I turned from the open door, went back and punched him lightly on the arm. “Yeah. I’ll be back soon, keep sewing.”
I crossed the bridge and went up Basilone to the Shankses’, and kicked around in the piles of burnt wood. Sure enough, buried in soggy ash inside the north wall was a rectangular piece of glass, as wide as my outstretched arms, and nearly that tall. One of their many windows. A corner of it was very wavy near the bottom, and a little pocked—it looked like it had melted some in the fire—but I didn’t care. I crowed at the sky, licked down raindrops, and very carefully returned to the valley, window held before me, dripping. Like a car’s windshield, eh? I stopped and knocked on the door of Rafael’s shop. He was at home; black with grease and hammering like Vulcan. “Rafe, will you help me put this window in the side of our place?”
“Sure,” he said, and looked out at the rain. “You want to do it now?”
“Well…”
“Let’s wait for a good day. We’ll have to be tramping in and out a lot.”
Reluctantly I agreed.
“I always wondered why you didn’t put a window in that place,” he remarked.
“Never had glass to put in it!” I said happily, and was off. And two days later we had a window in our south wall, and the light streamed in over everything, turning every dust mote to silver. There was a lot of dust, too.
We even had good windowsills, thanks to Rafael. He peered at the wavy part of the bottom. “Yep, almost melted this one down, looks like.” He nodded his approval and left, toting his tools over his shoulder, whistling. Pa and I hopped around the house, cleaning up and staring out, going outside to stare in.
“This is wonderful,” Pa said with a blissful smile. “Henry, that was one great idea you had. I can always count on you for the good ideas.”
We shook on it. I felt the strength in his right hand, and it sent a glow right through me. You got to have your father’s approval. I kept pumping his hand up and down till he started to laugh.
It made me think of Steve. He never had that approval, never would have had it. It must have been like walking around with a thorn in your shoe. I feel it in my mind’s foot, Horatio. I began to think that I understood him more, at the same time I felt like I was losing him—the real, immediate Steve, I mean. I could only recall his face well in dreams, when it came back to me perfectly. And it was hard to get him down right in the book; the way he could make you laugh, make you sure you were really living. I sat down to work on it, under the light of our new window. “I’ll have to sew us some good curtains,” Pa said, eyeing the window thoughtfully, measuring it in his mind.
A while after that I joined the small group going to the last swap meet of the year. Winter swap meets weren’t much like the summer ones; there were fewer people there, and less stuff being traded. This time it was drizzling steadily, and everyone there was anxious to get their trading done and go home. Debates over prices quickly turned into arguments, and sometimes fights. The sheriffs had their hands full. Time after time I heard one of them bellowing, “Just make your deal and move on! Come on, what’s the fuss!”
I hurried from canopy to canopy, and in the shelter from the rain did my best to trade for some cloth or old clothing for Pa. All I had to offer were some abalone and a couple of baskets, and it was tough trading.
One of the scavenger camps had gotten a fire going by pouring gas over the wet wood, and a lot of folks congregated under the canopy. I joined them, and after a bit I finally found a scavenger woman willing to trade a pile of ragged clothing for what I had.
After we had counted it out piece for piece she said, “I hear you Onofreans really did it to that crew from down south.”
“What’s this?” I said, jerking slightly.
She laughed, revealing a mouthful of busted brown stumps, and drank from a jar. “Don’t play simpleton with me, grubber.”
“I’m not,” I said. She offered me the jar but I shook my head. “What’s this we’re supposed to have done to the San Diegans?”
“Ha! Supposed to done. See how that washes with them when they come asking why you killed their mayor.”
I felt the cold of that dim afternoon shiver into me, and I went from a crouch to sitting on my butt. I took the jar from her and drank some sour corn mash. “Come on, tell me what you’ve heard,” I said.
“Well,” she said, happy to gossip, “the back country folks say you all took that mayor and his men right up into a Jap ambush.”
I nodded so she’d go on.
“Ah ha! Now he fesses up. So most of them were killed, including that mayor. And they’re pretty hot about it. If they weren’t fighting among themselves so hard to see who takes his place, they’d likely be on you pretty hard. But every man in San Diego wants to be mayor now, or so the back country folk say, and I believe them. Apparently things down there are wild these days.”
I took another gulp of her terrible liquor. It went to my stomach like a big lead sinker. Around us drizzle misted down through the trees, and bigger drops fell from the edge of the canopy.
“Say, grubber, you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I bundled up the rags, thanked her and left, in a hurry to get back to Onofre and give Tom the news.
Another rainy afternoon I sat in Rafael’s workshop, relaxing. I had told Tom what I had heard at the swap meet, and he had told John Nicolin and Rafael, and none of them had seemed overly concerned, which was a relief to me. Now the matter was out of my hands, and I was just passing the time. Kristen and Rebel sat crosslegged before Rafael’s set of double windows, making baskets and gossiping. Rafael sat on a short stool and tinkered with a battery. Tools and machine parts littered the stained floor, and around us stood products of Rafael’s invention and industry: pipes to carry a stove’s heat to another room, a small kiln, an electric generator connected to a bicycle on blocks, and so on.
“The fluids go bad,” Rafael said, answering a question of mine. “All the batteries that were full on the day are long gone. Corroded. But lucky for us, there were some sitting empty in warehouses. There’s no use for them, so it’s easy to trade for one. Some scavengers I know use batteries, and they’ll bring the acids to the meet if I ask them. Only a few people want them, so I get a good deal.”
“And that’s how you got your cart out there running?”
“That’s right. No use for it, though. Not usually.”
We sat quiet for a while, remembering. “So you heard us that night?” I asked.
“Not at first. I was on Basilone and I saw the lights. Then I heard the shooting.”
After a bit I shook my head to clear it, and changed the subject. “What about a radio, Rafe? Have you ever tried to repair one of those?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. They’re too complicated, I guess. And the scavengers ask a lot for them, and they always look an awful wreck.”
“So does most of the stuff you bring back.”
“I guess.”
I said, “You could read how they work in a manual, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t read much, Hank, you know that.”
“But we could help you read. I’d read, and you could figure out what it meant.”
“Maybe so. But we’d have to have a radio, and lots of parts, and I still wouldn’t be sure at all that I could do anything with them.”
“But you would be up for trying it?”
“Oh sure, sure.” He laughed. “You run across a silver mine out there on that beach you been inspecting so close?”
I blushed. “Nah.”
Rafael got up and rooted around in the big wall cupboard. I sat back lazily against the floor pillow behind me. Under the window Kristen and Rebel worked. The baskets they were weaving were made of old brown torrey pine needles, soaked in water so they were flexible again. Rebel took a needle and carefully bunched together the five individual slices of it, so that they made a neat cylinder. Then she curled the needle till it made a flat little wheel, and knotted several pieces of fishing line to it, splaying them out like spokes. Another pine needle was neatened up and tied around the outside of the first one. The first several needles were tied outside the ones before them, to make a flat bottom. It took two needles to make it around the circumference, then three. After that the nubs were set directly on top of each other, and the sides of the basket began to appear.