The night we picked to do it, fog was smoking up off the ocean and gusting onshore, under a quarter moon that gave all the white mist patches a faint glow. I waited just inside the door of our cabin, ignoring Pa’s snores. I had read him to sleep an hour before, and now he lay heavily on his side, calloused fingers resting on the crease in the side of his head. Pa is lame, and simple, on account of tangling with a horse when I was young. My ma always used to read him to sleep, and when she died Pa sent me up to Tom’s to carry on with my learning, saying in his slow way that it would be good for both of us. Right he was, I suppose.
I warmed my hands now and then over the gray coals of the stove fire, as I had the cabin door partway open, and it was cold. Outside, the big eucalyptus down the path blew in and out of visibility. Once I thought I saw figures standing under it; then a clammy puff of fog drifted onto the house, smelling like the rivermouth flats, and when it cleared away the tree stood alone. Except for Pa’s snoring there was no sound but the quiet patter of fog dew, sliding off leaves onto our roof.
W-whooo, w-whooo. Nicolin’s call startled me from a doze. It was a pretty good imitation of the big canyon owls, although the owls only called out once a year or so, so it didn’t make much sense as a secret call in my opinion. It did beat a leopard’s cough, however, which had been Nicolin’s first choice, and which might have gotten him shot.
I slipped out the door and hurried down the path to the eucalyptus. Nicolin had Del’s two shovels over his shoulders; Del and Gabby stood behind him.
“We’ve got to get Mando,” I said.
Del and Gabby looked at each other. “Costa?” Nicolin said.
I stared at him. “He’ll be waiting for us.” Mando and I were younger than the other three—me by one year, Mando by three—and I sometimes felt obliged to stick up for him.
“His house is on the way anyway,” Nicolin told the others. We took the river path to the bridge, crossed and hiked up the hill path leading to the Costas’.
Doc Costa’s weird oildrum house looked like a little black castle out of one of Tom’s books—squat as a toad, and darker than anything natural in the fog. Nicolin made his call, and pretty soon Mando came out and hustled down to us.
“You still going to do it tonight?” he asked, peering around at the mist.
“Sure,” I said quickly, before the others seized on his hesitation as an excuse to leave him. “You got the lantern?”
“I forgot.” He went back inside and got it. When he returned we walked back down to the old freeway and headed north.
We walked fast to warm up. The freeway was two pale ribbons in the mist, heavily cracked underfoot, black weeds in every crack. Quickly we crossed the ridge marking the north end of our valley, and narrow San Mateo Valley immediately to the north of the ridge. After that, we were walking up and down the steep hills of San Clemente. We held close together, and didn’t say much. On each side of us ruins sat in the forest: walls of cement blocks, roofs held up by skeletal foundations, tangles of wire looping from tree to tree—all of it dark and still. But we knew the scavengers lived up here somewhere, and we hurried along as silently as the ghosts Del and Gab had been joking about, a mile back where they’d felt more comfy. A wet tongue of fog licked over us as the freeway dropped into a broad canyon, and we couldn’t see a thing but the broken surface of the road. Creaks emerged from the dark wet silence around us, as well as an occasional flurry of dripping, as if something had brushed against leaves.
Nicolin stopped to examine an offramp curving down to the right. “This is it,” he hissed. “Cemetery’s at the top of this valley.”
“How do you know?” Gab said in his ordinary voice, which sounded awfully loud.
“I came up here and found it,” Nicolin said. “How do you think I knew?”
We followed him off the highway, pretty impressed that he had come up here alone. Even I hadn’t heard about that one. Down in the forest there were more buildings than trees, almost, and they were big buildings. They were falling down every way possible; windows and doors knocked out like teeth, with shrubs and ferns growing in every hole; walls slumped; roofs piled on the ground like barrows. The fog followed us up this street, rustling things so they sounded like thousands of scurrying feet. Wires looped over poles that sometimes tilted right down to the road; we had to step over them, and none of us touched the wires.
A coyote’s bark chopped the drippy silence and we all froze. Was that a coyote or a scavenger? But nothing followed it, and we took off again, more nervous than ever. The street made some awkward switchbacks at the head of the valley, and once we got up those, we were on the canyon-cut plateau that once made up the top of San Clemente. Up here were houses, big ones, all set in rows like fish out to dry, as if there had been so many people that there wasn’t room to give each family a decent garden. A lot of the houses were busted and overgrown, and some were gone entirely—just floors, with pipes sticking out of them like arms sticking up out of a grave. Scavengers had lived here, and had used the houses one by one for firewood, moving on when their nest was burned; it was a practice I had heard about, but I’d never before seen the results first hand, the destruction and waste.
Nicolin stopped at a street crossing filled with a bonfire pit. “Up this one here.”
We followed him north, along a street on the plateau’s edge. Below us the fog was like another ocean, putting us on the beach again so to speak, with occasional white waves running up over us. The houses lining the street stopped, and a fence began, metal rails connecting stone piles. Beyond the fence the rippling plateau was studded with squared stones, sticking out of tall grass: the cemetery. We all stopped and looked. In the mist it was impossible to see where it ended. Finally we stepped over a break in the fence and walked into the thick grass.
They had lined up the graves as straight as their houses. Suddenly Nicolin faced the sky and yowled his coyote yowl, yip yip yoo-ee-oo-ee-oo-eeee, yodeling as crazily as any bush dog.
“Stop that,” Gabby said, disgusted. “That’s all we need is dogs howling at us.”
“Or scavengers,” Mando added fearfully.
Nicolin laughed. “Boys, we’re standing in a silver mine, that’s all.” He crouched down to read a gravestone; too dark; he hopped over to another. “Look how big this one is.” He put his face next to it and with the help of his fingers read it. “Here we got a Mister John Appleby. 1904–1984. Nice big stone, died the right time—living in one of them big houses down the road—rich for sure, right?”
“There should be a lot written on the stone,” I said. “That’s proof he was rich.”
“There is a lot,” Nicolin said. “Be-loved father, I think… some other stuff. Want to give him a try?”
For a while no one answered. Then Gab said, “Good as any other.”
“Better,” Nicolin replied. He put down one shovel and hefted the other. “Let’s get this grass out of the way.” He started stabbing the shovel into the ground, making a line cut. Gabby and Del and Mando and I just stood and stared at him. He looked up and saw us watching. “Well?” he demanded quickly. “You want some of this silver?
So I walked over and started cutting; I had wanted to before, but it made me nervous. When we had the grass pulled away so the dirt was exposed, we started digging in earnest. When we were in up to our knees we gave the shovels to Gabby and Del, panting some. I was sweating easily in the fog, and I cooled off fast. Clods of the wet clay squashed under my feet. Pretty soon Gabby said, “It’s getting dark down here; better light the lantern.” Mando got out his spark rasp and set to lighting the wick.