“There are no spies in San Diego,” Danforth said, his chin tucked into his neck. His voice made me feel like I did when the brake was pulled on the train. “Jennings, you get hold of Thompson and have him sail you and Lee and these two up the coast. Get off at Onofre with them, and hike back down the tracks and survey the damage. I want to know how long it’s going to take to get that route open again.”
“Melted track will be hard,” Jennings replied. “We’ll have to replace it like we did on the Salton Sea line, and it’ll be impossible to do without leaving signs. Maybe we could follow three ninety-five up to Riverside, then turn back to the coast—”
Wham. “I want the coastal tracks working. You get Thompson and do as I tell you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Soon after that the Mayor and his men left the house, without any kind of farewell to Tom and me. Jennings sighed, and made an apologetic face at his wife, who was in the entrance to the kitchen looking discouraged. “Lee, I wish you’d talk back to him sometimes. He just gets madder when you don’t answer like that.” But Lee was still angry, and he said no more to Jennings than he had to Danforth. Tom jerked his head and I followed him out of the room. “Looks like it’s back by sea,” he said with a shrug.
The next day a heavy wall of clouds moved onshore, so quickly we got our bags filled and said goodbye to Mrs. Jennings. We pumped our handcar over steep hills back to the coast, and north to the Del Mar River. From the south side of the marsh we could see the hundred wandering streams that the river made through the grass and cattails, iron streams through solid green. The main channel of the river snaked back on itself in big S’s, and there against the bank, curving with it, was a long wooden dock. We began to roll faster down the tracks, which led us all the way to the sea beach before making a half-circle and coming back to the dock. Even so the incline was steep, and we flew down the rails and made the turn above the beach with a wicked screech, like we were strangling a thousand gulls at once. Then it was down a gentler incline to the dockside.
For a moment the setting sun poked through the black wall of cloud, and sent a pencil of light up the marsh, brightening the gloom of the dusk. In the muted green light I saw a couple of men working on a big sloop moored at the downstream end of the dock. The sloop was a long one, nearly thirty feet I reckoned, wide-beamed and shallow-keeled, with canvas decking before the mast, and open plank seats aft of it. As we walked onto the dock a whiff of fish in the general salt smell reminded me of home. The clouds came together again, and we were back in the murk.
“Looks like we’ll be sailing in a storm,” I observed, for the wind was picking up, and the clouds clearly held rain.
“That’s the way we want it,” said Jennings.
“Too much of a storm and we’d be in trouble.”
“Maybe. But we’ve got anchorages up the coast, and Thompson has done this a thousand times. In fact it should be easier than usual, with no Jap landing parties to intercept. You’ll be home almost as fast as if we’d gone by train.”
“Let’s be under way,” a man hallooed from the sloop. “Tide’s turning!”
Jennings introduced us to the speaker, who turned out to be Thompson, and to his two sailors, Handy and Gilmour. We stepped down into the sloop. Tom and I sat on the plank just aft of the mast, and leaned back against struts. Jennings and Lee sat down on the plank aft of ours. The men on the dock unmoored us and pushed us into the stream. The sailors rowed lazily, keeping us pointed downstream and letting the current do the work. A dinghy tied to the stern of the sloop weaved behind us, pushed this way and that by the stream. We looped through the marsh; grass grew half as tall as the mast on either bank, and scores of bobbing ducks paddled into the reeds as we passed. The river poured over a shallow break in the beach, beside the bluff on the north side of the marsh. We spilled over this bar and the rowers pulled like madmen to get us through the violent soup, and over some big waves. When we were outside the break they shipped the oars, and pulled up the two sails. Thompson trimmed the sails from his seat at the tiller, and we heeled over and sailed up the coast, paralleling the swells so that we rolled heavily. The wind was from the southwest, so we clipped along at a very good speed.
We stayed about a mile offshore, and before darkness fell we had a fine view of the beach cliffs, and the forested hills rising behind them. But soon the sun must have set, for the murk turned to night darkness, and the black bulk of the land was scarcely visible under the edge of the clouds. Over the hissing of our wake and the creaks of the boom rubbing the mast, Jennings told Thompson and Handy and Gilmour the story of how we had seen the bombing of the railroad tracks. Tom and I sat against the mast, huddled in every stitch of clothing we had. The swells riding under us smoked a little, and the clouds got lower and lower, till we sailed through a narrow layer of clear windy air, sandwiched between thick slices of water and cloud. Tom dozed from time to time, head lolling on the foredeck.
After a couple hours I stretched out on a pile of rope between two planks, and tried to imitate Tom and get some sleep. But I couldn’t. I lay on my back and watched the gray sail, almost the color of the clouds above it, suck and fill in an unpredictable way. I listened to the voices of Jennings and the others in the stern, without making out half of what they said. I shut my eyes, and thought about things we had seen on our journey south: the Mayor pounding Jennings’ table till the salt shaker bounced, the dial and gauge-filled front of the broken radio in the Mayor’s house, the face of the pretty girl I had danced with. We were in a new world now, I thought. We were in a world where Americans could freely pursue their destiny, or fight for it when they were opposed… a world altogether different from our little valley’s world, with its ignorance of anything beyond the swap meets. Nicolin would be ecstatic to hear of it, and to read the book Wentworth had given us—to learn how an American had traveled all over the world… to join the resistance with the rest of the valley, and fight our hidden enemies on Catalina… Oh, I’d have news for the gang, all right, and tales to tell that would make their eyes bug out like frogs’. How would I describe the Mayor’s island house, so unlike anything known in Onofre?… All those electric lights, reflected in that black lake with all its ruined towers…
I must have succeeded in falling asleep for a while, because when I opened my eyes again we were sailing in fog. Not a complete white out, but the sort of fog that is dense in patches and clear in others. Sometimes there was clear air for a man’s height above the water, and then a solid white ceiling of cloud; other times the cloud came right down and mixed with the smoking surface of the water. I stuck my hand over the side, and found that the water was considerably warmer than the air. I burrowed my cold feet into the pile of rope I’d been lying on. Tom still sat beside me, awake now.
“How do they know where we are?” I asked, sucking salt off my chilled fingers.
“Jennings says that Thompson stays close enough to shore to hear the waves break.” I cocked an ear landward and heard a faint crack and rumble.
“Big swell.”
“Yeah. He says the sound changes when we pass a rivermouth, and Thompson knows which rivermouth is which.”
“He must come up this way a lot to be able to do that.”
“True.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t lose track and run us onto the Pulgas River delta.”
“We’re past that, he says. I believe we’re ten or fifteen miles down from Onofre.”
So I had slept a long time, which was a blessing, as it meant I had missed a few hours of being cold. The men aft were still talking quietly among themselves, all of them awake and leaning back against the gunwales, their coats buttoned up and their necks wrapped in wool scarves. We sailed into a white patch, and Thompson, alert at the tiller, steered us seaward so that we slapped over the swells as we gained leeway. I couldn’t fall asleep again, and for a long time everything remained the same: the fog, the hiss of the swells sliding under the boat, the creaking of the boom, the cold. The wind blew in fits and starts, and I could hear Thompson and Lee discussing the possibility of running in to one of the rivermouths and spending the coming day there. “Hard to do,” Thompson said in an unconcerned way. “Damned hard to do with this fog, and the wind dying down. And the swell is picking up, whoah, see what I mean? These’ll make pretty damn big waves, I’d say.” The mast creaked as if in agreement, and the way the steep and smoking swells lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped, without us ever being able to properly see them, made them seem especially big. Swell after swell lifted the boat and slid away from it, and the rhythm of it almost had me asleep again, when Tom sat up suddenly.