The Ninth Wave (4 page)
Authors: Eugene Burdick
The girl's eyes would grow larger and her knuckles glowed red as she
tightened her grasp on the bow and her knees locked tighter around the
cello. During the third lesson he had grabbed the bow from her hands
and began to talk to her in a low intense voice.
"It is like two birds, my child. The bow is a bird and the cello is a
bird. Bring them together softly, make the wings barely touch. Do it
gently and the birds will make music for you. Forget the muscles of your
anm and legs. Close your eyes and do it softly."
The girl closed her eyes tightly and brought the bow down on the tight
gut. The notes croaked leaden and broken from the polished brown wood
of the cello. Her eyes popped open and she looked frantically up at her
teacher. He leaned over, and taking the bow and cello from her turned
away.
"Go tell your father you cannot play the cello. Tell him you have no
ear for music, your fingers are stiff and clumsy and you have an empty
head and he has scared you too much at home," he said without looking
at the girl.
When the girl left he flexed his fingers for several minutes and then
bending over the cello played for six hours while his family stood on
the back porch listening to the rich fat music that flowed underneath
and through the door.
In his second mood Mike's father was apoplectic and red-faced over the
table, pounding savagely with his fist as he told of the iniquities of
the capitalists and the cunning evil atrocities of the monopolies. As
the dishes chattered on the table he thundered the sins of America's
wealthy few. Each of the laws to protect property seemed to be a goad
in his flesh. In this mood, the children who could crept quietly from
the room, but those under his eye sat silently with their shoulders
hunched over, their eyes big in their heads and nodding dumbly like a
claque of infants. His father would stand in front of the tiny row of
children flourishing a newspaper, waving the crinkled paper in his hand.
"Look, here it says that income taxes are to be reduced. See, here it says
it. Read," and he would shove the paper under the eyes of the children
who looked with glazed, frightened faces at the maze of type. "The income
taxes for the rich are to be reduced and all the time people starve in
the streets. The filthy sniveling bastards, the vultures. Every ounce
of fat on their bodies is a pound d flesh from our bodies."
His voice raged and was heavy with a vitriolic hate. The little claque
nodded pointlessly and his voice went higher and more bitter. Occasionally
his wife would interrupt.
"Not in front of the children, John," her flat voice said. "They're too
young, they don't understand."
"No. Not in front of the children," he roared. "They don't understand
hunger or cold? They don't know what it is to belch cold potato soup for
thirty days in a row? Do you think they can't see their toes sticking
from their shoes?"
"But they don't understand," her flat voice went on. "It's too much for
children to know." She would bend her head over into her hands and begin
to sob, a sound as flat and dull as her voice. Even now Mike could not
remember his mother; she was a gray formless shadow, her personality so
thinly drawn beside the titanic rages and great hates of her husband
that she almost vanished. "They can't learn too young. When children
are undernourished in their mother's womb they know these things by
intuition," the father said, but now his voice was lower and his face
was suddenly tired. They know these things as intuitively as I know
my music." He turned and looked at the children and their heads bobbed
knowingly at him and then bent back down to inspect their knobby knees,
afraid to look at his face. He wadded the paper in his hands, dropped
it to the floor and as he walked toward the door he became smaller,
more crushed, seemingly almost to shrink in size as he walked. The sudden
deflation of pressure, the crumbling of their father would bring tears to
the children's eyes and they would sit in the little row, their shoulders
shaking delicately, making flat small sounds to match their mother.
In the third mood, the best one, Mike's father was tender and kind. He
would take a child on each knee and gently talk to them of a world where
there was no law and every man was every other man's brother. He talked
softly of Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman, kind and generous and loving
every man in the world. He talked of St. Simon and of Eugene Debs,
whose picture was cut from a newspaper and was growing yellow and dried
out over the kitchen sink. He told them of Joe Hill and the Wobblies
who went out against the guns and bayonets of a superior enemy because
they wanted to see justice done to all people. To the children it was a
lovely fairy story where huge men with beards and strong knotted muscles
were infinitely kind to women and children. The children smiled at one
another and boldly squeezed their father's arm and ran their fingers over
the curly black hair on the back of his hands. He rocked back and forth,
and when he had finished his airy tales he would begin to hum a strange
exciting song to which they added their piping, small voices . . .
"Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye workers of the world . . ."
When the four children played by themselves, they fought to play Joe
Hill. The winner would be chased by the other three who were "Salt
Lake City Special Deputies," and Joe Hill would dodge around the house
throwing imaginary balls of wet phosphorus into wheat fields, binding
bundles of dynamite to railroad car wheels, throwing kerosene on cribs
of corn. Finally the deputies would capture Joe Hill and would stand him
against the house with a bandage over his eyes. As they crouched down
with their sticks leveled to fire, Joe Hill would strip the bandage
from his eyes and look straight at them. Then they would make popping
noises with their tongues and Joe Hill would buckle against the side of
the house and finally slide in a crumpled heap to the ground. Then they
would start the game over and someone else would be Joe Hill.
Mike thought of a Christmas many years before. They had never had presents
or a Christmas tree, for Father had stated that they were symbols of a
corrupted ideal. Even when Father had a good job at the studios or the
Hollywood Bowl or in a string quartet, they did not have presents, but
spent Christmas Day behind the curtains of the home watching the other
children in the neighborhood run their cheap, painted bicycles and toys up
and down the sidewalk. This Christmas Mother had promised them a Christmas
tree and presents and the children had carefully not mentioned this to
their father.
It was late Christmas Eve when Mike had been awakened by a sound like
tiny crashing cymbals from the living room. He had walked quietly to
the door and opened it the slightest crack to see into the room. The
first thing he saw was a small Christmas tree upside down in the far
corner of the room and around it in perfect little splashes of blue,
red and green glass were the shattered Christmas tree ornaments. They lay
beautiful and sparkling on the floor, each one smashed into a circle of
fragments. The glass head of a reindeer was the only intact piece in the
wreckage. Mike's father was standing in the middle of the room, his hand
still in the air after throwing the Christmas tree against the wall.
He was smiling, a thin, gray smile that had nothing of humor in it,
but much of pleasure and self-righteousness.
His mother was standing crouched over in front of the tree facing the
center of the room where his father stood. Her lips were drawn tight and
thin so that her teeth showed. She was talking in a low fierce voice,
just opening her teeth enough to let the words out. All Mike could
remember of her face was the lips and chin and the white teeth.
"God damn you, John Freesmith. If I had the strength I'd claw your eyes
out," she whispered at him. "You've beat them down so often with your
crazy talk of injustice and your beautiful bloody revolution that's
going to make all men brothers they don't know where or what to stand
on. You're making them confused, almost crazy. You just keep cutting
the ground out from underneath them."
A fleck of spittle ran down her chin and with an incredibly sharp motion
she jerked her hand across her lips and went on talking.
"I don't care about the food and this house, but you have to leave them
something to live on. When they're older let them become anarchists or
revolutionaries and begin to hate, but now those ideas are just dry
bones that mean nothing to them. Oh, for the sake of Jesus Christ,
let them have something."
Mike's father stood startled in the middle of the room, his eyes bulging
slightly as he listened. Occasionally he looked at the shattered Christmas
tree in the corner and flexed his fingers with that quick expert way
he had. Finally he began to talk. He talked of the brotherhood of man
again and how Christmas had corrupted the ideal, but Mike could tell
he was uncertain. He hesitated over the words and tried to rephrase the
arguments in a new and more persuasive way.
Mike's mother stood listening to the words flow from his mouth and finally
she gave a shudder and turning toward the broken tree buried her face
in her hands. Then the old flat dull cry began to tear out between her
hands and as soon as both Mike and his father heard it they both knew
she had surrendered. Suddenly his father's words became confident again
and began to flow faster and after Mike had closed the door and crawled
in bed he could hear the confident monotone drone on through the dreary
Christmas night . . .
