As they ate Kevin brooded over Tom’s departure. Mexico, Central America, across the Pacific to Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Working the winds and currents as so many ships had before. Well, it sounded great. Good for Tom. But with Jill in Asia, his parents in space…
Hank would still be there. Gabby. The team. Yoshi, Cindy, Donna, the kids, the rest of the household. Doris would still be there. Doris.
Two days later Kevin was the only one who went down to Newport with Tom and Nadezhda to see them off. Everyone else was too busy, and said their good-byes that morning at the house, or over the phone. “Seem’s like half the town is overseas,” Jerry Geiger complained. “Don’t stay away long.”
They took a car to Balboa, and Kevin helped them get their baggage aboard. The ship seemed huge. Overhead the dense network of rigging looked like a cat’s cradle in the sky. Gulls flashed across the sun in screeching clouds, mistaking them for a fishing trip. The pavilion behind the dock was crowded.
Eventually Ganesh was ready. Kevin hugged Nadezhda and Tom, and they said things, but in the confusion of shouts and horns he didn’t really hear. Then he was on the dock with the other well-wishers, waving. Above him Tom and Nadezhda waved back. Ganesh swung away from the dock, then three topsails unfurled simultaneously, on the foremast, the second mast, and the mizzenmast. Slowly, as if drifting, the ship moved downchannel.
Feeling dissatisfied with this departure, Kevin jogged down the peninsula to the harbor entrance. He walked over the boulders of the Wedge’s jetty, looking back to see if the ship had appeared.
Then it was there, among the palms at the channel turn. The wind was from the north, so they could sail out on a single reach. With only the topsails set its movement was slow and majestic. Kevin had time to get to the end of the jetty and sit on the flat rocks. He couldn’t help recalling the last time he had been out there, with Ramona, watching the ships race in. Don’t think of it. Don’t think.
The topsails were set nearly fore-and-aft, emphasizing the elegant transfer of force that propelled the ship across the wind. Always beautiful to see a square-rigged ship set so. People on both jetties stood watching it pass.
Then it was even with him, and Kevin could make out figures on the deck. Suddenly he spotted Tom and Nadezhda, standing by the bowsprit. He stood and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Tom! TOM!” He wasn’t sure they would be able to hear him; the ocean’s ground bass ate all other sound. But Nadezhda spotted him and pointed. All three of them waved.
Ganesh swung to the south, the yards shifting in time with the movement, so that the topsails were square to what was now a following wind. And then all the sails on the ship unfurled at once, mainsails, topgallants, skysails, moonsails, stunsails, royals, jibs. It was as if some strange creature had just spread immense wings. Immediately it leaped forward in the water, crashing across the incoming swells and shooting broad fans of spray out to starboard. Kevin waved. The ship drew away from him and grew smaller, the centerpoint of a wide V of startling white wake. Maybe that was Tom and Nadezhda in the stern, waving. Maybe not. He waved back until he couldn’t see the figures any more.
Back in El Modena Kevin went to work campaigning against the Rattlesnake Hill development, just as Tom had suggested. He and Doris went down to the town’s TV studio and made a spot to put on the town affairs show, going over their arguments one by one. They walked around an alternative model of the hill with the development on it, one that showed the roads necessary, and had the landscaping changed so the extent of the buildings was more visible. Oscar directed the spot, and added points to their argument, including a long section he had written himself on the water requirements of the new structure. Doris pointed at graphs of the costs involved and the expected returns, the possible population increase, the rise in the cost of housing in the town when people poured in. “We set the town’s general policy over a long period of years, and it’s been a consensus agreement about El Modena’s character, its basic nature. If we approved this construction all that would change.” Every graph made a different point, and Doris walked from each to each, leading the watchers through to her inescapable conclusion. Then Kevin showed videos he had made on the hill, at dawn, in a rain shower, looking down at the plain on the clear day, in the grove on the top, down among the sage and cacti, with the lizards and ants. Bird song at dawn accompanied these images, along with Kevin’s laconic commentary, and an occasional cut shot of South Coast Plaza or other malls, with their crowds and concrete and the bright waxy greenery that looked plastic whether it was real or not.
It was a good spot, and the response to it was positive. Alfredo and Matt did a rebuttal show which concentrated on their economic arguments, but still it seemed to Kevin that they had won the first TV round, surely one of the crucial ones. Tom saw a tape on Ganesh, and in one of their frequent phone conversations nodded happily. “That will get you votes.”
Then, at Tom’s urging, Kevin went out door to door, stopping at all the big houses and talking to whoever was there for as long as their patience allowed. Four nights a week he made himself go out and do this, for two hours at a time. It was wearing work. When he got tired of it he thought of the hill at dawn, or of the expression on Alfredo’s face that night on the bikes. Some people were friendly and expressed a lot of support for what he was doing; occasionally they even joined him for the rounds in their neighborhood. Then again other households couldn’t be bothered. People told him right to his face that they thought he was being selfish, protecting his backyard while the town shares languished. Once someone accused him of going renegade against the Green party line. He denied it vehemently, but it left him thinking. Here was where the party organization could help—there should be lots of people out doing these visits, or making calls. He decided to go up and see Jean about it.
“Ah good,” Jean said, looking up from the phone. “I’d been meaning to get you up here.”
Kevin settled into the seat across from her.
She cut off the speaker on the phone: “Let me get back to you, Hyung, I’ve got someone here I need to talk to.” She tapped the console and swung her chair around to face him.
“Listen, Kevin, I think it’s time to slack off on this idea of Alfredo’s. It’s medical technology he wants to bring into town, not a weapons factory. It makes us look bad to oppose it.”
“I don’t care what it is,” Kevin said, surprised. “The hill is wilderness and was slated to be made part of Saddleback Park, you know that.”
“Right now it’s zoned open space. Nothing ever happened with that park proposal.”
“That’s not my fault,” Kevin said. “I wasn’t on the council then.”
“And I was, is that what you’re saying?”
Kevin remained silent.
Jean swiveled in her chair, stood, walked to her window. “I think you should stop campaigning against this development, Kevin. You and Doris both.”
“Why?” Kevin said, stunned.
“Because it’s divisive. When you take an extreme position against a development like that, then it makes the whole Green party look like extremists, and we can’t act on real issues.”
“This is a real issue,” he said sharply. She eyed him from the window. “I thought this was what the Green party was about—slowing growth, fighting for the land and for the way of life we’ve got here. It’s the Green party that made this town the way it is!”
“Exactly.” She looked out the window at the town. “But times are changing, Kevin, and having established the town’s style, we have to see what we can do to maintain it. That means taking a central position in affairs—if we do that, all subsequent decisions will be made by us, see? You can’t do that when you’re at one extreme of community opinion.”