Inside the front door was an entryway two stories tall, carpeted red, with red and gold wallpaper on the walls, and a glass candle holder hanging from the ceiling. The staircase against one wall was carpeted as well, and it had a bannister of carved and varnished oak. Wide-eyed, I said, “Is this the Mayor’s house?”
The San Diegans erupted with laughter. I felt my cheeks burn. Jennings put his arm around my shoulders with a whoop. “You’ve proved yourself tonight, Henry my boy. We aren’t laughing at you; it’s just… well, when you see the Mayor’s place, you’ll understand why. This here is my house. Come on in and clean up and meet the wife, and we’ll have a good meal to celebrate your arrival.”
7
After breakfast Tom and I slept for most of the day, on old couches in the Jennings’ front room. Late in the day Jennings bustled in and woke us, saying, “Quick now, quick. I’ve been to talk to the Mayor—he’s invited you to a dinner and a conference, and he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Shut up and let them get ready,” Jennings’ wife said as she looked over his shoulder at us. She looked remarkably like him, short, thick and cheerful. “When you’re ready I’ll show you to the bathroom.” Tom and I followed her to it, and relieved ourselves in a working water toilet. When we were done Jennings hustled us outside. Lee and the short man were already on one of the train cars. We joined them, and they pumped us south. Apparently in the light of day the tubby man felt more sociable, and he introduced himself as Abe Tonklin.
We rattled over tracks laid on the cracked concrete of another freeway, under a canopy of torrey pine and eucalyptus, redwood and oak. The car crunched swiftly through alternating shadows and slanted beams of sunlight, and now and then we passed a big clearing in the forest, packed with crops, usually corn. Once I waved at a man standing in one of these yellowy green expanses, and then realized he was a scarecrow.
Over the roar of wheel on rail Jennings shouted, “We’re almost there.” We topped a rise and below us was a narrow lake, stretching right to left in front of us. It was as if a marsh similar to the ones to the north had flooded. Scattered on the lake’s surface were towering buildings, skyscrapers, at least a dozen of them. One of them, to the left, was a giant circular wall. And in the middle of the lake stood a piece of freeway, up on concrete pilings above the water. A white house stood on this platform. Flying above this house I could make out a little American flag, snapping in the breeze. I looked at Tom, my mouth hanging open in amazement. Tom’s eyes were big. I took in the sight again. Flanked by forested hills, lit by the low sun, the long lake and its fantastic collection of drowned and ruined giants was the most impressive remnant of the old time I had ever laid eyes on. They were so big! Once again I had that feeling—like a hand squeezing my heart—that I knew what it had been like…
“Now that’s the Mayor’s house,” Jennings said.
“By God, it’s Mission Valley,” Tom said.
“That’s right,” Jennings replied, as proudly as if he’d made it all himself. Tom laughed. The tracks came to an end, and Lee braked the car with the usual nerve-jangling screech. We got off and followed the San Diegans down the freeway. It led right into the lake and disappeared. The piece of freeway standing on stilts in the lake’s center was on a line with it, and in a notch of the hills forming the opposite shore I saw the gray concrete rising out of the lake again. All at once I understood that the section of freeway on stilts in the lake was all that was left of a bridge that had spanned the whole valley. Rather than have their road dip into the valley and rise again, they had placed it on towers for well over a mile, from hillside to hillside—just to avoid a drop and rise for their cars! I was stunned; I stared at it; I couldn’t get a grasp on the sort of thinking that would even imagine such a bridge.
“You okay?” Lee asked me.
“Huh? Yeah, sure. Just looking at the lake.”
“Quite a sight. Maybe we can take a sail around it in the morning.” This was as friendly as Lee had been to me, and I saw that he appreciated my astonishment.
Where the road plunged into the lake a large floating dock moored a score of rowboats and small catboats. Lee and Abe led us to one of the larger rowboats. We got in, and Abe rowed us toward the freeway island. As we got closer Jennings answered Tom’s questions: “The rains washed mountains of dirt down to the rivermouth, which was bracketed by a pair of long jetties and crossed by several roads—just generally obstructed. So the dirt stuck there and formed a plug. A big dam. What? There’s still a channel through to the ocean, but it’s on top of the plug, so we got the lake back here. It’s well above sea level. Runs all the way to El Cajon.”
Tom laughed. “Ha! We always said a good rain would flood this valley, but this… What about the overpass out here?”
“The first floods were pretty violent, they say, and the sides of the hills got ripped away, so the towers holding the road fell. Only the center ones held. We blasted the wreckage hanging from the center section so it would look cleaner. More planned, you know.”
“Sure.”
As we rowed under it I could see the broken end of the freeway, yellow in the late sun. Rusted metal rods stuck out from the pocked concrete, twisting down at their ends. The platform was about fifteen feet thick, and its bottom was twenty feet or so above the sunbeaten lake surface. The platform had been part of an intersection, and narrow ramps branched from the main north-south fragment to descend to the valley floor. Now these curving side roads served as convenient boat ramps for us. We glided to the eastern ramp, and were moored by a few men who were there to greet us. We stepped from the front of the boat onto the concrete ramp. The red sun gleamed between two towers, and the breeze ruffled our hair. From the dwellings above we heard laughter and voices, and a tinkling of crockery.
“We’re late,” Lee said. “Let’s go.” As we ascended the ramp I noticed that it tilted side to side, as well as up. Tom told me, when I mentioned it, that this had been done to keep the cars coming down the ramp at high speed from skidding off the side. I looked over the edge at the water below and thought that the old Americans must have been fools.
Up on the wide and level north-south platform we could see the houses built on it. The big house stood at the north end, and the cluster of smaller buildings, each about the size of my home, were arranged in a horseshoe at the south end. Half of the big house was only one story tall, and on the roof of this part, facing us, was a porch with a blue railing. Over the railing leaned several men, watching us. Jennings waved to them as we approached. I walked next to Tom, suddenly nervous.
Lee and Jennings led Tom and me into the big house. Once inside Jennings took a comb from a pocket and ran it through his hair. Lee grinned sardonically at this grooming, and pushed past Jennings to lead us up a broad staircase. On the upper floor we walked down a dim hallway to a room containing a lot of chairs and a piano. Large glass doors in the south wall of this room opened onto the roof porch, and we walked through them.
The Mayor stood in a group of men by the railing, watching us approach. He was a big man, tall, wide-shouldered and deep-chested. His forearms were thick with muscle, and under his plaid wool pants I could see his thighs were the same. One of his men helped him to shrug into a plain blue coat. His head looked too small for his body. “Jennings, who are these men?” he said in a high, scratchy voice. Underneath his black moustache was a small mouth, a weak chin. But as he adjusted his collar he looked us over with sharply intelligent, pale blue eyes.