Pacific Edge

5

May. Hard buds on the branches, vibrant green in the rain. Barely a day’s sun all April. I can’t remember.

Pam came home last night tired and footsore after running two experiments at once. She thinks she can finish the lab work early and do the writing up in the States. Shorten separation. So she’s in Pamela Overdrive. I made dinner and she threw the paper down in disgust, told me about her day. “The probe compound and internal standards diffused out of the water sample into the headspace until an equilibrium between the liquid and gas phases was reached.”

“Uh huh.”

“And that depends on the water solubility and the volatility of the two compounds.”

As she went on I stared at her. What Chemists Say To Spouses/What Spouses Understand. Blah blah blah, Tom, blah blah blah.

She saw the doggie look on my face, smiled. “So how’d the book go?”

“The same.” It’s not fair, really. I can’t understand a word she says when she talks of her work, while for me, on this project at least, she is a crucial sounding board. “I’m thinking of alternating chapters of fiction with essay chapters which discuss the political and economic problems we need to solve.”

“My God.” Wrinkled nose, as if something gone bad in fridge.

“Hey, H.G. Wells did it.”

“Which book?”

“Well—one of the major utopian novels.”

“Still in print?”

“No.”

“Libraries have it?”

“University libraries.”

“So Wells’s science fiction adventures are still in every library and bookstore, while this major utopia with the essays is long gone, and you can’t even remember the title?”

I changed the subject.

Think I might pass on the essays.

Six months, four months. Three months? Go quickly, mysterious experiments. Go well. Please.

Kevin woke from a dream in which a huge bird was standing on the limpid water of a rapid stream, wings outstretched as it spun on the clear surface, keeping a precarious balance. Foggily he shook his head, grinned at himself. “Sally Tallhawk,” he said, rolling out the syllables. The strategies she had listed while wandering around her sublime campsite filled his thoughts, and feeling charged with energy he decided to visit Jean Aureliano before work and confer.

Jean’s office was on the saddle between Orange Hill and Chapman Hill. Kevin blasted up the trail in fifth gear and skidded into her little terrace. Her office was a low set of rooms built around a tiny central stone garden, with open walls and pagoda corners on the low roof. Kevin had done some work on it. When he walked into her office she looked up from the phone and smiled at him, gestured at him to take a seat. Instead he wandered around looking at the prints on the walls, Chinese landscape paintings in the Ming dynasty style, gold on green and blue. Jean spoke sharply, arguing with someone. She had iron gray hair, cut short in a cap over a solid, handsome head. Big-boned and heavyset, she moved like a dancer and had a black belt in karate. For many years now she had been the most powerful person in El Modena, and one of the most powerful in Orange County, and she still looked it. The smoldering glare of the Hispanic matriarch was currently fixed on whoever was on the other end of the line, and Kevin, glancing at her quickly, was glad it wasn’t him.

“Damn it,” she said, interrupting a tinny whine coming over the phone, “the whole Green alliance is breaking up on the shoals of extremists like you, we’re in the modern world now—no, no, don’t give me that, there’s no going back, all this talk of watershed sovereignty is so much nostalgia, it’s no wonder there’s shrieks of protest from all sides! You’re tearing the party apart and losing us the mandate we’ve had! Politics is the art of the possible, Damaso, and if you set impossible goals then what kind of politician are you? It’s stupid. What?… No. Wrong. Marx can be split into two parts, the historian and the prophet. As a historian he was great and we use his paradigm every day, I don’t contest that, but as a prophet he was wrong from the start! By now anyone who calls themselves a Marxist in that sense has elote for brains…. Damaso, I can’t believe you sometimes. Los pobres, come on, you think you help them with this balkanization?—Chinga yourself!” And then a long string of sulphurous Spanish.

Angrily she hit the phone, cutting off the connection. “What do you want?” she said to Kevin without looking up.

Nervously Kevin told her.

“Yes,” she said. “Alfredo’s great plan. From the crown of creation to the crown of the town. I’ve been keeping track of it and I think you and Doris are doing a good job.”

“Thanks,” Kevin said, “but we’ve been trying to do more. We talked to a water lawyer from UC Bishop—”

“Tallhawk?”

“Uh huh.”

“Yeah, she’s a good one. What did she say?”

“Well, she said we were unlikely to stop this development on the water issue alone.”

