide mouth—but from level on she looked all right. And the year before she and Steve had become lovers, so that the other girls snickered and wondered how long it would be before they had to get married; we had become better friends as a result, and I got to know her as more than the scarecrow with a rolling pin that she had been to me. Now we kidded each other about the old times:

  “Guess I’m going to lunch off that bread, I’m sure no one will mind.”

  “You do and I’ll kick your butt like I used to.” It made Nicolin laugh. He was a lot happier on these trips, with his family left behind. When the dogs yelped he jogged up and tussled with them till they were grinning and simpering and slobbering over him again, ready to haul all day for the fun of it, because of the way Steve was laughing.

  We made the swap meet about midday. The site was a grassy-floored meadow, filled with well-spaced eucalyptus and ironwood trees. When we got there the sun was out, more than half the attending villages were already there, and in the dappled light under the trees were colored canopies and flags
, trailers and car bodies and long tables, scores of people in their finest clothes, and plumes of woodsmoke, breaking through the trees from a number of campfires. The dogs went wild.

  We wound our way through the crowd to our campsite. After we said hello to the cowmen from Talega Canyon who camped next to us, I helped Rafael put up awnings over the fish trailers. The old man, staring raptly at the white canopy over the cowmen, pointed to it and said to Steve and me, “You know in the old time people used to string those things from their backs, and jump out of airplanes thousands of feet up. They floated all the way to the ground under them.”

  “Celebrating the meet a bit early, eh Tom?”

  The dogs were a nuisance and we took them out to the back of our site and tied them to trees. By the time we got back to the front of our camp the trading had already begun. We were the only seaside town at this meet, so we were popular. “Onofre’s here,” I heard someone calling. “Look at this abalone,” someone else said, “I’m going to eat mine right now!” Rafael sang out his call: “Pescados. Pescados.” Even the scavengers from Laguna came over to trade with us; they couldn’t do their own fishing even with the ocean slapping them in the face. “I don’t want your dimes, lady,” Doc insisted. “I want boots, boots, and I know you’ve got them.” “Take my dimes and buy the boots from someone else; I’m out today. Blue Book says one dime, one fish.” Doc grumbled and made the sale. After moving the campfire wood off a trailer, I was done with my work for the day. Sometimes I had clothes to trade: I got them all tattered and torn from the scavengers, and then sold them whole again after Pa had sewn them up. But this time he hadn’t patched a thing, because we hadn’t had anything to trade for old clothes last month. So the day was mine, though I would keep an eye out for wrecked coats—and see them, too, but on people’s backs. I walked to the front of our camp and sat down in the sun, on the edge of the main promenade. One woman in a long purple dress balanced a crate of chickens on her head as she walked by; she was trailed by two men in matching yellow and red striped pants, and blue long-sleeved shirts. Another woman in a group of colorfully dressed friends wore a rainbow-stained pair of pants so stiff they had a crease fore and aft.

  It wasn’t just the clothes that distinguished the scavengers. They all talked loudly, all the time. Perhaps they did it to overcome the silence of the ruins. Tom often said that living in the ruins made the scavengers mad, every single one of them; and quite a few of them passing me had a look in their eye that made me think he was right—a look wild and wanton, as if they were searching for something exciting to do that they couldn’t quite find. I watched the younger ones closely, wondering if they were among those who had run us out of San Clemente. We had had small fights with a group of them before, at the swap meets and in San Mateo Valley, where rocks had flown like bombs—but I didn’t see any of the members of that crowd. A pair of them walked by dressed in pure white suits, with white hats to match. I had to grin. My blue jeans had had their knees patched countless times. All the folks from new towns and villages wore the same sort of thing, back country clothes kept together by needle and prayer, sometimes new things made up of scraps of cloth, or hides; wearing them was like having a badge saying you were healthy and normal. I suppose the scavengers’ clothes were another sort of badge, saying that they were rich, and dangerous.

  Then I saw Melissa Shanks walking out of our camp, carrying a basket of crabs. I hopped up without a thought and approached her. “Melissa!” I said, and gave her a fool’s grin. “Want some help bringing back what you get for those pinchers?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “What if I was out to get a pack of needles?”

  “Well, um, I guess you wouldn’t need much help.”

  “True. But lucky for you I’m out in search of a barrel half, so I’d be happy to have you along.”

  “Oh good.” Melissa spent some time working at the ovens; she was a friend of Kathryn’s younger sister Kristen. Other than the times I’d seen her at the ovens, I didn’t know her. Her father, Addison Shanks, lived on Basilone Hill, and they didn’t have much to do with the rest of the valley. “You’ll be lucky to get a half cask for that many crabs,” I went on, looking in her basket.

  “I know. The Blue Book says it’s possible, but I’ll have to do some fast talking.” She tossed back her long black hair confidently, and it blazed in the sun, so glossy and perfectly kept that it seemed she wore jewelry. She was pretty: small teeth, a narrow nose, fine white skin.… She had a whole series of careful, serious, haughty expressions that her lips would hold, and that made her rare smiles all the sweeter. I stared at her too long, and bumped into an old woman going the other way.

