The Ninth Wave (28 page)

The land in San Fernando was owned by two polite Japs. They said the land
was really not for sale and then, with much embarrassment and sucking of
teeth, said that it could be had for $10,000 per acre. They all walked
out and looked at the land.
The land was very black and rich. It was planted in spring onions and
the tiny light green spikes were laid out in long even rows. The earth
between the rows was soft and recently turned. A Japanese woman and a
boy were irrigating and the water ran down the rows in long thin streams.
"This isn't what we want," Mike said. "They think we want it for
subdividing and so they jack the price up."
His voice was irritated and he spoke directly to the Japanese. They
grinned and ducked their heads. Georgia blushed.
On the way back to Los Angeles, Mike drove to the top of Mount Wilson. It
was a clear day with the smog blown out to sea. Below them was all of
Los Angeles.
The older part of the city was dun-colored, neat and made soft by
trees. Crawling out of the older city, like parasites abandoning a
decrepit and useless host, were the new subdivisions. Close-packed,
identical, shining-new, glittering with paint and new grass the
subdivisions flowed down toward the sea and around the blackened spikes
of the abandoned oil derricks of Signal Hill. They moved, in a welter
of two-bedroom one-bath globs, toward Pomona and Whittier and devoured
the orange trees as they went. In the Hollywood Hills and in the slopes
behind Burbank, the land was scarred by raw new roads and the units were
bigger and sparkled with polished glass and redwood. Only occasionally
was there an open and orderly stretch of green where crops were growing.
"Now all this is hopeless," Mike said restlessly, sweeping his hand
to include the whole area from the mountains to the sea. "It's too
crowded. Pretty soon it will all be subdivided. It's too expensive for
farming. We have to get farther out."
"Farther out?"
"Yes, farther out. Out where the land hasn't been worked over. Where you
are the first person to get to it. I don't know where, but not around
here." With a sharp cut of his hands he rejected the city, the houses,
the whole bright saucer of land. "You have to get something that's new;
where you're the first one."
Georgia glanced at him and there was interest in her face. Mike put
his hands down and swpped talking. They looked out over the city for
another minute.
"All right, let's go," Georgia said. "I'll find out about Imperial Valley,
the desert, all those places. I understand."
Two days later they drove to Imperial Valley. Hank went along. Mike knew
it was his day off and insisted that Hank go with them. As soon as Hank
got in the back seat of the car he fell asleep.
He fell asleep sitting up. His chin fell forward slightly, but he sat
straight and stiff, as if he had just closed his eyes for a moment. Mike
could see his head in the rear-view mirror. Hank was thinner and the
hair above his ears was streaked with gray. He had a bone-and-gristle
leanness that indicated he would never get fat. Oddly, the freckles
still stood out on his nose and added to his bleached-out, tense look.
The highway was new and broad and neat. It was eight lanes wide and
was divided down the center by a strip of grass. The lanes were made
of poured concrete, six inches thick. The shoulders were made of black
asphalt and were bordered by a strip of gray gravel. The trees close to
the highway were stifled by the gasoline fumes and their skinny limbs
were as leafless as bones.
The highway rolled across the countryside without mercy. It cut through
hills in great raw gashes and swept on concrete bridges across the
rivers. It cut through mountains in long tunnels lined with white tile
and gleaming with lights. Occasionally from the new highway, the old
twisting road could be seen and the remains of the towns that had lined
the old road. The towns held up their french-fried almond signs and
antique signs and date shops and chirichilla ranches to the abandoned
empty strip of asphalt, while the dirty windows in the back brooded
malignantly over the new highway.
Mike held the Cadillac steady at seventy-five miles an hour. The car
poured into a long beautiful curve and there was the faint rasp of
rubber. Hank opened his eyes, lifted his head and looked out the window.
"Miss Blenner, do you spend all your time driving around with Mike
looking for farm land?" Hank asked. "Or do you do something else?"
Georgia turned around and looked at Hank. She smiled.
"Sometimes I go to U.C.L.A. and take a course. I never finish them,
but I start a lot of them. Ceramics, creative writing, history; things
like that."
"Why don't you finish?"