Jean nodded. “But we’ve got resolution two-oh-two-two to hang onto, there.”

“Yeah. But she gave us some suggestions for other avenues to take, and one of them was to use the various requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act. Oscar said you would know about that and how it was going—you could ask to see their EIS when it comes in.”

“Yeah that’s right, we’ll do that. The problem is that they’ll probably be able to minimize the environmental impact on that little hill, it barely touches Santiago Park, and with all the other hills already built up—” She made a quick gesture at her office.

“Wouldn’t that be a point in our favor?”

“More likely a precedent. But we’ll do what we can about it.”

“Oscar said that if you mobilized the party machinery to fight the proposal…”

“Exactly. We should be able to crush it, and I’ll certainly be trying, believe me.” She stood up, strode around the office, flung open one sliding wall door, stepped half out onto the porch. “Of course if it comes to a referendum you can never be sure. It’s just impossible to tell what the people in this town will vote for and what they won’t. A lot of people would be happy if the town were making more money, and this would do that, so it’s a dangerous thing to bring to a vote. What I’m saying is that it would be a lot safer if we could stop it in the council itself, right there at the zoning. So you and Doris have to keep at the moderates. We all do.”

They discussed Hiroko Washington, Susan Mayer, and Jerry Geiger in turn; Jean knew them intimately from her years as mayor, and her assessment was that their chances of convincing the three were fairly good. None could be counted on for sure, but all were possibilities. “We only need to get two. Keep after it every way you can, and I’ll be doing the same up here.” There was a look on her face—determined, stubborn, ready to fight. As if she were going in for her black belt trial again.

Reassured, Kevin left her office and coasted down to work. He and Hank and Gabriela were beginning the renovation of Oscar’s house, and the other two were already hard at it, tearing out interior walls. Oscar emerged from his library from time to time to watch them. “You look like you’re having fun,” he observed.

“This is the best part of carpentry!” Gabriela exclaimed as she hammered plaster away from studs, sending white dust flying. “Yar! Ah! Hack!”

“You’re an anarchist, Gabriela.”

“No, I’m a nihilist.”

“I like it too,” Hank said, eyeing a joint in exposed framing. He took an exploratory slam at it.

“Why is that?” Oscar asked.

Hank squinted, stilled. “Well… carpentry is so precise, you always have to be very careful and measured and controlled, and you’re always having to juke with edges that don’t quite meet and make everything look perfect—it’s such a perfectionist thing, even if you’re just covering up so it looks right even though it ain’t—anyway…” He looked around as if tracking a bird that had flown into the room. “Anyway, so you get to the part of the job that is just destructive—”

“Yar!” Bang. “Ha!” Bang. “Hack hack hack!” BANG. BANG. BANG.

“I see,” Oscar said.

“It’s like how Russ and his vet friends are always going duck-hunting on the weekends. Same principle.”

“Fucking schizophrenics,” Gabriela said. “I went over there one time and they had some duck they had found while they were hunting, it had busted a wing or something so they brought it home so they could nurse it back to health, had it in a box right next to the bag of all the other ones they’d blasted to smithereens that same day.”

“I understand,” Oscar said. “No one breaks the law as happily as a lawyer.”

“We want to wreck things,” Gabriela said. “Soldiers know all about it. Generals, how do you think generals got to be generals? They just have more of it than the rest of us.”

“Should call you General Gabby, eh?” Hank said.

“Generalissimo Gabrielosima,” she growled, and took a vicious swing at a stud. BANG!

Around noon Oscar made them all sandwiches, and after lunch he followed Kevin around, poring over the plans Kevin had drawn up for the renovation, and asking him questions. Each answer spawned more questions, and in the days that followed Oscar asked more, until it became a regular cross-examination.

“What don’t you like about these old places you work on?”

“Well, they’re pretty poorly built. And, well, they’re dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah, they’re just boxes. Inert. They don’t do anything, except protect you from wind and rain. Hell, you can do that with a box.”

“And you like the new houses because they’re alive?”

“Yeah. And the whole system is so neat, so… ingenious. Like this cloudgel.” He pulled at a long roll of clear fabric, stretched it between his fists, let it contract. “You put panels of this stuff in the roof or walls, and if the temperature inside the room is low, then the cloudgel is clear, and sunlight is let in. At around seventy degrees it begins to cloud up, and at eighty it’s white, and reflecting sun away. So it thermostats, just like clouds over the land. It’s so neat.”

