Gift of the Golden Mountain (27 page)

     "You're right there, Israel," Eli said, backing off. "Nobody's trying to put you down."

     "Yes they are!" Israel raised his voice. "Your friend Elmore, didn't you hear what he called me? What do you mean, nobody's trying to put me down? That prison bait, that lowlife nogood. . . ."

     Hayes broke in: "Eli, do you remember that time we were with a local CORE guy named Slim out in the backroads of Mississippi, I think it was near a little town called Pawtonville, or something like that? We met this grizzled white man wobbling down the road with the help of a cane. Slim told us he'd been wounded in the war. We were downwind of the guy, and he smelled like he hadn't had a bath since the Battle of the Bulge. Anyway, we could see a black guy coining down the road in an old wagon pulled by a mule, and when he gets up with the other guy he stops. Neither one of them said anything, but the white guy climbs up into the wagon and off they go. Slim said they'd been doing that twice a week for twenty years. Just outside of town the black guy would stop and let off the white man, so he wouldn't be seen riding in a mule cart with a
Negro. I asked Slim why the black guy bothered, and Slim said he asked him once."

     Hayes paused, remembering.

     "And?" May prompted.

     "And the black guy said he felt sorry for him."

     Israel, calmed, said: "That's right, that's exactly right."

     "Maybe so," Eli added, draping his arm loosely over Israel's shoulder, a gesture of reconciliation. Suddenly he looked at his watch and said, "Christ! It's after eleven—I'm supposed to be meeting somebody in the Fillmore right now." Turning to Hayes he added, "Think you could hitch a ride home with Magnificent May here?"

     "Magnificent May," Hayes said, turning to her, "what are the chances?"

     "Call me pretty names and I'll take you anywhere," she answered, laughing. When she bent to kiss me goodnight, I felt her cheek burning warm against mine.

May eased the Jaguar slowly onto Broadway, glad for the tangle of traffic in front of the striptease and topless joints. A barker with a top hat and an English accent called out to Hayes: "Come on in, mate, there's things in here—great galloping balloons you'll bloody well never see again in this lifetime."

     "Great galloping balloons," Hayes repeated as they picked up speed, and he rolled up the windows. They slipped easily onto the freeway that curved along the edge of the Bay. May was glad to be alone with him, glad to be in the car sealed off from the rest of the world. The air seemed to expand; she held the Jaguar back, wanting to make the ride last.

     She took a deep breath. "I've missed you," she said, exhaling.

     "You've missed me?" he repeated. "Funny. I haven't missed you till that much. I never think of you."

     "Never?" she came back, ready to play.

     "Not in the morning when I'm drinking my Ovaltine and eating my crunchy granola. And you never pop into my mind when I'm circling the campus looking for a parking place and I see a tall, willowy, dark-haired female person walking by."

     "Not even then?" she sounded the refrain.

     "Not even when I was in the Lowie Museum the other day, looking at some terrific masks from New Guinea. I didn't wish you were around to see them with me."

     "Nope?"

     "Nope. Never think about you at all. Not in the shower. Not even in bed at night."

     "Wait a minute," she laughed, "or I'm likely to run us off the bridge."

     They entered the tunnel, the lights flickered through the car and she felt, suddenly, lightheaded and happy. Then they were in the dark again and the lights of the Oakland waterfront blazed bright against the night sky. She slid the car easily into the lanes marked for Berkeley and felt a strange elation. She considered kicking hard on the gas and going on, driving up highway 80 to Sacramento and on to Lake Tahoe, driving on and on through the Nevada desert to Salt Lake.

     "Whoa—University Avenue coming up," Hayes warned as she picked up speed.

     "You've passed the bar," she said as they moved up the wide street.

     "What next?"

     "I'm not sure," he answered. "I have an offer to go to Washington, play penny ante with the power brokers . . . Don't laugh, I might just do that. I'm also thinking of getting out of the country for a while, see if that helps."

     She pulled up in front of his place on Benvenue.

     "Are you going back to Hawaii next summer?"

     "June and July," she told him. "I have to be back here for a project in August."

     "You like it there?"

     "I love it. The Big Island, especially. I can't quite explain what there is about it—there is just this clarity. It's such lovely big empty land, so gentle, floating out there in the middle of the ocean. And the volcanoes are so accessible . . . they all but invite you to study them."

     "Sounds civilized."

     "It is. Why don't you come out while I'm there?"

     He looked at her. "You and me and the sea and the sand?"

