“About that.” Jennings nodded. “And since the Mayor began organizing things, we’ve accomplished a good deal. The settlements are pretty well scattered, but we have a train system between them that works well. All handcars, you understand, although we do have generators providing a good supply of electricity back home. There’s a weekly swap meet, and a fishing fleet, and a militia—all manner of things there weren’t before. Naturally Lee and I are proudest of the exploration team. Why, we cleared highway eight all the way across the mountains to the Salton Sea, and shifted the train tracks onto it.” Something in the way Lee moved before the fire caused Jennings to stop talking for a moment.
“The Salton Sea must be huge now,” Tom said.
Jennings let Lee answer. Lee nodded. “It’s fresh water now, too, and filled with fish. People out there were doing pretty good, considering how few of them there were.”
“What brings you up here?” John Nicolin asked bluntly.
While Lee stared at John, Jennings looked around at his audience. Every face in the room was watching him closely, listening to what he had to tell. He appeared to like that. “Well, we had the rails going up to Oceanside,” he explained, “and the ruined tracks extended north of that, so we decided to repair them.”
“Why?” John persisted.
Jennings cocked his head to match the angle of John’s. “Why? I guess you’d have to ask the Mayor that one. It was his idea. You see”—he glanced at Lee, as if getting permission to speak further—“you’re all aware that the Japanese are guarding us on the west coast here?”
“Of course,” John said.
“You could hardly miss that,” Rafael added. He had put his pistol away, and was sitting on the edge of the bath.
“But I don’t mean from just the ships offshore,” Jennings said. “I mean from the sky. From satellites.”
“You mean cameras?” Tom said.
“Sure. You’ve all seen the satellites?”
We had. Tom had pointed them out, swiftly moving points of light that were like stars, cut loose and falling away as the universe moved on. And he had told us that there were cameras in them, too. But—
“Those satellites carry cameras that can see things no bigger than a rat,” said Jennings. “They really got the eye on us.”
“You could look up and say ‘go to hell!’ and they’d read your lips,” Lee added with a humorless laugh.
“That’s right,” Jennings said. “And at night they have heat sensitive cameras that could pick up something as small as this roof, if you had the fire in here lit on a rainless night.”
People were shaking their heads in disbelief, but Tom and Rafael looked as if they believed it, and as people noticed this there were some angry comments made. “I told you,” Doc said to Tom. Nat and Gabby and a couple others stared at the roof in dismay. To think we were being watched that closely… it was terrible, somehow.
Strangers are good for news, they say, but these two were really something. I wondered if Tom had known about this all along, and had never bothered to tell us, or if he had been ignorant of it too. From his look I guessed he might have known. I wasn’t sure that such surveillance made any difference in a practical way, but it sure felt awful, like a permanent trespass. At the same time it was fascinating. John looked to Tom for confirmation, and after a slight nod from him John said, “Just how do you know that? And what does that have to do with your coming this way, again?”
“We’ve learned some things from Catalina,” Jennings said vaguely. “But that’s not the end of it. Apparently the Japs’ policy includes keeping our communities isolated. They don’t want reunification on any scale whatsoever. Why, when we built the tracks on highway eight east”—he swelled indignantly at the memory—“we built some bridges big and strong as you please. One night around sunset, wham. They blew them up.”
“What?” Tom cried.
“They don’t do it in any big way,” Jennings said. Lee snorted to hear this. “It’s true. Always at dusk—a red streak out of the sky, and thunk, it’s gone. No explosions.”
“Burnt up?” Tom asked.
Lee nodded. “Tremendous heat. The tracks melt, the wood incinerates instantly. Sometimes things around will catch fire, but usually not.”
“We don’t camp near our bridges much.” Jennings cackled, but no one laughed with him. “Anyway, when the Mayor found out about this, he got mad. He wanted to complete the tracks, no matter the bombings. Communications with other Americans is a God-given right! he said. Since they got the upper hand for the time being, and will bomb us when they see us, we’ll just have to see to it that they don’t see us. That’s what he said.”
“We work real light,” Lee said with sudden enthusiasm. “Most of the old pilings are still there for river bridges, and we just put beams across those and lay the rails across the beams. The handcars are light and don’t need much support. After we’ve crossed we take the rails and beams across with us and hide them under trees, and there’s no sign we’ve crossed. A few times for practice and we get so we can cross the easier rivers in a couple of hours.”
“Of course sometimes it doesn’t work,” Jennings added. “Once out near Julian we had bridge pilings burnt right to the water by those red streaks.”
“Once they know we’re at it, they may keep a closer watch,” Lee said. “We don’t know. They’re not consistent. Mayor says there may be disagreements on how to deal with us. Or spotty surveillance. So we can’t predict very well. But we don’t camp near bridges.”
The fact that these two men were struggling with the Japanese, even indirectly, silenced everyone in the room. They had a lot of eyes on them, and Jennings basked in it. Lee didn’t notice. After a bit John pursued his question: “And now that you’ve managed to get up here, what might your mayor want with us?”
Lee was eyeing John sharper and sharper, but Jennings replied in a perfectly friendly way: “Why, to say hello, I reckon. To show that we can get to each other quick if we need to. And he was hoping we could convince you to send one of your valley’s officials to come down and talk about trade agreements and such. And then there’s the matter of extending the tracks farther north—we’d need your permission and cooperation to do that, of course. The Mayor is mighty anxious to establish tracks up to the Los Angeles basin.”
“The scavengers in Orange County would be a problem there,” Rafael said.
“Our valley doesn’t have officials,” John said belligerently.
“Someone to speak for the rest of you, then,” Jennings said mildly.
“The Mayor wants to talk about these scavengers, too,” said Lee. “I take it you folks don’t have much use for them?” No one answered. “We don’t fancy them either. Appears they are helping the Japs.”
Steve had been nudging me so often that my ribs were sore; now he almost busted them. “Did you hear that?” he said in a fierce whisper. “I knew those zopilotes were up to no good. So that’s where they get their silver!” Kathryn and I shushed him so we could hear the rest of the discussion.
Then there was an absence: the roof was silent. Those who wanted to go home dry inquired, and found that Lee and Jennings planned to stay for a day or two. So several people gathered their ponchos and boots and left. Tom invited the San Diegans to stay up at his place, and they accepted. Pa came over to me.
“Is it okay with you if we go home and eat now?”
It looked like the talking was over, so I said, “Let’s do it.”
There was a sense of slowness and confusion to our departures. The strangers had told us so much we had never learned even at the swap meets that it filled our minds, and even finding dry clothes became difficult. After all the projects Lee and Jennings had listed the bathhouse didn’t seem like much anymore. Pa and I got back into our wet clothes, as we had none to spare for the bathhouse, and we hurried home along the hissing brown river. By the time we got home it was drizzling again. We got the fire going good and sat in our beds as we ate our dried fish and tortillas, gabbing about the San Diegans and their train. I fell asleep thinking of bridges made of nothing but train tracks.