“Spaceship technology, right?”

“Yeah. Apply it here, along with the other stuff, and you can make a really efficient little farm of a house. Stick in a nervous system of sensors for the house computer, run a tube down into the earth for cool air, use the sunlight for heat and to grow plants and fish, sling a couple of photovotaic cells on the roof for power, put in an Emerson tank—you know, depending on how far you want to go with it, you can get it to provide most of your daily needs. In any case you’re saving lots of money.”

“But what about styling? How do you keep it from looking like a lab?”

“Easy! Lot of panels and open space, porches, atriums, French windows—you know, a lot of areas where it’s hard to say if you’re inside or out. That’s what I like, anyway.” He tapped one of the sketches scattered on the kitchen table. “There’s this architect in Costa Mesa putting homes on water, they float on a little pond that stabilizes the temp and allows them to rotate the house in relation to the sun, and do a lot of aquaculture—”

“You row across to it?”

“Nah, there’s a bridge.”

“Maybe I want one of those.”

“Please.”

“But what about food? Why a farmhouse?”

“Why not? Don’t you like food?”

“It’s obvious I like food. But why grow it in my house? To me it seems no more than fashion.”

“Of course it’s a fashion. House styles always are. But it makes so much sense, given the materials at hand. Extra heat is going to be generated in the south-facing rooms, especially in this part of the country. And the house computer has the capacity for millions of times more work than you’ve given it so far. Why not put that heat and attention to work? See here, three small rooms on the south front, so you can vary temperatures and crops, and control infestations better.”

“I want no bugs in my house.”

“Nobody does, but that’s greenhouses for you. Besides the computer is actually pretty good at controlling them. Then look, a pool in a central skylighted atrium. Panels adjustable so the skylight can be opened to make it a real atrium.”

“I have no central atrium.”

“Not yet, but look, we’re just gonna knock a little hole in your ceiling here—”

“We’re going to knock a giant fucking hole in your ceiling!” Gabriela said as she walked by. “Don’t let him fool you. You ain’t gonna have a roof any bigger’n a cat’s forehead by the time we’re done.”

“Ignore her. See, cloudgel skylight over a pool.”

“I don’t know if I like the idea of water in my house.”

“Well, it’s a good idea, because it’s so stable thermally. And you can grow fish and provide a good bit of your protein.”

“I detest fishing.”

“The computer does it. First thing you know they’re fillets in your fridge. Chinese carp is the usual staple.”

“I don’t like the idea of eating my house guests.”

From the next room: “He don’t like the idea of a computer than can kill occupants!”

“Good point.”

“You get used to it. Then here, we’ll enclose the area under the old carport, make it a breakfast room and part of the greenhouse, keep that peach tree in one wall, it’ll be great. I love that kind of room.”

“Is that why you like this work? To create rooms like that?”

“I like making the whole house. Changing bad to good. Man, I go into some of those old condo complexes, and my God—six hundred square feet, little tiny white-walled rooms with cottage cheese ceilings, cheap carpet over plywood floors, no light—they were like rats in a cage! Little white prison cells, I can’t believe people lived like that! I mean they were more prosperous than that, weren’t they? Couldn’t they have done better?”

Oscar shrugged. “I suppose they could have.”

“But they didn’t! Now I go into one of those places and blast some space and light into them, do the whole program and in the end you can house just about as many people, but the feel of living there is completely different.”

Oscar said, “You have to believe that you can live in a more communal situation without going crazy. You have to be willing to share space.”

“I always make sure everyone has a room of their own, that’s important to me.”

“But the rest of it—kitchens, living rooms, all that. Social organization has to change for you to be able to redo those big places.”

“So it’s like Doris says—it’s a matter of values.”

“Yes, I think that’s right.”

“Well, I like our values. Seeing homes as organisms—there’s an elegance to that, and if you can still make it beautiful…”

“It’s a work of art.”

“Yes, but a work of art that you live in. If you live in a work of art, it does something to you. It…” Kevin shook his head, unable to express it. “It gives you a good feeling.”

From the next room Gabriela hooted. “It gives you a good feeling?”

Oscar called to her, “The aestheticization of la vie quotidienne!”

“Oh, now I get it! Just what I was going to say!”

