Big drops of rain hit the window. I watched them run down the glass, and wished my home had a window. Even with the door closed and dark clouds filling the sky, all the books and crockery and lanterns and even the walls gleamed silvery grey, as if they all contained a light of their own.
“I don’t want you fighting at the swap meet,” Tom said.
Steve shook his head. “We won’t if we don’t have to.”
Tom frowned and changed the subject. “You got your lesson memorized?”
Steve shook his head. “I’ve had to work too much… I’m sorry.”
After a bit I said, “You know what it looks like to me?”
“What what looks like,” Tom asked.
“The coastline here. It looks like one time there was nothing but hills and valleys, all the way out to the horizon. Then one day some giant drew a straight line down it all, and everything west of the line fell down and the ocean came rushing in. Where the line crossed a hill there’s a cliff, and where it crossed a valley there’s a marsh and a beach. But always a straight line, see? The hills don’t stick out into the ocean, and water doesn’t come and fill in the valleys.”
“That’s a faultline,” Tom said dreamily, eyes closed as if he were consulting books in his head. “The earth’s surface is made up of big plates that are slowly sliding around. Truth! Very slowly—in your lifetime it might move an inch—in mine two, hee hee—and we’re next to a fault where the plates meet. The Pacific plate is sliding north, and the land here south. That’s why you get the straight line there. And earthquakes—you’ve felt them—those are the two plates slipping, grinding against each other. One time… one time in the old time, there was an earthquake that shattered every city on this coast. Buildings fell like they did on the day. Fires burned and there was no water to put them out. Freeways like that one down there pointed at the sky, and no one could get in to help, at first. For a lot of people it was the end. But when the fires were burned out… they came from everywhere. They brought in giant machines and material, and they used the rubble that was all that was left of the cities. A month later every one of those cities was built back up again, just as they had been before, so exactly that you couldn’t even tell there had been an earthquake.”
“Ah come on,” said Steve.
The old man shrugged. “That’s what it was like.”
We sat and looked through the slant-lines of water at the valley below. Black brooms of rain swept the whitecapped sea. Despite the years of work done in the valley, despite the square fields by the river, and the little bridge over it, despite the rooftops here and there, wood or tile or telephone wire—despite all of that, it was the freeway that was the main sign that humans lived in the valley… the freeway, cracked and dead and half silted over and worthless. The huge strips of concrete changed from whitish to wet gray as we watched. Many was the time when we had sat in Tom’s house drinking tea and looking at it, Steve and me and Mando and Kathryn and Kristen, during our lessons or sitting out one shower or another, and many was the time that the old man had told us tales of America, pointing down at the freeway and describing the cars, until I could almost see them flashing back and forth, big metal machines of every color and shape just flying along, weaving in and out amongst each other and missing dreadful crashes by an inch as they hurried to do business in San Diego or Los Angeles, red and white headlights glaring off the wet concrete and winking out over the hill, plumes of spray spiraling back and enveloping the cars following so that no one could see properly, and Death sat in every passenger seat, waiting for mistakes—so Tom would tell it, until it would actually seem strange to me to look down and see the road so empty.
But today Tom just sat there, letting out long breaths, looking over at Steve now and then and shaking his head. Sipping his tea in silence. It made me feel low; I wished he would tell another story. I would have to walk home in the rain, and Pa would have made the fire too small and our cabin would be chill, and long after our meal of bread and fish was done, I’d have to hunch over the coals to get warm, in the drafty dark… Below us the freeway lay like a road of giants, gray in the wet green of the forest, and I wondered if cars would drive over it ever again.
3
Swap meets brought out most of the people in Onofre, to get the caravan ready to go. A score of us stood on the freeway at the takeoff point on Basilone Ridge, some piling fish onto the boat trailers, some still running down to the valley and back again with forgotten stuff, others yelling at the dogs, who were for once useful, as they pulled the boat trailers. Around the trailers folks bickered over space. The trailers, light metal racks on a pair of wheels, were good wains, but there was a shortage of room on them. So there was old Tom threatening anyone who tried to change the wasteful stowing of his honey jars, and Kathryn defending her loaves of bread with the same threats and curses, and Steve commandeering whole trailers for the fish. Mostly we took fish to the swap meet—nine or ten trailers of them, fresh and dried—and my task was to help Rafael and Steve and Doc and Gabby to load the racks. Fish were slapping and dogs were yapping, and Steve was giving orders right and left to everyone but Kathryn, who would have kicked him, and overhead a flock of gulls screeched at us as they realized they weren’t going to get a meal. It drove the dogs wild. It all reached a final pitch of excited yelling, and we were off.
On the coast the sky was the color of sour milk, but as we turned off the freeway and moved inland up San Mateo Valley, the one just north of ours, the sun began to break through here and there, and splashes of sunlight made the green hills blaze. Our caravan stretched out as the road got thinner—it was an ancient asphalt thing, starred by potholes that we had filled with stones to make our travel easier.
Steve and Kathryn walked at the end of the line of trailers, arms around each other. Sitting on the trailer end and letting one foot drag over asphalt, I watched them. I had known Kathryn Mariani for most of my life, and for most of my life I had been scared of her. The Marianis lived next to Pa and me, so I saw her all the time. She was the oldest of five girls, and when I was younger it seemed like she was always bossing us around, or giving someone a quick slap for trying to snatch bread or sneak through the cornfields. And she was big, too—after felling me with a kick of her heavy boot, as she had done more than once, her freckled ugly glare had inspected me from what seemed a tremendous height. I thought then that she was the meanest girl alive. It was only in the previous couple of years, when I grew as tall as her, that I got to the vantage point where I could see she was pretty. A snub nose doesn’t look so good from below (looks like a pig snout, to tell the truth), nor a big wide mouth—but from level on she looked all right. And the year before she and Steve had become lovers, so that the other girls snickered and wondered how long it would be before they had to get married; we had become better friends as a result, and I got to know her as more than the scarecrow with a rolling pin that she had been to me. Now we kidded each other about the old times:
“Guess I’m going to lunch off that bread, I’m sure no one will mind.”
“You do and I’ll kick your butt like I used to.” It made Nicolin laugh. He was a lot happier on these trips, with his family left behind. When the dogs yelped he jogged up and tussled with them till they were grinning and simpering and slobbering over him again, ready to haul all day for the fun of it, because of the way Steve was laughing.
We made the swap meet about midday. The site was a grassy-floored meadow, filled with well-spaced eucalyptus and ironwood trees. When we got there the sun was out, more than half the attending villages were already there, and in the dappled light under the trees were colored canopies and flags, trailers and car bodies and long tables, scores of people in their finest clothes, and plumes of woodsmoke, breaking through the trees from a number of campfires. The dogs went wild.