“We know that,” Doris said, voice as sharp as a nail. “But what we have never heard yet from you is a coherent explanation of why this proposed center of yours should be located on the hill instead of somewhere else in the town, or in some other town entirely.”
Alfredo went through his reasons again. The prestige, the esthetic attraction of it, the increased town shares. On each point Doris assailed him bitterly. “You can’t make us into Irvine or Laguna, Alfredo, if you want that you should move there.”
Alfredo defended himself irritably. The other council members pitched in with their opinions. Doris mentioned Tom, started to tell them what Tom had been working on when he died—dangerous territory, Kevin thought, since they had never heard from Tom’s friends. And since much of the material had been taken from Avending by Doris herself. But Alfredo cut her off before she got to any of that. “It was a great loss to all of us when Tom died. You can’t bring him into this in a partisan way, he was simply one of the town’s most important citizens, and in a way he belonged to all of us. I think it very well might be appropriate to name any center built on Rattlesnake Hill after him.”
Kevin laughed out loud.
Doris cut through it, almost shouting: “When Tom Barnard died he was doing his damndest to stop this thing! To suggest naming the center after him when he opposed it is obscene!”
Alfredo said, “He never told me he opposed it.”
“He never told you anything,” Doris snarled.
Alfredo hit the tabletop, stung at last. “I’m tired of this. You’re getting into the area of slander when you imply that there’s illegal capital behind this venture—”
“Sue me!” Doris shouted. “You can’t afford to sue me, because then your funding would be revealed for sure!” Kevin nudged her with his knee, but as far as he could tell she didn’t even feel it. “Go ahead and sue me!”
Shocked silence. Clearly Alfredo was at a loss for words.
“Properly speaking,” Jerry Geiger said mildly, “this is only a discussion of the zoning change.”
“It’s the zoning makes the rest of it possible!” Doris said. “If you want to go on record against the development, here’s where you act.”
Jerry shrugged. “I’m not sure that’s true.”
Matt Chung decided to follow that tack, and talked about how zoning gave them options. Alfredo and Doris hammered away at each other, both getting really angry. It went on for nearly an hour before Alfredo slammed his hand down and said imperiously, “We’ve been over this before, five or six times in fact. We have the testimony of the town, we know what people want! Time to vote!”
Doris nodded curtly. Showdown.
They voted by hand, one at a time. Doris and Kevin voted against the proposed zoning change. Alfredo and Matt voted for. Hiroko Washington voted against. Susan Mayer voted for. And Jerry voted for.
“Ah, Jerry,” Kevin said under his breath. No rhyme nor reason, same as always. Might as well flip a coin.
So the zoning for Rattlesnake Hill was changed, from 5.4 (open space) to 3.2 (commercial).
Afterwards Kevin and Doris walked home. There it stood, a bubble of light in a dark orange grove, looking like a Chinese lantern. Behind and above it the dark bulk of the hill they had lost. They stopped and looked.
“Thanks for doing the talking tonight,” Kevin said. “I really appreciate it.”
“Damn it,” Doris said. She turned into him, and he hugged her. He leaned his head down and put his face on the part of her straight black hair. Familiar fit, same as it ever was. “Damn it!” she said fiercely, voice muffled by his chest. “I’m sorry. I tried.”
“I know. We all tried.”
“It’s not over yet. We can take it to the courts, or try to get the Nature Conservancy to help us.”
“I know.”
But they had lost a critical battle, Kevin thought. The critical battles. The Flyer’s polls showed solid support for Alfredo. People thought he was doing a good job, dynamic, forward-looking. They wanted the town shares higher. Things were changing, the pendulum swinging, the Greens’ day had passed. To fight business in America… it was asking for trouble, always. Kick the world, break your foot.
They walked into the house, arms around each other.
Kevin couldn’t sleep that night. Finally he got up, dressed, left the house. Climbed the trail up the side of Rattlesnake Hill, moving slowly in the dark. Rustle of small animals, the light of the stars. In the little grove on top he sat, arms wrapped around his knees, thinking.
For a while he dozed. Uneasily he dreamed: he was in bed down in the house when a noise outside roused him, and he got up, went down the hall to the balcony window at the north end of the horseshoe. He looked down into the avocado grove, and there by the light of the moon he saw it again—the shape. It stood upright, on two legs, big and black, a node of darkness. It looked up at him, their gazes met and the moonlight flashed in its eyes, vertical slits of green like a big cat’s eyes. Through the window he could hear the thing’s eerie chuckle-giggle, and the hair on the back of his neck rose, and suddenly he felt as if the world were a vast, dark, windy place, with danger suffusing every part of its texture, every leaf and stone.
He jerked out of it. Too uneasy to wake up fully, he dove back below again, into sleep. Uneasy sleep, more dreams. A crowd on the hill.
When finally he woke to full consciousness, he got up and walked around the hilltop. It was just before dawn.
He found he had a plan. Somewhere in the night… he shivered, frightened by what he didn’t know. But he had a plan. He thought about it until sunrise, and then, stiff and cold, he walked back down to home and bed.
The next morning he went to talk to Hank about his plan. Hank thought it was a good idea, and so did Oscar. So they went to talk to Doris. She laughed out loud. “Give me a couple of days,” she told them. “I can make it by then.”
“I’ll let people know what’s happening,” Hank said. “We’ll do it Sunday.”
So on Sunday morning they held a memorial service for Tom Barnard, up on Rattlesnake Hill. Doris had cast a small plate, ceramic overlaid on a bronzelike alloy, with the overlay making a bas-relief border, and in the corners, animal figures: turtle, coyote, horse, cat. In the middle, a brief message:
Hank conducted a brief ceremony. He was dressed in his Unitarian minister’s shirt, and at first he looked like he was in costume, his face still lined and brick-red with sun, his hair still a tangle. And when he spoke it was in the same Hank voice, nothing inflated or ministerial about it. But he was a minister, in the Unitarian Church (also in the Universal Life Church, and in the World Peace Church, and in the Ba’hais), and as he talked about Tom, and the crowd continued to collect on the crown of the hill—older people who had known Tom all their lives, younger people who had only heard of him or seen him in the canyonlands, members of Hank’s congregation, friends, neighbors, passersby, until there were two or three hundred people up there—all of them listened to what Hank had to say. Because there was a conviction in Hank, an intensity of belief in the importance of what they were doing, that could not be denied. Watching him Kevin lost his sense of Hank as daily partner and friend, the rapid voice tumbling words one over the next picked Kevin up and carried him along with the rest of them, into a shared sense of values, into a community. How Hank could gather them, Kevin thought. Such a presence. People dropping by the work sites to ask Hank about this or that, and he laughing and offering his advice, based on some obscure text or his own thoughts, whatever, there was never any pretense to it; only belief. It was as if he were their real leader, somehow, and the town council nothing at all. How did he do it? A matter of faith. Hank was certain they were all of them spiritual beings, in a spiritual community. And as he acted on that belief, those who had anything to do with him became a part of it, helped make it so.