The Bear Flag was taken over by Dora’s next of kin, an older sister who came down from San Francisco, where for some years she had been running a Midnight Mission on Howard Street, running it at a profit. She had been a silent partner all along and had dictated its unique practices and policies. For instance, Dora had wanted to name her place the Lone Star, because once in her youth she had spent a wonderful weekend in Fort Worth. But her sister insisted that it be called the Bear Flag,[13] in honor of California. She said if you were hustling a state you should do honor to that state. She didn’t find her new profession very different from her old, and she thought of both as a public service. She read horoscopes and continued, after hours at least, to transform the Bear Flag into a kind of finishing school for girls. She was named Flora, but one time in the Mission a gentleman bum finished his soup and said, “Flora, you seem more a fauna-type to me.”
“Say, I like that,” she said. “Mind if I keep it?” And she did. She was Fauna ever afterward.
Now all this was sad enough, but there was a greater sadness that Mack kept putting off. He didn’t want to get to it. And so he told Doc about Henri the painter.
Mack kind of blamed himself for Henri. Henri had built a boat, a perfect little boat with a nice stateroom. But he’d built it up in the woods, because he was afraid of the ocean. His boat sat on concrete blocks and Henri was happy there. One time, when there wasn’t much else to do, Mack and the boys played a trick on him. They were bored. They went down to the sea rocks and chiseled off a sack of barnacles and took them up and glued them on the bottom of Henri’s boat with quick-drying cement. Henri was pretty upset, particularly since he couldn’t tell anybody about it. Doc could have reassured him, but Doc was in the Army. Henri scraped the bottom and painted it, but no sooner was the paint dry than the boys did it again, and stuck a little seaweed on too. They were terribly ashamed when they saw what happened. Henri sold his boat and left town within twenty-four hours. He could not shake the persistent and horrifying notion that the boat was going to sea while he was asleep.
And Mack told how Hazel had been in the Army too, although you couldn’t get anybody to believe it. Hazel was in the Army long enough to qualify for the G.I. bill,[14] and he enrolled at the University of California for training in astrophysics by making a check mark on an application. Three months later, when some of the confusion had died down, the college authorities discovered him. The Department of Psychology wanted to keep him, but it was against the law.
Hazel often wondered what it was that he had gone to study. He intended to ask Doc, but by the time Doc got back it had slipped his mind.
Doc poured out the last of the first bottle of Old Tennis Shoes, and he said, “You’ve talked about everything else. What happened to you, Mack?”
Mack said, “I just kind of stayed around and kept things in order.”
Well, Mack had kept things in order, and he had discussed war with everybody he’d met. He called his war the Big War. That was the first one. After the war the atom-bomb tests interested him, in a Fourth-of-July kind of way. The huge reward the government offered for the discovery of new uranium deposits set off a chain reaction in Mack, and he bought a second-hand Geiger counter.
At the Monterey bus station the Geiger counter started buzzing and Mack went along with it—first to San Francisco, then to Marysville, Sacramento, Portland. Mack was so scientifically interested that he didn’t notice the girl on the same bus. That is, he didn’t notice her much. Well, one thing led to another, which was not unique in Mack’s experience. The girl was taking the long way to Jacksonville, Florida. Mack would have left her in Tacoma if his Geiger counter hadn’t throbbed him eastward. He got clear to Salina, Kansas, with the girl. On a hot muggy day the girl lunged at a fly on the bus and broke her watch, and only then did Mack discover that he had been following a radium dial. Romance alone was not enough for Mack at his age. He arrived back in Monterey on a flatcar, under a tarpaulin that covered a medium-sized tank destined for Fort Ord.[15] Mack was very glad to get home. He had won a few dollars from a guard on the flatcar. He scrubbed out the Palace Flop house and planted a row of morning glories along the front, and he and Eddie got it ready for the returning heroes. They had quite a time when the heroes straggled back.
