Walking to the river in the raw morning sun it seemed that everything was packed with color, as if static electricity might be something that filled things and made them brighter. The hair on my arms stood away from my skin, and I could feel the roots in my scalp as the wind pulled my hair this way and that. Static electricity… maybe it gathered in humans over the stomach. At the river I stepped in to my knees, ducked my head under, sloshed water down my throat and back up, hoping the electricity might catch to the water and leave with it. It didn’t work.
Wide awake now. Cat’s paws fanned across the river’s surface, one after another, helping it down to sea. Already the air was warm and dry; it felt like it would be burning soon. The sky was a bright pale blue. I drank half a bucket of water, threw rocks at a fallen tree stuck against the other bank. What to do? Gulls wheeled and flapped overhead, complaining at how hard they had to work in this backwards wind. I walked back to my house and ate a loaf of bread with Pa.
“What you doing today?” he asked.
“Checking snares. That’s what old Mendez told me, anyway.”
“That should make a good break from the fishing.”
“Yeah.”
Pa looked at me and wrinkled his nose. “You sure aren’t one for talking much these days.”
I nodded, too distracted to pay much attention to him.
“You don’t want to get so’s people can’t talk to you,” he went on.
“I’m not. I’d better be off, though.”
I went to the river again, thinking to get up to the snares eventually. Sat down on one of the tiny bluffs that overhang the bank. Downriver the women appeared one by one, the Mariani clan and the rest of them, out while the Santa Ana was blowing to bathe and wash clothes and sheets and blankets and towels and anything else they could haul to the water. The air was a bit hotter every minute, and dry so you could feel it in your nostrils. The women got out the soap and stripped down, moved into the shallows at the bend with washboards and baskets of clothes and linens, and went to work, chattering and laughing, diving out into the mainstream to paddle around a bit and get the soap off them. The morning sun gleamed on their wet bodies and slicked-down hair, and I could have stayed longer to watch them, such sleek white creatures they were; like a pod of dolphins, I thought, splashing water at each other, tits swinging together as clothes were scrubbed over washboards, mouths open to laugh and grin at the sky. But they had seen me sitting upriver, and pretty soon if I stayed they would be throwing rocks, and lifting their legs to embarrass me, and calling out jokes like: Do you need some help with that? or Careful it’ll wash away like this here bar of soap… And besides I had other things on my mind anyway, so with a last glance I turned and walked upriver, forgot about the women and began to worry again. (But what would they think of all this?)
See, I could have not told him. I could have said, Steve, I didn’t find anything out and I don’t know how I could, and left it at that. And Friday night would have come and gone and we would never have known the difference. They wouldn’t have, anyway. And everything would have gone on as before. Walking the river path it occurred to me I could do this, and as I hiked from snare to snare I considered it. In some ways it appealed to me.
But I remembered my fight with Add; how I’d knocked him against a tree when he held the knife and I didn’t. And after clearing a rabbit out of a snare and resetting it, I remembered my escape from the Japanese, my swim to shore, my struggle up that ravine. It seemed like great adventure to me now. I remembered climbing up the side of the Shankses’ house to hear the conversation with the scavengers, and my silent bat-runs after Addison through the woods. I had enjoyed that more than anything that had ever happened in Onofre. I’d never felt such power. It seemed to me more than ever that these things were not just happening to me, but that I was doing them, that I was choosing to do certain things and then I was going out and doing them. And now I had the chance to do something better than anything else had been so far, to fight for my lost country. This land I walked over was ours, it was all we had left. They had to stay off it or suffer for it. We weren’t a freak show, a bigger version of those little ones that visited the swap meets sometimes, exhibiting pathetic radiation cripples, both animal and human… We were a country, a living country, living communities on living land, and they had to leave us alone.
So when I returned to the valley through the neck, I dropped off three rabbits and a smelly skunk, and continued downriver to the Nicolins’ house. Steve was out front, shouting furiously at his mother in the doorway. Something about John again, I gathered, something he had said or done to enrage Steve… I winced and waited until Steve was done shouting. As he stalked away toward the cliffs I approached him.
“What’s up?” he said as he saw me.
“I know the date!” I cried. His face lit up. I told him all about it. When I was done I felt a certain chill, and I thought, well, you’ve told him. I had never really decided to; the act itself was the decision.
“That’s great,” he kept saying, “that’s great. Now we’ve got them! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did,” I said, annoyed. “I just found out yesterday.”
He slapped me on the back. “Let’s go tell the San Diegans. We don’t have much time—a day, whoo! They might need to get more men from south or something.”
But now that I had told him, I was more uncertain than before that it was the right thing to do. I shrugged and said, “You go on down and tell them, and I’ll tell Gabby and Del and Mando if I see them.”
“Well”—he cocked his head at me curiously—“sure. If that’s what you want.”
“I’ve done my share,” I said defensively. “We shouldn’t both go down there; it might draw attention to us.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Come by tonight and tell me what they said.”
“I will.”
When he came by that night the wind was blowing harder than ever. The big eucalyptus’s branches creaked against each other, and its leaves clicked and spinnerdrifted down on us. The pines hummed their deepest chord, and tossed up and down across the bright stars.
“Guess who was at their camp?” Steve demanded, all charged up and even bouncing on his feet. “Guess!”
“I don’t know. Lee?”
“No, the Mayor! The Mayor of San Diego.”
“Is that right? What’s he doing up here?”
“He’s here to fight the Japs, of course. He was really happy when I told him we could lead them to a landing. He shook my hand and we drank some whisky and everything.”
“I bet. Did you tell him where it was?”
“Course not! Do you take me for a fool? I said we weren’t getting the final word till tomorrow, and that we’d tell them when we were up there ourselves with them. That way they’ll have to take us, see? In fact—I told them that only you know where they’re landing, and that you wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“Oh, fine. Now why should I do that?”
“Because you’re a suspicious kind of guy, naturally, and you don’t want the Japanese to find out somehow that we know. That’s what I told them.”
That suggested something to me that I hadn’t thought of before, believe it or not: the Japanese could find out we knew from Add. The landing might not take place after all. Another possibility occurred to me: Add could have lied to me about the date. But I didn’t say anything about that. I didn’t want to bring up any problems. All I said was, “They must think we’re crazy.”
“Not at all, why should they? The Mayor was real pleased with us.”
“I bet he was. How many men were with him?”
“Fifteen, maybe twenty.”