Miss Bell was quivering. Her neck was pink and on her cheek Mike could
see a round bright spot. He put a hand over her breast and squeezed. She
shuddered and a tiny, sharp yelp of pleasure came unexpectedly out of
her mouth. She turned and stretched out beside him on the bed and put
her arms around him.
"You won't forget me," she whispered harshly, "I won't let you. I just
won't let you. Ever, ever, ever . . . " Her fingers dug into his back.
Mike laughed, his hands full of her flesh, automatically caressing. He
laughed for he had already forgotten her, quite literally for a moment
he could not remember her name and he had no memory of her face or body
or actions. She was already forgotten and he was thinking of other things.
CHAPTER 3
Across the Grapevine
Highway 99 between Los Angeles and Bakersfield cuts directly across
the Tehachapi Mountains in a twisting narrow road which was known as
the Ridge Route. At the bottom of almost every elevation there was the
huge burned-out hulk of a truck which wore out its brake-shoes on the
descent and had to crash off the road. On the Bakersfield side of the
Ridge Route, beyond the Grapevine, is a smooth long strip of asphalt
which drops gently toward Bakersfield for twenty miles without a turn in
the road. Here is where the great semi-trailers are in the most danger,
for the slope is so gradual that unless the driver drops down into a lower
gear every few miles he is soon going so fast that his brakes are crisped
black at the first touch and the truck runs away. On the long slope the
runaway trucks reach eighty or ninety or even one hundred miles an hour
before the driver will run the truck off the road. The straight rows
of eucalyptus trees that line the road are scarred and battered by the
accidents and occasionally an entire tree will be destroyed or stunted.
In the summer the wrecks are marked by enormous clots of alfalfa that
look as if they had been exploded over the landscape. In the spring
the wrecks will scatter carrots down the road and occasionally an egg
truck will crash and gobbets of egg yolk are splattered over the fields,
the roadside cafés, the black asphalt and passing cars. When one of the
milk trucks crashes there is a sudden eruption of milk running down the
side of the road and then, with incredible speed, the flies arrive in
great dense clouds.
Hank Moore and Mike came down the Grapevine in Hank's Model-A on their
way to Stanford. Hank kept his long thin fingers on the gearshift and
when it wobbled too much he double-clutched and slid it into second
gear. Then the Ford would tremble, the rear wheels would shriek against
the asphalt and the car would slow down to forty-five miles an hour.
"How much money have you got, Hank," Mike asked.
"About five hundred bucks," Hank said.
Mike whistled. "Where did you get that?" he asked.
"I had it. Had it around for a long time."
"I'm damned. Old Hankus with all that money and no one knew it. You're
a funny one. Live by yourself in a boardinghouse, don't have a family,
only work a little bit and you've got five hundred' bucks. I work every
Saturday and all summer and all I've got is two hundred bucks. And
fifty of that my mother gave me. I don't know where she got it. Come on,
Hank. Where did you get that money?"
Hank looked over at Mike and grinned.
"Maybe I'll tell you later. But I didn't steal it. It's mine. I earned
it."
"How long will my two hundred bucks last at Stanford?"
"Not very long. Tuition is $115, room and board at Encina is $120 a
quarter. Books will cost a little. You haven't got enough to last even
a quarter."
"I'll make it do. I've got ways. I understand you can sign a note for
the tuition and pay it off when you graduate. So I'll have enough for
the first quarter."
The eucalyptus trees whirred by, big shreds of bark hanging from their
boles, putting a pungent oil smell out into the air. They passed a truck
going very slowly and as they went by they saw huge round bottles labeled
ACID nestled in excelsior on the bed of the truck.
"Look, Mike. I don't want a lot of talk and crap about money when we
get up there," Hank said, and his voice was sharp. "I'm going to have
enough other things to worry about. We'll pool our money and I'll let
you know when we start to run out. When that happens we'll talk about
money. Not before. O.K.?"
"That wouldn't be fair. You're the guy with most . . . " Mike started
to say.
