Pacific Edge

2

2 March 2012, 8 A.M. I decided that as a gesture to its spirit I would write my book outdoors. Unfortunately it’s snowing today. The balcony above ours makes a sort of roof, however, so I am sticking to my resolve. Roll out computer stand, extension cords, chair. Sit bundled in down booties, bunting pants, down jacket, down hood. Plug in and pound away. The mind’s finest hour. My hands are cold.

“Stark bewölkt, Schnee.” We haven’t seen the sun all year, even the Zürchers are moaning. Suddenly a dream comes back to me: Owens Valley in spring bloom.

Writing a utopia. Certainly it’s a kind of compensation, a stab at succeeding where my real work has failed. Or at least an attempt to clarify my beliefs, my desires.

I remember in law school, thinking that the law determined the way the world was run, that if I learned it I could change things. Then the public defender’s office, the case loads, the daily grind. The realization that nothing I did there would ever change things. And it wasn’t much better at the CLE, or doing lawsuits for the Socialist Party, miserable remnant that it was. So many attacks from so many directions, we were lucky if we could hold on to the good that already existed. No chance to improve things. Nothing but a holding action. Really it was a relief when this post-doc of Pam’s gave me the chance to quit.

Now I’ll change the world in my mind.

Our balcony overlooks a small yard, surrounded by solid brick buildings. A massive linden dominates smaller trees and shrubs. Wet black branches thrust into a white sky. Below me are two evergreens, one something like a holly, the other something like a juniper; the birds are clustered in these, fluffed quivering feather-balls, infrequently cheeping. Between two buildings, a slice of Zürich: Grossmünster and Fraumünster and their copper-green spires, steely lake, big stone buildings of the university, the banks, the medieval town. Iron sound of a tram rolling downhill.

I’m writing a utopia in a country that runs as efficiently as Züri’s blue trams, even though it has four languages, two religions, a nearly useless landscape. Conflicts that tear the rest of the world apart are solved here with the coolest kind of rationality, like engineers figuring out a problem in materials stress. How much torque can society take before it snaps, Dr. Science? Ask the Swiss.

Maybe they’re too good at it. Refugees are pouring in, Ausländer nearly half the population they say, and so the National Action party has won some elections, become part of the ruling coalition. With a bullet. Return Switzerland to the Swiss! they cry. And in fact yesterday we got an einladung from the Fremdenkontrolle der Stadt Zürich. The Stranger Control. Time to renew our Ausländerausweise. It’s down to every four months now. I wonder if they’ll try to kick us out this time.

For now, all is calm. White flakes falling. I write in a kind of pocket utopia, a little island of calm in a maddened world. Perhaps it will help make my future seem more plausible to me—perhaps, remembering Switzerland, it will even seem possible.

But there’s no such thing as a pocket utopia.

The next morning Nadezhda joined Kevin and Doris for the visit to Oscar Baldarramma. They biked over in heavy traffic (voices, squeaky brakes, whirring derailleurs) and coasted down Oscar’s street, gliding through the spaced shadows of liquid amber trees, so that it seemed the morning blinked.

Oscar’s house was flanked by lemon and avocado trees. Un-harvested lemons lay rotting in the weeds, giving the air a sweet-sour scent. The house itself was an old stucco and wood suburban thing, roofed with concrete tiles. A separate garden and bike shed stood under an avocado tree at the back of the lot, and a bit of the house’s roof extended before the shed: “Carport,” Kevin said, eyeing it with interest. “Pretty rare.”

Oscar greeted them in a Hawaiian shirt slashed with yellow and blue stripes, and purple shorts. He ignored Doris’s exaggerated squint, and led them inside for a tour. It was a typical tract house, built in the 1950s. Doris remarked that it was a big place for one person, and Oscar promptly hunched over and took a long sideways step, waggling his eyebrows fiercely and brandishing an invisible cigar: “Always available for boarding!”

Kevin and Doris stared at him, and he straightened up. “Groucho Marx,” he explained.

Kevin and Doris looked at each other. “I’ve heard the name,” Doris said. Kevin nodded.

Oscar glanced at Nadezhda, who was grinning. His mouth made a little O. “In that case…” he murmured, and turned to show them the next room.

When the tour was finished Kevin asked what Oscar wanted done.

“The usual thing.” Oscar waved a hand. “Big clear walls that make it impossible to tell if you’re indoors or out, an atrium three stories tall, perhaps an aviary, solar air conditioning and refrigeration and waste disposal, some banana trees and cinnamon bushes, a staircase with gold bannisters, a library big enough to hold twenty thousand books, and a completely work-free food supply.”

“You don’t want to garden?” Doris asked.

“I detest gardening.”

Doris rolled her eyes. “That’s silly, Oscar.”

Oscar nodded solemnly. “I’m a silly guy.”