Hank appeared in the doorway, saw and two-by-four in his hands. “It’s Chinese, really. Their little gardens, and the sliding panels and the indoor-outdoor, and the communal thing and the domestic life as art—they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”

“That’s true,” Kevin said. “I love Chinese landscaping.”

But now Hank was entranced by the two-by-four in his hand. “Uh oh, I appear to have sawed this one a little sigogglin.” He made a face, hitched up his pants, walked back out under the carport.

One time after the day’s work they bought some dumpies of beer and went up onto Rattlesnake Hill to look for endangered species. This was Kevin’s idea, and they gave him a hard time about it, but he held fast. “Look, it’s one of the best ways to stop the whole thing dead in its tracks, all right? There were some horned lizards down in the Newport Hills stopped a whole freeway a few years back. So we should try it.”

And so they did, hiking up from Kevin and Doris’s, and stopping often to inspect plants along the way. Jody was their botanist, and she brought along Ramona for a back-up. It was a hot afternoon, and they stopped often to consult with the beer.

“What’s this tree, I don’t remember seeing a tree quite like that.”

It was a short twisted thing, with smooth gray bark runnelled by vertical lines. Big shiny leaves hid clumps of berries. “That’s a mulefat tree,” Jody said.

“How the hell did a tree get a name like that?”

“Maybe it burns well.”

“Did they burn mule fat?”

“I don’t think so. Pass that dumpie over.”

Kevin wandered around as the rest sat to observe the mulefat tree. “What about this?” he said, pointing to a shrub with threadlike needles bushing everywhere on it.

“Sage!” they all yelled at him. “Purple sage,” Jody amended. “We’ll also see black sage and regular gray sage.”

“About as endangered as dirt,” Hank said.

“Okay, okay. Come on, you guys, we’ve got the whole hill to go over.”

So they got up and continued the search. Kevin led them, and Jody identified a lot of plants. Gabby and Hank and Oscar and Ramona drank a lot of beer. A shrubby tree with oval flat leaves was a laurel sumac. A shrub with long stiff needles poking in every direction was Spanish broom. “Make it bigger and it’s a foxtail pine,” Hank said. Ramona identified about half the plants they ran across: mantilija poppy with its tiny leaves; horehound, a plain shrub; periwinkle with its broad leaves and purple flowers, a fine ground cover on the hill’s north side; a tree that looked like a Torrey pine but was actually a Coulter pine; and on the crown of the hill, in the grove Tom had helped plant so long ago, a pair of fine black walnuts, with the bark looking broken, and the small green leaves in neat rows.

On the west side of the hill there were some steep ravines leading down into Crawford Canyon, and they clambered up and down, scrabbling for footholds in the loose sandstone and the sandy dirt. “What about this cactus?” Kevin said, pointing.

“Jesus, Kevin, that’s prickly pear,” Jody said. “You can get that stuff pickled down at the Mexican deli.”

“That’s it!” Gabriela cried. “Pickled cactus gets so popular that they’re cutting it down everywhere to supply the market, and so suddenly it’s endangered up here, yeah!”

“Ah shut up,” Kevin said.

“Hey, here’s some wildlife,” Hank said from some distance away. He was on his hands and knees, his face inches from the dirt.

“Ants,” Gabriela said as they walked over. “Chocolate covered ants get popular, and so suddenly—”

“No, it’s a newt.”

So it was; a small brown newt, crawling across an opening between sage bushes.

“It looks like rubber. Look how slow it moves.”

“That’s obviously a rare fake newt, put here to get Kevin’s hopes up.”

“It does look fake.”

“They should be endangered, look how slow they are.” The newt was moving each leg in turn, very slowly. Even blinking its little yellow eyes took time.

“The battery’s running down.”

“All right, all right,” Kevin said, walking away angrily.

They followed him down the hill.

“That’s all right, Kevin,” Ramona said. “We’ve got a softball game tonight, remember?”

“True,” Kevin said, perking up.

“Hey, are you still hitting a thousand?”

“Come on, Gabby, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You are, you are! What is it, thirty for thirty?”

“Thirty-six for thirty-six,” Ramona said. “But it is bad luck to talk about it.”

“That’s all right,” Kevin said. “I’m not gonna mind when it ends anyway, it’s making me nervous.”