"Don't give me that crap, I said," Hank cut in. "Just say yes or no. If I
put in more money than you I'll get a good return on it. One way or another."
tightened her grasp on the bow and her knees locked tighter around the
cello. During the third lesson he had grabbed the bow from her hands
and began to talk to her in a low intense voice.
"It is like two birds, my child. The bow is a bird and the cello is a
bird. Bring them together softly, make the wings barely touch. Do it
gently and the birds will make music for you. Forget the muscles of your
anm and legs. Close your eyes and do it softly."
The girl closed her eyes tightly and brought the bow down on the tight
gut. The notes croaked leaden and broken from the polished brown wood
of the cello. Her eyes popped open and she looked frantically up at her
teacher. He leaned over, and taking the bow and cello from her turned
away.
"Go tell your father you cannot play the cello. Tell him you have no
ear for music, your fingers are stiff and clumsy and you have an empty
head and he has scared you too much at home," he said without looking
at the girl.
When the girl left he flexed his fingers for several minutes and then
bending over the cello played for six hours while his family stood on
the back porch listening to the rich fat music that flowed underneath
and through the door.
In his second mood Mike's father was apoplectic and red-faced over the
table, pounding savagely with his fist as he told of the iniquities of
the capitalists and the cunning evil atrocities of the monopolies. As
the dishes chattered on the table he thundered the sins of America's
wealthy few. Each of the laws to protect property seemed to be a goad
in his flesh. In this mood, the children who could crept quietly from
the room, but those under his eye sat silently with their shoulders
hunched over, their eyes big in their heads and nodding dumbly like a
claque of infants. His father would stand in front of the tiny row of
children flourishing a newspaper, waving the crinkled paper in his hand.
"Look, here it says that income taxes are to be reduced. See, here it says
it. Read," and he would shove the paper under the eyes of the children
who looked with glazed, frightened faces at the maze of type. "The income
taxes for the rich are to be reduced and all the time people starve in
the streets. The filthy sniveling bastards, the vultures. Every ounce
of fat on their bodies is a pound d flesh from our bodies."
His voice raged and was heavy with a vitriolic hate. The little claque
nodded pointlessly and his voice went higher and more bitter. Occasionally
his wife would interrupt.
"Not in front of the children, John," her flat voice said. "They're too
young, they don't understand."
"No. Not in front of the children," he roared. "They don't understand
hunger or cold? They don't know what it is to belch cold potato soup for
thirty days in a row? Do you think they can't see their toes sticking
from their shoes?"
"But they don't understand," her flat voice went on. "It's too much for
children to know." She would bend her head over into her hands and begin
to sob, a sound as flat and dull as her voice. Even now Mike could not
remember his mother; she was a gray formless shadow, her personality so
thinly drawn beside the titanic rages and great hates of her husband
that she almost vanished. "They can't learn too young. When children
are undernourished in their mother's womb they know these things by
intuition," the father said, but now his voice was lower and his face
was suddenly tired. They know these things as intuitively as I know
my music." He turned and looked at the children and their heads bobbed
knowingly at him and then bent back down to inspect their knobby knees,
afraid to look at his face. He wadded the paper in his hands, dropped
it to the floor and as he walked toward the door he became smaller,
more crushed, seemingly almost to shrink in size as he walked. The sudden
deflation of pressure, the crumbling of their father would bring tears to
the children's eyes and they would sit in the little row, their shoulders
shaking delicately, making flat small sounds to match their mother.
In the third mood, the best one, Mike's father was tender and kind. He
would take a child on each knee and gently talk to them of a world where
there was no law and every man was every other man's brother. He talked
softly of Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman, kind and generous and loving
every man in the world. He talked of St. Simon and of Eugene Debs,
whose picture was cut from a newspaper and was growing yellow and dried
out over the kitchen sink. He told them of Joe Hill and the Wobblies
who went out against the guns and bayonets of a superior enemy because
they wanted to see justice done to all people. To the children it was a
lovely fairy story where huge men with beards and strong knotted muscles
were infinitely kind to women and children. The children smiled at one
another and boldly squeezed their father's arm and ran their fingers over
the curly black hair on the back of his hands. He rocked back and forth,
and when he had finished his airy tales he would begin to hum a strange
exciting song to which they added their piping, small voices . . .
"Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye workers of the world . . ."
When the four children played by themselves, they fought to play Joe
Hill. The winner would be chased by the other three who were "Salt
Lake City Special Deputies," and Joe Hill would dodge around the house
throwing imaginary balls of wet phosphorus into wheat fields, binding
bundles of dynamite to railroad car wheels, throwing kerosene on cribs
of corn. Finally the deputies would capture Joe Hill and would stand him
against the house with a bandage over his eyes. As they crouched down
with their sticks leveled to fire, Joe Hill would strip the bandage
from his eyes and look straight at them. Then they would make popping
noises with their tongues and Joe Hill would buckle against the side of
the house and finally slide in a crumpled heap to the ground. Then they
would start the game over and someone else would be Joe Hill.
Mike thought of a Christmas many years before. They had never had presents
or a Christmas tree, for Father had stated that they were symbols of a
corrupted ideal. Even when Father had a good job at the studios or the
Hollywood Bowl or in a string quartet, they did not have presents, but
spent Christmas Day behind the curtains of the home watching the other
children in the neighborhood run their cheap, painted bicycles and toys up
and down the sidewalk. This Christmas Mother had promised them a Christmas
tree and presents and the children had carefully not mentioned this to
their father.
It was late Christmas Eve when Mike had been awakened by a sound like
tiny crashing cymbals from the living room. He had walked quietly to
the door and opened it the slightest crack to see into the room. The
first thing he saw was a small Christmas tree upside down in the far
corner of the room and around it in perfect little splashes of blue,
red and green glass were the shattered Christmas tree ornaments. They lay
beautiful and sparkling on the floor, each one smashed into a circle of
fragments. The glass head of a reindeer was the only intact piece in the
wreckage. Mike's father was standing in the middle of the room, his hand
still in the air after throwing the Christmas tree against the wall.
He was smiling, a thin, gray smile that had nothing of humor in it,
but much of pleasure and self-righteousness.
His mother was standing crouched over in front of the tree facing the
center of the room where his father stood. Her lips were drawn tight and
thin so that her teeth showed. She was talking in a low fierce voice,
just opening her teeth enough to let the words out. All Mike could
remember of her face was the lips and chin and the white teeth.
"God damn you, John Freesmith. If I had the strength I'd claw your eyes
out," she whispered at him. "You've beat them down so often with your
crazy talk of injustice and your beautiful bloody revolution that's
going to make all men brothers they don't know where or what to stand
on. You're making them confused, almost crazy. You just keep cutting
the ground out from underneath them."
A fleck of spittle ran down her chin and with an incredibly sharp motion
she jerked her hand across her lips and went on talking.
"I don't care about the food and this house, but you have to leave them
something to live on. When they're older let them become anarchists or
revolutionaries and begin to hate, but now those ideas are just dry
bones that mean nothing to them. Oh, for the sake of Jesus Christ,
let them have something."
Mike's father stood startled in the middle of the room, his eyes bulging
slightly as he listened. Occasionally he looked at the shattered Christmas
tree in the corner and flexed his fingers with that quick expert way
he had. Finally he began to talk. He talked of the brotherhood of man
again and how Christmas had corrupted the ideal, but Mike could tell
he was uncertain. He hesitated over the words and tried to rephrase the
arguments in a new and more persuasive way.
Mike's mother stood listening to the words flow from his mouth and finally
she gave a shudder and turning toward the broken tree buried her face
in her hands. Then the old flat dull cry began to tear out between her
hands and as soon as both Mike and his father heard it they both knew
she had surrendered. Suddenly his father's words became confident again
and began to flow faster and after Mike had closed the door and crawled
in bed he could hear the confident monotone drone on through the dreary
Christmas night . . .
