Leonard, however, was only listening to Doc: “We’d be in a race with the Communists to rebuild, and you know who would win that one. We would!”
“Yeah!” said George. “Or maybe the French…”
Barnard just shook his head and grabbed the jar from Steve, who gave him a struggle for it. “As a doctor you should never wish such destruction on others, Ernest.”
“As a doctor I know best what they did to us, and where they’re keeping us,” Doc replied fiercely. “We’re bears in the pit.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Steve said to me. “They’re going to start deciding whether we belong to the Russians or the Chinese.”
“Or the French,” I said, and we slithered off the bench. I took a last gulp of the old man’s liquor and he whacked me. “Out of here, you ungrateful wretches,” he cried. “Not willing to listen to history without poking fun.”
“We’ll read the books,” Steve said. “They don’t get drunk.”
“Listen to him,” said Tom, as his cronies laughed. “I taught him to read, and he calls me a drunk.”
“No wonder they’re so mixed up, with you teaching them to read,” Leonard said. “You sure you got the books turned right way up?”
We wandered off to the sound of this sort of thing, and made our way with some stumbling to the orange tree. This was a giant old oak, one of a half dozen or so in the park, that held in its branches gas lanterns wrapped in transparent orange plastic. It was the mark of the scavengers from central Orange County, and our gang used it as the meeting place later at night. We didn’t see anyone from Onofre, so we sat on the grass under the tree, arms around each other, and made ribald comments on the passing crowd. Steve waved down a man selling jars of liquor and gave him two dimes for a jar of tequila. “Jars back without a crack, else we put the crack in your back,” the man intoned as he moved on. On the other side of the orange tree a small bike-powered generator was humming and crackling; a group of scavengers was using it to operate a small instant oven, cooking slabs of meat or whole potatoes in seconds. “Heat it and eat it,” they cried. “See the miracle microwave, the super horno! Heat it and eat it!” I took a sip of the tequila; it was strong stuff, but I was drunk enough to want to get drunker. “I am drunk,” I told Steve. “I am borracho. I am aplastaaaa-do.”
“Yes you are,” Steve said. “Look at that silver.” He pointed at one of the scavenger women’s heavy necklaces. “Look at it!” He took a long swallow. “Hanker, those people are rich. Don’t you think they could do just about anything they pleased? Go anywhere they pleased? Be anything they pleased? We’ve got to get some of that silver. Somehow we’ve got to. Life isn’t just grunging for food in the same spot day after day, Henry. That’s how animals live. But we’re human beings, Hanker, that’s what we are and don’t you forget it, and Onofre ain’t big enough for us, we can’t live our whole lives in that valley like cows chewing cud. Chewing our cud and waiting to get tossed in some instant oven and microwaved, give me another swallow of that, Hanker my best buddy, a powerful thirst for more has suddenly afflicted me.”
“The mind is its own place,” I remarked solemnly as I gave him the jar. Neither of us needed any more liquor, but when Gabby and Rebel and Kathryn and Kristen showed up, we were quick to help drink another jar. Steve forgot about silver for a while in favor of a kiss; Kathryn’s red hair covered the sight. The band started again, a trumpet, a clarinet, two saxes, a drum and a bass fiddle, and we sang along with the tunes: “Waltzing Matilda,” or “Oh Susannah,” or “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” Melissa showed up and sat down beside me. She’d been drinking and smoking, I could see. I put an arm around her, and over her shoulder Kathryn winked at me. More and more people crowded around the orange tree as the band heated up, and soon we couldn’t see anything but legs. We played a game of guessing what town people were from by their legs alone, and then we danced around the tree with the rest of the crowd.
Much later we started our return to camp. I felt great. We staggered on the promenade, holding each other up and singing “High Hopes” all out of tune with the fading sound of the band. Halfway home we collided with a group coming out of the trees, and I was roughly shoved to the ground. “Chinga,” I said, and scrambled up. There were shouts and scufflings, a few others hit the ground and rolled back up swinging and shouting angrily. “What the—” The two groups separated and stood facing each other belligerently; by the light of a distant lantern we saw that it was the gang from San Clemente, decked out in identical red and white striped shirts.
“Oh,” said Nicolin, his voice dripping with disgust, “it’s them.”
One of the leaders of their gang stepped into a shaft of light and grinned unpleasantly. His earlobes were all torn up from having on earrings in fights, but that hadn’t stopped him; he still had two gold earrings in his left ear, and two silver ones in his right.
“Hello, Doll Grin,” Nicolin said.
“Little people shouldn’t come into Clemente at night,” said the scavenger.
“What’s Clemente?” Nicolin asked casually. “Nothing north of us but ruins.”
“Little people might get scared. They might hear a sound,” Doll Grin went on, and the guys behind him began to hum a rising tone, “uhnnnnnn-eeeeeehhhhhhh,” then falling, rising again: the sound of the siren we had heard that night. When they stopped their leader said, “We don’t like people like you in our town. Next time you won’t get away so easy…”
Nicolin cracked his crazy smile. “Found any good dead bodies to eat lately?” he asked the scavengers innocently. With a rush they were on him, and Gabby and I had to come up on each side of him swinging hard, to keep him from being surrounded, although with his heavy boots he was doing quite well on their kneecaps. As the fight broke out in earnest he started shouting happily “Vultures! Buzzards! Wreckrats! Zopilotes!” and I had to look sharp because there were more of them than there were of us, and they seemed to have rings on every finger—
The sheriffs barged into us bellowing “What’s this? Stop this—HEY!” I found myself on the dirt again, as did most of us. I started the laborious process of standing. “You kids get the fuck out of here,” one of the sheriffs said. He was shaped like a barrel and was a foot taller than Steve, whom he held by the shirt. “We’ll ban you all from swap meets forever if we have to break up these fights again. Now get out of here before we cave your faces in to make you think about it.”
We rejoined the girls—Kristen and Rebel had been in the midst of the tussle, but the rest had stayed back—and trooped down the promenade. Behind us the Clemente gang started up the siren sound, “uhnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeee…”
“Damn!” Nicolin said, wrapping an arm around Kathryn. “We were going to pound those guys, too.”
“They had you two to one,” Kathryn pointed out.
“Oh Katie, don’t you know that’s just the way we wanted it?” We all agreed we had had them in a tight spot, and walked back to camp in a fine humor. Melissa found me and slipped under my arm. As we approached the camp she slowed down and we fell behind the others. Sensing something to this, I steered us off the promenade into the grove. I stopped and leaned back against a laurel.
“You looked good fighting,” she said, and then we were kissing. After some long kisses she sort of let her weight go on me, and I slid down the tree with her, scraping my back good on the bark. Once on the leaves I laid half on top, half beside her, a leg between hers, an awkward position, but it was making my blood pound. We were kissing without pause and I could feel her breathing fast, humming little gasps. I tried to get my hand down her pants but couldn’t get it far enough, so I pushed it up under her shirt and held her breast. She bit my neck and a jolt ran down that whole side of my body. Someone with a lantern walked by on the promenade, and for a second I could see her shoulder: dirty white cotton twisted against pale skin, the swell of her breast pushed up by my hand… back to kissing, with the image clear in my closed eyes.