Kim Robinson - The Wild Shore

“No.”

“Well, I’m surprised at you.” He stood up, stiff and slow, and refilled the teapot. After he got it set on the rack over the fire he went to one of his bookshelves. The inside of his house was a bit like the yard: more clocks, cracked china plates, a collection of lanterns and lamps, a machine for playing music (once in a while he’d put a record on it and turn it with one bony finger, commanding us to put our ears next to it, to hear scratchy songs whispering up and down, while he said “That’s the Eroica! Listen to that!”); but most of two walls were taken up by bookshelves, overflowing with stacks of mangy books. A lot of them he wouldn’t let me read. But now he brought one over and tossed it in my lap. “Time for some sight reading. Start where I have the marker, there.”

I opened the slim, mildewed book and began to read—an act that still gave me great trouble, great pleasure. “ ‘Justice is in itself powerless: what rules by nature is force. To draw this over to the side of justice, so that by means of force justice rules—that is the problem of statecraft, and it is certainly a hard one; how hard you will realize if you consider what boundless egoism reposes in almost every human breast; and that it is many millions of individuals so constituted who have to be kept within the bounds of peace, order and legality. This being so, it is a wonder the world is on the whole as peaceful and law-abiding as we see it to be’ ”—this caused the old man to laugh for a while—“ ‘which situation, however, is brought about only by the machinery of the state. For the only thing that can produce an immediate effect is physical force, since this is the only thing which men as they generally are understand and respect—’ ”

“Hey!”

It was Nicolin, busting into the house like Satan into God’s bedroom. “I’m going to kill you right here and now!” he cried, advancing on the old man.

Tom jumped up with a whoop: “Let’s see you try!” he shouted. “You don’t stand a chance!”—and the two of them grappled a bit in the middle of the room, Steve holding the old man by the shoulders at just enough distance so that Tom’s fierce blows missed him.

“Just what do you mean filling our heads with lies, you old son of a bitch?” Nicolin demanded, shaking Tom back and forth with genuine anger.

“And what do you mean busting into my house like that. Besides”—losing his pleasure in their usual sport—“when did I ever lie to you?”

Steve snorted. “When didn’t you? Telling us they used to bury their dead in silver-lined caskets. Well now we know that one’s a lie, because we went up to San Clemente last night and dug one up, and the only thing it had on it was plastic.”

“What’s this?” Tom looked at me. “You did what?”

So I told him about the gang’s expedition into San Clemente. When I got to the part about the coffin handles he began to laugh; he sat down in his chair and laughed, heee, heeee, hee hee heeee, all through the rest of it, including the part about the scavengers’ siren attack.

Nicolin stood over him, glowering. “So now we know you’re lying, see?”

“Heeeeeee, hee hee hee hee hee hee.” A cough or two. “No lies at all, boys. Only the truth from Tom Barnard. Listen here—why do you think that plastic on that coffin was silver-colored?” Steve gave me a significant look. “Because it usually was silver, of course. You just dug up some poor guy who died broke. Now, what were you doing digging up graves for, anyway?”

“We wanted the silver,” Steve said.

“Bad luck.” He got up to get another cup, poured it full. “I tell you, most of them were buried wrapped in the stuff. Sit down here, Stephen, and have some tea.” Steve pulled up a little wooden chair, sat down and commenced sucking on his tea. Tom curled in his chair and wrapped his knobby hands around his cup. “The really rich ones were buried in gold,” he said slowly, looking down at the steam rising from his cup. “One of them had a gold mask, carved to look just like him, put over his dead face. In his burial chamber were gold statues of his wife, and dogs, and kids—he had on gold shoes, too, and little mosaic pictures of the important events of his life, made of precious stones, surrounding him on each wall of the chamber…”

“Ah, come on,” Nicolin protested.

“I’m serious! That’s what it was like. You’ve been up there, now, and seen the ruins—are you going to tell me they didn’t throw silver in the ground with their dead?”

“But why?” I asked. “Why that gold mask and all?”

“Because they were Americans.” He sipped his tea. “That was the least of it, let me tell you.” He stared out the window for a while. “Rain coming.” After another minute’s silent sipping: “What do you want silver so bad for, anyway?”

I let Nicolin answer that one, because it was his idea.

“To trade for things,” Steve said. “To get what we want at the swap meets. To be able to go somewhere, down the coast maybe, and have something to trade for food.” He glanced at the old man, who was watching him closely. “To be able to travel like you used to.”

Tom ignored that. “You can get everything you want by trading what you make. Fish, in your case.”

“But you can’t go anywhere! You can’t travel with fish on your back.”

“You can’t travel anyway. They blasted every important bridge in the country, from the looks of it. And if you did manage to get somewhere, the locals would take your silver and kill you, like as not. Or if they were just, you’d still run out of silver eventually, and you’d have to go to work where you were. Digging shit ditches or something.”

The fire crackled as we sat there and watched it. Nicolin let out a long sigh, looking stubborn. The old man sipped his tea and went on. “We travel to the swap meet in three days, if the weather allows. That’s farther than we used to travel, let me tell you. And we’re meeting more new people than ever.”

“Including scavengers,” I said.

“You don’t want to get in any feud with those young scavengers,” Tom said.

“We already are,” Steve replied.

Now it was Tom’s turn to let out a sigh. “There’s been too much of that already. So few people alive these days, there’s no reason for it.”

“They started it.”

Big drops of rain hit the window. I watched them run down the glass, and wished my home had a window. Even with the door closed and dark clouds filling the sky, all the books and crockery and lanterns and even the walls gleamed silvery grey, as if they all contained a light of their own.

“I don’t want you fighting at the swap meet,” Tom said.

Steve shook his head. “We won’t if we don’t have to.”

Tom frowned and changed the subject. “You got your lesson memorized?”

Steve shook his head. “I’ve had to work too much… I’m sorry.”

After a bit I said, “You know what it looks like to me?”

“What what looks like,” Tom asked.

“The coastline here. It looks like one time there was nothing but hills and valleys, all the way out to the horizon. Then one day some giant drew a straight line down it all, and everything west of the line fell down and the ocean came rushing in. Where the line crossed a hill there’s a cliff, and where it crossed a valley there’s a marsh and a beach. But always a straight line, see? The hills don’t stick out into the ocean, and water doesn’t come and fill in the valleys.”

“That’s a faultline,” Tom said dreamily, eyes closed as if he were consulting books in his head. “The earth’s surface is made up of big plates that are slowly sliding around. Truth! Very slowly—in your lifetime it might move an inch—in mine two, hee hee—and we’re next to a fault where the plates meet. The Pacific plate is sliding north, and the land here south. That’s why you get the straight line there. And earthquakes—you’ve felt them—those are the two plates slipping, grinding against each other. One time… one time in the old time, there was an earthquake that shattered every city on this coast. Buildings fell like they did on the day. Fires burned and there was no water to put them out. Freeways like that one down there pointed at the sky, and no one could get in to help, at first. For a lot of people it was the end. But when the fires were burned out… they came from everywhere. They brought in giant machines and material, and they used the rubble that was all that was left of the cities. A month later every one of those cities was built back up again, just as they had been before, so exactly that you couldn’t even tell there had been an earthquake.”