“Where will you get your vegetables?”

“I will buy them. You recall the method.”

“Huh,” Doris said, not amused.

They viewed the back yard in a frosty silence. Kevin tried to get Oscar to speak seriously about his desires, but had little success. Oscar spoke of libraries, wood paneling, fireplaces, comfortable little nooks where one could huddle on long winter nights…. Kevin tried to explain that winter nights in the region weren’t all that long, or cold. That he tended to work in a style that left a lot of open space, making homes that functioned as nearly self-sufficient little farms. Oscar seemed agreeable, although he still spoke in the same way about what he wanted. Kevin scratched his head, squinted at him. Buddha, babbling.

Finally Nadezhda asked Oscar about the previous night’s council meeting.

“Ah yes. Well—I’m not sure how much you know about the water situation here?”

She stood to attention, as if reciting a lesson. “The American West begins where the annual rainfall drops below ten inches.”

“Exactly.”

And therefore, Oscar went on, much of the United States was a desert civilization; and like all previous desert civilizations, it was in danger of foundering when its water systems began to clog. Currently some sixty million people lived in the American West, where the natural supplies of water might support two or three. But even the largest reservoirs silt up, and most of the West, existing not just on surface water, had mined its groundwater like oil—thousands of years of accumulated rainfall, pumped out of the ground in less than a century. The great aquifers were drying up, and the reservoirs were holding less each day; while drought, in their warming climate, was more and more common. So the search for water was becoming desperate.

The solution was on a truly gigantic scale, which pleased the Army Corps of Engineers no end. Up in the Northwest, the Columbia River poured enormous amounts of water into the Pacific every year. Washington, Oregon and Idaho squawked mightily, remembering how Owens Valley had withered when Los Angeles gained the rights to its water; but the Columbia carried more than a hundred times the water those states were ever expected to need, and their fellow states to the south were truly in need. The Corps of Engineers loved the idea: dams, reservoirs, pipelines, canals—a multi-billion-dollar system, rescuing the sand-choked civilizations of the south. Grand! Lovely! What could be nicer? “It’s what we’ve done in California for years; instead of moving to where the water is, we move the water to where the people are.”

Nadezhda nodded. “We have this tradition in my country too. There was a plan to turn the Volga River right around, the whole thing, and send it south for irrigation purposes. Only when it seemed that world weather patterns might be shifted was the plan abandoned.” She smiled. “Or maybe it was just lack of funds. Anyway, in your situation, where water will soon be plentiful again, what did that item on last night’s agenda mean?”

“I’m not sure, but there were two parts I found interesting. One, the inquiry to Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Water District, which supplies most of our town’s water from their Colorado River pipeline. Second, the nominations for the watermaster. On the one hand, it looks like an attempt to bring more water to El Modena; on the other, an attempt to control its use when it arrives. You see?”

His guests nodded. “And what about this offer from Los Angeles?” Nadezhda said.

A ghost of a smile crossed Oscar’s face. “When the federal courts made the original apportionment of the Colorado River’s water to the states bordering it, they accidentally used a flood year’s estimate of the river’s annual flow. Every year after that they came up short, and the states fought like dogs over what water there was. To solve the problem the court cut all the states’ shares proportionally. But California—the MWD, to be precise—recently won back the rights to their original allotment.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, first, because they had been using their rights the longest, and most fully, and that solidifies their claim. And secondly, it’s felt that the Columbia pipeline will solve the competing states’ problems, so they won’t need the Colorado’s water. So, the MWD has more water than they have had for years, and since these rights are made more secure by usage, they’re anxious to have their new water bought up and used as quickly as possible. All of their clients in southern California are being offered more water. Most are refusing it, and so MWD is getting anxious.”

“Why are most refusing it?”

“They have what they need. It’s a method of growth control. If they don’t have the water, they can’t expand without special action. The Santa Barbara strategy, it’s called.”

“But your mayor wants this water.”

“Apparently so.”

“But why?” Kevin said.

Oscar pursed his lips. “Well, you know what I heard.”

Suddenly he jerked to left and right, peering about in a gross caricature of a check for spies. Low conspirator’s voice: “I was dining at Le Boulangerie soon after my arrival in town, when I heard voices from the next booth—”

“Eavesdropping!” Doris exclaimed.

“Yes.” Oscar grimaced horribly at her. “I can’t help myself. Forgive me. Please.”

Doris made a face.

Oscar went on: “Later I discovered the voices were those of your mayor, and someone named Ed. They were discussing a new complex, one which would combine labs with offices and shops. Novagene and Heartech were mentioned as potential tenants.”

“Alfredo and Ed Macey run Heartech,” Doris told him.

“Ah. Well.”

“Did they say where they wanted to build?” Kevin asked.

