“So it is. But there is no habitation directly onshore, so you must come from north or south.”
“How do you know there isn’t a habitation onshore?”
He smiled just like we do, though the results were ugly. “We have observed your coastline.”
“Spies,” I said. “Sneaking spies. You should be ashamed. You’re a sailor, mister. Don’t you feel ashamed for attacking unarmed sailors on a foggy night and killing them all—sailors who weren’t doing you any harm?”
The captain pursed his lips as if he’d bitten into something sour. “You were hardly unarmed. We took quite a few shots from you, and one of our men was hurt.”
“Good.”
“Not good.” He shook his head. “Besides—I suspect your companions may have swimmed to shore. Otherwise we would have found them.”
I remembered the dinghy we had been pulling, and thought a prayer.
“I must have an answer, please. You come from San Diego?”
I shook my head. “Newport Beach.”
“Ah.” He wrote on his paper. “But you were returning from San Diego?”
As long as I lied, it was okay to tell him things. “We were on our way to San Clemente and missed it in the fog.”
“Missed San Clemente? Come now, we are several miles south of that town.”
“I told you, we missed it.”
“But you had been headed north for some time.”
“We knew we had gone too far, and we were headed back. It’s hard to tell where you are in the fog.”
“In that case, why were you at sea?”
“Why do you think?”
“Ah—to avoid our patrols, you mean. Yet we don’t interfere with coastal traffic. What was your business in San Clemente?”
I thought fast, looking down so the captain wouldn’t see me doing it. “Well… we were taking some Japanese down there to hike in and look at the old mission.”
“Japanese don’t land on the mainland,” the captain said sharply.
So I had startled him! “Of course they do,” I said. “You say that because it’s your job to see that they don’t. But they do it all the time, and you know it.”
He stared at me, then conferred with his officers in Japanese. For the first time I took notice of that fact that I was hearing someone talk in a foreign tongue. It was peculiar. It sounded like they were repeating four or five sounds over and over again, too fast to actually be saying anything. But obviously they were, for the officers gestured and nodded agreement, the captain gave orders, all in a rapid gibberish. More than their skin or their eyelids, their meaningless speech brought it to me that I was dealing with men from the other side of the world—men a lot different from me than the San Diegans had been. When the captain turned and spoke to me in English it sounded unreal, as if he were just making sounds he didn’t understand.
Scribbling on the page clipped to the board, he said, “How old are you?”
“I don’t know. My pa can’t remember.”
“Your mother can’t remember?”
“My father.”
This struck him as odd, I could see. “No one else knows?”
“Tom guesses I’m sixteen or seventeen.” Tom…
“How many people were on your boat?”
“Ten.”
“How many people live in your community?”
“Sixty.”
“Sixty people in Newport Beach?” he said, surprised.
“Hundred and sixty, I mean.”
“How many people live in your house or dwelling?”
“Ten.”
His nose wrinkled, and he lowered the board. “Can you describe the Japanese you met in Newport Beach?”
“They looked just like you,” I said truculently.
He pursed his lips. “And they were with you tonight on the boat we sank?”
“That’s right. And they came over here on a ship as big as this one, so why didn’t you stop them? Isn’t that your job?”
He waved a hand impatiently. “Not all landings can be stopped.”
“Especially when you’re paid not to try, eh?”
He pursed his lips again into that bad-taste look.
Shaking more and more, I cried, “You say you’re here to guard the coast, but all you really do is bomb our tracks and kill us when we’re just sailing—when we’re just sailing home—” and all of a sudden I was crying again, bawling and crying. I couldn’t help it. I was cold, and Tom was dead, and my head hurt something fierce, and I couldn’t stand up to this stranger and his questions any longer.
“Your head is still painful?” I was holding my head between my arms. “Here, stretch out on this bench and rest. We need to get you to hospital.” His hands took me by the shoulders, and helped me lie out against the curving metal of the ship’s tall gunwale. The officers lifted my legs up and wrapped them in the blankets, moving the clipboard from where the captain had put it down. I was too dispirited to kick them. The captain’s hands were small and strong; they reminded me of Carmen Eggloff’s hands, strangely enough, and I was about to burst into sobs again, when I noticed the ring on the captain’s left ring finger. It was a big darkened gold ring that held a cut red jewel in the top of it. Letters were carved into the gold around the jewel, curving around the stone so they were hard to read. But the hand wearing the ring stilled for a moment right before my nose, and I could make out the words. Anaheim High School 1976.
I jerked back and bumped my head against the gunwale. “Be peaceful, young sir. Don’t agitate yourself. We’ll talk further of these things in Avalon.”
He was wearing an American ring. A class ring, like those the scavengers wore during the evenings at the swap meets, to show which of the ruins they came from. I quivered in the scratchy blankets as I thought about what that meant. If the captain of the ship assigned to keep foreigners from coming to our coast was himself visiting Orange County—visiting it regularly, and wearing a ring that a scavenger must have given him—then no one was guarding the coast in earnest. It was all a sham, this quarantine—a sham that had gotten Tom killed. Tears pooled in my eyes, and I squeezed them back, furious at the injustice, the corruption of it—furious and confused. It seemed just moments ago I had been dozing, eyes shut, in the San Diegans’ sloop. And now—what had he said?—“We’ll talk further of these things in Avalon.”
I sat up. They were taking me to Catalina to be questioned. Tortured, maybe. Thrown in prison, or made a slave—kept away from Onofre for the rest of my life. The more I thought of it the more frightened I became. Up to that point I hadn’t stopped to think what they were going to do with me—I was confused, and that’s a fact—but now it was obvious I should have; they weren’t going to take me up the Onofre river and drop me off. They were going to take me with them. The idea made my heart thump so hard I thought my ribs would bust. My breathing was so quick and choppy I thought I might faint. Catalina! I would never see home again! Though it was selfish of me, I felt worse about that than I had about Tom’s death.
The captain and his officers stood under the little red light over the door in the back wall. Salt crusts marred the dim red reflections of them in the big windows. The reflection of the captain’s face was looking at me, which meant, I decided, he was watching my reflection. He was keeping an eye on me.
Out on the bow deck a couple of sailors still stood by the searchlight. It looked like they were fixing it. Otherwise, the deck was empty. Fog swept over us, cold and white. The ship vibrated ever so slightly, but we still hadn’t gone anywhere.
They had taken every stitch of clothing off of me, to get me dry. All the better.