And this was true. Batting a thousand was not natural. Hit as well as possible, some line drives should still be caught. To keep firing them into empty places on the field was just plain weird, and Kevin was not comfortable with it. People were razzing him, too, both opponents and his own teammates. Mr. Thousand. Mr. Perfect. Heaven Kevin. It was embarrassing.

“Strike out on purpose, then,” Hank suggested. “Get it over with. That’s what I’d do.”

“Damned if I will!”

They laughed at him.

Besides, each time he walked to the plate, that night or any other, and stood there half-swinging his bat, and the pitcher lofted up the ball, big and white and round against the black and the skittering moths, like a full moon falling out of the sky—then all thought would fly from his mind, he became an utter blank; and would come to standing on first or second or third, grinning and feeling the hit still in his hands and wrists. He couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to.

Another day as they were finishing work Ramona cruised by and said to Kevin, “Want to go to the beach?”

His heartbeat tocked at the back of his throat. “Sure.”

Biking down the Newport Freeway the wind cut through him, and with clear road ahead he shifted into high gear and started pumping hard. Ramona drafted him and after a while took the lead, and they zipped down the gentle slope of the coastal basin pumping so hard that they passed the cars in the next lane, and all for the fun of going fast. On the narrow streets of Costa Mesa and Newport Beach they had to slow and negotiate the traffic, following it out to the end of Balboa Peninsula. Here apartment blocks jumbled high on both sides of the street. Nothing could be done to reduce the population along such a fine beach, and besides the ocean-mad residents seemed to enjoy the crowd. Many of the old crackerbox apartments had been joined and reworked, and now big tentlike complexes quivered like flags in the wind, sheltering co-ops, tribes, big families, vacation groups, complete strangers—every social unit ever imagined was housed there, behind fabric walls bright with the traditional Newport Beach pastels.

They coasted to the end of the peninsula, under rows of palm trees. Scraps of green tossed overhead in the strong onshore breeze. They came to the Wedge and stopped. This was the world’s most famous body surfing beach. Here waves from the west came in at an angle to the long jetty at the Newport Harbor channel, and as the waves approached the beach, masses of water built up against the rocks. Eventually these masses surged back out to sea in a huge backwash, a counterwave which crossed subsequent incoming swells at an angle, creating peaks, fast powerful cusps that moved across the waves very rapidly, often just at the point they were breaking. It was like something out of a physics class wave tank, and it was tremendously popular with body surfers, because the secondary wave could propel a body across the face of the primary wave with heartstopping speed. Add an element of danger—the water was often only three feet deep at the break, and tales of paralysis and death were common—and the result was a perfect adrenalin rush for the OC ocean maniac.

Today, however, the Pacific was pacific, almost lakelike, and the Wedge Effect was not working. This was fine with Ramona and Kevin, they were happy just to swim. Cool salt tang, the luxurious sensuality of immersion, flotation, the return to the sea. Kevin sharked over the rippled tawny sand on the bottom, looked up through silver bubbles at the surface, saw its rise and fall, its curious partial reflectivity, sky and sand both visible at once. Long graceful body in a dark red suit, swimming overhead with powerful strokes. Women are dolphins, he thought, and laughed a burst of silver at the sky. He ran out of air and shot to the surface, broke into blinding white air, eyes scored by salt and sun, delicious stinging. “Outside,” Ramona called, but she was fooling; no waves of any size out there, only flat glary blue, all the way to the horizon. Nothing but shore break. They grunioned around in that for a long time, mindless, lifted up and down by the moon. After that their suits were full of sand, they had to swim out again to flush them clean.

Back on the beach. Sitting on sand, half dry. Salt crust on smooth brown skin. The smell of salt and seaweed, the cool wind.

“Want to walk out the jetty?”

Onto the mound of giant boulders, stepping carefully. Rough uneven surfaces of basalt and feldspar gleamed in the light, gray and black and white and red and brown. Between the rocks the swells rose and fell, sucking and slapping the barnacles.

“We used to come out here all the time when we were kids.”

“Us too,” Ramona said. “The whole house. Boulder ballet, we called it. Only on the other jetty, because my mom always took us to Corona del Mar.” Newport Harbor’s channel was flanked on both sides by jetties, the other one was some two hundred yards across the water.

“It was always the Wedge for us. There was something magical about walking out this jetty when I was a kid. A big adventure, like going to the end of the world.”