“No, they didn’t mention location—although Mr. Blair did say ‘They want that view.’ Perhaps that means in the hills somewhere. But if one were contemplating a new development of any size in El Modena, it would be necessary to have more water. And so last night when I saw item twenty-seven, I wondered if this might not be a small first step.”

“The underhanded weasel!” Doris said.

“It all seemed fairly public to me,” Oscar pointed out.

Doris glared at him. “I suppose you’re going to claim a lawyerly neutrality in all this?”

Kevin winced. The truth was, Doris has a prejudice against lawyers. We’re suffocating in lawyers, she would say, they’re doing nothing but creating more excuses for themselves. We should make all of them train as ecologists before they’re let into law school, give them some decent values.

They do take courses in ecology, Hank would tell her. It’s part of their training.

Well they aren’t learning it, Doris would say. Damned parasites!

Now, in Oscar’s presence, she was icily discreet; she only used the adjective “lawyerly” with a little twist to it, and left it at that.

Though he certainly heard the inflection, Oscar eyed her impassively. “I am not a neutral man,” he said, “in any sense of the word.”

“Do you want to see this development stopped?”

“It is still only a matter of conjecture that one is proposed. I’d like to find out more about it.”

“But if there is a large development, planned for the hills?”

“It depends—”

“It depends!”

“Yes. It depends on where it is. I wouldn’t like to see any empty hilltops razed and built on. There are few of those left.”

“Hardly any,” Kevin said. “Really, to get a view over the plain in El Modena, there’s only Rattlesnake Hill….”

He and Doris stared at each other.

Oscar served them a sumptuous breakfast of French toast and sausages, but Kevin had little appetite for it. His hill, his sandstone refuge…

When they were done Nadezhda said, “Assuming that Rattlesnake Hill is Alfredo’s target, what can you do to stop him?”

Oscar rose from his chair. “The law lies in our hands like a blackjack!” He took a few vicious swings at the air. “If we choose to use it.”

“Champion shadow boxer, I see,” Doris muttered.

Kevin said, “You bet we choose to use it!”

“The water problem has potential,” Oscar said. “I’m no expert in it, but I do know California water law is a swamp. We could be the creature from the black lagoon.” He limped around the kitchen to illustrate this strategy. “And I have a friend in Bishop we should talk to, her name’s Sally Tallhawk and she teaches at the law school. She was on the State Water Resources Control Board until recently, and she knows more than anyone about the current state of water law. I’m going there soon—we could talk to her about it.”

Nadezhda said, “We need to know more of the mayor’s plans.”

“I don’t know how we’ll get them.”

“I do,” Kevin said. “I’m just going to go up to Alfredo’s place and ask him!”

“Direct,” Oscar noted.

Doris said, “Alternatively, we could crawl under his windows and eavesdrop until we learn what we want to know.”

Oscar blinked. “Nothing like a little confrontation,” he said to Kevin.

“Doesn’t Thomas Barnard live in this area?” Nadezhda asked.

“That’s my grandfather,” Kevin said, surprised. “He lives up in the hills.”

“Perhaps he can help.”

“Well, maybe. I mean, true, but…”

Kevin’s grandfather had had an active career in law and politics, and had been a prominent figure in the economic reforms of the twenties and thirties.

“He was a good lawyer,” Nadezhda said. “Powerful. He knew how to get things done.”

“You’re right.” Kevin nodded. “It’s a good idea, really. It’s just that he’s a sort of hermit, now. I haven’t seen him myself in a long time.”

Nadezhda shrugged. “We all get strange. I would like to see him anyway.”

“You know him?”

“We met once, long ago.”

So Kevin agreed, a bit apprehensively, to take her up to see him.

Before they left Oscar showed them his library, contained in scores of cardboard boxes; one whole room was full of them. Kevin glanced in a box and saw a biography of Lou Gehrig. “Hey Oscar, you ought to join our softball team!”

“No thank you. I detest softball.”

Doris snorted. “What?” Kevin said. “But why?”

Oscar shifted into a martial arts stance. Low growl: “The world plays hardball, Claiborne.”

The world plays hardball. Sure, and he could handle it. But not his hill, not Rattlesnake Hill!

It was not just that it stood behind his house, which was true, and important; but that it was his place. It was an insignificant little round top at the end of the El Modena hills, broken dirty sandstone covered with scrub, and a small grove of trees which had been planted by his grandfather’s grade school class, many years before. It stood there, the only empty hilltop in the area, because it had been owned for decades by the Orange County Water District, who left it alone.

And no one seemed to go up there but him. Oh, occasionally he’d find an empty beer dumpie or the like, thrown away on the summit. But the hill was always empty when he was there—quiet except for insect creaks, hot, dusty, and somehow filled with a sunny, calm presence, as if inhabited by an old Indian hill spirit, small but powerful.

