“Anyway,” Tom was saying to me now, “John Nicolin did or directed everything that had to do with fishing, and doing it was what brought the people in this valley together, and made us a town. The second winter after he arrived was the first one no one died from hunger. Boy, you don’t know what that means. There’s been hard times since, but none to match those before Nicolin arrived. I admire him. So if he’s got fish on the brain, if he won’t let his son leave it for a week or even a day, then that’s too bad. That’s the way he is now, and you’ve got to understand it.”
“But it doesn’t matter how well fed he is, if he makes his son hate him.”
“Aye. But that’s not his intention. I know he doesn’t intend that. Remember John Junior. Could be, even if John himself doesn’t know it, he just wants to keep Steve where he can see him. To try and keep him safe. So that even the fishing is just a cover. I don’t know.”
I shook my head. It still wasn’t fair, keeping Steve at home. A wedge in a crack. I understood a little better what Tom had meant, but it seemed to me then that we were the wedges, stuck so far in history that we couldn’t move but one way when we were struck by events. How I wished we could be clear and free to move where we would!
We had walked to my home. Firelight shone through the cracks around the door. “Steve’ll make it another time,” said Tom. “But us—we’ll be off to San Diego on the next cloudy night.”
“Yeah.” Right then I couldn’t rouse much enthusiasm for it. Tom hit my shoulder and was off through the trees.
“Be ready!” he called as he disappeared in the forest gloom.
The next cloudy night didn’t come for a while. For once the warm current brought clear skies with it, and I spent my evenings impatiently cursing the stars. During the days I kept fishing. Steve was ordered by John to stay on the net boats, so off in my rowboat I wasn’t faced with him hour after hour, but I did feel lonesome, and odd—as if I was betraying him somehow. When we did work together, unloading fish or rolling nets, he just talked fishing, not meeting my eye, and I couldn’t find anything to say. I felt tremendously relieved when three days after the dinner he laughed and said, “Just when you don’t want clear days they come blaring down. Come on, let’s use this one for what it was meant to be used for.” Fishing was done, and with the hours of day left we walked out the wide beach to the rivermouth, where waves were slowly changing from blue lines to white lines. Gabby and Mando and Del joined us with the fins, and we waded out over the coarse tan sand of the shallows into the break. The water was as warm as it ever got. We took a fin each and swam out through the soup to the clear water outside the waves’ breaking point. Out there the water was like blue glass; I could see the smooth sheet of sand on the bottom perfectly. It was a pleasure just to tread water out there, to let the swells wash over my head and to look back at the tan cliffs and the green forest, edged by the sky and the eye-blue ocean under my chin. I drifted back in and rode the waves with the others, happy they didn’t resent me, too much, for getting the chance to go to San Diego.
When we got back on the beach, the others said goodbye to me, and left in a group. I sat in the sand, feeling strange.
A figure appeared walking down the riverside, in the narrow gap in the cliffs where the river rolled through to the sea. When it got closer I saw that it was Melissa Shanks. I stood and waved; she saw me and made her way around the pools on the beach to me.
“Hello, Henry,” she said. “Have you been out body surfing?”
“Yeah. What brings you down here?”
“Oh, I was looking for clams up on the flats.” It never occurred to me that she didn’t have any rake or bucket with her. “Henry, I hear you’re going down to San Diego with Tom?”
I nodded. Her eyes got wide with excitement.
“Why, you must be thrilled,” she said. “When are you going?”
“The next cloudy night. Seems like the weather doesn’t want me to go.”
She laughed, and leaned over to kiss my cheek. When I raised my eyebrows she kissed me again, and I turned and kissed back.
“I can’t believe you’re going,” she said dreamily, between kisses. “It’s just so—well, you’re the best man to do it.”
I began to feel better about going on this trip of mine.
“How many of you are going?”
“Just me and Tom.”
“But what about those San Diegans?”
“Oh they’re going too. They’re taking us down.”
“Just those two who came up here?”
“No, they have a whole crew of men waiting down the freeway where they stopped fixing up the tracks.” I explained to her how the San Diegans ran their operation. “So we have to go on a cloudy night, so the Japs won’t see us.”
“My God.” She shivered. “It sounds dangerous.”
“Oh no, I don’t think so.” I kissed her again, rolling her back onto the sand, and we kissed for so long that I had her half out of her clothes. Suddenly she looked around and laughed.
“Not here on the beach,” she said. “Why, anyone on the cliff could see us.”
“No they couldn’t.”
“Oh yes they could, you know they could. Tell you what.” She sat up and rearranged her blue cotton shirt. I looked through her black hair to the late afternoon sun, and felt a surge of happiness pulse through me. “When you get back from San Diego, maybe we could go up Swing Canyon and take some swings.”
Swing Canyon was a place where lovers went; I nodded eagerly, and reached for her, but she stood up.
“I have to be off now, really, my pa is going to be wondering where I got to.” She kissed her forefinger and put it to my lips, skipped off with a laugh. I watched her cross the wide beach, then stood up myself. I shook myself, laughed out loud. I looked out to sea; were those clouds, out there?
Just after sunset my question was answered. Clouds streamed in like broken waves, and the sky was blue-gray and starless when it got dark. I took my coat off its hook and got a thick sweater from our clothes bag, chattering with Pa. Late that night Tom rapped at the door. I was off to San Diego.
PART TWO
San Diego
6
Out by the big eucalyptus Jennings and Lee stood waiting. “Let’s be off,” Lee said roughly.
We went to the freeway and headed south. Soon we passed the steep bank at the back of Concrete Bay, and were out of the valley and onto the Pendleton shore. The freeway was in pretty good shape; though the surface was cracked a bit, it was clear of trees and shrubs, except for an occasional line of them filling a big crack like a fence. But most of the way the road was a light slash through dark, overhanging forest. The level country it crossed was a narrow strip between steep hills and the sea cliff, cut often by deep ravines. Usually the freeway spanned these ravines, but twice it fell into them, and we were forced to descend their sides and cross the gurgling black creeks at their bottoms, on big blocks of concrete. Lee led the way over these breaks without a word. He was anxious to be in San Diego, it seemed.