Miss Bell was quivering. Her neck was pink and on her cheek Mike could
see a round bright spot. He put a hand over her breast and squeezed. She
shuddered and a tiny, sharp yelp of pleasure came unexpectedly out of
her mouth. She turned and stretched out beside him on the bed and put
her arms around him.
"You won't forget me," she whispered harshly, "I won't let you. I just
won't let you. Ever, ever, ever . . . " Her fingers dug into his back.
Mike laughed, his hands full of her flesh, automatically caressing. He
laughed for he had already forgotten her, quite literally for a moment
he could not remember her name and he had no memory of her face or body
or actions. She was already forgotten and he was thinking of other things.
CHAPTER 3
Across the Grapevine
Highway 99 between Los Angeles and Bakersfield cuts directly across
the Tehachapi Mountains in a twisting narrow road which was known as
the Ridge Route. At the bottom of almost every elevation there was the
huge burned-out hulk of a truck which wore out its brake-shoes on the
descent and had to crash off the road. On the Bakersfield side of the
Ridge Route, beyond the Grapevine, is a smooth long strip of asphalt
which drops gently toward Bakersfield for twenty miles without a turn in
the road. Here is where the great semi-trailers are in the most danger,
for the slope is so gradual that unless the driver drops down into a lower
gear every few miles he is soon going so fast that his brakes are crisped
black at the first touch and the truck runs away. On the long slope the
runaway trucks reach eighty or ninety or even one hundred miles an hour
before the driver will run the truck off the road. The straight rows
of eucalyptus trees that line the road are scarred and battered by the
accidents and occasionally an entire tree will be destroyed or stunted.
In the summer the wrecks are marked by enormous clots of alfalfa that
look as if they had been exploded over the landscape. In the spring
the wrecks will scatter carrots down the road and occasionally an egg
truck will crash and gobbets of egg yolk are splattered over the fields,
the roadside cafés, the black asphalt and passing cars. When one of the
milk trucks crashes there is a sudden eruption of milk running down the
side of the road and then, with incredible speed, the flies arrive in
great dense clouds.
Hank Moore and Mike came down the Grapevine in Hank's Model-A on their
way to Stanford. Hank kept his long thin fingers on the gearshift and
when it wobbled too much he double-clutched and slid it into second
gear. Then the Ford would tremble, the rear wheels would shriek against
the asphalt and the car would slow down to forty-five miles an hour.
"How much money have you got, Hank," Mike asked.
"About five hundred bucks," Hank said.
Mike whistled. "Where did you get that?" he asked.
"I had it. Had it around for a long time."
"I'm damned. Old Hankus with all that money and no one knew it. You're
a funny one. Live by yourself in a boardinghouse, don't have a family,
only work a little bit and you've got five hundred' bucks. I work every
Saturday and all summer and all I've got is two hundred bucks. And
fifty of that my mother gave me. I don't know where she got it. Come on,
Hank. Where did you get that money?"
Hank looked over at Mike and grinned.
"Maybe I'll tell you later. But I didn't steal it. It's mine. I earned
it."
"How long will my two hundred bucks last at Stanford?"
"Not very long. Tuition is $115, room and board at Encina is $120 a
quarter. Books will cost a little. You haven't got enough to last even
a quarter."
"I'll make it do. I've got ways. I understand you can sign a note for
the tuition and pay it off when you graduate. So I'll have enough for
the first quarter."
The eucalyptus trees whirred by, big shreds of bark hanging from their
boles, putting a pungent oil smell out into the air. They passed a truck
going very slowly and as they went by they saw huge round bottles labeled
ACID nestled in excelsior on the bed of the truck.
"Look, Mike. I don't want a lot of talk and crap about money when we
get up there," Hank said, and his voice was sharp. "I'm going to have
enough other things to worry about. We'll pool our money and I'll let
you know when we start to run out. When that happens we'll talk about
money. Not before. O.K.?"
"That wouldn't be fair. You're the guy with most . . . " Mike started
to say.
"Don't give me that crap, I said," Hank cut in. "Just say yes or no. If I
put in more money than you I'll get a good return on it. One way or another."
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