He went up there when he wanted to work outdoors. He took his sketchpad, up to his favorite spot on the western edge of the copse of trees, and he’d sit and look out over the plain and sketch rooms, plans, interiors, exteriors. He’d done that for most of his life, had done a fair amount of homework there in his schooldays. He had scrambled up the dry ravines on the western side, he had thrown rocks off the top, he had followed the track of an old dirt road that had once spiraled up it. He went there when he was feeling lazy, when he only wanted to sit in the sun and feel the earth turning under him. He went there with women friends, at night, when he was feeling romantic.

Now he went up there and sat in the dirt, in his spot. Midday, the air hot, filled with dust and sage oils. He brushed his hands over the soil, over the sharp-edged nondescript sandstone pebbles. Picked them up, rubbed them together in his hands. He couldn’t seem to achieve his usual feeling of peace, however, his feeling of connection with the ground beneath him; and the ballooning sense of lightness, the kind of epiphany he had felt while bicycling home the other night, eluded him completely. He was too worried. He could only sit and touch the earth, and worry.

At work he thought about it, worried about it. He and Hank and Gabriela were busy finishing up two jobs, one down in Costa Mesa, and he worked on the trim and clean-up in a state of distraction. Could they really want to develop Rattlesnake Hill? “It’s that view they’re after.” If they were going to build, they would need more water. If they were going to have a view, in El Modena… there really wasn’t any other choice! Rattlesnake Hill. A place where—he realized this one morning, scraping caulking off of tile—where when you were there, you felt quite certain it would never change. And that was part of its appeal.

Usually when Kevin was working he was happy. He enjoyed most of the labor involved in construction, especially the carpentry. All of it, really. The direct continual results of his efforts, popping into existence before his eyes: framing, wiring, stucco, painting, tilework, trim, they all had their pleasures for him. And as he did the designs for their little team’s work, he also had the architect’s pleasure of seeing his ideas realized. With this Costa Mesa condo rehab, for instance, a lot of things had been uncertain: would you really be able to see the entire length of the structure, rooms opening on rooms? Would the atrium give enough light to that west wing? No way to be sure until it was done; and so the pleasure of work, bringing the vision into material being, finding out whether the calculations had been correct. Solving the mystery. Not much delayed gratification in construction. Immediate gratification, little problem after little problem, faced and solved, until the big problem was solved as well. And all through the process, the childlike joys of hammering, cutting, measuring. Bang bang bang, out in the sun and the wind, with clouds as his constant companions.

Usually. But this week he was too worried about the hill. Touch-up work, usually one of his favorite parts, seemed pale diversion, finicky and boring. He hardly even noticed it. And his town work was positively irritating. They would be digging out that street forever at their pace!

He had to get some answers. He had to go up and confront Alfredo, like he had said he would that morning at Oscar’s. No way around it.

So one afternoon after town work he pedaled up into the hills, to the house on Redhill where a big group of Heartech people lived. Alfredo’s new home.

The house was set on a terrace, cut high on the side of the hill above Tustin and Foothill. It was a huge white lump of Mission Revival, a style Kevin detested. To him the California Indians were noble savages, devastated by Junípero Serra’s mission system. Thus Mission Revival, which every thirty years or so swept through southern California architecture in a great nostalgic wave, seemed to Kevin no more than a kind of homage to genocide. Any time he got the chance to renovate an example of the style he loved to obliterate it.

One small advantage to Mission Revival was it was always easy to find the front door—in this case a huge pair of oak monsters, standing in the center of a massive wall of whitewashed adobe, under a tile-roofed portico. Kevin stalked up the gravel drive and yanked on a thick rope bellpull.

Alfredo himself answered, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. “Kevin, what a surprise. Come on in, man.”

“I’d rather talk out here, if you don’t mind. Do you have time?”

“Sure, sure.” Alfredo stepped out, leaving the door open. “What is it?”

No really indirect approach to the issue had suggested itself to Kevin, and so he said, “Is it true that you and Ed and John are planning to build an industrial park on Rattlesnake Hill?”

Alfredo raised his eyebrows. Kevin had expected him to flinch, or in some other way look obviously guilty. The fact that he didn’t made Kevin uneasy, nervous—a little bit guilty himself. Perhaps Oscar had misoverheard.

“Who told you that?”

“Never mind who—I just heard it. Is it true?”

Alfredo paused, shrugged. “There’re always plans being talked around—”

Ah ha!

“—but I don’t know of anything in particular. You would know if there was something up, being on the council.”

Anger fired through Kevin, quick and hot. “So that’s why you tried to slip that water stuff past us!”

Alfredo looked puzzled. “I didn’t try to slip anything past anyone. Some business was taken care of—or we tried—in front of the whole council, in the ordinary course of a meeting. Right?”