They stepped and balanced, hopped and teetered. Occasionally they bumped together, arm to arm. Their skin was warm in the sun. They talked about this and that, and Kevin felt certain boundaries disappearing. Ramona was willing to talk about anything, now, about things beyond the present moment. Childhoods in El Modena and at the beach. The boats offshore. Their work. The people they knew. The huge rocks jumbled under them: “Where did they come from, anyway?” They didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What do you talk about when you’re falling in love? It doesn’t matter. All the questions are, Who are you? How do you think? Are you like me? Will you love me? And all the answers are, I am like this, like this, like this. I am like you. I like you.

“We used to race out to the end sometimes, running over these rocks! Crazy!”

“Yeah, we’re a lot more sensible now,” Ramona said, and grinned.

They came to the end, where the causeway of stone plunged into the sea. The horizon stood before them at eye level, a hazy white bar. Sunlight broke on the sea in a billion points, flickering like gold signal mirrors, sending a Morse of infinite complexity.

They sat on a flat boulder, side by side. Ramona leaned back on both hands, jacking her elbows forward. Muscley brown forearms bulged side to side, muscley brown biceps bulged front to back. Triceps stood out like the swells between the jetties.

“How’s things at your house?”

“Okay,” Kevin said. “Andrea’s back is bothering her. Yoshi is sick of teaching English, Sylvia’s worried that the kids have chicken pox. Donna and Cindy are still drinking too much, and Tomas still spends all his time at the screen. The usual lunacy. I bet Nadezhda thinks we’re bedlam.”

“She’s nice.”

“Yeah. But sometimes the house is just howling, and the look on her face…”

“It can’t be any worse than India.”

“Maybe. Maybe it bothers me more than her. I tell you, some nights when the kids are wild I wonder if living in small families isn’t a good idea.”

“Oh no,” Ramona said. “Do you think so? I mean, they’re so isolated.”

“Quieter.”

“Sure, but so what? I mean, you’ve always got your room. But if it were only you and a partner and kids! Try to imagine Rosa and Josh doing that! Rosa doesn’t do a thing to take care of Doug and Ginger, she’s always working or down here surfing. So those kids are there and they’re really into being entertained constantly, and sometime I know Josh would just go crazy if he were in a little house all by himself. He almost does already.”

“A lot of them did, I guess. Mothers.”

“Yeah. But at our place Josh can get me or my mom to take the kids while he goes out to swim or something, and we can talk with him, and he tells us about it and feels better, and by the time Rosa’s back he’s having a good time and he doesn’t care. Unless he’s really pissed at her. But they manage. I don’t think their marriage would survive if they lived by themselves.”

Kevin nodded. “But what about other couples who’re different? What you’re saying is that marriages are less intense now because people tend to live in groups. But what about the really good marriages? Then reducing the intensity is just diffusing something good.”

“Diffusing it, yeah, spreading it around. Maybe we need to have that kind of good diffused out. The couple won’t suffer.”

“No? Well. Maybe not.” What about us, then? Kevin wanted to say. He had never even found someone he felt like trying with. And she and Alfredo, fifteen years? What went wrong? “But… something is gone, I think. Something I think I’d like.”

Ramona frowned, considering it. They watched swells run up and down the seaweedy, mussel-crusted band of rock at sea level. Talked about other things. Felt light crash into their skin.

Ramona pointed north. “Couple of big ships coming.”

“Oh, I love to watch those.” He sat up, shaded his eyes with a hand. Two tall ships had risen over the horizon, converging on the harbor from slightly different angles, one from San Pedro, and the other rounding Catalina from the north. Both were combinations of square rigged and fore-and-aft rigged, the current favorite of ship designers. They resembled the giant barkentines built in the last years of sailing’s classic age, only the fore-and-aft sails were rigid, and bulged around the masts in an airfoil shape. Each ship had five masts, and the one rounding Catalina had an isosceles mast for its foremast, two spars rising from the hull to meet overhead.

Suddenly all the yards on both ships bloomed white with sail, and the little bones of white water chewed by their sharp bows got larger. “Hey they’re racing!” Kevin said. “They’re racing!”

