She pulled back. “Ohh,” she sighed, “Henry. I told my dad I’d be right back. He’ll start looking for me if I don’t get back there pretty soon.” She made a pout that I could just see in the dark, and I laughed and kissed it.
“That’s okay. Some other time.” I was too drunk to feel balked, why five minutes before I hadn’t been expecting anything like this, and it was easy to slip back to that. Anything was easy. I helped her to her feet and took a piece of bark out of my back. And laughed.
I walked Melissa into camp and with a final quick kiss left her near her father’s set-up. I went back out in the grove to take a leak. Off through the treetrunks I could still see the scavengers’ camps, bouncing in the firelight, and faintly I could hear a group of them singing “America the Beautiful.” I sang along under my breath, a perfect harmony part that only I could hear, and the old tune filled my heart.
Back on the promenade in front of our camp I saw the old man, talking with two strangers dressed in dark coats. The old man asked them questions, but I couldn’t make out the words. Wondering who they were I stumbled back to my sleeping spot. I laid down, head spinning, and looked up at the black branches against the sky, every pine needle clear as an ink stroke. I figured I’d be out in a second. But when I settled down there was a noise; someone was crushing leaves over and over again, crick, crick, crick, crick… from where Steve slept. I started listening and before long I heard breathing, and a soft, rhythmic expelling of breath. I knew it was Kathryn’s voice. My hard-on was back; I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep. After a minute’s listening I felt strange, and making some irritated noises, I got up and went out to the front of the camp, where the fire was a warm mass of coals. I sat watching them shift from gray to orange with every breath of wind, feeling horny and envious and drunk and happy.
All of a sudden the old man crashed into camp, looking drunker than I by a good deal. His scruff of hair flew around his head like smoke. He saw me and squatted by the fire. “Hank,” he said, his voice uncommonly excited. “I’ve just been talking with two men who were looking for me.”
“I saw you out there with them. Who were they?”
He looked at me, his bloodshot eyes gleaming with reflected firelight. “Hank, those men were from San Diego. And they came here—or up to just south of Onofre, actually—they talked to Recovery Simpson and followed us to the meet, to talk with me, ain’t that nice—word gets around, you know, who a village elder is. Anyway…”
“The men.”
“Yes! These men say they got from San Diego to Onofre by train.”
We sat there staring at each other over the fire, and some little flames popped up. Light danced on his wild eyes. “They came by train.”
4
A few days after we got back from the meet, Pa and I woke up to the sound of a hard rain drumming on the roof. We ate a loaf of bread and made a big fire, and sat down to needle clothes, but the rain fisted the roof harder and harder, and when we looked out the door we could scarcely see the big eucalyptus. It looked like the ocean had decided to jump up and wash us down to it, and the young crops would be the first to go. Plants, stakes, the soil itself; they’d all be ripped away.
“Looks like we’ll be putting the tarps down,” Pa said.
“No doubt about it.” We paced around the dark room in the firelight, got out our rain gear and paced some more. In a sheet downpour we heard Rafael’s bugle faintly calling over the roar of the rain, hitting high-low-high-low.
We put on our gear and rushed out, and were drenched in seconds. “Whoo!” Pa cried, and ran for the bridge, splashing through puddles. At the bridge a few people were huddled under ponchos and umbrellas, waiting for the tarps to arrive. Pa and I ran to the bathhouse beside the river path, which was now a little creek bordering the foaming brown river. We had to dodge the occasional group of three or four trundling along awkwardly under the weight of one of the long tarps. At the bathhouse shed the Mendezes, Mando and Doc Costa, and Steve and Kathryn were hauling out tarps and lifting them onto the shoulders of whoever was there. I jumped under the end of a roll and followed it off, spurred by Kathryn’s sharp voice. She had her whole crew jumping, no doubt of that. And it rained down on us like the world was under a waterfall.
I helped run three tarps over the bridge and out to the fields, and then it was time to get them down. Mando and I got on one end of a roll—loosely rolled plastic it was, once clear, now opaque with mud—and leaned over to get our arms around it. Rain poured onto my lower back and down my pants; my poncho was flying around my shoulders. Gabby and Kristen were on the other end of our roll, and the four of us maneuvered it into position at the downhill end of some rows of cabbage. We unrolled it one lift at a time, grunting and shouting directions at each other, walking up the furrows ankle deep in water. The field sloped ahead of us black and lumpy. Gray pools of water bounced under the rain’s onslaught where the grading was not right. When we got to the end of the roll the last cabbages were just covered. Below us small bowed figures were unfurling other tarps: the Hamishes, the Eggloffs, Manuel Reyes and the rest of Kathryn’s farm crew plus Rafael and Steve. Beyond them the river churned, a brown flood studded with tree-trunks and drowned shrubs. A thinner cloud rushed over and for a moment the light changed, so that everything glowed through the streaky veils of rain. Then just as suddenly it was twilight again.
The old man was at the bottom of the field helping to position the rest of the tarps, striding about under his shoulder umbrella, a plastic thing held over his head by two poles strapped to his back. I laughed and felt the rain in my mouth: “Now why can’t he just wear a hat like everyone else?”
“That’s just it,” Mando said, hands clamped in his armpits for warmth. “He doesn’t want to be like everyone else.”
“He’s already managed that without any such contraption on his head.”
Gabby and Kristen joined us at the bottom. Gabby had fallen and was completely covered with mud. We got another roll and began pulling it uphill. Wind hit the trees on the hill above and their branches bobbed and bent, as if the hillside were a big animal struggling under the storm, going whoooo, whoooo, and making the valley seem vast. Water poured down the tarps that were already laid. The drainage ditch at the bottom of the fields was overflowing, but it all spilled into the river anyway.
Tom came over to greet us. His sheltered face was as wet as anyone’s. “Hello Gabriel, Henry. And Armando, Kristen. Well met. Kathryn says she needs help with the corn.” The four of us hurried up the riverbank to the cornfields. Kathryn was at their foot, running around getting groups together, booting reluctant rolls uphill, pointing out slack in the tarps already tied down. She was as black with mud as Gabby. She shouted instructions at us, and hearing that shrill tone in her voice we ran.
The shoots of corn were about two hands high, and we couldn’t just lay the tarps right on them without breaking them. There were cement blocks every few yards, therefore, and the tarps had to be tied down to these through grommet holes. So the blocks had to be perfectly placed to match the holes. I saw that Steve and John Nicolin were working together, heaving blocks and tying knots. Everyone out there was dripping black. Kathryn had sent us to the upper end of the field, and when we got there we found her two youngest sisters and Doc and Carmen Eggloff, struggling with one of the narrowest tarps. “Hey Dad, let’s get this thing rolling,” Mando said as we approached them.