“Well, yeah, that’s right. But it was late, everyone was tired, I was new. No one was watching anymore. It was as close to slipping the thing under the door as you could get.”

“A council meeting is a council meeting, Kevin. Things go on right till the last moment. You’re going to have to get used to that.” Alfredo looked amused at Kevin’s naïveté. “If someone wanted to slip something by, it could have been shoved in among a bunch of other changes, it could have been done in the town planner’s office and presented as boilerplate—”

“I guess you wish you had done it that way, now.”

“Not at all. I’m just saying we didn’t try to slip one by you.” Alfredo spoke slowly, as if doing his best to explain a difficult matter to a child. He moved out onto the gravel drive.

“I think you did,” Kevin said. “Obviously it isn’t something you’d admit now. Anyway, what are you doing trying to turn some of our open land into a mall?”

“What mall? Look here, what are you talking about? We’re making an inquiry about the extra water MWD is offering, because it makes sense, it saves us money. That’s part of our job on the council. Now as to this other thing, if someone is exploring the possibilities of a multi-use center, what’s the problem? Are you saying we shouldn’t try to create jobs here in El Modena?”

“No!”

“Of course not. We need more jobs—El Modena is small, we don’t generate much income. If some businesses moved here everyone would benefit. You might not need your share increased, but other people do.”

“We already make enough from town shares.”

“Is that the Green position?”

“Well…”

“I didn’t think so. As I recall, you said increased efficiency would increase the shares.”

“So it would!”

Alfredo walked further down the drive, to the low mounds of an extensive cactus garden. Standing there they had a view over all of Orange County’s treetopped plain. “It gets to be a question of how we can become more efficient, doesn’t it. I don’t think we can do it without businesses to be efficient. But you—sometimes I think if you had your way you’d empty out the town and tear it down entirely.” He gestured at the cacti. “Back to mustard fields and scrub hills, and maybe a couple of camps down on the creek.”

“Come on,” Kevin said scornfully. In fact, he had quite often daydreamed about just such a return to nature when tearing old structures down. But he knew it was just a fantasy, a wish to live the Indians’ life, and he never mentioned it to others. It was disconcerting to hear Alfredo read his mind like that.

Alfredo saw his confusion. “You can only go so far with negative growth before it becomes harmful, Kevin. I realize there’s a lot of momentum in your direction these days, and believe me, I think it’s been a good thing. We needed it, and things are better now because of it. But any pendulum can swing too far, and you’re one of those trying to hold it out there when it wants to swing back. Now that you’re in a position of responsibility you’ve got to face it—the people who talked you into joining the council are extremists.”

“We’re talking about your company here,” Kevin said feebly.

“We are? Well heck, say that we are. At Heartech we make cardiovascular equipment and blood substitutes and related material. It helps everyone, especially the regions still dealing with hepatitis and malaria. You were in Tanzania for your work abroad, you’ve got to know the kind of help it does!”

“I know, I know.” Heartech was an important part of Orange County’s booming medtech industry, doing state-of-the-art work. It was right at the legal limits on company size; most of its long-time workers were hundreds, which meant that the company paid an enormous amount of money into Tustin’s town shares, which were then redistributed out among the town’s citizens, as part of their personal income. And Heartech helped a lot of liaison companies in Africa and Indonesia as well. No doubt about it, it was a good company, and Alfredo believed in it passionately. “Listen,” he said, “let’s follow this through. Don’t you think biotechnology is valuable work?”

“Of course,” Kevin said. “I use it every day.”

“And the medical aspects of it save lives every day.” “That’s true. Sure.”

“Now wouldn’t it be a good thing if El Modena contributed to that?”

“Yeah, it would. That would be great.”

Alfredo spread his hands, palms up.

They looked at cacti.

Kevin, beginning to feel the way he did when he rode the Mad Hatter’s Teacups in Disneyland, tried to gather his thoughts. “Actually, it seems to me it isn’t so important where it happens…” Ah yes: where. “I mean where exactly do you have in mind, Alfredo?”

“Where what? Sorry, I’ve lost track of what you’re talking about.”

“Well, if you’re thinking of building in the hills. Are you?”

“If there were people thinking about a development in the El Modena Hills, it would be a matter of attracting the best tenants possible. Things like that are important when you’re competing with places like Irvine.”

So he was thinking of the hills! “You should be mayor of Irvine,” Kevin said bitterly. “Irvine is just your style.”

“You mean they make money there? They attract business, they have big town shares?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s what our town council is for, right? I mean, there are people in this town who could use it, even if you can’t.”

“I’m not against the town shares growing!”

“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”

Kevin exhaled noisily, frustrated. Feeling completely dizzy, he said, “Well—still—”

“So we should do what we can, right?”

“Yeah, sure—”

“I think we’re more in agreement than you realize, Kevin. You build things, I build things. It’s really the same thing.”