Ramona stood to watch. The onshore breeze was strengthening, and the two ships were on a reach across it, so their sails bulged toward shore. Stunsails bloomed to each side of the highest yards, and from a distance it seemed the ships flew over the water, gliding like pelicans. Working freighters only, so big they could never be really fast, but those stacks of white sail, full-bellied with the wind! Complex as jets, simple as kites, the two craft cut through the swells and converged on the harbor, on each other. It seemed possible the windward ship might try to steal the other’s wind, and sure enough the leeward ship began to luff off a bit, toward the beach. Perhaps the pilot would have to try swinging behind the windward ship, to trade places and reverse the tactic; a dangerous maneuver, however, as they might never catch up. “Isosceles is trying to push them into the beach,” Ramona observed.

“Yeah, they’re caught inside. I say Isosceles has them.”

“No, I say Leeward’s closer, they’ll slip right around the jetty here, we’ll probably be able to step aboard.”

“Bet.”

“Okay.”

On the end of the other jetty a group of kids were standing and shouting at the sight. The wind pushed at them, Kevin raised his arms to feel it. That something so free and wild should be harnessed to the will: the ancient elegance of it made him laugh.

“Go, Isosceles!” “Go, Leeward!” And they shouted and bumped shoulders like the kids on the other jetty. As the ships got closer they could see better how big they were. The channel couldn’t take any larger, it looked as if the mainyards would stretch from one jetty to the other, great silver condor wings of alloy. The crews of the two ships were standing on the windward rails as ballast, and someone on each ship hurled amplified insults across the ever-narrowing gap of water between them. It really did look as though they would reach the channel mouth in a dead heat, in which case Isosceles would be forced to luff off, according to race protocol. Ramona was gleefully pointing this out to Kevin when a long silver spar telescoped out from the windward side of Isosceles’ bow, and an immense rainbow-striped balloon spinnaker whooshed into existence like a parachute, dragging the whole great ship behind it. Swells exploded under the bow. “Coming through!” they heard the tinny loudspeaker from Isosceles cry, and with a faint Bronx cheer the Leeward sloughed off. Its stunsails rolled up into their spars, and the spars telescoped back in under the yards. Sail was taken in everywhere, without a single sailor aloft, and the ship settled down into the water like a motorboat with the throttle cut. When Isosceles turned into the channel entrance, to the cheers of spectators on both jetties, its sails too disappeared, rolling up with the faint hum of automated rigging and tackle blocks. Three of the five topsails and the isosceles top section served to propel it down the channel at a stately five miles an hour, and the bare spars stood high against the hills of Corona del Mar. Leeward followed it in, looking much the same. The crews waved back at them.

“They’re so beautiful,” Kevin said.

“I wonder if one of them is Nadezhda’s ship,” Ramona said. “It’s due soon.”

They sat down again, leaned back against the warm rock side by side, arms touching. A thick rain of light poured down on them, knitting tightly with the onshore wind. Photon by photon, striking and flaking off, filling the air so that everything—the sea, the tall ships, the stone of the jetties, the green light tower at the other jetty’s end, the buoys clanging on the groundswell, the long sand reach of the beach, the lifeguard stands and their streaming flags, the pastel wrack of apartments, the palm fronds swaying over it all—everything floated in a white light, an aura of salt mist, ethereal in the photon rain. In every particulate jot of being… Kevin settled back like a sleepy cat. “What a day.”

And Ramona leaned over, black hair blinding as a crow’s wing, and kissed him.

Over the next weeks matters progressed on the Rattlesnake Hill issue, but slowly and amorphously, so that it was hard to keep a sense of what was happening. A letter came back from LA’s Metropolitan Water District, outlining their offer of more water. What it came down to was a reduced rate if they purchased more. Mary and the town planner’s office immediately made inquiries with the OCWD concerning sell-through rates. Clearly they were hoping that El Modena could buy the extra water from LA, and then give what they didn’t use to OCWD by pouring it into the groundwater basin. This would get them credits from OCWD that they could use against pump taxes, and the net result might be a considerable savings, with a lot of water in reserve.

