Jim nods, startled by this intersection with his own recent thoughts. So the old man had tried to resist!
“But in the end it doesn’t matter. Most of your clients hate you because you’re just part of the system that’s snared them. And a good percentage are guilty as charged. And the case loads…” The plastic cracking, it really seems like something in him must be breaking. “In the end it doesn’t make any difference. Someone else would have done it, yes they would! Just as well. I should have been a tax lawyer, investment counselor. Then I’d have enough money now to be in some villa somewhere. Private nurse and secretary.…”
Jim shivers. Tom knows just exactly what he’s living in, he’s perfectly aware of it. Who better? It’s despair making all those Q’s and O’s, in this old folks’ mental ward.…
“But you did some good! I’m sure you did.” Doubtfully: “You saved some people from jail who were grateful for it.…”
“Maybe.” Crack crack crack. “I remember… I got this one Russian immigrant who could barely speak English. He’d only been in the country a month or two. He was lonely and went into one of the porno theaters in Santa Ana. The police were trying to close those places down at the time. They made a sweep and arrested everyone they could catch. So they got this Russian and he was charged with public indecency. Because they said he was masturbating in there. If you can believe that. When I first saw him he was really scared. I mean he was used to the Soviet system where if you’re arrested then you’re a goner. Guilty as charged. And he didn’t understand the charges and I mean he was scared. So I took it to trial and just massacred the assistant D.A.’s case, which was bullshit to begin with. I mean how can you prove something like that? So the judge dismissed it. And the look on that Russian’s face when they let him out…” Crack! Crack! “Oh, that might have been worth a few days in this hole, I guess. A few days.”
“So…” Jim is thinking of his own problems, his own choices. “So what would you do today, Tom? I mean, if you wanted to resist the injustices, the people who run it all… what would you do?”
“I don’t know. Nothing seems to work. I guess I would teach. Except that’s useless too. Write, maybe. Or practice law at a higher level. Affect the laws themselves somehow. That’s where it all rests, boy. This whole edifice of privilege and exploitation. It’s all firmly grounded in the law of the land. That’s what’s got to change.”
“But how? Would you resist actively? Like… go out at night and sabotage a space weapons factory, or something like that?”
Tom stares out the window bright-eyed. As often happens, his bitterness has galvanized him, made him seem younger. “Sure. If I could do it without hurting anybody. Or getting hurt myself.” Crack! “A liberal to the end. I guess that’s always been my problem. But yeah, why not? It would take a lot of that kind of thing. But they should be stopped somehow. They’re sucking the world dry to fuel their games.”
Jim nods, thinking it over.
They talk about Jim’s parents, a natural enough association, although neither of them mentions Dennis’s occupation. Jim talks a bit about his work and friends, until Tom’s eyes begin to blur. He’s getting tired: slumping down, speech coming with an ugly hiss of breath. Jim sees again that the mind, that sharp-edged bitter quick mind, is trapped in an old wreck of a body that is just barely kept going by constant infusion of oxygen, of drugs. A body that poisons its mind occasionally, blunts all its edges… One gnarled hand creeps over the bedsheet after the other, like a pair of crabs; spotted, fleshless, the joints so swollen that the fingers will never straighten again.… That has to hurt! It all does. He must live with pain every day, just as a part of living.
Jim can’t really imagine that, and the thought doesn’t stay with him long. Too hard. It’s getting time to go, it really is.
“Tell me one last Orange County story, Tom. Then I’ve got to go.”
Tom stares through him, without recognition: Jim shivers.
The focus returns, Tom stares out the window at the sky. “Before they built Dana Point harbor, there was a beautiful beach down there under the bluff. Not many people went there. The only way down was a rickety old wood staircase built against the bluff. Every year steps came out and it got chancier to go down it. But we did. The thing was to go after a big storm had hit the coast. The beach was all fresh, sand torn out and flushed and thrown back in. And in the sand were tiny bits of colored stones. Gem sand, we called it. It was really an extraordinary thing. I don’t know if they really were tiny bits of sapphires, rubies, emeralds—but they looked like it, and that’s what we called them. Not driftglass, no, real stones. Walking along the beach real slow, you’d see a blink of colored light, green, red, blue—perfectly intense and clear against the wet sand. You could collect a little handful in a day, and if you kept them in a jar of water… I had one at home. Wonder what happened to that. What happens to all the things you own? The people you know? I’m sure I never would have thrown that out.…”
And Tom falls off into reverie, then into an uneasy sleep, tossing so that the oxygen tube presses against his neck. Jim, who has heard about the gem sand before, arranges the tube and the sheets as best he can, and leaves. He feels sad. There was a place here, once. And a person, with a whole life. Now hanging on past all sense. This awful condomundo—a jail for the old, a kind of concentration camp! It really is depressing. He’s got to come by more often. Tom needs the company. And he’s a historical resource, he really is.
But tracking up 5, Jim begins to forget about this. The truth is, the overall experience is just too unpleasant for him. He can’t stand it. And so he forgets his visits there, and avoids the place.
On to dinner at the folks’. Then his class! It really is turning out to be a hell of a long day.
13
After Jim leaves, Old Tom continues the conversation in his head.
I played in the orange groves as a child, he tells Jim. When you lived on a street plunging into a grove that extended away in every direction, then you could go out any time you liked. Mid-afternoon when everything was hot and lazy was a good time. It was always sunny.
They cleared the ground around the trees, nothing but dirt. Around each tree was a circular irrigation moat maybe thirty feet across, which made the groves look strange. As did the symmetrical planting. Every tree was in a perfect rank, a perfect file, and two perfect diagonals, for as far as you could see. The trees were symmetrical too, something like the shape of an olive, made of small green leaves on small twisted branches.
There were almost always oranges on the trees, they blossomed and grew twice a year and the growing took up most of the time. Oranges first green and small, then through an odd transition of mixed green and yellow, to orange, darkening always as they ripened—until if not picked they would darken to a browny orange and then go brown and dry and small and hard, and then whitish brown and then earth again. But most of them were picked.
We used to throw them at each other. Like snowballs already formed and ready to go. Old ones were squishy and smelled bad, whole new ones were hard and hurt a little. We fought wars, boys throwing oranges back and forth and it was kind of like German dodgeball at school. Getting hit was no big deal, except perhaps when you had to explain it to your mother. During the fights itself it was kind of funny. I wonder if any of those young friends ended up in Vietnam? If so, they were poorly trained for it.
We took bows and arrows out into the groves to shoot the jackrabbits we often saw bounding away from us. They could really run. We never even came close to them, happily, so we shot at oranges on trees instead. Perfect targets, quite difficult to hit and a wonderful triumph if you did, the oranges burst open and flew off or hung there punctured, it was great.