“I like making the whole house. Changing bad to good. Man, I go into some of those old condo complexes, and my God—six hundred square feet, little tiny white-walled rooms with cottage cheese ceilings, cheap carpet over plywood floors, no light—they were like rats in a cage! Little white prison cells, I can’t believe people lived like that! I mean they were more prosperous than that, weren’t they? Couldn’t they have done better?”
Oscar shrugged. “I suppose they could have.”
“But they didn’t! Now I go into one of those places and blast some space and light into them, do the whole program and in the end you can house just about as many people, but the feel of living there is completely different.”
Oscar said, “You have to believe that you can live in a more communal situation without going crazy. You have to be willing to share space.”
“I always make sure everyone has a room of their own, that’s important to me.”
“But the rest of it—kitchens, living rooms, all that. Social organization has to change for you to be able to redo those big places.”
“So it’s like Doris says—it’s a matter of values.”
“Yes, I think that’s right.”
“Well, I like our values. Seeing homes as organisms—there’s an elegance to that, and if you can still make it beautiful…”
“It’s a work of art.”
“Yes, but a work of art that you live in. If you live in a work of art, it does something to you. It…” Kevin shook his head, unable to express it. “It gives you a good feeling.”
From the next room Gabriela hooted. “It gives you a good feeling?”
Oscar called to her, “The aestheticization of la vie quotidienne!”
“Oh, now I get it! Just what I was going to say!”
Hank appeared in the doorway, saw and two-by-four in his hands. “It’s Chinese, really. Their little gardens, and the sliding panels and the indoor-outdoor, and the communal thing and the domestic life as art—they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”
“That’s true,” Kevin said. “I love Chinese landscaping.”
But now Hank was entranced by the two-by-four in his hand. “Uh oh, I appear to have sawed this one a little sigogglin.” He made a face, hitched up his pants, walked back out under the carport.
One time after the day’s work they bought some dumpies of beer and went up onto Rattlesnake Hill to look for endangered species. This was Kevin’s idea, and they gave him a hard time about it, but he held fast. “Look, it’s one of the best ways to stop the whole thing dead in its tracks, all right? There were some horned lizards down in the Newport Hills stopped a whole freeway a few years back. So we should try it.”
And so they did, hiking up from Kevin and Doris’s, and stopping often to inspect plants along the way. Jody was their botanist, and she brought along Ramona for a back-up. It was a hot afternoon, and they stopped often to consult with the beer.
“What’s this tree, I don’t remember seeing a tree quite like that.”
It was a short twisted thing, with smooth gray bark runnelled by vertical lines. Big shiny leaves hid clumps of berries. “That’s a mulefat tree,” Jody said.
“How the hell did a tree get a name like that?”
“Maybe it burns well.”
“Did they burn mule fat?”
“I don’t think so. Pass that dumpie over.”
Kevin wandered around as the rest sat to observe the mulefat tree. “What about this?” he said, pointing to a shrub with threadlike needles bushing everywhere on it.
“Sage!” they all yelled at him. “Purple sage,” Jody amended. “We’ll also see black sage and regular gray sage.”
“About as endangered as dirt,” Hank said.
“Okay, okay. Come on, you guys, we’ve got the whole hill to go over.”
So they got up and continued the search. Kevin led them, and Jody identified a lot of plants. Gabby and Hank and Oscar and Ramona drank a lot of beer. A shrubby tree with oval flat leaves was a laurel sumac. A shrub with long stiff needles poking in every direction was Spanish broom. “Make it bigger and it’s a foxtail pine,” Hank said. Ramona identified about half the plants they ran across: mantilija poppy with its tiny leaves; horehound, a plain shrub; periwinkle with its broad leaves and purple flowers, a fine ground cover on the hill’s north side; a tree that looked like a Torrey pine but was actually a Coulter pine; and on the crown of the hill, in the grove Tom had helped plant so long ago, a pair of fine black walnuts, with the bark looking broken, and the small green leaves in neat rows.
On the west side of the hill there were some steep ravines leading down into Crawford Canyon, and they clambered up and down, scrabbling for footholds in the loose sandstone and the sandy dirt. “What about this cactus?” Kevin said, pointing.
“Jesus, Kevin, that’s prickly pear,” Jody said. “You can get that stuff pickled down at the Mexican deli.”
“That’s it!” Gabriela cried. “Pickled cactus gets so popular that they’re cutting it down everywhere to supply the market, and so suddenly it’s endangered up here, yeah!”
“Ah shut up,” Kevin said.
“Hey, here’s some wildlife,” Hank said from some distance away. He was on his hands and knees, his face inches from the dirt.
“Ants,” Gabriela said as they walked over. “Chocolate covered ants get popular, and so suddenly—”
“No, it’s a newt.”
So it was; a small brown newt, crawling across an opening between sage bushes.
“It looks like rubber. Look how slow it moves.”
“That’s obviously a rare fake newt, put here to get Kevin’s hopes up.”
“It does look fake.”
“They should be endangered, look how slow they are.” The newt was moving each leg in turn, very slowly. Even blinking its little yellow eyes took time.
“The battery’s running down.”
“All right, all right,” Kevin said, walking away angrily.
They followed him down the hill.
“That’s all right, Kevin,” Ramona said. “We’ve got a softball game tonight, remember?”
“True,” Kevin said, perking up.
“Hey, are you still hitting a thousand?”
“Come on, Gabby, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You are, you are! What is it, thirty for thirty?”
“Thirty-six for thirty-six,” Ramona said. “But it is bad luck to talk about it.”
“That’s all right,” Kevin said. “I’m not gonna mind when it ends anyway, it’s making me nervous.”
And this was true. Batting a thousand was not natural. Hit as well as possible, some line drives should still be caught. To keep firing them into empty places on the field was just plain weird, and Kevin was not comfortable with it. People were razzing him, too, both opponents and his own teammates. Mr. Thousand. Mr. Perfect. Heaven Kevin. It was embarrassing.
“Strike out on purpose, then,” Hank suggested. “Get it over with. That’s what I’d do.”
“Damned if I will!”
They laughed at him.
Besides, each time he walked to the plate, that night or any other, and stood there half-swinging his bat, and the pitcher lofted up the ball, big and white and round against the black and the skittering moths, like a full moon falling out of the sky—then all thought would fly from his mind, he became an utter blank; and would come to standing on first or second or third, grinning and feeling the hit still in his hands and wrists. He couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to.
Another day as they were finishing work Ramona cruised by and said to Kevin, “Want to go to the beach?”
His heartbeat tocked at the back of his throat. “Sure.”