“Sounds like you had a time,” Pa said.
“Yes,” Tom said. He jammed a last chunk of bread in his mouth, nodded, swallowed. “That was something.”
PART THREE
The World
11
After Tom went home I slept like a dead man for the rest of the day and all that night. When I woke up the next morning I was annoyed to see that the storm was over. The sun streamed in the door like it had never left. Why, if we had held on one more day in our shelter, we could have waltzed home easy as you please! Pa heard me moan and he stopped sewing. “Want me to get the water this morning?”
“No, I’ll do it. I’m sore is all.” Actually my arms were blocks of wood, and my legs scissors, and I was unhappy to discover a host of scratches and scrapes and bruises that hurt practically every time I breathed. But I had an urge to get out and look around.
When I got outside and started down the path (buckets jerking my poor arms every step) the sunlight stung my eyes. There were still some clouds but mostly it was sunny, everything steaming. The Costas’ drum house looked like it was on fire it was steaming so. I creaked down the path staring and staring.
Have I described the valley yet? It is in the shape of a cupped hand, and filled with trees. Down in the crease of the palm is the river winding to the sea, and the fields of corn and barley and potatoes. The heel of the hand is Basilone Hill, and up there is the Costas’ place, and Addison’s tower, and Rafael’s rambling house and workshop. Across from that, the spiny forested fingers of Tom’s ridge. All of the oldest houses were eccentric, I noticed; I had never thought of it that way before, but it was so. Rafael kept adding rooms to store machinery and things, and they followed the contour of the hillside, so that in time, if you were to try and draw a plan of it, it would look like an X written on top of a W. Doc Costa had made his house of oil drums, as I’ve said, to hold in the heat in the winter and the cool in the summer. Probably he hadn’t counted on the house whistling like a banshee in the least little breeze; he said it didn’t bother him any, but I thought it might be the reason Mando scared so easily. The Nicolins had their big old time house on the beach cliff, and the Eggloffs had their home burrowed back into the hillside where thumb and finger would meet, if you were still thinking of the valley as a cupped hand; they lived like weasels in there, and by the graveyard too, but they claimed to have Doc all beat as far as warmth in the winter and cool in the summer were concerned. And then there was Tom, up on his ridge where he was bound to get frozen by storms and baked by the sun, but did he care? Not him—he wanted to see. So did Addison Shanks, apparently, set up on Basilone Hill in a house built around an old electric tower; but maybe he was there because it was nice and close to San Clemente, where he could conduct his dealings with no one the wiser. The newer houses, now, were all down in the valley next to the fields, convenient to the river, and everybody had helped build them, so that they looked pretty much the same: square boxes, steel struts at the corners, old wood for walls, wood or sheet metal, maybe tiles, for a roof. The same design twice as long and you had the bathhouse.
When I got to the river I sat gingerly. It all looked so familiar and yet so strange. Before my trip south Onofre was just home, a natural place, and the houses, the bridge and the paths, the fields and the latrines, they were all just as much a part of it as the cliffs and the river and the trees. But now I saw it all in a new way. The path. A broad swath of dusty dirt cutting through the weeds, curving here to get around the corner of the Simpsons’ garden, narrowing there where rocks cramped it on both sides… It went where it did because there had been agreement, when folks first moved to the valley, that this was the best way to the river from the meadows to the south. People’s thinking made that path. I looked at the bridge—rough planks on steel struts, spanning the gap between the stone bases on each bank. People I knew had thought that bridge, and built it. And the same was true of every structure in the valley. I tried to look at the bridge in the old way, as part of things as they were, but it didn’t work. When you’ve changed you can’t go back. Nothing looks the same ever again.
Walking back from the river, arms aching with the weight of the full buckets, I was grabbed roughly from behind.
“Ow!”
“You’re back!” It was Nicolin, teeth bared in a grin. “Where you been hiding?”
“I just got back last night,” I protested.
He took one of my buckets. “Well, tell me about it.”
We walked up the path. “Man, you’re all dinged up!” Steve said. “You’re hobbling!” I nodded and told him about the train ride south, and the Mayor’s dinner. Nicolin squinted as he imagined the Mayor’s island house, but I thought, he’s not getting it right. There was nothing I could do about it by talking, either. When I told him about the trip home, my swim and all, he put his bucket down in Pa’s garden and took me by the shoulders to shake me, laughing at the clouds. “Jumped overboard! And in a storm! Good work, Henry. Good work.”
“Hard work,” I said, rubbing my arm as he danced around the bucket. But I was pleased.
He stopped dancing and pursed his lips. “So these Japanese are landing in Orange County?”
I nodded.
“And the Mayor of San Diego wants us to help put a stop to it?”
“Right again. But Tom doesn’t seem real fond of the idea.”
There were snails on the cabbage, and I stooped to kill them off. Down close I could see the damage pests had done to every head. Miserable cabbage it was, and I sighed, thinking of the salads at the Mayor’s dinner.
“I knew those scavengers were up to no good,” Nicolin said. “But helping the Japanese, that’s despicable. We’ll make them pay for it. And we’ll be the American resistance!” He swung a fist at the sky.
“Part of it, anyway.”
The idea took him into regions of his own, and he wandered the garden insensible to me. I yanked some weeds and inspected the rest of the cabbages. Gave it up as a bad job.
The next morning Steve dropped by to walk with me down to the rivermouth. The men there stopped launching the boats long enough to greet me and ask some questions. When John walked by we all shut up and looked busy until he passed. Eventually we got the boats off, and getting them outside the swell took all our attention. The men were impressed that I’d managed to swim in through such a swell at night, and to tell the truth so was I. In fact I was scared all over again. Far to the south the long curving lines of the swell swept toward the land, crashed over, tumbled whitely to shore. For a display of raw power there was nothing to match it. I was lucky to be alive, damned lucky!
Rafael wanted to hear everything about the Japanese, so all the time we were getting the nets out I talked, and he questioned me, and I had a good time. John rowed by and ordered Steve to get out and do the rod fishing—told me to stay with the nets. Steve got in the dinghy and rowed off south, with a resentful glance over his shoulder at us.
And then it was fishing again. The boats tossed hard in the swell, the spray gleamed in the sun, the green hills bounced. We cast the nets (my arms complaining with every pull or throw), and rowed them into circles and drew them up again heavy with fish. I rowed, pulled on nets, whacked fish, caught my balance on the gunwale, talked, kneaded my arms, and, looking up once at the familiar sight of the valley from the sea, I figured my adventure had ended. Despite all I was sorry about that.