The Ninth Wave (44 page)

But then they came with hydraulic gear. They came into the counties of
Plumas and Placer and Eldorado with the big squat pumps, the long lengths
of pipe, and the sharp lawyers who bought "hosing rights." From the end
of the monitor came a hard bright gush of water. The water hissed against
the startled land, It cut around rocks, chewed up adobe, lacerated hills,
chewed through roots and old lava. The land resisted for a few hours. And
then it turned into thin coffee-colored slop and poured slowly down the
hillsides, into the ravines, down to the river beds and finally into
the mouth of the big machines.
The sharp young mountains were worn smooth. They turned into brown hills,
laced with gullies and ravines. And the hills became mounds of soft
leached-out dirt. And if the gold persisted, the mountain became a hole
in the ground.
The dredges came last. They were huge, ugly, black and created their own
world. The dredges floated on water. The continuous belt of scoops dug
up the earth in front of the dredge and threw the exhausted and goldless
waste out behind. Each dredge moved its pond across the countryside,
ignoring the old stream beds, chewing into pastures, flat land, through
small hills, up valleys. The land they moved was ruined, covered with
smooth round rocks that had been underground for a million years. After
the dredge nothing could grow or did. Highways were built across the
desolation, but that was all.
When the gold was gone the dredges died. They died where the gold ended;
the barges rotting in the artificial lakes, the pipes turning red with
rust, the scoops hanging like useless claws on an iron dinosaur. The
incongruous, unbelievable wreck took only ten years to rot and disappear,
but the land behind them was gone forever.
"What we need is reforestation," they said. And they said it in Nevada
City, Eldorado, Yankee Jim's, Grass Valley, Gold Run, Sierra City and
elsewhere. "And the state should pay for it."
At first only the resort owners and lumbermen said it and they said it
for the purposes of simple greed. Then the rotary clubs and chambers of
commerce and the bankers said it. And pretty soon the Catholic priests,
the Protestant ministers, the Grange and, newspaper editors began to
say it.
One day it had a slogan: "Restore the Land."
And that day it became political and a bill was introduced named
"No. 1090: A Bill to Provide for Reforestation in Certain Counties of
Northern California." And soon after it became a political plank in the
party platforms.
It is a long low building built of concrete and covered with gray paint.
It is surrounded by shrubs and neat lawns and behind the building is
a farm with cows and barns and pigs. The land in front of the building
drops slowly to the sea and in the far distance one can see the faint
smudged outline of Point Buchon, the sandy spits over which the Pacific
breaks, the deep green lines of windbreak eucalyptus trees.
From the building no one watches the view, for it is an insane asylum
and everyone inside is too busy. A middle-aged woman sits rigidly on a
stool, her jaw tight, her eyes abstracted, passionately busy defending
a dark inner privicy, locked in a catatonic rigidity which absorbs all
her energy. She is oblivious even when her mouth is opened, the rubber
tube is stuck in, and the warm soup funneled into her stomach.
In a small room a man masturbates endlessly, childlessly, fondly. Once
his hands were strapped so that he could not touch himself and with an
infantile ingenuity he rubbed himself with the heel of his right foot
and when this was strapped tight he rubbed the inside of his thighs
together and they saw it was hopeless and freed his hands.
In a common room a thin bony man talks fervently to a large, fattish,
slack-jawed man.
"And just when I had the well ready to come in and the oil people were
making offers from New York, they framed me and stuck me in here," the
thin man says, his eyes gleaming with paranoia, black with suspicion.
"Shame, awful shame," the fat man says. He shakes his head and the skin
of his jaw, pebbled by paresis, trembles.
"And under that well is the god damnedest, biggest pool of oil ever
seen. Reaches for miles, big and shiny, biggest pool in the world,"
the thin man says. Then suddenly crafty. "But I've got a plan. Can't
keep a good man down."
They smile at one another; a tiny community of two; isolated against
the rest of the asylum; perfectly matched by their diseases; their
afflictions enfolded and complemented within one another.