“Yeah, but, but if you’re tearing up wilderness!”

“Don’t worry about that. There isn’t any wilderness in El Modena in the first place, so don’t get too romantic about it. Besides, we’ll all be working out anything that happens here in the next couple of years, so we’ll bang out a consensus just like always. Don’t let your friends make you too paranoid about it.”

“My friends don’t make me paranoid. You make me paranoid.”

“I don’t appreciate that, Kevin. And it won’t help in the long run. Look, I build things to make money, and so do you. We’re in the same business, aren’t we? I mean, aren’t you in the construction business?”

“Yeah!”

Alfredo smiled. “Well, there you have it. We’ll work it out. Hey, I’ve got to get going—I’ve got a date—down in Irvine, in fact.” He winked, went into the house.

Ka… CHUNK.

Kevin faced the door, and after a moment’s thought he slammed his fist into his palm. “It’s completely different!” he shouted. “I do renovation!” Or else we tear down a structure and put another one in its place. And it always fits the land better. It’s entirely different!

But there was no one there to argue with.

He let out a long breath. “Shit.”

What had happened? Well, maybe Alfredo and his partners were planning a development. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe it was up in the hills. Maybe it wasn’t. He had learned that much.

He pulled his bike from the rack, observed his hands shaking. Alfredo was too much for him; try as he might, Alfredo could run rings around him. Chagrined at the realization, he turned the bike and headed downhill.

He needed help. Doris, Oscar, Oscar’s friend in Bishop; Jean and the Green party organization; Nadezhda. Perhaps even Ramona, somehow. He shied away from the thought—the implication that his dislike for Alfredo had non-political components—it was a political matter, nothing more!

And Tom.

Once home he went looking for Nadezhda. “Do you still want to meet my grandfather?”

Kevin’s grandfather lived in the back country, on a ridge in the broken hills north of Black Star Canyon. Kevin led Nadezhda and Doris up a poorly kept trail to his place, winding between sage and scrub oak and broken ribs of sandstone. Nadezhda was inquisitive about everything: plants, rocks, Tom’s livelihood. She had a beautiful low voice, and had learned her English in India, so that the musical lilt of the subcontinent filled all her sentences.

“Well, Tom takes his ten thousand and lets it go at that. He’s got a garden and some chickens, and he does some trapping and beekeeping and I don’t know what all. He really does keep to himself these days. Didn’t used to be that way.”

“I wonder what happened.”

“Well, he retired. And then my grandma died, about ten years ago.”

“Ten years.”

A switchback, and Kevin looked down at her. Next to Doris she seemed slight as a bird, graceful, cool, fit. No wonder Doris admired her. Ex-head of the Soviet State Planning Commission, currently lecturer in history on a school freighter, which was up in Seattle—

“He can get ten thousand dollars a year without working?”

“At his age he can. You know about the income magnitude thing?”

“A legal floor and ceiling on personal income, yes?”

“Yeah. Tom takes the floor.”

She laughed. “We have a similar system. Your grandfather was a big advocate of those laws when they were introduced. He must have had a plan.”

“No doubt. In fact he told me that once, when I was a kid.”

Hiking with Grandpa, up the back canyons. Up Harding Canyon to the little waterfall, bushwhacking up crazy steep slopes to the ridge of Saddleback, up the dirt road to the double summit. Birds, lizards, dusty plants, endless streams of talk. Stories. Sandstone. The overwhelming smell of sage.

They topped a rise, and saw Tom’s house. It was a small weather-beaten cabin, perched on the ridge that boxed the little canyon they had ascended. A big front window looked down at them, reflecting clouds like a monocle. Walls of cracked shingle were faded to the color of sand. Weeds grew waist high in an abandoned garden, and sticking out of the weeds were broken beehive flats, rain barrels, mountain bikes rusted or disassembled, a couple of grandfather clocks broken open to the sky.

Kevin thought of homes as windows to the soul, and so Tom’s place left him baffled. The way it fit the ridge, disappeared into the sandstone and sage, was nice. A good sign. But the disarray, the lack of care, the piles of refuse. It looked like the area around an animal’s hole in the ground.

Nadezhda merely looked at the place, black eyes bright. They walked through a weedy garden to the front door, and Kevin knocked. No answer. They stepped around back to the kitchen door, which was open. Looked in; no one there.

“Well, we might as well sit and wait a while,” Kevin said. “I’ll try calling him.” He went to the other side of the ridge, put both hands to his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle.

There was a tall black walnut up the ridge, with a bench made of logs underneath it; Doris and Nadezhda sat there. Kevin wandered the yard, checking the little set of solar panels in back, the connections to the satellite dish. All in order. He pulled some weeds away from the overrun tomatoes and zucchini. Long black and orange bugs flew noisily away; other than that there was a complete, somehow audible silence. Ah: bees in the distance, defining the silence they buzzed in.