     She nodded.

     "Christ," he said, leaning to touch his lips lightly to hers as he opened the door.

     She put her hand on his arm to stop him. "Wait. Hayes. Please." She was searching for the words, and they were coming in short bursts. "I can't pretend anymore . . . I think it's time . . . we need to talk . . . about us . . ."

     He put his head back and closed his eyes. The silence settled on them, May felt herself sinking under the weight of it. She pulled herself up, grasped the steering wheel firmly, and waited.

     "I'm sorry," he said, his eyes still closed.

     "You keep saying that," she told him, a sting in her voice.

     "What I'm sorry about," he said slowly, the words were hard in coming, "is that we had to meet now . . . in the middle of all this . . . what I'm sorry about is that our timing has been so lousy."

     The taste of bile rose in her throat. "What are you trying to say . . . right girl, wrong time . . . something like that?"

     He didn't answer, but grasped the door handle as if he were about to leave. She could not let him go, not yet. She knew she shouldn't do it, shouldn't say it, shouldn't cling but she could not help herself. Panic rising, she pleaded. "Does that mean forever?"

     He touched her face. "God, I hope not," was his answer.

When everyone had left the cottage that night and I lay in bed, phrases flew about the room, bombarding me, but the one that stuck in my mind was:
You know how those things go
, which Kit had said when I asked about Philip Ward. There was something, I knew, some small detail tucked away in a dusty little unused room of my memory: And then I got it. Of course.

     I climbed back out of bed, pulled on my robe, and cursed my old bones for taking so long to move. It took awhile to find the right file and longer to find the right letter.

June 4, 1944, Lena Kerr to Porter Reade in Burma.

     I scanned the fragile onionskin page covered with Lena's feathery script . . . news of a cousin in Los Angeles . . . an almost tangible feeling that the war in the Pacific is winding down, will soon be over . . . And then:
"Kit has not yet been able to resolve her dilemma over Philip Ward. I can only wonder what has made her so cautious, so suspicious of passion . . .

DON'T EXPECT TOO much," Philip said, "from Daniel, I mean. He's not very articulate, and his social graces are just short of nonexistent."

     "Just short of?" she smiled.

     "He might say 'hullo.' Then again, he might not."

     The two-lane blacktop shot straight down the empty valley floor, the highest peaks of the Sierra Nevadas looming on one side, the White Mountains on the other. There was no color, only shades of black and white and a dark, dark green. It was a strangely menacing landscape, desolate and beautiful in the January cold. Karin shivered.

     "More heat?" he asked, reaching for the control.

     "No, no. It just looks so cold out there. And I guess I'm a little nervous. About Daniel. I want him to like me."

     He reached for her hand. "The kid may not be swift, but he's sure as hell not stupid. The way I figure it, he'll take one look at you and figure there must be more to the old man than he thought. My ratings should go up considerably."

     She pressed his hand to her cheek and said, "I'm very serious. Daniel has to accept me if this is going to work."

     "This?"

     "Us."

     "Don't do that, Karin. Don't make us contingent on Daniel. That's too much for me to handle—Daniel's produced more than his share of disappointments already. And it's too much to lay on the kid."

     She looked out the window, focused on a tall stand of alders in the half-distance. The sun glinted off a frosting of snow that lay on the open land, creating a surreal brilliance that made the mountains stand out sharp against the hard blue of the sky.

     "Dear God this is violent country," she said, breathing out.

     "I've always thought of Owens Valley as the True West," he answered, glad to move away from the subject of his son. "It has the scope and the geographic terror . . . Can you imagine the Sierras here being heaved up out of the earth? Think of the magnitude of the earthquakes, the volcanoes. Mind boggling."

     "I was just thinking about volcanoes, and May. She's been here several times on field trips . . . and always said this was magnificent country. It really is. But it's . . . well, what you said. Terrifying too. At least to me."

     "To me, too. Given the choice, I'll take Manhattan. But Daniel likes the out of doors, the rugged life, and this is the first school he hasn't run from, which is something." He glanced at the odometer. "The school should be coming up just . . . about . . . now."

     He swung open the gate while she drove the car through, over a cattle guard. They could see the school in the distance: a cluster of low buildings grouped around a stand of barren trees. "Looks like a prison camp left over from World War II, doesn't it? Now that I think of it, one of the Japanese internment camps was near here—Manzanar."

     "It seems very Spartan," she answered, "But that's the idea, isn't it?"