“Well, Tom takes his ten thousand and lets it go at that. He’s got a garden and some chickens, and he does some trapping and beekeeping and I don’t know what all. He really does keep to himself these days. Didn’t used to be that way.”
“I wonder what happened.”
“Well, he retired. And then my grandma died, about ten years ago.”
“Ten years.”
A switchback, and Kevin looked down at her. Next to Doris she seemed slight as a bird, graceful, cool, fit. No wonder Doris admired her. Ex-head of the Soviet State Planning Commission, currently lecturer in history on a school freighter, which was up in Seattle—
“He can get ten thousand dollars a year without working?”
“At his age he can. You know about the income magnitude thing?”
“A legal floor and ceiling on personal income, yes?”
“Yeah. Tom takes the floor.”
She laughed. “We have a similar system. Your grandfather was a big advocate of those laws when they were introduced. He must have had a plan.”
“No doubt. In fact he told me that once, when I was a kid.”
Hiking with Grandpa, up the back canyons. Up Harding Canyon to the little waterfall, bushwhacking up crazy steep slopes to the ridge of Saddleback, up the dirt road to the double summit. Birds, lizards, dusty plants, endless streams of talk. Stories. Sandstone. The overwhelming smell of sage.
They topped a rise, and saw Tom’s house. It was a small weather-beaten cabin, perched on the ridge that boxed the little canyon they had ascended. A big front window looked down at them, reflecting clouds like a monocle. Walls of cracked shingle were faded to the color of sand. Weeds grew waist high in an abandoned garden, and sticking out of the weeds were broken beehive flats, rain barrels, mountain bikes rusted or disassembled, a couple of grandfather clocks broken open to the sky.
Kevin thought of homes as windows to the soul, and so Tom’s place left him baffled. The way it fit the ridge, disappeared into the sandstone and sage, was nice. A good sign. But the disarray, the lack of care, the piles of refuse. It looked like the area around an animal’s hole in the ground.
Nadezhda merely looked at the place, black eyes bright. They walked through a weedy garden to the front door, and Kevin knocked. No answer. They stepped around back to the kitchen door, which was open. Looked in; no one there.
“Well, we might as well sit and wait a while,” Kevin said. “I’ll try calling him.” He went to the other side of the ridge, put both hands to his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle.
There was a tall black walnut up the ridge, with a bench made of logs underneath it; Doris and Nadezhda sat there. Kevin wandered the yard, checking the little set of solar panels in back, the connections to the satellite dish. All in order. He pulled some weeds away from the overrun tomatoes and zucchini. Long black and orange bugs flew noisily away; other than that there was a complete, somehow audible silence. Ah: bees in the distance, defining the silence they buzzed in.
“Hey.”
“Jesus, Grandpa!”
“What’s happening, boy.”
“You frightened me!”
“Apparently so.”
He had come up the same trail they had. Bent over, humping some small iron traps and four dead rabbits. He’d been only feet from Kevin’s back when he announced his presence, and not a sound of approach.
“Up here to weed?”
“Well, no. I brought Doris and a friend. We wanted to talk with you.”
Tom just stared at him, bright-eyed. Stepped past and ducked into his cabin. Clatter of traps on the floor. When he re-emerged Doris and Nadezhda had come over from the bench and were standing beside Kevin. Tom stopped and stared at them. He was wearing pants worn to the color of the hillsides, and a blue T-shirt torn enough to reveal a bony white-haired chest. The hair edging his bald pate was a tangle, and his uncut beard was gray and white and brown and auburn, stained around his mouth. A dust-colored old man. He always looked like this, Kevin was used to it; it was, he had thought, a part of aging. But now Nadezhda stood before them neat as a bird after a bath, her silvery hair cut so that even when windblown it fell perfectly into place. One of her enamel earrings flashed turquoise and cream in the sun.
“Well?”
“Grandpa, this is a friend of Doris’s—”
But Nadezhda stepped past him and extended a hand. “Nadezhda Katayev,” she said. “We met a long time ago, at the Singapore Conference.”
For an instant Tom’s eyebrows shot up. Then he took her hand, dropped it. “You look much the same.”
“And you too.”
He smiled briefly, slipped past them with a neat, skittish movement. “Water,” he said over his shoulder, and took off down a trail into a copse of live oak. His three guests looked at each other. Kevin shrugged, led the women down the trail. There in the shade Tom was attaching a pump handle to a skinny black pump, then pumping, slowly and steadily, his back to them. After quite a while water spurted from the pump into a tin trough, and through an open spigot into a five-gallon bucket. Kevin adjusted the bucket under the spigot, and then the three of them stood there and watched Tom pump. It was as if he were mute. Feeling uncomfortable, Kevin said, “We came up to talk to you about a problem we’re having. You know I’m on the town council now?”
Tom nodded.
Kevin described what had happened so far, then said, “We don’t really know for sure, but if Alfredo is interested in Rattlesnake Hill, it would be a disaster—there just aren’t that many empty hills left.”
Tom squinted, looked around briefly.
“I mean in El Modena, Tom! Overlooking the plain! You know what I mean. Shit, you planted the trees on top of Rattlesnake Hill, didn’t you?”
“I helped.”
“So don’t you care what happens to it?”
“It’s your backyard now.”
“Yeah, but—”
“And you’re on the council?”
“Yeah.”
“Stop him, then. You know what to do, you don’t need me.”
“We do too! Man, when I talk to Alfredo I end up saying black is white!”
Tom shrugged, moved the full bucket from under the spigot and replaced it with an empty one. Stymied, Kevin moved the full bucket onto flat ground and sat beside it.
“You don’t want to help?”
“I’m done with that stuff, Kevin. It’s your job now.” He said this with a friendly, birdlike glance.
Second bucket filled, Tom pulled out the pump handle and put it in a slot on the pump’s side. He lifted the two buckets and started back toward the cabin.
“Here, let me take one of those.”
“That’s okay, thanks. I need the two for balance.”
Following Tom up the trail to his cabin, Kevin looked at the old man’s bowed back and shook his head, exasperated. This just was not the Grandpa he had grown up with. In those years there had been no more social animal than Tom Barnard; he was always talking, he organized camping trips for groups from town constantly, and he had taken his grandson up into the canyons and over the Santa Ana Mountains, and the San Jacintos, and back into Anza Borrego and Joshua Tree, and over to Catalina and down into Baja and up into the southern Sierras—and talking the whole way, for hours at a time every day, about everything you could possibly imagine! Much of Kevin’s education—the parts he really remembered—had come from Tom on their hikes together, from asking questions and listening to Tom ramble. “I hated capitalism because it was a lie!” Tom would say, fording Harding Canyon stream with abandon. “It said that everyone exercising their self-interest would make a decent community! Such a lie!” Splash, splash! “It was government as protection agency, a belief system for the rich. Why, even when it seemed to work, where did it leave them? Holed up in mansions and crazy as loons.”