He stood slowly. Tired. It would be a long ride home, but suddenly he wanted to be there. Needed to be there.
The next couple of weeks were warm and humid, and there was a dull feeling of tension in the air, as if more and more static electricity were building, as if any day a Santa Ana wind would come pouring over the hills and blow them all into the sea.
Tom didn’t come back down into town, and eventually Nadezhda got in the habit of going to see him. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasn’t. When she found him at home they talked, in fits and starts; when he wasn’t there she worked in his garden. Once she saw him slipping away as she hiked up the last stretch of trail, and realized he was having trouble adjusting to so much company. She stopped going, and spent her days with Doris or Kevin or Oscar, or Rafael and Andrea, or her other housemates. And then one evening Tom showed up at the house, to have a cup of coffee after dinner. Ready to talk for an hour or two, then slip away.
Kevin and Ramona fell into a pattern of a different sort; they got together in the late afternoon after work, every few days, to go flying, and then perhaps have dinner. While in the air they talked over the day’s work, or something equally inconsequential. Out of nowhere, it seemed, Kevin had found an instinct for avoiding certain topics—for letting Ramona choose what to talk about, and then following along. It was a sort of tact he had never had; he hadn’t cared enough, he hadn’t been paying enough attention to the people he was with. But on these flights he was really paying attention, with the same dreamlike intensity he had felt on their first flight. Every excursion aloft was a whole and distinct adventure, the most important part of his day by far. Just to soar around the sky like that, to feel the wind lift them like a gull… to see the land, lying below like a gift on a plate!
And there was something wonderful about working so hard in tandem, harnessed to the same chain, legs pumping in the same rhythm. The physicality of it, the things they learned about each other’s characters while at the edge of physical endurance—the constant reminder of their bodies, of their animal reality… add that to their softball games, and the swim workouts they sometimes joined in the mornings, and there wasn’t much they didn’t know about each other, as animals.
And so Kevin paid attention. And they pumped madly in the seats of the Ultralite, and soared through the air. And pointed out the sights below, and talked about nothing but the present moment. “Look at that flock of crows,” Kevin would say, pointing at a cloud of black-dot birds below.
“Gangsters,” Ramona would reply.
“No, no! I really like crows!” She would laugh. “I do, don’t you? They’re such powerful flyers, they don’t look pretty but they do it with such efficiency.”
“Fullbacks of the air.”
“Exactly!” There were thousands of crows in Orange County, living in great flocks off the fruit of the groves. “I like their croaky voices and the sheen on their wings, and that smart look in their eye when they watch you”—he was discovering all this in himself only at the moment he spoke it, so that it felt marvelous to speak, to discover—“and the way they hop sideways all shaggy and awkward. I really love them!”
And Ramona would laugh harder at each declaration. And Kevin would never speak of other things, knowing it was what she wanted. And she would fly them around the sky, more graceful than the crows, as graceful as the gulls, and the sweat would dry white on their skins as they worked like dervishes in the sky. And Kevin’s heart… well, it was full. Brimming. But he had an instinct, now, telling him what to do. Telling him to bide his time.
Thus the most important part of his life, these days, was taking place two or three hundred feet in the air. Of course he was concerned about the workings of the town council, and it took up a fair amount of time, but from week to week he didn’t worry about it much. They were waiting for Alfredo to make his next move, and doing what they could to find out more about his intentions. Doris had a friend in the financial offices of her company, who had a friend in a similar job with Heartech, and she was digging carefully there to find out what the rumors were in Alfredo’s base of operations. There were rumors of a move, in fact. Perhaps they could get more details out of this friend of a friend; Doris was excited by the possibility, and put a lot of work into it, talking, acting innocent and ignorant, asking questions over lunches.
Then the re-zoning proposal appeared on the agenda, and it included the re-zoning of the old OCWD tract. Doris and Kevin walked into the council meeting like hunters settling into a blind.
It was a much more modest affair than the inaugural meeting; the people who had to be there were there, and that was it. The long room was mostly empty and dark, with all the light and people crowded into the business end of things. Alfredo ran the meeting through its paces with his usual efficiency, only lightly peppering things with jokes and asides. Then he came to item twelve. “Okay, let’s get to the big stuff—re-zoning proposals.”
Petitioners in the audience laughed as if that were another of his jokes. Kevin hunched forward in his seat, put his elbows on the table.
Doris, seeing the way Kevin’s hands were clenched, decided she had better do the talking. “What about this change for the Crawford Canyon lots, Alfredo?”
“They’re the lots that OCWD used to own. And the land up above it, across from Orange Hill.”
“That’s called Rattlesnake Hill,” she said sharply.
“Not on the maps.”
“Why a zoning change? That land was supposed to be added to Santiago Park.”
“No, nothing’s been decided about that land, actually.”
“If you go back to the minutes of the meeting where those Crawford Canyon condos were condemned, I think you’ll find that was the plan.”
“I don’t recall what was discussed then, but nothing was ever done about it.”
“Going from five point four to three point two is a big change,” Jerry Geiger noted.
“It sure is!” Kevin said loudly. “It means you could do major commercial building. What’s the story, Alfredo?”
“The planning commission wanted to be able to consider that land as a possibility for various projects, isn’t that right, Mary?”
Mary looked down at her notes. “Three point two is a general purpose classification.”
“Meaning you could do almost anything up there!” Kevin exclaimed.
He was losing his temper already. Doris scowled at him, tried to take back their side of the argument. “It’s actually commercial zoning, isn’t it, Mary?”
“It allows commercial development, yes, but doesn’t mandate it—”
Face red with emotion, Kevin said, “That is the last empty hill in El Modena!”
“Well,” Alfredo said calmly. “No need to get upset. I know it’s more or less in your backyard, but still, for the good of the town—”
“Where I live has nothing to do with it!” Kevin exclaimed, sliding his chair back as if he might stand. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
A shocked silence, a titter. Doris elbowed Kevin in the side and then stepped hard on his foot. He glanced at her, startled.