Oscar shook his head when he heard about it. “I believe I’d like to look into this one a little more,” he murmured. First of all, he told Kevin, town resolution 2022 would have to be overthrown or some sort of special dispensation made, which would take council action or a town vote. And then the whole maneuver would tend to put the town in the water business, buying it here and selling it there, and the State Water Resources Control Board was likely to have some thoughts about that, no matter what the district watermaster said. If it came to a town vote that superficially looked like it was only about saving money, Oscar wanted to talk to Sally Tallhawk about her suggestion concerning Inyo County’s water. Inyo now owned the water that used to belong to Los Angeles, and it was possible they could work out some kind of deal, and buy even cheaper water from Inyo than the MWD was offering, with some use stipulations included that would keep the water from fueling a big development. Certainly Inyo would appreciate the irony of altering the shape of development in southern California, after the years of manipulation they had suffered at the hands of LA.

So Oscar was busy. Kevin for his part dropped by to talk with Hiroko, Susan, and Jerry, to see what they were thinking about the matter. Jerry had let his law practice lapse so that he could help run a small computer firm located down on Santiago Creek where it crossed Tustin Avenue, and Kevin found him there one day, eating lunch by the creek. He was a burly man in his early sixties, who looked as calm and sensible as you could ever want, until you noticed a glint in his eye, the only indication of a secret sense of humor, a sort of anarchist’s playfulness that the town had come to know all too well.

He shrugged when Kevin asked him about the hill matter. “Depends what it is. I need to see Alfredo’s plans, what it would do for the town.”

“Jerry, that’s the last empty hill in the whole area! Why should he take that hill? I notice you’re content to have your business down here on the flats.”

Jerry swallowed a bit of sandwich. “Maybe I’m not content. Maybe I’d like to take some offices up there in Alfredo’s complex.”

“Ah, come on. Here you are down by the creek for lunch. I know you appreciate the way this town has been working, what it stands for. Why else would you be here?”

“I was born here.”

“Yah, well…” Kevin sighed. Talking to Jerry was hard. “All the more reason you should want to protect it. It’s a miracle the water district held onto that hill for so long, and now that we’ve got it, it would be a shame to make it look like all the rest of them. Think about it.”

“I’ll think about it.” He swallowed. “Know what I heard?”

“What?”

“I heard Alfredo’s being pressed into trying for this move. Needs to do it.”

Kevin thought about that as he rode over to see Susan Mayer. Susan was chief scientist at the El Modena Chicken Farm, which supplied much of northern Orange County with chickens. Kevin found her out in the farm’s lab, cursing a gc/mass spec: an athletic woman in her forties, one of the best swimmers in town. “I don’t really have time to talk about it now, Kevin, but I assure you I know just what you’re worried about. Alfredo is a nice man, and good for the town, but sometimes it seems like he should be in Irvine or Anaheim where the stakes are higher.” She wouldn’t say more than that. “Sorry, I’ve got to get to work on this, it looks like we might have an outbreak in one of the coops. We’ll have to wait and see about the hill stuff until we know more anyway, right?”

Sigh. On to Hiroko, botanist and orchard farmer. Also a landscape gardener, and she was out on a job. Kevin found her and gave her a hand digging up a front yard, and they had a good long talk as they worked. Hiroko had been on the council on and off for about twenty years, and so nothing much in that area excited her any more. But she seemed sympathetic, and skeptical about Alfredo and his big plans, as she put it. Kevin left her feeling good. If they could count on Hiroko, then it would only take one more to have a majority on the council. Susan and Jerry were both possibles, and so…

He told Doris what Jerry had said about Alfredo needing to make the move. “Hmm,” Doris said. “Okay, I’ll see if pretending I know that for sure will pull anything more out of John.” She was working the hardest of them all, pumping her connections for more news from inside Heartech. Her friend John heard a lot in the financial office of her own firm, Avending, and his friend over in Heartech’s offices knew even more. The next time she talked to him, she said something about Alfredo having to make a move. “Yeah, it’s an outside thing,” John said, “Ann’s sure of it. They’ve always had a source of outside money, she says. That’s why it’s ballooned so fast.”

Apparently Heartech’s growth had been even more rapid than it appeared to the public. And some of that growth was being absorbed by a hidden backer, so that Heartech would remain within legal company size, and avoid any special audits from the IRS. Or so the rumors had it. “They’re iceberging in the black, Ann says,” John told Doris in low voice.

“Unbelievable,” Doris said. If it were true, then they would have the best weapon possible to stop any office-building by Heartech. Proving it, however… “But if they build this development they’re going to come under the microscope! No way they can fund it themselves—they’ll either have to apply for government help or have a partner.”

“True,” John said a week later. “And Doris—I’m sorry to tell you, but…”