“Hey.”

“Jesus, Grandpa!”

“What’s happening, boy.”

“You frightened me!”

“Apparently so.”

He had come up the same trail they had. Bent over, humping some small iron traps and four dead rabbits. He’d been only feet from Kevin’s back when he announced his presence, and not a sound of approach.

“Up here to weed?”

“Well, no. I brought Doris and a friend. We wanted to talk with you.”

Tom just stared at him, bright-eyed. Stepped past and ducked into his cabin. Clatter of traps on the floor. When he re-emerged Doris and Nadezhda had come over from the bench and were standing beside Kevin. Tom stopped and stared at them. He was wearing pants worn to the color of the hillsides, and a blue T-shirt torn enough to reveal a bony white-haired chest. The hair edging his bald pate was a tangle, and his uncut beard was gray and white and brown and auburn, stained around his mouth. A dust-colored old man. He always looked like this, Kevin was used to it; it was, he had thought, a part of aging. But now Nadezhda stood before them neat as a bird after a bath, her silvery hair cut so that even when windblown it fell perfectly into place. One of her enamel earrings flashed turquoise and cream in the sun.

“Well?”

“Grandpa, this is a friend of Doris’s—”

But Nadezhda stepped past him and extended a hand. “Nadezhda Katayev,” she said. “We met a long time ago, at the Singapore Conference.”

For an instant Tom’s eyebrows shot up. Then he took her hand, dropped it. “You look much the same.”

“And you too.”

He smiled briefly, slipped past them with a neat, skittish movement. “Water,” he said over his shoulder, and took off down a trail into a copse of live oak. His three guests looked at each other. Kevin shrugged, led the women down the trail. There in the shade Tom was attaching a pump handle to a skinny black pump, then pumping, slowly and steadily, his back to them. After quite a while water spurted from the pump into a tin trough, and through an open spigot into a five-gallon bucket. Kevin adjusted the bucket under the spigot, and then the three of them stood there and watched Tom pump. It was as if he were mute. Feeling uncomfortable, Kevin said, “We came up to talk to you about a problem we’re having. You know I’m on the town council now?”

Tom nodded.

Kevin described what had happened so far, then said, “We don’t really know for sure, but if Alfredo is interested in Rattlesnake Hill, it would be a disaster—there just aren’t that many empty hills left.”

Tom squinted, looked around briefly.

“I mean in El Modena, Tom! Overlooking the plain! You know what I mean. Shit, you planted the trees on top of Rattlesnake Hill, didn’t you?”

“I helped.”

“So don’t you care what happens to it?”

“It’s your backyard now.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And you’re on the council?”

“Yeah.”

“Stop him, then. You know what to do, you don’t need me.”

“We do too! Man, when I talk to Alfredo I end up saying black is white!”

Tom shrugged, moved the full bucket from under the spigot and replaced it with an empty one. Stymied, Kevin moved the full bucket onto flat ground and sat beside it.

“You don’t want to help?”

“I’m done with that stuff, Kevin. It’s your job now.” He said this with a friendly, birdlike glance.

Second bucket filled, Tom pulled out the pump handle and put it in a slot on the pump’s side. He lifted the two buckets and started back toward the cabin.

“Here, let me take one of those.”

“That’s okay, thanks. I need the two for balance.”

Following Tom up the trail to his cabin, Kevin looked at the old man’s bowed back and shook his head, exasperated. This just was not the Grandpa he had grown up with. In those years there had been no more social animal than Tom Barnard; he was always talking, he organized camping trips for groups from town constantly, and he had taken his grandson up into the canyons and over the Santa Ana Mountains, and the San Jacintos, and back into Anza Borrego and Joshua Tree, and over to Catalina and down into Baja and up into the southern Sierras—and talking the whole way, for hours at a time every day, about everything you could possibly imagine! Much of Kevin’s education—the parts he really remembered—had come from Tom on their hikes together, from asking questions and listening to Tom ramble. “I hated capitalism because it was a lie!” Tom would say, fording Harding Canyon stream with abandon. “It said that everyone exercising their self-interest would make a decent community! Such a lie!” Splash, splash! “It was government as protection agency, a belief system for the rich. Why, even when it seemed to work, where did it leave them? Holed up in mansions and crazy as loons.”

“But some people like to be alone.”

“Yeah, yeah. And self-interest exists, no one can say it doesn’t—the governments that tried got in deep trouble, because that’s a lie of a different kind. But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money.”

“But you changed that,” Kevin would say, watching his footwork.

“Yes, we did. We gave self-interest some room to work in, but we limited it. Channeled it toward the common good. That’s the job of the law, as we saw it then.” He laughed. “Legislation is a revolutionary power, boy, though it’s seldom seen as such. We used it for all it was worth, and most liked the results, except for some of the rich, who fought like wolverines to hold on to what they had. In fact that’s a fight that’s still going on. I don’t think it will ever end.”