The less afflicted work on the farm. With nightmarish slowness they
pitch hay, watching each yellow curl of hay fall on the pile, turning
with scarecrow awkwardness. They stumble across the barnyard, smiling
dimly, doing the rote and hard-learned tasks with a minute precision. The
overalls hang from them, shred on nails and boards, and the naked skin
shows through and they still continue the convoluted, elaborate ritual
of the farm. Occasionally, very occasionally, through the dullness comes
a sense of outrage and there are fights. Slow, shambling fights; like
drowning bears fighting under water; hands pawing one another; teeth
biting fingers; a pulling of ears and a welling of tears in the eyes.
The Visiting Committee comes once a year. Three psychiatrists, two
educators, three businessmen, one housewife and a retired army officer.
They inspect the kitchen, made bright for the occasion. The housewife
tastes the spaghetti and meat balls and, as the superintendent hangs
nervously on the fringes of the group, she asks how much milk the inmates
get per day.
The Committee walks through the wards and rooms. They look at hydrocephalics,
microcephalics, paranoiacs, schizophrenics, paretics and Mongolian idiots.
They watch a fifteen-year-old girl snap her fingers, slap her right fist
into her left fist, pause fifteen seconds and repeat the gesture. Her
fingers are covered with thick callouses from the snapping and the palm
of her left fist is a huge swollen pad of callous.
They came to the large common room, reserved for the good and sober cases,
for the patients who are cooperative. They paused and smiled out over the
room and a few fragmented, disorderly, crooked smiles came back at them.
Then the housewife sees it: the dark, shiny tendril of blood flowing
across the floor. They rush forward and see that it comes from a rocking
chair in which the body of the middle-aged catatonic woman rests.
A paranoiac cheerfully reconstructed it for them. The woman had suddenly,
after years of immobility, moved her head, peered shrewdly around the
room and walked over to a desk. She picked up a pencil, walked back
to the rocking chair and sat down. As a few of the interested patients
watched, she hacked her wrist open with the pencil, chopping fiercely
at the tendons and flesh and then, when she had opened an artery, sat
back with a smile in the chair. They had watched passively as the blood
flowed from her hand, gathered in a pool and ran across the floor and
the smile on the woman's face went thinner and tighter until at last it
was a thin pale snarl and the woman was dead.
"She should have been in a private isolated room. By herself," the
housewife said and looked with horror at the superintendent.
So the Visiting Committee recommended that the legislature appropriate
an additional $26,000 for the asylum. The budget read:
For construction of six private rooms.. $23,500
For one FTE, hospital attendant ....... 2,500
The legislative auditor recommended that the request be denied. The Budget
Committee of the legilature concurred. The two lines were stricken from
the budget.
But the housewife on the Visiting Committee was the wife of the publisher
of the 'San Francisco Dispatch,' a great crusading paper. Pictures appeared
in the 'Dispatch' of the inmates huddling in common rooms. Stories were
written by reporters. And, as a result, the official Democratic Party
platform included, "Adequate budgetary provision for the care and
rehabilitation of patients in State mental institutions."
The State of California has an agency that makes building loans to veterans.
Under the provisions of the original act, the state will make a loan, at a
low rate of interest, to a veteran to construct a home.
In Sacramento the applications for veteran loans are processed by
machines, almost entirely. But not entirely. For at some point humans
look over the forms, check them for accuracy and either approve or
disapprove on the basis of the calculations which the machines have
made. The individuals fix their initials to the lower left-hand corner
of the forms, just below their decision. It is as neat and mechanical
an operation as one could hope for.
One of the persons who affixed his initials to the bottom of the
application forms was Michael Garrity. Fifty-four years old, a Republican,
a Catholic, two years of work at Santa Clara University, before he
flunked out, a high blood pressure, five kids, a longing for beer;
a flaccid wife, an eater of chocolates, the owner of three shiny-pants
suits, a tic in his jowl, that, mostly, was Michael Garrity.
One day Michael Garrity received a case of Old Taylor whisky and five
cases of Budweiser beer from Sharp's Liquor Store. They were delivered to
his door and he thought it was a marvelous mistake and drank all of the
beer and half of the whisky in two weeks. Shrewdly, sharply, primitively,
he reasoned that he had done nothing criminal . . . any man could drink
up booze delivered to his door . . . he hadn't done anything wrong. For
two weeks he enjoyed his hangovers, made sweeter by the knowledge that
they were acquired at someone else's expense.
