We agreed that we did.
“Before we go back out, then, let me show you a little secret.” We stood and followed him out of the room. He bobbed down the hallway to another door, and pulled a key from his vest. “In here is the key to a whole new world.” He unlocked the door, and we followed him into the room, which contained nothing but machine parts, scattered over three tables. On the biggest table was a metal box as big as a boat locker, covered with knobs and dials and gauges, with wires trailing out of it from two openings.
“Short wave radio?” Tom said.
“Exactly,” said Ben, beaming with approval at Tom’s good guess.
“We’ve got a man coming from the Salton Sea to fix this thing,” the Mayor whispered. “And when we do that, we’ll be in touch with the whole country. Every part of the resistance. It will be the start of a new age.”
So we stood there and stared at it for a while, and then tiptoed out of the room. When the Mayor was done locking the door we went outside onto the freeway, where the band was still playing. Instantly the Mayor was surrounded by young women who wanted a dance with him. Tom wandered off toward the west railing, and I went for the drink table. The man behind the table recognized me; he had helped dock our boat when we arrived at the island. “Drink’s on the house,” he declared, and poured me a cup of tequila punch. I took it and walked in circles around the dance floor. The women dancing with the Mayor held close to him and danced in slow circles. I was feeling the drink. The music, the electric lights glaring off the concrete, the bright rugs thrown here and there, the cool breeze, the night sky, the eerie ruined skyscrapers rising blackly from the murk around us—the incredible news of the American resistance—it all combined to put me in a blaze of excitement. I was on the edge of a new world, truly. I twisted through the crowd to Tom, who was leaning against the fat railing, looking down at the water. “Tom, isn’t it grand? Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Let me think, boy,” he said quietly.
So I walked back over to the band, subdued for a moment. But it didn’t last. The girl dancing with the Mayor was the blond who had served our table at the feast. When she gave way to another girl I hurried out among the dancers and swept her into a hug.
“Dance with me too,” I asked her. “I’m from the north.”
“I know,” she said, and laughed. “You sure aren’t one of the boys from around here, and that’s a fact.”
“From the icy north,” I said as I awkwardly swept her into the polka. It made me a little dizzy. “From over glaciers and crevasses and great expanses of snow have I come to your fair civilized town.”
“What?”
“Here from the barbarous north, to see your Mayor, the prophet of a new age.”
“He is like a prophet, isn’t he? Just like from church. My father says he’s made San Diego what it is.”
“I believe it. Did he make a lot of changes when he took office?”
“Oh, he’s been mayor since before I can remember. Since I was two, I think Daddy said.”
“Long time ago.”
“Fourteen years…”
I kissed her briefly, and we danced three or four songs, until my dizziness returned and I had trouble with my bearings. She accompanied me to the tables, and we sat and talked. I chattered on like the most extravagant liar in California; Nicolin himself couldn’t have beat me that night, and the girl laughed and laughed. Later on Jennings and Tom came by, and I was sorry to see them. Jennings said he was taking us to our night’s lodgings on the other end of the platform. Reluctantly I said goodnight to the girl, and followed them drunkenly down the freeway south, singing to myself, “Oomp-pah-pah,” and greeting most of the people we passed. Jennings installed us in one of the bungalows at the south end of the platform, and I chattered at the silent Tom for two or three minutes before I passed out. “A new age, Tom, I’m telling you. A new world.”
8
Shotgun blasts woke us up the next morning. Jumping up to look out the door of our little bungalow, we discovered that the Mayor and several of his men were taking target practice, shooting at plates that one of them was throwing out over the lake. The man threw—the plate arched out—the shooter aimed—bam!—a flat sound like two wet planks slapping together. About one in every three plates burst into white splinters. The rest clipped the sparkling surface of the lake and disappeared. Tom shook his head disdainfully as he regarded this exercise. “They must have found a lot of ammunition somewhere,” he said. Jennings saw us in our doorway and came over and led us to one of the tables set outside the big house. There in the tangy clouds of gunpowder smoke we had a breakfast of bread and milk. Between the bangs of the gun I could hear the American flag snapping smartly in the fresh morning breeze. Every time a plate exploded the men hooted and talked it over. The Mayor was a good shot; he seldom missed, which may have been the result of taking his turn often. The rest of his men might as well have been dumping those plates into the lake by the boxful.
When we were done eating the Mayor gave his shotgun to one of the men around him, and clumped over to us. He looked a bit smaller in the sunlight than he had under the lanterns and electric lights.
“I’m going to send you back to Jennings’ house by way of La Jolla, so you can talk to Wentworth.”
“Who’s he?” Tom asked, without any pretense of politeness.
“He’s our bookmaker. He can tell you more about the situation Ben and I described to you last night. After you’ve talked to him, Jennings and Lee and their crew will take you back north on the train.” He sat down across from us and leaned his thick forearms on the table. “When you get there, you tell your folk just what I said last night.”
“Let me understand you clearly,” Tom said. “You want us to join this resistance effort you’ve heard of.”
“That we’re part of. That’s right.”
“Which means what, in actual terms?”
Danforth stared steadily at Tom’s face. “Every town in the resistance has to do its share. That’s the only way we’ll achieve victory. Of course we’ve got a much larger population down here, and we’ll be providing most of the manpower on this coast, I’m sure. But we need to get through your valley on the tracks, for one thing. And you folks could make raids up the coast a lot easier than we can, living where you do. Or we could base our raids in your river, depending on how we decide to work it. See, there is no set way, you should understand that. But we need you to sign up.”
“What if we don’t want to?”
The Mayor’s jaw tightened. He let Tom’s question hang in the air for a while, and the men around us (target practice being over for the moment) grew silent. “I can’t figure you, old man,” Danforth complained. “You just take my message to the people in your valley.”
“I’ll tell them what you’ve told me, and we’ll let you know our decision.”
“Good enough. I’ll be seeing you again.” He pushed back his chair, stood up and limped into the gleaming white house.
“I think he’s done talking to you,” Jennings said after another long silence. “We can be off.” He led us back to our bungalow, and when Tom had gotten his shoulder bag we walked down the tilted ramp to the boats. Lee and Abe were waiting on the floating dock, and we all got in a boat and cut over the blue water to the lake’s north shore. It was a fine day, sky free of clouds and not much wind. We climbed up to a different train than the one we had arrived on, set on different tracks, ones that took us west along the shore of the lake. “Quite a terminal you have there,” Tom remarked, breaking his silence. Jennings began to describe every mile of the rail system, but since none of the names he mentioned meant anything to me I stopped listening and kept a lookout for the sea. We came to a big marsh just when I expected to spot it, and turned north to skirt the marsh’s edge. A heavily forested hill marked the northern end of the marsh, and we clattered along on a freeway that snaked through a crease to the east of the hill. Lee braked the car—I had learned to stick my fingers in my ears when he did that. “We have to walk to La Jolla,” Jennings said. “No tracks from here.”