He pedaled down and joined them. The man was the new town attorney, named Oscar. They were deciding which movie star each ballplayer most resembled. Nadezhda said Ramona looked like Ingrid Bergman, Oscar said she looked like Belinda Brav.
“Nah she’s prettier than that,” Tom murmured, and felt a little creak of surprise when they laughed.
“What about me?” Oscar said to Nadezhda.
“Um… maybe Zero Mostel.”
“You must have had quite an interesting career as a diplomat.”
“What about Kevin?” Tom said.
“Norman Rockwell,” Nadezhda decided. “Hay in his mouth.”
“That’s not a movie star.”
“Same thing.”
“A cross between Lyle Sims and Jim Nabors,” Oscar said.
“No crosses allowed,” Nadezhda ruled. “One of the Little Rascals, anyway.”
Kevin came to bat, swung at the first pitch and hit a sharp line drive to the outfield. By the time they got the ball back in he was standing on third, with a grin splitting his face. You could see every tooth he had.
Nadezhda said, “He’s like a little kid.”
“Nine years old forever,” Tom said, and cupped his hands to yell “Nice hit!” Automatic. Instinctual behavior. Couldn’t stop it. So much for changing your memes.
Kevin saw him and laughed, waved. “Little Rascals for sure,” Nadezhda said.
They watched the game. Oscar lay back on the grass, rubbing one pudgy hand over the cut blades, looking up at clouds. The sea-breeze kept them cool. Fran Kratovil biked by, and seeing Tom she stopped, came over with a look of pleased surprise, greeted him, chatted a while before taking off. Old friends….
Kevin came to bat again, lined another sharp hit. “He’s hitting well,” Tom said.
“Hitting a thousand,” Oscar said.
“Wow.”
“Hitting a thousand?”
They explained the system.
“He has a beautiful swing,” she noted.
“Yes,” Tom said. “That’s a buggy whip swing.”
“Buggy whip?”
“Quick wrists,” Oscar said. “Flat swing, high bat speed. It looks like the bat has to bend to catch up with the rest of the swing.”
“But why a buggy whip?”
Silence. Hesitantly, Tom said, “A buggy whip was a flexible pole, with a switch at the end. So it makes sense—a quick bat would look more like that than like a bull whip, which was like a piece of rope. Funny—I don’t suppose anyone has actually seen a buggy whip for years, but they still have that name for the swing.”
The other team came to bat, and got a rally going. “Ducks on the pond!” someone yelled.
“Ducks on the pond?”
“Runners in scoring position,” Oscar explained. “From hunting.”
“Do hunters shoot ducks when they’re still on the water?”
“Hmm,” Tom said.
Oscar said, “Maybe it means that knocking the runners in is easier than shooting ducks in the air.”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “It’s more a question of potential. RBI time, you know.”
“RBI time!” someone in the dugout yelled.
Then Doris came blasting over a grassy rise and coasted down to them, skidding to a halt.
“Hey, hi, Tom.” She was excited. “I went to the town offices and checked through the planner’s files to see if there were any re-zoning proposals in the works, and there are! There’s one for Rattlesnake Hill!”
“Do you remember what the change was?” Oscar asked.
Doris gave him a look. “Five point four to three point two.”
The two men thought about it.
Nadezhda said, “Is that an important change?”
“Five point four is open space,” Oscar replied. He had rolled onto his side, and was lying on the grass with his massive head propped on one hand. “Three point two is commercial. How much are they proposing to change?”
Doris glared at him, incensed at his evident lack of concern. “Three hundred and twenty acres! It’s the whole Water District lot—land I thought we were going to add to Santiago Creek Park. And damned if they aren’t trying to slip it by in a comprehensive zoning package.”
“It’s stupid for Alfredo to try to slip all this stuff by,” Tom said, thinking about it. “There’s no way it’ll work for long.”
Oscar agreed. For the zoning change alone there would certainly have to be an environmental impact statement, and a rubber stamp town vote at the least—perhaps a contested town vote; and much the same would be true of any increase in the amount of water bought from MWD.
“The smart way to do it,” Tom said, “would be to explain what you had in mind for the hill, and once that was generally approved of, get the necessary legislation through for it.”
“It’s almost as if…” Oscar said.
“As if he needs to do it this way.” Tom nodded. “That’s something to look for. If you can find out why he’s trying to do the groundwork first, you might have found something useful.” He gazed mildly at Doris and Oscar. Oscar rolled back onto his back. Doris gave Oscar a disgusted look, and fired away on her mountain bike.
After the game Oscar returned to work, and Nadezhda asked Tom to show her the hill in question. They went by Kevin and Doris’s house, where Nadezhda was staying, then through the back garden to the bottom slope of the hill. An avocado grove extended up it fifty yards or so. “This is it. Crawford Canyon down there to the left, Rattlesnake Hill above.”
“I thought so. It really is right behind their house.”
Working in the grove was Rafael Jones, another old friend. “Hey, Tom! Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine, Rafe.”
“Man, I haven’t seen you in years! What brings you down here?”
Tom pointed a thumb at Nadezhda, and the other two laughed. “Yeah,” Rafael said, “she’s shaking up our house too.” He was part of Kevin and Doris’s household, the senior member and the house farmer; he ran their groves, and the garden. Tom asked him about the avocados and they chatted briefly. Feeling exhausted at the effort, Tom pointed uphill. “We’re off to the top.”
“Okay. Good to see you again, Tom, real good. Come on down and have dinner with us sometime.”
Tom nodded and led Nadezhda up a trail. The irrigated greens gave way abruptly to deer-colored browns. It was May, which in southern California was the equivalent of late summer. Time for golden hills. Hesitantly Tom explained; southern California springtime, when things bloomed, occurred from November through February, corresponding to the rainy season. Summer’s equivalent would be March through May; and the dry brown autumn was June through October. Leaving no good equivalent for winter proper, which was about right.
He really had forgotten how to talk.
Up the trail, wending between scrub oak, black sage, purple sage, matilija poppy, horehound, patches of prickly pear. The sharp smells of the hot shrubs filled the air, dominated by sage. The ground was a loose light-brown dirt, liberally mixed with sandstone pebbles. Tom stopped to search for fossils in the outcrops of sandstone, but didn’t find any. They were there, he told Nadezhda. Shark teeth from giant extinct species, scores of mollusk-like things, and the teeth of a mammal called a desmostylian, which had no close relatives either living or extinct—kind of a cross between a hippo and a walrus. All kinds of fossils up here.
Occasionally they disturbed a pheasant, or a crowd of crows. From time to time they heard the rustling of some small animal getting out of their way. The sun beat on their necks.
First a flat ridge, then up to the hill’s broad top. The wind struck them coolly. They walked to the little grove of black walnut and sycamore and live oak at the hill’s highest point, and sat in the shade of a sycamore, among big brown leaves.