“Aye, I’ll be quiet,” he said softly, the strain gone from his voice. “Wouldn’t want Doc mad at me.”
“No you wouldn’t,” I said seriously. I was still scared; my heart still pumped hard. “Besides, you’ve got to save what energy you’ve got.”
He shook his head. “I’m tired.” The wind howled like it wanted to pick us up and knock us down. The old man eyed me. “You won’t go up there, will you? You promised.”
“Ah, Tom,” I said. “Some time I may have to, you know that.”
He slumped down onto the pillow, stared at the ceiling. After a time he spoke, very calmly. “When you learn things important enough that you feel like teaching them, it always seems possible. Everything’s so clear given what you’ve gone through—the images are there, even sometimes the words to convey them with. But it doesn’t work. You can’t teach what the world has taught you. All the tricks of rhetoric, the force of personality, the false authority of being teacher, or pretending to be immensely old… none of that’s enough to bridge the gap. And nothing else would be either.
“So I’ve failed. What I did end up teaching you was no doubt exactly backwards to my purpose. But there’s no help for it. I was trying to do the impossible, and so I got… confused.”
He slid down the pillow until he was flat on his back. Snuggled under the sheet, so that it looked like he would fall asleep right then, for his eyes were closed and he was breathing deep, in the way of an exhausted man. But then one brown eye opened and stared at me, pierced me. “You’ll be taught by something strong as this wind, boy, picking you up and blowing you into the sea.”
PART FOUR
Orange County
19
Outside it was dark, and the wind howled. I stood at the log bench in the garden and watched wind tear at the potato tops, felt it tear at me. To the west Cuchillo poked into the last blue before night’s black. It all looked different, as if I had walked out of the drum house into another time. Wind tore my breath from me, shoved it back in. I tried to collect myself.
“Ready?” Steve said sharply, and I jumped. He and Mando and Gabby were behind me. Impossible in the wind to hear anybody come up on you.
“Very funny,” I said.
“Let’s go.”
Mando said, “I have to make sure Pa’s awake to look after Tom.”
“Tom’s up,” I said. “He can call your pa if he wants him. If you wake him up, what will you tell him you’re going to do?”
In the dark Mando’s blurred, uneasy face.
“Let’s go,” Steve insisted. “If you want to come along, that is.”
Without a word Mando took off down the trail, back into the valley. We followed him. In the woods the wind became no more than a gust here and there. Trees creaked, moaned, hummed. Over Basilone we hiked, steering clear of the Shankses’ house. Through overgrown foundations to the freeway, where we picked up the pace. Quickly enough we were in San Mateo Valley, and past the spot where I had confronted Add. Steve stopped, and we waited for him to decide what to do.
He said, “We’re supposed to meet them where the freeway crosses the river.”
“We’d best keep going, then,” Gabby said. “It’s ahead a bit.”
“I know, but… seems to me we shouldn’t walk right down there. That doesn’t seem like the right way to do it.”
“Let’s get down there,” I put in. “They might be waiting, and we’ve got a long way to go.”
“Okay…”
We walked close together so we could hear each other in the wind. A ball of tumbleweed bounced across the freeway and Mando shied. Steve and Gabby laughed. Mando pressed on ahead. We followed him to the San Mateo River. Nobody was there.
“They’ll see us and let us know where they are,” I guessed. “They need us, and they know we’ll be on the freeway. They can hide.”
“That’s true,” said Steve. “Maybe we should cross—”
A bright light flashed on us from below the freeway’s shoulder, and a voice from the trees said “Don’t move!”
We squinted into the glare. It reminded me of the Japanese surprising us in the fog at sea, and my heart hammered like it wanted to bound off by itself.
“It’s us!” Steve called. Gabby snickered disgustedly. “From Onofre.”
The light went out, leaving me blind. Under the sound of the wind, some rustling.
“Good.” A shape loomed on the sea side of the freeway. “Get on down here.”
We felt our way down the slope, bumping together in a clump. There were a lot of men around us. When we got to the bottom of the slope we stood in bushes that came to our waists. A dozen or more men surrounded us. One of them bent over and opened the shade on a gas lantern; most of its light was caught in the lower branches of the brush, but standing in one dim beam in front of the lantern was Timothy Danforth, Mayor of San Diego. His trousers were muddy.
“Four of you, are there?” he said in his loud bray. His voice brought back every detail of my night at his house on the freeway island, and it was Nicolin who answered, “Yes, sir.”
More men joined us, dark shapes coming up through the brush from the river. “That’s all of you?” the Mayor said.
“Yes, sir,” Steve said.
“That’s all right. Jennings, get these men guns.”
One of the men, looking like Jennings now that he had been named, crouched over a large canvas bag on the ground.
“Is Lee here?” I asked.
“Lee doesn’t like this sort of thing,” Danforth said. “He’s no good at it, either. Why do you want to know?”
“He’s someone I know.”
“You know me, right? And Jennings here?”
“Sure. I was just wondering, that’s all.”
Jennings gave a pistol to each of us. Mine was big, and heavy. I crouched and looked at it in the lantern’s light, holding it in both hands. Black metal business end, black plastic handle. It was the first time I had held a gun outside a swap meet. Jennings handed me a leather pouch filled with bullets, and kneeled beside me. “Here’s the safety catch; you have to push it to here before it will shoot. Here’s how you reload.” He spun the cylinder to show me where the bullets fit in. The others were getting instructions around me. I straightened and blinked to help my night sight return, hefting the pistol in my hand. “You got a pocket it’ll fit in?”
“I don’t think so. Well—”
“All right, men!” If it weren’t for the wind, the Mayor’s voice would be heard all the way back in Onofre, it seemed. He limped over to me, and I had to look up at him. His hair danced over his shadowed face. “Tell us where they’re landing, and we’ll be off.”
Steve said, “We can’t tell you till we’re up there.”
“None of that!” said the Mayor. Steve looked at me. The Mayor went on: “We’ve got to know how far away they’re landing, so we can decide whether or not to take the boats.” So, I thought, they had boated up the coast to get past Onofre. “You men have got guns, and you’re part of the raid. I understand your caution, but we’re all on the same side here. I give you my word. So let’s have it.”
The circle of men stood around us silently.
“They’re landing at Dana Point,” I said.
There it was. If they wanted to leave us now, there was nothing we could do about it. We stood watching the Mayor. No one spoke, and I could feel Nicolin’s accusing gaze, but I kept staring into the underlit face of the Mayor, who looked back at me without expression.
“Do you know what time they’re landing?”
“Midnight, I heard.”
“And who’d you hear from?”
“Scavengers who don’t like the Japanese.”