Tom walked through the trees a distance away, looking for me. I stood and called out, walked over to him. “Let’s go out to the cliff and find those guys,” he said. He still looked low, and I fell in beside him without a word. “Here, around this way,” he said, and led me to the south rim of the canyon.
The trees gave way to shrubs, then to knee high weeds, and then we were on the cliff’s edge. Far below lay the ocean, flat and silvery. The horizon was really out there—it must have been a hundred miles away. So much water! A stiff wind hit me in the face as I looked down the pocked tan cliff, which fell down and down and down in nearly vertical ravines, to a very broad beach, strewn with seaweed. Jennings and Lee were a few hundred yards along the cliff edge, just tiny figures on top of that cliff, throwing rocks down at the beach, though they hit the middle of the cliff instead. Looking at the rocks fall I suddenly knew what the gulls saw, and I felt I was soaring in the sky, high above the world.
To the left Mount Soledad and La Jolla stuck out into the sea, blocking the view farther south. To the north the cliff curved away, until in the distance little cliffs alternated with blank bluish spots, which were marshes. The tiny cliffs and marshes extended in a curve all the way up to the green hills of Pendleton, and up there where the hills met the sea and sky was our valley, our home. It was hard to believe I could see that far. The waves below broke in long curves, leaving their white tracery on the water with just a whisper, a faint kkkkkkkkkkk, kkkkkkkkkkk. Tom was sitting down, his feet swinging over the edge. “The beach is at least twice as wide,” he said in a strangled voice. Talking to himself. “They shouldn’t let the world change so much in one life. It’s too hard.” I moved to get out of earshot, so he could talk without being overheard. But he looked up at me; he was talking to me: “I spent hours down there when time could have stopped, and I wouldn’t have minded.” He tugged his beard. “These cliffs are all different now.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. The setting sun lit the cliffs, so that they threw off an orange light that filled the air. Our shadows stretched far across the field behind us, and the wind was cold. The world seemed a big place, a big, windy, dusky place. Uneasily I paced up and down the cliff edge. The old man stayed where he sat, a little bump on the cliff. The sun sank into the water, drowning bit by bit, paring away until only the emerald wink of the green flash was left. The wind picked up. Jennings and Lee came along the cliff toward us, tiny figures waving their arms.
“Better be getting back,” Jennings called when they got closer. “Elma will be having dinner on the table.”
“Give the old man a minute more,” I said.
“She’ll be mad if dinner has to wait too long,” Jennings said more quietly. But Lee said “Let him be,” and Jennings stood quietly, looking down at the tapestry left by broken waves.
Eventually Tom stirred, walked down to us as if he’d just woken up. The evening star glowed like a lantern in the ocean sky.
“Thanks for bringing us out here,” Tom said.
“Our pleasure,” Jennings replied. “But we’d better head back now. It’s going to be a hell of a walk through those ruins in the dark.”
“We’ll skirt them to the south,” Lee said, “down that road that…” He sucked in his breath hard.
“What’s wrong?” Jennings exclaimed.
Lee pointed north, toward Pendleton.
We all looked, saw nothing but the dark curve of the coast, the first faint stars above—
A white streak fell out of the sky, plunged into the hills far to the north and disappeared.
“Oh, no,” Jennings whispered.
Another streak from the sky. It fell just like a shooting star, except it didn’t slow down or break into pieces; it fell in a straight line, like lightning set against a straightedge, taking no more than three blinks of the eye from the time it appeared high above to the time it silently disappeared into the coastline.
“Pendleton,” Lee said. “They’re busting up our track.” He began to curse in a heavy, furious low voice.
“Shit!” Jennings shouted. “Shit! God damn those people, God damn them. Why can’t they leave us alone—”
Three more streaks fell from the sky, one after another, landing farther and farther north, defining the curve of the coast. I closed my eyes and red bars swam around in the black. I opened them to see another streak burst into the world up there among the stars, plummeting down instantly onto the land.
“Where are they coming from?” I asked, and was surprised to hear my voice shake. I was afraid, I think, that they would be bombs like those that had fallen on the day.
“Airplane,” Jennings said grimly. “Or satellite, or Catalina, or halfway around the world. How the fuck would we know?”
“They’re hitting all over Pendleton,” Lee said in a bitter voice.
“They’ve stopped,” Tom pointed out. In the dark I couldn’t read his expression, and after Lee’s and Jennings’ shouts his voice was calm. We watched the sky for another one. Nothing.
“Let’s go,” Lee finally croaked. Slowly we crossed the weed field on the edge of the cliff in single file. Then into the forest. Halfway back to the train Jennings, walking ahead of me, said, “The Mayor ain’t going to like this one little bit.”
9
Jennings was right. The Mayor didn’t like it. He went north himself to inspect the damage, and when he returned to Jennings’ home leading his little crew of assistants, he told us how much he didn’t like it. “I’ve been to look, and the rails where those bombs hit are melted,” he shouted, stretching the seams of a tight blue coat to pound on the dining table. Limping around the room, pausing to shout in the impassive faces of Lee and Jennings, waving his fists overhead as he cursed the Japanese… oh, he was in a state all right. I stayed behind Tom and took care to keep quiet. “Puddles of iron! And the dirt around it like black brick. Trees burnt to a crisp.” He stumped over to Lee and waved a finger in Lee’s face. “You men must have left some sign that you were working on those tracks, something that could be seen in the satellite pictures. I hold you responsible for that.”
Lee stood with his mouth clamped tight, staring angrily past the Mayor. Behind that I noticed that a couple of the Mayor’s men (Ben for one) looked pleased at Lee’s chastisement, and gave each other sneering glances. Jennings, bold in his own home, stepped up to protest.
“Most of that line goes through forest, Mayor, and it’s under trees so it can’t be seen from above. You saw that. In the open patches we didn’t touch a thing, even if we had to work the cars through brush. And the bridges look exactly like they did before. Not a thing had been changed except the track, and we had to change that to make it passable. There was nothing that could be seen from above, I swear.”
Jennings went on spouting lies and contradictions like that for a while, and when he had convinced the Mayor of his point, the Mayor got even angrier. “Spies,” he hissed. “Someone in Onofre must have told the scavengers in Orange County, and they told the Japs.” He tested the strength of Jennings’ table again, wham. “We can’t have that. That sort of thing has to be stopped.”
“How do you know the spies aren’t here in San Diego?” Tom asked.
Danforth and Ben and the rest of the Mayor’s men glared at Tom. Even Jennings and Lee looked shocked.