Hana nods, looking straight at him for once. She smiles. “You love your friends.”
“Yeah? Well, sure.” Jim laughs.
“Here, I’m ready to work. Get out of that light, okay? Sit down, or feel free to track or whatever.”
“I’ll look at the other ones here.” He studies painting after painting, watching her as well. She has the canvas flat on a low table, and is seated next to it, bent over and dabbing at it with a tiny brush. Face lost in black hair. Still bulky body, hand moving deftly, tiny motions… it must take her hours to do one painting, and here there are, what, sixty of them? “Whoah.”
After a while he just sits by one stack and watches her. She doesn’t notice. Every once in a while she heaves a big breath, like a sigh. Then she’s almost holding it. Cheynes-Stokes breathing, Jim thinks. She’s at altitude. Once he comes to and realizes he’s been watching her still form without thought, for—he doesn’t know how long. Like the meditation he can never do! Except he’s about to fall asleep. “Hey, I’m going to track.” “All right. See you later?” “You bet.”
On the drive home he can hear a poem rolling around in his mind, a great long thing filled with gold freeways and green skies, a bulky figure perched over a low table. But at home, staring at the computer screen, he only hears fragments, jumbled together; the images won’t be fixed by words, and he only stares until finally he goes to bed and falls into an uneasy insomniac’s slumber. He dreams again that he is walking around a hilltop in ruins, the low walls broken and tumbled down, the land empty out to the horizon… and the thing rises up out of the hill to tell him whatever it is it has to say, he can’t understand it. And he looks up and sees a gold freeway in a green sky.
39
Sandy manages to talk Tash into accompanying him on his sailing trip to rendezvous with the incoming shipment of Rhinoceros. As always it’s the personal plea rather than financial arguments that convince Tash.
Soon after that Sandy is visited by Bob Tompkins, who gives him the latest information on the smugglers, and the keys to the boat moored in Newport harbor. When that business is done they retire to Sandy and Angela’s balcony for a drink. Angela comes out and joins them.
“So how’s Raymond doing?” Sandy asks casually when they are suitably relaxed.
“Oh, okay.”
“Is he still involved with this thing in OC, the defense industry vendetta?”
“Yeah, yeah. More than ever.”
“So he has people up here that he’s recruited, then?”
“Hired, to be exact. Sure. You don’t think Raymond would do all this by himself?”
Sandy hesitates, trying to figure out an unobtrusive opening; Angela takes the direct approach. “We think some of our friends might be working for him, and we’re worried that they’ll get in trouble.”
Bob frowns. “Well… I don’t know what to say, Angela. Raymond’s going about it with his usual security measures, though. He swears it’s all going very quietly.”
“Rumors are flying up here,” Sandy says.
“Yeah?” Bob frowns again. “Well, I’ll tell Raymond about that. I think it’d be nice if he stopped, myself, but I don’t know if he will.”
Sandy looks at Angela, and they let the conversation drift to other topics. Afterward, thinking about it, Sandy decides he didn’t really find out much. But he might have sent some useful news up the line to Raymond.
The next afternoon Sandy goes down with Tash to the upper bay. They’ve got all the keys they need: one for the marina parking lot, one for the marina, one for the cage around the boat’s slip, one to turn off the boat’s alarm system, three to get into the boat, and one to unlock the beam and the rigging.
It’s a thirty-three-foot catamaran, big-hulled and slow as cats go, named Pride of Topeka. Solid teak paneling, dark blue hull and decking, rainbow sails, little auxiliary engines in each hull. They get it out of the slip and putter down the waterways of Newport harbor.
Past five thousand small boats.
Past Balboa Pavilion, and the ferry kept running for tourists.
Past the house split in two by feuding brothers. That’s History.
Past the buoy marking where John Wayne moored his yacht.
Past the Coast Guard station (look innocent).
Past the palm trees arched over Pirate’s Cove. That’s your childhood.
And out between the jetties. They’re caught in the five-mile-per-hour traffic jam of the busiest harbor on earth. Might as well be on the freeway. To their left over the jetty is Corona del Mar, where Duke Kahanamoko introduced surfing to California. To their right over the longer jetty is the Wedge, famous bodysurfing break. “I wonder where they got the boulders for the jetties,” Sandy says. “They sure aren’t local.”
“Ask Jim.”
“Remember when we were kids and we used to run out to the end?”
“Yeah.” They look at the metal tower at the end of the Corona del Mar jetty, the green light blinking on its top. Once it was one of their magic destinations. “We were crazy to run over those boulders.”
“I know!” Sandy laughs. “Just one slip and it’s all over! I wouldn’t do it now.”
“No. We’re a lot more sensible now.”
“Ahhh, hahaha. Speaking of which, it’s time for an eye-dropper, eh?”
“Let’s get the sails up first so we don’t forget how.”
They put up the mainsail, the boat heels over, they sail south.
Engines off. White wake spreading behind.
Sun on water. Wind pushing onshore.
The sail bellies
Full.
Sandy takes a big breath, lets it out. “Yes, yes, yes. Free at last. Let’s celebrate with that eyedropper.”
“Really change the routine.”
After a few blinks Sandy sighs. “This is the only way to travel. They should flood the streets, give everyone a little Hobie cat.”
“Good idea.”
They’re headed for the backside of San Clemente Island, some sixty miles off the north San Diego coast. It’s owned by the government, inhabited only by goats, and used by the Navy and the Marines to practice amphibious landings, helicopter attacks, parachuting, precision bombing, that sort of thing. Sandy and Tash are scheduled to rendezvous sometime the next day or night with the boat from Hawaii, off the west side of the island.
They sail in a comfortable silence, broken only occasionally by stretches of talk. It’s an old friendship, there’s no pressure to make conversation.
That’s the sort of companionship that brings people out; even the quiet ones talk, given this kind of silence. And suddenly Tash is talking about Erica. He’s worried. As Erica rises ever higher in the management of Hewes Mall, her complaints about her layabout ally and his eccentric life-style become sharper. And no one can get sharper than Erica Palme when she wants to be.
Sandy questions Tash about it. What does she want? A businessman partner, kids, a respectable alliance in the condomundos of south OC?
Tash can only blink into an eyedropper and declare “I don’t know.”
Sandy doubts this; he suspects Tash knows but doesn’t want to know. If Sandy’s guesses are correct, then Tash’ll have to make changes he doesn’t want to make, to keep the ally he wants to keep. Classic problem.
Sandy has the solidest of allies in Angela; she’s biochemically optimistic, as he’s joked more than once, she appears to have equal amounts of Funny Bone, Apprehension of Beauty, the Buzz, and California Mello running in her veins. If he could get his clients to Angela’s ordinary everyday mental state, he’d be rich. Sandy treasuresher, in fact they’re really old-fashioned that way; they’re in love, they’ve been allies for almost ten years. Some kind of miracle, for sure. And the more Sandy hears from all his friends, the more he sees of their shaky, patched-up, provisional alliances, the luckier he feels.