"Sometimes because they get boring. Take sculpturing. They show you a
nude girl and tell you to sculp her. But first you have to learn about
armatures and keeping clay wet and plaster and anatomy and sculpturing
theory. Someplace along the line I always get bored and give it up. I
feel bad about it, but I never finish the courses. And then there's
the family."
"What about the family?"
"The family is just more interesting than the courses. So I get to
thinking of the family and it's more interesting than ceramics and I
go home."
"Do you have a big family?"
"No. Not really. Just Father and Morrie, my brother. But there are
always a lot of people around. Fund raisers for Israel Bonds or producers
from New York or broken-down comedians who want Father to finance a new
picture for them. The house is full of them."
Something about the girl disturbed Hank. She seemed to lack a dimension,
a quality. For one thing she was not careful enough. She said everything
she thought. When she answered a question she thought for a moment,
but not to protect herself or to be careful. She paused the way a child
will pause, so that she could give a complete answer. Then she said
everything. Some instinct of protection, some device of insulation or
caution was missing in the girl. Really, Hank thought, it's that she's
exposed. No protections.
They drove past the turn-off for Palm Springs and Thousand Palms and came
to the long rows of date trees. The dates were tiny and green against the
brown of the trees. At Coachella it began to get hot, and in the valley
hundreds of Mexicans walked down the rows of melons. Like huge clever ants
they hurried down the rows, rapping with a knuckle on the melons, picking
only the ripest. The melons gathered in huge yellow mounds along the road.
"They say only Mexicans can tell a ripe melon in the field," Mike said.
"They can tell by the smell or the feel or something. Put an Irishman
out there and he'd pick all the wrong melons. But a Mexican, even a
little Mexican kid, never makes a mistake . . . always picks the ripe
ones and leaves the green ones."
Hank moved over to the window and looked out at the fields with new
interest.
"That's why all the big farmers encourage the wetbacks to come over
from Mexico," he said. "So they'll have a supply of pickers who can
smell out a ripe melon. I read somewhere that some of these Mexicans
will be deported by the immigration people six or eight times during a
harvest season. And they just keep coming back for more."
They left the fields and went past the white glittering emptiness of
the Salton Sea and the endless stretching away of alkali flats. Every
few miles there was a little town. They were all alike. Each one had a
restaurant, a few bars, a truck-fueling station with a few semis parked
around it. There was a garage with a big tow truck ready to go, the hook
hanging free. At the outskirts of every town there was always a great
ugly heap of wrecked and abandoned cars. The Model-T's and old Chevvies
were on the bottom of the heap, turning rusty and stripped almost bare,
reduced to a carcass. On top of them were the layers of newer cars;
Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Chryslers, Mercurys. Some were squashed up into
oddly shortened and twisted bodies; others were jerked lengthways. The
guts of the cars; the cushions, steering wheels, wires, rubber mats and
mirrors spilled down the side of the heap. On some of the newer wrecks
the blood still showed on the windshields and the rust was just beginning
to eat away the fresh chrome of the bumpers.
"So now you don't sculp or go to school or anything else except go along
to see your daddy's investment is protected?" Hank asked as if they had
been talking about it all along.
Mike laughed. Georgia turned with a smile on her face, but then she saw
Hank's tight unsmiling face and a bruised, confused look appeared around
her eyes.
She knows I meant it to hurt, Hank thought. He was sorry at once. The
girl had no defenses, it was pointless to attack.
"That's not the reason I'm along," she said carefully, slowly. "I just
want to see what happens. See, Hank, we're Jews and we're in motion
pictures and those two things make people scared of politics. At home
everyone gets nervous when politics come up. They're afraid the government
will censor the movies or pass legislation against Jews or something like
that. Politics always seemed distant and very bad and confusing." She
shrugged her shoulders, despairing of her words. "So I came along."
"You hang around Mike and you'll learn a lot about politics," Hank
said and his voice was not mocking. Then he paused and too swiftly his
voice became harsh. "Jesus, Mike, you're not really going to run that
bum Cromwell for governor? He doesn't have a chance. And if he does
he shouldn't."
Georgia looked startled and then interested and Hank felt a quick
relief. She had not detected his clumsy shift away from her,
The rest of the way into Brawley they talked about Cromwell's chances.
