“Much later the moon rose, and still we walked through the forest together. Then I heard gunshots ahead, and the beast’s purring stopped, its shoulder muscles tensed. In a clearing illumined by moonlight I made out several horses, and around them men—Indians, I guessed, for my party had no horses with it. More gunshots sounded from trees on the other side of the clearing, and I surmised that my friends were there, for just as we had no horses, the Cuyamuca Indians had no guns. The tiger shrugged off my hand with a twitch of his fur, a twitch that no doubt usually removed flies, and strode ahead of me, down toward the clearing.”
“Hey!” Tom cried, hurrying around the corner of the hallway. He held one of the books printed on the hand letter press firmly before him, and gestured with it at Wentworth.
“Which one have you found?” Wentworth inquired. He didn’t seem disturbed by the interruption of his story, but I was squirming.
“An American Around the World,” Tom read. “Being an Account of a Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 2030 to 2039. By Glen Baum.”
Wentworth uttered his sharp, spontaneous laugh. “Very good. You have found the masterpiece of our line, I believe. Besides being an intrepid adventurer, Glen can tell a tale.”
“But is it true? An American went around the world and returned just eight years ago?” Put that way, I understood why Tom was so flabbergasted—I had been stuck with the tiger in the back country—and I got out of my chair to have a look at this book. Sure enough, there it was: An American Around the World, right there on the cover.
Wentworth was smiling at Tom. “Glen sailed to Catalina in 2030, that is certain. And he reappeared in San Diego one night in the fall of 2039.” His egg eyes flickered and something passed between the two men that I didn’t catch, for Tom laughed out loud. “The rest you have between those covers.”
“I had no idea this kind of stuff was still being written,” Tom said. “How wonderful.”
“It is, isn’t it.”
“Where is this Glen Baum now?”
“He took off for the Salton Sea last fall. Before he left he told me the title of his next book: Overland to Boston. I expect it will be as interesting as the one you hold.” He stood up. Down the hall I could hear Jennings, joking with the woman in the mimeograph room. Wentworth led us back into the library.
“So what happened to you and the tiger?” I asked.
But he was rooting in a box on the bottom shelf of one case. “We have a lot of copies of that book. Take one with you back to San Onofre, courtesy of the New Green Tiger Press.” He offered one of the leather-bound books to Tom.
Tom said, “Thank you sir. This means a lot to me.”
“Always glad to get new readers, I assure you.”
“I’ll make all my students read it,” said Tom, grinning as if he’d just been handed a block of silver.
“You won’t have to make us,” I said. “But what about the tiger that time—”
Jennings and Lee entered the room. “Lunch time,” Jennings cried. Apparently it was the habit in San Diego to eat a meal in the middle of the day. “Have a good tour?” Tom and I told him that we had, and showed him our book.
“Another thing,” Wentworth said, groping in a different box. “Here is a blank book, in case you decide to write that memoir.” He riffled the pages of a bound book, showing them to be blank. “Give it back to us full, and we will set about the task of reproducing it.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Tom. “You’ve given us enough already.”
“Please, take it.” Wentworth held it out to him. “We have plenty of these. No obligation to write—but if you decide to, then the materials will be at hand.”
“Well, thanks,” Tom said. After a moment’s hesitation he put the two volumes in his shoulder bag.
“Shall we have lunch out on their lawn?” Jennings asked, holding aloft a long loaf of bread.
“I must return to my class,” Wentworth said. “But feel free to enjoy the courtyard.” And to Tom, as he led us to the door: “Remember what I said about that memoir, sir.”
“I will. You’re doing great work here.”
“Thank you. Keep teaching people to read, or it will all go to naught. Now I must get back. Goodbye, thank you for visiting, goodbye.” He turned and went into the front room, where his students were still kneading the paper pulp.
After lunch in the sun-filled salt air of the courtyard, we hiked back over Mount Soledad to the tracks, and pumped the car northward up and down steep hills. A few miles up the tracks Tom had Lee apply the brakes. “Mind if we go out to the cliffs for a look around?”
Jennings looked doubtful, and I said, “Tom, we can look off cliffs when we get home.”
“Not like these.” Tom looked at Jennings. “I want to show him.”
“Sure,” Jennings said. “I told the wife we’d be back for supper, but she won’t have that ready till after dark anyway.”
So we got off the car again, and made our way westward to the coast, through a dense forest of torrey pine and brambleberry. Pretty soon we came upon an outcropping of tall stone crags. When we got in among them I saw they were concrete. They were buildings. The walls that remained—some of them as high as our beach cliff—were surrounded by piles of concrete rubble. Blocks as big as my house rose out of the ferns and brambleberries. Jennings was talking a streak about the place, and Tom held me by the arm and told the two San Diegans to go on ahead of us to the cliff. “He’s got it all wrong,” he said sourly when Jennings was out of earshot.
After they were gone I wandered in the ruins. A bomb had gone off nearby, I reckoned; the north side of every standing wall was black, and as soft and crumbly as sandstone. In the rubble and weeds I saw shards of glass, angled bits of metal both rusty and shiny, strips of plastic, a ribcage from a skeleton, melted glass tubes, metal boxes, slate boards… Rafael would have loved it. But after a time I felt oppressed, like I had in San Clemente. This was no different from that: the ruins of the old time, the signs of a giant past that was now shattered bits of rock covered by weeds, a past so big that not all our efforts would ever get us back to it, or to anything like it. Ruins like these told us how little our lives were, and I hated them.
I saw Tom in the outbreak of concrete crags to the north, wandering aimlessly from ruin to ruin, tripping over blocks and then staring down at them like they’d jumped into his path. He was tugging on his beard as if he wanted to pull it out. Unaware of my presence, he was talking to himself, uttering short violent phrases that all ended with a sharp tug on the beard. As I got closer I saw that all the thousand lines in his face drooped down. I’d never seen him look so desolate.
“What was this place, Tom?”
I thought he wouldn’t answer. He looked away, pulled his beard. “It was a school. My school.”
One time a couple of summers before, we had all gathered under the torrey pine in Tom’s junkyard, Steve and Kathryn, Gabby and Mando and Kristen, Del and little Teddy Nicolin, all talking at once under sunny skies, we were, and fighting over who got to read Tom Sawyer next, and plotting to tickle Kristen till she cried, and the old man sitting with his back against the treetrunk, laughing and laughing. “All right, shut up you kids, shut up now, school’s in session.”
I let Tom be and walked west across the faint remains of a road, into trees where little tangles of rotted beams marked the sites of old buildings. Buildings you could believe people had once put up, had once inhabited. I sat at the edge of a canyon that dropped to the sea. I could tell that the cliffs were going to be big ones, because I was still far above the water, and the canyon was short. The sun got lower. I wished I was home.