Over Doc and Mack a golden melancholy settled like autumn leaves, melancholy concocted equally of Old Tennis Shoes and old times, of friends lost and friends changed. And both of them knew they were avoiding one subject, telling minor stories to avoid a major one. But at last they were dry, and their subject confronted them.
Doc opened with considerable bravery. “What do you think of the new owner over at the grocery?”
“Oh, he’s all right,” said Mack. “Kind of interesting. The only trouble is he can’t never take Lee Chong’s place. There was never a friend like Lee Chong,” Mack said brokenly.
“Yes, he was wise and good,” said Doc.
“And tricky,” said Mack.
“And smart,” said Doc.
“He took care of a lot of people,” said Mack.
“And he took a few,” said Doc.
They volleyed Lee Chong back and forth, and their memories built virtues that would have surprised him, and cleverness and beauty too. While one told a fine tale of that mercantile Chinaman the other waited impatiently to top the story. Out of their memories there emerged a being scarcely human, a dragon of goodness and an angel of guile. In such a way are the gods created.
But the bottle was empty now, and its emptiness irritated Mack, and his irritation oozed toward Lee Chong’s memory.
“The son-of-a-bitch was sneaky,” said Mack. “He should of told us he was going to sell out and go away. It wasn’t friendly, doing all that alone without his friends to help.”
“Maybe that’s what he was afraid of,” said Doc. “Lee wrote to me about it. I couldn’t advise him—I was too far away—so he was safe.”
“You can’t never find out what a Chink’s got on his mind,” said Mack. “Doc, who would of thought he was what you might say—plotting?”
Oh, it had been a shocking thing. Lee Chong had operated his emporium for so long that no one could possibly have foreseen that he would sell out. He was so mixed up in the feeding and clothing of Cannery Row that he was considered permanent. Who could have suspected the secret turnings of his paradoxical Oriental mind, which seems to have paralleled the paradoxical Occidental mind?
It is customary to think of a sea captain sitting in his cabin, planning a future grocery store not subject to wind or bottom-fouling. Lee Chong dreamed while he worked his abacus and passed out pints of Old Tennis Shoes and delicately sliced bacon with his big knife. He dreamed all right—he dreamed of the sea. He did not share his plans or ask advice. He would have got lots of advice.
One day Lee Chong sold out and bought a schooner. He wanted to go trading in the South Seas. He dreamed of palms and Polynesians. In the hold of his schooner he loaded the entire stock of his store—all the canned goods, the rubber boots, the caps and needles and small tools, the fireworks and calendars, even the glass-fronted showcases where he kept gold-plated collar buttons and cigarette lighters. He took it all with him. And the last anyone saw of him, he was waving his blue naval cap from the flying bridge of his dream ship as he passed the whistle buoy at Point Pinos[16] into the sunset. And if he didn’t go down on the way over, that’s where he is now—probably lying in a hammock under an awning on the rear deck, while beautiful Polynesian girls in very scanty clothes pick over his stock of canned tomatoes and striped mechanics’ caps.
13
Bear Flag: The Bear Flag, so named because it featured a grizzly bear (once native to California), was raised at Sonoma, California, on June 14, 1846, by a group of American settlers led by Captain John C. Frémont in a revolt against Mexican rule. In 1911 California’s state legislature adopted it as the state flag.
14
G.I. bilclass="underline" The popular name for the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (1944), which provided college or vocational education for returning World War II veterans.
15
Fort Ord: Originally called Camp Gigling when it was established in 1917, the Fort Ord Military Reservation (1940–94) was located on the Monterey Bay Peninsula between Marina and Sand City. At more than twenty-seven thousand acres, it was one of the largest U.S. Army bases on the West Coast and housed as many as fifty thousand troops. After World War II it became a facility for basic combat and advanced infantry training. Part of the base is now the site of California State University, Monterey Bay.
16
Point Pinos: Located at the northern end of the Monterey Peninsula, Point Pinos was named by Spanish explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602. It became the site of the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the West Coast (established in 1855).