  “Carajo!”

  “Sorry, mam, but I was made distract by this here young maiden—”

  “Well get a grip!”

  “Indeed I’ll try mam, goodbye,” and with a wink and a pinch on the butt (she slapped my hand) I rounded the crone, who was grinning. As Melissa was smiling too I took her arm in hand and we talked cheerily as we toured the meet on the main promenade, looking for a cooper. We eventually made for the Trabuco Canyon camp, agreeing that the farmers there were good woodworkers.

  A plume of smoke rose from the Trabuco camp, floating through wedged sunbeams that turned the smoke seashell pink.

  We smelled meat; they were roasting a steer half by half. A good crowd had gathered in their camp to join the feast. Melissa and I traded one of the crabs for a pair of ribs, and ate them standing, observing the antics of a slick trio of scavengers, who wanted six ribs for a box of safety pins. I was about to make a joke about them when I remembered Melissa’s father. Addison did a lot of trading by night, to the north, and no one was sure how much he traded with scavengers, how much he stole from them, how much he worked for them.… He was sort of a scavenger himself, who preferred to live outside of the ruins. I chewed the beef in silence, aware all of a sudden that I didn’t know the girl at my side very well. She gnawed her rib clean as a dog’s bone, looking at the sizzling meat over the fire. She sighed. “That was good, but I don’t see any barrels. I guess we should look in the scavenger camps.”

  I agreed, although that would mean a tougher trade. We walked over to the north half of the park, where the scavengers stayed—keeping a clear route back home, perhaps. The camps and goods for trade were much different here: no food, except for several women guarding trays of spices and canned delicacies. We passed a man dressed in a shiny blue suit, trading tools that were spread out over a blanket on the grass. Some of the tools were rusty, others brighter than silver, each a different shape and size. We tried to guess what this or that tool had been for. One that gave us the giggles was two pairs of greenish metal clamps at each end of a wire in a tube of orange plastic. “That was to hold together husbands and wives who didn’t get along,” Melissa said.

  “Nah, they’d need something stronger than those. They’re probably a doorstop.”

  She crowed. “A what?” But she wouldn’t let me explain—she started to double over every time I tried, until I couldn’t talk myself. We walked on, past large displays of bright clothing and shiny shoes, and big rusty machines that were no use without electricity, and gun men with their crowd of spectators, on hand to watch the occasional big trade or demonstration shot. The seed exchange, on the border between the scavengers’ camps and ours, was hopping as usual. I wanted to go over and see if Kathryn was trading, because the way she traded for seeds was an art; but in the crowd of traders I couldn’t see if she was there, and suddenly Melissa tugged on my arm. “There!” she said. Beyond the seed exchange was a woman in a scarlet dress, selling chairs, tables, and barrels.

  “There you are,” I said. I caught sight of Tom Barnard across the promenade. “I’m going to see what Tom’s up to while you start your dealing.”

  “Good. I’ll try the poor and innocent routine until you get there.”

  “Good luck.” She didn’t look all that innocent, and that was the truth. I walked over to Tom, who w
as deep in discussion with another tool trader. When I stopped at his side he clapped a hand on my shoulder and went on talking.

  “—industrial wastes, rotting wood, animal bodies, sometimes—”

  “Bullshit,” said the tool trader. (“That too,” the old man got in.) “They made it from sugar cane and sugar beets; it says so right on the boxes. And sugar stays good forever, and it tastes just as good as your honey.”

  “There are no such things as sugar cane and sugar beets,” Tom said scornfully. “You ever seen one of either? There are no such plants. Sugar companies made them up. Meanwhile they made their sugar out of sludge, and you’ll pay for it with no end of dreadful diseases and deformities. But honey! Honey’ll keep away colds and all ailments of the lungs, it’ll get rid of gout and bad breath, it tastes ten times better than sugar, it’ll help you live as long as me, and it’s new and natural, not some sixty-year-old synthetic junk. Here, taste some of this, take a fingerful, I’ve been turning the whole meet on to it, no obligation in a fingerful.”

  The tool man dipped two fingers in the jar the old man held before him, and licked the honey off them.

  “Yeah, it tastes good—”

  “You bet it does! Now one God damned little lighter, of which you’ve got thousands up in O.C., is surely not much for two, twooooo jars of this delicious honey. Especially…” Tom cracked his palm against the side of his head to loosen the hinges of his memory. “Especially when you get the jars, too.”

  “The jars too, you say.”

  “Yes, I know it’s generous of me, but you know how we Onofreans are, we’d give our pants away if people didn’t mind our bare asses hanging out, besides I’m senile almost—”

  “Okay, okay! You can shut up now, it’s a deal. Give them over.”

  “All right, here they are young man,” handing the jars to him. “You’ll live to be as old as me eating this magic elixir, I swear.”

  “I’ll pass on that if you don’t mind,” the scavenger said with a laugh. “But it’ll taste good.” He took the lighter, clear plastic with a metal cap, and gave it to the old man.