Then Mr. Dante Ignazio appeared at his desk. Mr. Ignazio had gone to Santa
Clara with Michael Garrity, but Mr. Ignazio had gone on to graduate and
then went into big-scale contracting in Santa Clara Valley. He tore down
prune trees and put up houses and he prospered exceedingly. He prospered
until the spring of Election Year when the recession set in. Then,
maddeningly, surprisingly, malignantly, buyers no longer had the down
payment or did not want to put it down. They did not have enough money
to qualify for the FHA loans and too few of them were veterans.
For three weeks Mr. Ignazio's fortunes dangled in the balance. The houses
did not sell; the liens poured in; the blank-faced men from the banks
walked curiously about the empty project. Then Mr. Ignazio went to see
his classmate, Michael Garrity.
"Here are fifty applications of people who want to buy houses on my
Santa Clara tract," Mr. Ignazio said. "That is, they will buy them if
they can qualify for the veterans' loan and avoid the big down payment
they have to make on FHA ordinary bank loans. Christ, Mike, why does
the government jack up the down so high?"
Michael grinned sympathetically. They both looked out the windows, down
the tree-lined streets of Sacramento glittering in the sunlight.
"Sure, Iggy," Michael said. "I'll expedite them. If they're veterans
we'll get them through."
"But that's the point, Mike," Mr. Ignazio said softly. "They're not
veterans."
"Then it's hopeless, Iggy. Really hopeless."
"Nothing's hopeless, Mike," Mr. Ignazio said, and his voice turned
regretful, but under the voice, lost in its Italian softness was a hint
of steel. "I thought, Mike, when I sent you that case of Old Taylor
and the beer that you understood that. Didn't you read the note? If
you read the note and didn't send the liquor back, Mike, I think it's
a little dishonest."
"What note?" Michael Garrity asked.
He looked across at Mr. Ignazio and he knew that they both understood
that there was no note with the liquor. But he also knew that it did
not matter. The Old Taylor was floating in his blood stream, had gone
to fat around his middle. He had belched the Budweiser for two weeks,
had floated euphorically on the windfall of booze, had gotten fat on
the whole mess of it. Dimly Michael Garrity perceived that he had been
bribed and that he had accepted; that literally the bribe had become a
part of his body. Metaphysically, he was one with it; there was no way
he could ever rid himself of it again. Bitterly he recalled the lectures
by Brother Cooley at Santa Clara on the nature of sin and willfulness
and gluttony. He knew that he had sinned; that the initialing of the
forms would be a lesser sin and that, dimly, inarticulately, dumbly,
he knew that the larger sin authorized the lesser.
He looked up at Mr. Ignazio, suddenly shy with the enormity of what he
was doing.
"All right, lggy, I'll do it," he said.
And that night Mr. Ignazio had Sharp's Liquor Store send Michael Garrity
three more cases of Budweiser and another case of Old Taylor. The head
clerk at Sharp's was a lean and very sharp Mexican boy, who was passionately
devoted to the Democratic Party and he thought for a few days about the
probity of a private contractor sending liquor to a state employee in
the housing division. Then he went to the office of a lawyer who was high
in the councils of the Democratic Party and told his story. The lawyer's
eyes gleamed, he patted the Mexican on the back and lifted his phone.
Three days later the newspapers carried headlines. "Graft Charged in
State Housing," "Housing Official Says Bribe Charges 'Politics,'"
"Attorney General Says Indictments Will Issue," "Democrats Charge
Corruption in Veterans Housing."
Michael Garrity left his five children and his flaccid wife and his
beery tastes and began an elaborate habituation of jails and lockups
that ended finally when he was sentenced to five years in San Quentin.
That spring the matter of graft in state offices became a political issue.
And in these ways, and many others, the issues of Election Year unfolded.
They were known by manifestoes, resolutions, newspaper editorials,
handbills, polls and television and radio.
The issues were made public by the leaders of the Spanish vote, the
German vote, the Italian vote, the realtors vote, the Japanese vote, the
oil vote, the orange vote, the lemon vote, the walnut vote, the radical
vote, the conservative vote, the socialist vote, the golf-club vote,
the Montgomery Street vote, the Spring Street vote, the South of Market
vote, the Negro vote, the rural vote, the urban vote, and others. And
nobody listened.