Mike nodded his head and grinned, but he did not say how he thought
Cromwell could win.
In Brawley they talked to a real estate agent. He was a lean, sun-burned,
friendly man. He had an office, but he liked to do business in his
air-conditioned Cadillac. He leaned back in his seat, yawned as the
air-conditioner hummed quietly. He had shown them all the land that was
for sale.
"Well, thars the situation around here," he said. "Nobody really wants
to sell. Maybe later if farm prices drop a bit they will. But not right
now. Oh, you could get land if you wanted to go high for it. Eight or
ten thousand an acre. But, God, with what they're getting for honeydews
and casabas in L.A., everyone is making a fortune."
"What if there's a depression?" Mike asked. He was irritated, restless.
"Then watch 'em run," the real estate agent said. "None of these people
are really farmers. They're just like the old prospectors. Come in,
skim off the surface gold and leave before you have to get down to the
low grade ore. None of 'em want to put in fertilizer or really build up
the land, they just want to skim the cream."
"O.K., let's go," Mike said. "This isn't what we're looking for."
Later, as they drove back toward Los Angeles, Mike was silent. He did
not speak until they reached the Morongo Valley turnoff.
"I don't know anything about farm land, but I don't want to get into
anything like Imperial Valley," he said.
"I knew it," Hank said. "As soon as I saw those big melons and those
solid red tomatoes and the nice straight rows in Imperial, I knew Mike
wouldn't be interested. Too easy."
Georgia looked from Hank to Mike. Mike was grinning. His teeth were
held together, his eyes narrowed. He fumbled in his pocket for a cigar,
slipped off the cellophane. His teeth separated and he put the cigar
into the corner of his mouth, bit down with the big heavy teeth, closed
his lips. He did not light the cigar for ten minutes.
They turned east and drove past the Bouillon Mountains and the Sheep
Hole Mountains. They went past the dry bed of Bristol Lake, through
Bagdad and into the white, searing desert below Rasor. Mike parked the
car on top of a low bluff and they got out. The sagebrush had vanished
and the ground was covered with a few greasewood trees, some dwarfed
yuccas, cholla cactus, and occasionally the great spiny figure of a giant
saguaro. There was not a building in sight. Only the straight, narrowing
strip of grease-soaked road. They stood silently and looked at it.
"It's impossible, Mike," Georgia said. "Nothing could grow here."
"It could if you had water," Mike said.
Hank watched them from the back seat of the car.
At their feet a gridiron-tailed lizard came up out of the sand. His
tongue flicked wildly and suddenly he saw them and dove into the sand. He
was gone instantly, leaving only a tiny cloud of dust where he had
disappeared. In a few seconds he popped up a yard away and then dove
under the sand again.
"But there isn't any water," Georgia said.
Mike walked back to the car and took out a map. It was labeled "Irrigation
System Map of California." He pointed to a large irregular blank spot on
the map.
"That's where we are," he said. "Right in the middle of nothing. The
land here is cheap. We could get it for almost nothing. All it needs is
water. And the state could put water in here if it wanted."
He pointed at a thick line which marked the Los Angeles Aqueduct. It
ran black and promising across the map, far above the land on which they
were standing:
"All you'd have to do is to run an irrigation canal from that aqueduct
and this land would be as rich as Imperial Valley," he said. His voice
was tense. "Then you'd have something, Georgia. And it'd be new; brand
new. Something you carved out of nothing. Better than taking over
something that's already there."
In the middle distance a big, ugly, splayfooted jack rabbit went in great
bounds. His ears stood straight up as he went over some four-podspurge.
Then he disappeared; instantly as if he had been swallowed by the hot sand.
"Could this land grow anything?" Georgia said doubtfully.
"Anything. Bring water in and it'll grow alfalfa, cotton, celery, any
damned thing," Mike said. "Georgia, this is like a great big natural
hothouse here. There are months when the temperature is over a hundred.
And some days the humidity is absolute zero. Bring water in and you'd have
tomatoes as big as . . . " he paused, searched for the right word, could
not find it and moved his hands to make a globe as big as a watermelon,
" . . . really, big, huge. Anything would grow."