The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Read Online Free PDF Page A

me.”
    “Sure.” Tom’s tea was so strong it was almost like having a meal.
    “Have you got your lesson ready?”
    “You bet. Say, did you hear about the dead man washed up?”
    “I went down to look at him. Washed up just north of the rivermouth. A Japanese, I’d venture. We buried him at the back of the graveyard with the rest of them.”
    “What do you think happened to him?”
    “Well…” We turned onto the path to his house. “Someone shot him!” He cackled at my expression. “I guess he was trying to visit the United States of America. But the United States of America is out of bounds. ” He navigated his yard without paying the least bit of attention to it, and I followed him closely. We went into the house. “Obviously someone has declared us out of bounds, we are beyond the pale, boy, only in this case the pale is rather dark, those ships steaming back and forth out there are so black you can see them even on a moonless night, rather stupid of them if they wanted them truly invisible. I haven’t seen a foreigner—a live foreigner, that is—those dead ones make mighty poor informants, hee hee—since the day. That’s too long for coincidence, not that there aren’t contributing indications. But that’s the main fact; where are they?—since they are out there.” He filled the teapot. “It’s my hypothesis that declaring us off limits was the only way to avoid fighting over us, and destroying … but I’ve outlined this particular guess to you before, eh?”
    I nodded.
    “And yet I don’t even know who we’re talking about, when you get right down to it.”
    “The Chinese, right?”
    “Or the Japanese.”
    “So you think they really are out there on Catalina just to keep folks away?”
    “Well I know someone’s on Catalina, someone not like us. That’s one thing I know. I’ve seen the lights from up here at night, blinking all over the island. You’ve seen them.”
    “I sure have,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
    “Yeah, that Avalon must be a bustling little port these days. No doubt something bigger on the backside, some Alexandrian causeway harbor, you know. It’s a blessing to know something for sure, Henry. Surprisingly few things you can say that about. Knowledge is like quicksilver.” He walked over to the fireplace. “But someone is on Catalina.”
    “We should go over and see who.”
    He shook his head, looking out his big window at the fast onshore streamers. “We wouldn’t come back.”
    Subdued, he threw some twigs on the coals of the banked fire, and we sat before the window in two of his armchairs, waiting for the water to heat. The sea was a patchcloth, dark grays and light grays, with silver buttons scattered in a crooked line between us and the sun. It looked like it was going to rain rather than fog up; old Nicolin would be mighty annoyed, because you can fish in the rain. Tom pulled at his face, making a new pattern in the ten thousand wrinkles lining it. “Whatever happened to summertime,” he sang, “yes when the living was eee-sy.” I threw some more twigs on the fire, not bothering to respond to the little tune I had heard so often. Tom had told a lot of stories about the old time, and he was insistent that in those days our coastline had been a treeless, waterless desert. But looking out the window at the forest and the billowing clouds, feeling the fire warm the chill air of the room, remembering our adventure of the night before, I wondered if I could believe him. Half of his stories I could not confirm in his many books—and besides, couldn’t he have taught me to read wrong, so that what I read would back up what he said?
    It would be pretty difficult to make up a consistent system, I decided as he threw one of his packets of tea—made of plants he picked in the back country—into the pot. And I remembered once at a swap meet, when he came running up to Steve and Kathryn and me, drunk and excited, blabbing, “Look what I bought, look