At a slow nate we drove through Ross and San Anselmo, fighting the commute traffic. And then, past Fairfax, we left the stores and apartments and got out on that stretch in the first pasture land, the first canyons. All at once there were cows instead of gas stations.
“How does it look to you?” Charley asked my brother.
Jack said, “It’s deserted.”
With bitterness, I said, “Well, who’d want to live out here with the cows.”
“A cow has four stomachs,” Jack said.
White’s Hill impressed him, with its terribly steep and winding grade, and then, on the far side, the San Geronimo Valley made the three of us feel pleased. Charley got the Buick up to eighty-five on the straightaway, and the warm mid-day wind, the fresh-smelling country wind, blew in around us and cleaned the can of the smell of moldy paper and old laundry. The fields on both sides of us had turned brown from the sun and lack of water, but around the clusters of live oak trees, mixed in with the granite boulders, we saw grass and wild flowers.
We would have liked to have lived down here, closer to San Francisco, but land cost too much and the traffic, in summer, had a depressing element to it, the resort people heading for Lagunitas and the cabins there and the campers on their way to Samuel Taylor Park. Now we passed through Lagunitas with its one general stone, and then the road curved, suddenly as always, forcing Charley to slow so radically that the nose of the Buick sank down and all four tires squealed. The warm dry sunlight disappeared and we were down deep in the redwoods, sniffing the stream, the wet needles, the cold, dark places where ferns grew in July.
Rousing himself, Jack said, “Hey, didn’t we go picnicking here once?” He craned his neck at the sight of the tables and barbecue pits.
“No,” I said. “That was Muir Woods. You were nine.”
After we had reached the hills overlooking Olema and Tomales Bay, Jack began to recognize that he had passed entirely out of the town area and had entered the country. He noticed the shabby, peeling old wooden windmills, the boarded-up abandoned buildings, the chickens scratching in driveways, and that indubitable sign of the country: the butane tanks mounted one behind each house. There, too, was the sign to the right of the road just before reaching the Inverness Wye: so-and-so well driller.
As we drove by Paper Mill Creek he saw the fishermen down in the water and he saw, for the first time in his life, a flashing white egret out on the marshes, fishing.
“You see blue heron up here,” I said. “And once we saw a flock of wild swan. Eighteen of them, on an inlet near Drake’s Esteno.”
After we had passed thnough Drake’s Landing and had started up the narrow blacktop road, Saw Mill Road, to our place, Jack said, “It’s sure quiet up here.”
“Yes,” Charley said. “At night you’ll hear the cows bellowing.”
“They sound like dinosaurs stuck in the swamp,” I said.
Perched on the telephone wires, at the last bend of the road, was a falcon. I told Jack how that particular falcon spent his time standing on the wire, year in year out, catching frogs and grasshoppers. Sometimes he looked sleek, but other times his feathers had a molting, disreputable look. And not far from us the Hallinans lost goldfish from their outdoor pond to a kingfisher who stationed himself in the cypress tree nearby.
Not so many years ago elk and bear had roamed around the hills overlooking Tomales Bay, and the winter before, Charley claimed to have spotted a huge black leg at the edge of his headlights; something had gone off into the woods, and if it wasn’t a bean it was a man in a bean suit. But I did not discuss this with Jack. There was no point in providing him with the local myths, because he would soon enough concoct myths of his own; and it would not be beans or elk that meandered down into the vegetable garden after dark and ate the rhubarb—it would be Martians whose flying saucers had landed in the Inverness canyons. Now it occurred to me to remember the feverish flying saucer activity at Inverness Park; a rabid group already existed, that would no doubt draw Jack into their midst and give him the benefit of their twice-weekly explorations into hypnosis, reincarnation, Zen Buddhism, ESP, and of course UFOs.
5
The boy and girl, in rust-colored turtle necked wool sweaters and jeans, rested their bikes against the pharmacy building and leaned against each other. The girl lifted a finger and brushed a speck from the boy’s eye. She and the boy conferred at their leisure. Her face, in profile, with its ringlets of chestnut hair, was like the profile on an earlier coin, possibly a coin from the ‘twenties or the turn of the century… .an archaic profile, the face of allegory: mild, introspective, impersonal, gentle. The boy’s hair had been cut to the shape of his head, a black cup. Both he and the girl were slender. He stood slightly taller.
Beside him, Fay watched through the windshield of the car as the boy and girl moved away together. “I have to know them,” she said. “I think I’ll get out and go ask them to come up to the house and have a martini.” She started to open the car door. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she said. “Like something out of Nietzsche.” Her face had become remorseless; she would not let them get away, and he saw her keeping her eyes on them, not losing sight of them. She had them in view; she had located them. “You stay here,” she said, stepping onto the ground and starting to close the car door after her; her purse, from its leather strap, swung against the car. As she started off her prescription-ground sunglasses fell from her arms, to the gravel parking lot. With haste she snatched them back up, hardly noticing if the lenses remained intact. So concerned was she with making contact with the boy and girl that she began to lope. And yet she retained her grace, the poise of her lean legs. She ran after them with consciousness of herself; she kept in mind what impression her appearance would make on them and on the other people who might be watching.
Leaning out of the car, he called after her, “wait.”
Fay paused questioningly, with impatience.
“Come back,” he said, in a false tone of voice, making it sound as if she were going in to shop and he had remembered some item.
Her head shook, gesturing no.
“Come on,” he repeated, this time stepping out.
Without moving toward him or any farther away she waited as he approached her. “God damn you, you motherfucker,” she said, as he got up to her. “They’re going to get on their god damn bikes and peddle away.”
“Let them,” he said. “We don’t know them.” Her determined interest in them, the extent of the fascination that showed on her face, had made him suspicious. “What do you care about them?” he demanded. “They’re just kids—no more than eighteen at the most. Probably up for a swim in the bay.”
“I wonder if they’re brother and sister,” Fay said. “On if they’re married and on their honeymoon. They can’t live around here. They must be just visiting. I wonder who would know them. Did you see which way they came from? From which end of town?” She watched the boy and girl peddle off up the hill of highway One. “Maybe they’re on a bicycle tour of the United States,” she said, shading her eyes to see.
Having lost them, she got back into the car with him. As they drove home she conjectured.
“I can ask Pete the Postmaster,” she said. “He’d know them if anybody does. Or Florence Rhodes.”
“God damn you,” he said, “what do you want to meet them for? You intend to screw them? Which? Both?”
“They’re so pretty,” Fay said. “They’re like something that dropped out of the sky; I have to know them or perish.” She spoke in a flat, harsh voice, with no sentimentality. “The next time I see them I’m going up to them and tell them point blank that I can’t stand not to know two such fascinating people, and who the hell are they and why.”