“Ah, shit,” I said, yanking some of his long white hair out of the corner of his mouth before he chewed it down. “All our lives you’ve been telling us about America. How great it was. Now we’ve got a chance to fight for it, and you vote against the idea. I don’t get it. It’s contrary to everything you’ve taught us.”
“Is not. America was great in the way that whales are great, see what I mean?”
“No.”
“You’ve gotten remarkably dense lately, you know that? I mean, America was huge, it was a giant. It swam through the seas eating up all the littler countries—drinking them up as it went along. We were eating up the world, boy, and that’s why the world rose up and put an end to us. So I’m not contradicting myself. America was great like a whale—it was giant and majestic, but it stank and was a killer. Lots of fish died to make it so big. Now haven’t I always taught you that?”
“No.”
“The hell I haven’t! What about all those arguments at the swap meet with Doc and Leonard and George?”
“There you’re different, but just to rile Doc and Leonard. Here at home you always make America sound like God’s own country. Besides, right in the here and now there’s no doubt we’re being held down, just like Rafe said. We have to fight them, Tom, you know that.”
He shook his head, and sucked in his cheek on the caved-in side of his mouth, so that from my angle it looked like he only had half a face. “Carmen hit the nail hardest, as usual. Did you listen to her? I didn’t think so. Her point was, murdering those dumb tourists doesn’t do a thing to change the structure of the situation. Catalina will still be Japanese, satellites will still be watching us, we’ll still be inside a quarantine. Even the tourists won’t stop coming. They’ll just be better armed, and more likely to hurt us.”
“If the Japanese are really trying to keep people away, we could kill all the visitors who sneak in.”
“Maybe so, but the structure remains.”
“But it’s a start. Anything as big as this can’t be done all at once, and the start will always look small. Why, if you’d been around during the Revolution, you’d have been against ever starting it. ‘Killing a few redcoats won’t change the structure,’ you’d have said.”
“No I wouldn’t, because it wasn’t the same structure. We aren’t being occupied, we’re being quarantined. If we joined San Diego in this fight the only result would be that we’d be part of San Diego. Doc was right just like Carmen was.”
I thought I had him on the run, and I said, “The same objection could have been made in the Revolution. People from Pennsylvania or wherever could have said, if we join the fight we’ll become part of New York. But since they were part of the same country, they worked together.”
“Boy, it’s a false analogy, like historical analogies always are. Just ’cause I taught you your history don’t mean you understand it. In the Revolution the British had men and guns, and we had men and guns. Now we still have men and guns like in 1776, but the enemy has satellites, intercontinental missiles, ships that could shell us from Hawaii, laser beams and atom bombs and who knows what all. Think about it logically for a bit. A tiger and a titmouse would make a better fight.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I grumbled, feeling the weight of his argument. I wandered through the dismantled hives, the sundials and rain barrels and junk, to regroup. Below us the valley was a patchwork, the fields like gold handkerchiefs dropped on the forest, with gliding patches of sunlight making even larger fields of brilliant green. “I still say that every revolution starts small. If you had voted for the resistance, we could have thought of something. As it is, you’ve put me in a tough spot.”
“How so?” he asked, looking up from the supers.
I realized I’d said too much. “Oh, in talk, you know,” I floundered. Then I hit on something: “Since we aren’t going to help the resistance, I’ll be the only one of the gang who got to go to San Diego. Steve and Gabby and Del don’t like that much.”
“They’ll get there some day,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief to have him off the track. But I felt bad to keep something from him; I saw that I would be lying to him regularly, from then on. His arguments had a sense that couldn’t be denied, even though I was sure his conclusions were wrong. Because I wanted his conclusions to be wrong.
“You got your lesson ready?” he asked. “Other than the history of the United States?”
“Some of it.”
“You’re getting to be as bad as Nicolin.”
“I am not.”
“Let’s hear it then. ‘I know you. Where’s the king?’ ”
I called the page up before my mind’s eye, and against a fuzzy gray mental field appeared the yellow crumbly page, with the rounded black marks that meant so much. I spoke the lines as I saw them.
“Very good!” Tom cried. “That was our night, all right. ‘All-shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity of the world, crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once that make ingrateful man.’ ”
“Wow, you memorized two whole lines,” I said.
“Oh hush. I’ll give you lines from Lear. You listen to this.
“We that are young?” I inquired.
“Hush! O sharper than a serpent’s tooth indeed. The oldest hath borne most, no lie.” He shook his head. “But listen, ungrateful wretch, I gave you those lines to help you to remember our trip back up here in that storm. The way you’ve been carrying on up here since then, it’s like you’ve already forgotten it—”
“No I haven’t.”
“—Or you haven’t been able to believe in it, or fit it into your life. But it happened to you.”
“I know that.”
Those liquid brown eyes looked at me hard. Quietly he said, “You know that it happened. Now you have to go on from there. You have to learn from it, or it might as well not have happened.”
I didn’t follow him, but all of the sudden he was scraping the super resting on his knees. And saying, “I hear they’re reading that book we brought back, down at the Marianis’—how come you’re not down there?”