“First, there’s a couple of announcements. We’re pooling our books and videotapes and such at the Ahwanee to make a kind of library. Anybody who wants to contribute is welcome. The park service has chipped in a lot of books about Yosemite and the Sierras. I’m the librarian, so to speak, so talk to me if you want to read anything, or donate anything.
“Oh. We’re also arranging for a music library. We have fifty portable optical disk players used for recorded park tours and about three hundred music disks. If you want to donate more, anything is appreciated. Now, here’s Tony and Mary Lampedusa.”
Edward sat with the half-full beer can between his knees and listened to the high, sweet folksinging. Minelli shook his head and wandered off before they were done. “See you at the dance,” he whispered to Edward in passing.
The dance began slowly on the open-air wooden deck of the visitors’ center. A ranger’s powerful stereo system provided the music, mostly rock tunes from the eighties.
About half the people in the park were single. Some who weren’t single acted as if they were, and a few arguments broke out among couples. Edward heard one man telling his wife, “Christ, you know I love you, but doesn’t this make anything different? Aren’t we all supposed to be together here?” The woman, shaking her head tearfully, was having none of that.
Minelli had no luck finding a partner. His appearance — short, on the edge of unkempt, his grin a little too manic — did not attract the fit, well-groomed single females. He glanced at Edward across the open-air pavilion and shrugged expressively, then pointed at him and held a hand out, thumbs up. Edward shook his head.
Everybody was on edge that night, which was only to be expected. Edward stood to one side, unwilling to approach a woman just yet, willing only to watch and evaluate.
The dance ended early. “Not a great dance,” Minelli commented as they walked in the dark back to Camp Curry. They separated near the public showers to go to their separate tent cabins.
Edward was not ready for sleep, however. Flashlight in hand, he walked west along a trail and came to the Happy Isles, where he stood on a wood bridge and listened to the Merced. In the distance, he could hear Vernal and Nevada falls roaring with snowmelt. The river ran high on the bridge pilings, black as pitch in the deeps, dark blue-gray in turbulence.
He glanced up at the stars. Through the trees, just above Half Dome, the sky was twinkling again, tiny intense flashes of blue-green and red. Fascinated, he watched for several minutes, thinking, “It’s not over out there. Looks like somebody’s fighting.” He tried to imagine the kind of war that might be fought in space, through the asteroids, but he couldn’t. “I wish I could understand,” he said. “I wish somebody would tell me what this is all about.”
Suddenly, his whole body ached. He clenched his jaw and slammed his fist on the wooden railing, screaming wordlessly, kicking at a post until he collapsed on the wooden deck and clutched his throbbing foot. For a quarter of an hour, back against the rail, legs spread limp, he cried like a child, opening and closing his fists.
A half hour later, walking slowly back to the camp, flashlight beam showing the way, he realized what he had to lose.
He climbed the steps to his tent cabin and collapsed on the bed without undressing. Tomorrow night, he would not hesitate to ask a woman to dance, or to return with him and stay with him. He would not be shy or principled or stand on his dignity.
There was simply no time for such scruples. He did not understand what was happening, but he could feel the end coming. Like everybody else, he knew it in his bones.
58
Reuben came awake at five o’clock. Eyes wide, he oriented himself: spread-eagled on a short single bed in a small, shabby hotel room. His nighttime thrashings had pulled the upper sheet and blankets loose and he was only half covered.
Sitting on the side of the bed, he put on his ballpackers (that’s what his father always called jockey briefs) and a T-shirt and his pants. Then he pulled the curtains on the narrow window and stood in front of it, looking out at the predawn light coming up over the city. Gray buildings, old brick and stone darkened by last night’s sleet and snow; orange streetlights casting lonely spots on wet pavement; a single ancient Toyota truck driving through slush below the window and slowly cornering past an abandoned and boarded-up storefront.
Reuben showered, put on his new suit, and was out of the hotel by five-thirty. He had paid his room tab the night before. He stood shivering for a moment by the abandoned storefront, listening to the network, getting his final directions. The old Toyota came down the street again and pulled to the curb in front of him. A man just a few years older than Reuben, dressed in overalls and a baseball cap, sat behind the wheel. “Need a lift?” he asked, reaching over to open the opposite door. Heat poured from the cab. “You’re heading down to the Toland Brothers Excursion Terminal. You’re the second I’ve picked up this morning.”
Reuben slid into the passenger side and smiled at the driver. “Awful early to be out driving,” he said. “I appreciate this.”
“Hey, it’s in a good cause,” the man said. His gaze lingered on Reuben’s face. He did not appear happy that his passenger was black. “That’s what I’m being told, anyway.”
They took East Ninth Street to the Municipal Pier. The driver let Reuben out and drove away without saying another word.
Dawn was something more than a promise as he walked along the pier and approached the heavy iron bars and gate beneath the giant painted TOLAND BROS. sign. A plump, grizzled man of something less than seventy years and more than sixty stood behind the gate with a flashlight in hand, waggling a cigar between his teeth. He saw Reuben but did not move until the young man was less than two yards away. Then he pushed off from the bars next to the closed gate and shined his flashlight on Reuben’s face.
“What can I do for you?” he asked sharply. The cigar was soggy and unlighted.
“I’m here for the morning excursion,” Reuben said.
“Excursion? To where?”
Reuben stretched out an arm and pointed vaguely at Lake Erie. The man scrutinized him for several long moments in the flashlight beam, then lowered the lens and called out, “Donovan!”
Donovan, a short, clean-cut fellow in a cream-colored suit, about as old as the plump man but far better preserved, came out of a shed near the office.
Donovan glanced quickly at Reuben. “Network?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let him in, Mickey.”
“Goddamn fools,” Mickey muttered. “There’s still ice on the lake. Making us go out before the season.” He leaned his head to one side and concentrated on keying the padlock and releasing a chain from the gate latch. He tugged the chain out of the eye with a conspicuous machine-gun snick-tink, pulled the gate inward, and bade Reuben enter by swinging a large, callused red hand.
Halfway down the pier, past an old, boarded-up seafood restaurant, a two-decked excursion boat named the Gerald FitzEdmund belched diesel from twin motors through stern pipes just above the waterline. The boat was easily capable of carrying two or three hundred passengers, but at this hour it was practically deserted. Donovan walked ahead of Reuben and gestured for him to cross the roped boarding ramp.