“Hey!” I cried. While she was under I had wanted to say, look, I can’t help you, I’m with Steve on this one… but looking at her face to face, I didn’t. I couldn’t. The truth was, I couldn’t do anything: no matter what I chose to do, I would be betraying someone.
“Let’s go to my house,” she said. “I’m hungry, and Mom made a berry pie.”
“Okay,” said I, wiping my face off. “You don’t have to ask me twice when it comes to berry pie.”
“I never noticed,” she said, and ducked the scoop of water I sent her way.
We stood. Walked down the riverbank until the trail appeared—first as a trampled-down line in the weeds and shrubs, then as scuffed dirt and displaced rocks, then as trenches through the loam that became little creeks after a rain. New paths appeared beside these as they became too wet or deep or rocky. It reminded me of something Tom had said before we went to San Diego, about how we were all wedges stuck in cracks. But it wasn’t like that, I saw; we weren’t that tightly bound. It was more like being on trails, on a network of trails like the one crossing the bog beside the river here… “Choosing your way is easy when you’re on established trails,” I said, more to myself than to Kathryn.
She cocked her head. “Doing what people have done before, you mean.”
“Yes, exactly. A lot of people have gone that way, and they establish the best route. But out in the woods…”
She nodded. “We’re all in the woods now.” A kingfisher flashed over a snag. “I don’t know why.” Shadows from the trees across the river stretched over the rippled water and striped our bank. In the still of a side pool a trout broke the surface, and ripples grew away in perfect circles from the spot—why couldn’t the heart grow as fast? I wanted to know… I wanted to know what I was doing.
The more I feel the more I see. That evening I saw everything with a crispness that startled me; leaves all had knife edges, colors were as rich as a scavenger’s swap meet outfit… But I only felt fuzzy things, oceans of clouds in my chest, the knot in my stomach. Too mixed to sort out and name. The river at dusk; the long stride of this woman my friend; the prospect of berry pie, making my mouth water; against these, the idea of a free land. Nicolin’s plots. The old man, across the shadowed stream in a bed. I couldn’t find the words to name all that, and I walked beside Kathryn without saying a thing, all the way downriver to her family’s home.
Inside it was warm (Rafael had put pipes underneath their place to convey heat from the bread ovens), lamps were lit, the pies were on the table steaming. The women chattered. I ate my piece of pie and forgot everything else. Purple berries, sweet summer taste. When I left, Kathryn said, “You’ll help?”
“I’ll try.” In the dark she couldn’t see my face. So she didn’t know that on the way home, at the same time I was thinking of arguments to get Steve to abandon his plan, I was also trying to figure out a way to get the landing date out of Add. Maybe I could spy on him every night until I heard him say it…
I kept thinking about it, but no good trick to fool the date from Addison came to me. The next time I fished with Steve, it got to be a problem I couldn’t sidestep.
“They’re down at the station ruins,” Steve said as we rowed out of earshot of the other boats. “I went down there and they were setting up what looked like a permanent camp in the ruins. Jennings was in charge.”
“So they’re here, eh? How many of them?”
“Fifteen or twenty. Jennings asked where you were. And he wanted to know when the Japanese were landing. When and where. I told him we knew where, and would find out when real soon.”
“Why’d you tell him that?” I demanded. “I mean, first of all, the Japanese may not be landing soon at all.”
“But you said you heard those scavengers say they would!”
“I know, but who’s to say they were right?”
“Well, shit,” he said, and tossed his lure into the channel. I stared at the steep back wall of Concrete Bay unhappily. “If you go at it that way, we can never really be sure of anything, can we. But if these scavengers told Add that much, it means Add is in on it, so he’ll know when they’re going to land. I told Jennings what we told him before, that we’d find that out for him.”
“What you told him before,” I corrected.
“You were in on it too,” he said crossly. “Don’t try and pretend you weren’t.”
I slung my lure out the opposite side from Steve’s, and let the line run out. I said, “I was in on it, but that doesn’t mean I’m sure it’s a good idea. Look, Steve, if we get caught helping these folks after the vote went against it, what are people going to say? How are we going to justify it?”
“I don’t care what people say.” A fish took his lure, and he hauled the thing up viciously. “That’s if they do find out. They can’t keep us from doing what we want, especially when we’re fighting for their lives, the cowards.” He gaffed the bonita like it was one of the cowards he had in mind, pulled it into the boat and whacked it on the head. It flopped weakly and gave up the ghost. “What is this, are you backing out on me now? Now that we got the San Diegans up here waiting for us?”
“No. I’m not backing out. I just don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.”
“We are doing the right thing, and you know it. Remember all those things you said at the meeting! You were the best one there—what you said was right, every bit of it. And you know it. Let’s get back to the matter at hand, here. We’ve got to get that date out of Add, and you’re the one who knows the Shankses. You’ve got to go up there and get to Melissa somehow, that’s all there is to it.”
“Umph.” Now it was getting to be very inconvenient that I hadn’t told Steve the whole truth about how much Melissa and Add had fooled me… I felt a bite, but I pulled too hard and the fish didn’t take. “I guess.” I couldn’t admit that I’d lied to make myself look good.
“You’ve got to.”
“All right all right!” I exclaimed. “Let me be, will you? I don’t notice you suggesting any smart schemes for getting him to tell us if he don’t feel like it. Just lay off!”
So we fished in silence, and looked after our lines. Onshore bobbed the green hillsides.
Steve changed the subject. “I hope we try whaling again this winter, I think we could make a go of it if we harpooned a small whale. From more than one boat, maybe.”
“You can leave me out of that one, thanks,” I said shortly.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s got into you, Hanker. Ever since you got back—”
“Nothing’s gotten into me.” Bitterly I added, “I could say the same about you.”
“How come? Because I think we should try whaling again?”
“No, for God’s sake.” The only time we had tried to kill one of the gray whales in their migration down the coast, we had gone out in the fishing boats and harpooned one. It was an excellent throw by Rafael, using a harpoon of his own manufacture. Then we stood in the boats and watched all of the line attached to the diving whale fly out of the boat, until it was gone. Our mistake was tying the end of the line to an eye in the bow; that whale pulled the boat right down from under us. The bow was yanked under the surface and slurp it was gone. We ended up fishing men out of that cold water rather than whale. And the line had torn across Manuel’s forearm, so that he almost bled to death. John had declared that whales were too big for our boats, and as I had been in the boat next to the one that went under, I was inclined to agree with him.