Exactly! Kevin thought, watching his strangely silent grandfather toil up the trail. The fight will go on forever, and yet you’ve stepped out of it, left it to us. Well, maybe that was fair, maybe it was their turn. But he needed the old man’s help!

He sighed. They got to the cabin and Tom ducked inside. One bucket of water went into a holding tank. The other was brought out into the sun, along with the four dead rabbits. Big knife, slab of wood, tub for the blood and guts. Great. Tom began the grisly task of skinning and cleaning the little beasts. Hardly any meat on them; hardly any meat on Tom. Kevin went around the side and fed the chickens. When he returned Tom was still at it. Doris and Nadezhda were seated on the ground under the kitchen window. Kevin didn’t know what to say.

“This conference in Singapore you met at—what was it about?” Doris finally said, breaking a long silence.

“Conversion strategies,” Nadezhda said.

“What’s that?”

Nadezhda looked up at Tom. “Maybe you can explain it more clearly,” she said. “My English is not so good to be explaining such a thing.”

Tom glanced at her. “Uh huh.” He went into the kitchen with the skinned rabbits; they heard a freezer door open and shut. He came back out and took the tub of entrails over the Emerson septic tank, dumped them in, shut the lid and clamped it down.

Nadezhda shrugged at Doris, said, “We were finding ways to convert the military parts of the economy. The big countries had essentially war economies, and switching to a civilian economy without causing a depression was no easy thing. In fact, no one could afford to change. So strategies had to be conceived. We had a big crowd in Singapore, though some there opposed the idea. Do you remember General Larsen?” she said to Tom. “U.S. Air Force, head of strategic defense?”

“I think so,” Tom said as he walked by her. He went out into his garden and started plucking tomatoes.

Nadezhda followed him. She picked up his basket, followed him around as he shifted. “I am thinking people like him made aerospace industries the hardest to change.”

“Nah.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Nah.”

“But why?”

Long silence.

Then Tom said, “Aerospace could be sicced on the energy problem. But who needs tanks? Who needs artillery shells?”

He lapsed back into silence, rooted under weeds in search of another tomato. He glanced at Nadezhda resentfully, as if she had tricked him into speaking. Which, Kevin thought, she had.

“Yes,” Nadezhda said, “conventional weapons were hard. Remember those Swiss plans, for cars built like troop movers?” She laughed, a low clear chuckle, and even elbowed Tom in the arm. He smiled, nodded. She said, “What about those prefab schoolrooms, made by the helmet and armor plants!”

Tom smiled politely, got up and went into the kitchen.

Nadezhda followed him, talking, taking down a second cutting board and cutting tomatoes with him, going through his shelves to find spices to add to oil and vinegar. Talking all the while. Occasionally in passing she put a hand to his arm, or while cutting she would elbow him gently, as old friends might: “Do you remember? Don’t you remember?”

“I remember,” he said, with that small smile. He glanced at her.

“When the engineers got the idea of it,” she said to Doris and Kevin, “their eyes lit up. It was the best problems they were ever having, you could hear it in their voices! Because everything helped, you see? With all that military work redirected to survival problems, conflicts caused by the problems were eased, which reduced the demand for weapons. So it was a feedback spiral, and once in it, things changed very quickly.” She laughed again, suffused with nervous energy, doing her best, Kevin saw, to arc that energy into Tom; to charm him, cajole him—seduce him….

Tom merely smiled that brief glancing smile, and offered them a lunch of tomato salad. “All there is.” But he was watching her, out of the corner of his eye; it seemed to Kevin that he couldn’t help it.

They ate in silence. Tom wandered off to the pump with his buckets. Nadezhda went with him, talking about people they had known in Singapore.

Doris and Kevin sat in the sun. They could hear voices down at the pump. At one point Nadezhda exclaimed “But we acted!” so sharply they could make it out.

Muttered response, no response.

When they returned she was laughing again, helping with one bucket and telling a story. Tom was as silent as before. He still seemed friendly—but remote, watching them as if from a distance. Glancing frequently at Nadezhda. He took one bucket down to the Emerson tank, began working there.

Eventually Kevin shrugged, and indicated to the women that he thought it was time to leave. Tom wandered back as they stood. “You sure you won’t help us?” Kevin asked, catching Tom’s gaze and holding it.

Tom smiled. “You get ’em this time,” he said. And to Nadezhda: “Nice to see you again.”

Nadezhda looked him in the eye. “It was my pleasure,” she said. She smiled at him, and something in it was so appealing, so intimate, that Kevin looked away. He noticed Tom did the same. Then Nadezhda led them down the trail.