Across the grove, where the trees are already gone, and the craters bulldozed away, surveyors have set out stakes with red strips of plastic tied in bows around their tops. These guide the men at the cement mixers, the big trucks whose contents grumble as their barrels spin. They will be pouring foundations for the new tract houses before the last trees are pulled out.
Now it’s the end of a short November day. Early 1960s. The sun is low, and the shadows of the remaining eucalyptus in the west wall—one in every three—fall across the remains of the grove. There are nothing but craters left, today; craters, and stacks of wood by the dumpsters. The backhoes and tractors and bulldozers are all in a yellow row, still as dinosaurs. Cars pass by. The men whose work is done for the day have congregated by the canteen truck, open on one side, displaying evening snacks of burritos and triangular sandwiches in clear plastic boxes. Some of the men have gotten bottles of beer out of their pickups, and the click pop hiss of bottles opening mingles with their quiet talk. Cars pass by. The distant hum of the Newport Freeway washes over them with the wind. Eucalyptus leaves fall from the trees still standing.
Out in the craters, far from the men at the canteen truck, some children are playing. Young boys, using the craters as foxholes to play some simple war game. The craters are new, they’re exciting, they show what orange roots look like, something the boys have always been curious about. Cars pass by. The shadows lengthen. One of the boys wanders off alone. Tire tracks in the torn dirt lead his gaze to one of the cement mixers, still emitting its slushy grumble. He sits down to look at it, openmouthed. Cars pass by. The other boys tire of their game and go home to dinner, each to his own house. The men around the trucks finish their beers and their stories, and they get into their pickup trucks—thunk! thunk!—and drive off. A couple of supervisors walk around the dirt lot, planning the next day’s work. They stop by a stack of wood next to the shredder. It’s quiet, you can hear the freeway in the distance. A single boy sits on a crater’s edge, staring off at the distance. Cars pass by. Eucalyptus leaves spinnerdrift to the ground. The sun disappears. The day is done, and shadows are falling across our empty field.
83
When Jim is done, he types a fair copy into the computer. Prints it up. He sticks it in with the taped-up pages. No, those poor tape-up jobs won’t do. He types them all into the computer again, filling them out, revising them. Then he prints up new copies of each. There we go. Orange County. He never was much of a one for titles. Call it Torn Maps, why not.
Much of the night has passed. Jim gets up stiffly, hobbles out to look around. Four A.M.; the freeways at its quietest. After a bit he goes back inside, and holds the newly printed pages in his hands. It’s not a big book, nor a great one; but it’s his. His, and the land’s. And the people who lived here through all the years; it’s theirs too, in a way. They all did their best to make a home of the place—those of them who weren’t actively doing their best to parcel and sell it off, anyway. And even them… Jim laughs. Clearly he’ll never be able to resolve his ambivalence regarding his hometown, and the generations who made it. Impossible to separate out the good from the bad, the heroic from the tawdry.
Okay, what next? Light-headed, Jim wanders his home again, the pages clutched in his hand. What should he do? He isn’t sure. It’s awful, having one’s habits shattered, having to make one’s life up from scratch; you have to invent it all moment to moment, and it’s hard!
He eats some potato chips, cleans up the kitchen. He sits down at his little Formica kitchen table; and briefly, head down on his pages, he naps.
While he’s asleep, crouched uncomfortably over the table, he dreams. There’s an elevated freeway on the cliff by the edge of the sea, and in the cars tracking slowly along are all his friends and family. They have a map of Orange County, and they’re tearing it into pieces. His father, Hana, Tom, Tashi, Abe, his mom, Sandy and Angela… Jim, down on the beach, cries out at them to stop tearing the map; no one hears him. And the pieces of the map are jigsaw puzzle pieces, big as family-sized pizzas, pale pastel in color, and all his family take these pieces and spin them out into the air like frisbees, till they stall and tumble down onto a beach as wide as the world. And Jim runs to gather them up, hard work in the loose sand, which sparkles with gems; and then he’s on the beach, trying to put together this big puzzle before the tide comes in—
He starts awake.
He gets up; he has a plan. He’ll track up the Santiago Freeway to Modjeska Canyon and Hana’s house, with his pages, and he’ll sit down under the eucalyptus trees on the lawn outside her white garage, and he’ll wait there till she comes out or comes home. And then he’ll make her read the pages, make her see… whatever she’ll see. And from there… well, whatever. That’s as far as he can plan. That’s his plan.
He goes to the bathroom, quick brushes his teeth and hair, pees, goes out to the car. It’s still dark! Four-thirty A.M., oh well. No time like the present. And he gets in his car and tracks onto the freeway, in his haste punching the wrong program and getting on in the wrong direction. It takes a while to get turned around. The freeway is almost empty: tracks gleaming under the moon, the lightshow at its absolute minimum, a coolness to the humming air. He gets off the freeway onto Chapman Avenue, down the empty street under flashing yellow stoplights, past the dark parking lots and shopping centers and the dark Fluffy Donuts place that stands over the ruins of El Modena Elementary School, past the Quaker church and up into the dark hills. Then onto the Santiago Freeway, under the blue mercury vapor lights, the blue-white concrete flowing under him, the dark hillsides spangled with streetlights like stars, a smell of sage in the air rushing by the window. And he comes to Hana’s exit and takes the offramp, down in a big concrete curve, down and down to the embrace of the hills, the touch of the earth. Any minute he’ll be there.
Acknowledgments
Some of my friends and family gave me a lot of help with various aspects of this book. I’d like to thank Terry Baier, Daryl Bonin, Brian Carlisle, Donald and Nancy Crosby, Patrick Delahunt, Robert Franko, Charles R. Ill, Beth Meacham, Lisa Nowell, Linda Rogas, and Victor Salerno.
A special thanks to Steve Bixler and Larry Huhn; and to my parents.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE GOLD COAST
Copyright © 1988 by Kim Stanley Robinson
All rights reserved.
This book was originally published as a Tor hardcover in February 1988.
An Orb Edition
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data