The Ninth Wave (51 page)

It was a racing day at Del Mar, and as they swept past the track they
could hear the diminutive mechanical cheering of the crowd. They saw
the faraway tiny shapes of the horses for just a moment.
They turned off the highway at Torrey Pines and drove toward La Jolla.
They went past the neat brushed homes of the retired admirals and
colonels and generals and the elaborate Spanish homes of the San Diego
rich. The buildings thinned out and then disappeared, and they went past
the abandoned subdivisions. The hotel they were looking for was right
on the ocean. Behind the hotel was one of the most recently abandoned
subdivisions. The elaborate bronze street lamps hung over asphalt
strips which had been laid down neatly across the sand. Ice plant,
heavy with purple buds, crawled over the asphalt, reached almost to the
middle of the road and there it was crushed to death by the passage of an
occasional car. Lots were still marked by faded flags and stakes, and in
the middle of the unfinished streets was a colorful little office which,
on its windward side, had stopped a large heap of browned and dried out
papers that reached almost to the roof.
The hotel was much older. Most of it reached out over the water and was
supported by pier pilings. Thirty years before, in the warm millennial
glow, the minarets had been bold. Now the stucco had peeled away and
the laths and chicken wire showed in big ugly splotches. The sea air
and salt water had gnawed patiently at the building and the damages had
been repaired singly and over long intervals so that the building had a
spotted, irregular look. Also the pilings had settled at different rates
so that the hotel had a jerky roofline. Clotheslines hung between the
minarets and held up bathing suits, yellowish towels, bras and shorts
to a gray, flat sky. The clothes looked as if they had hung there for
a very long time without drying.
In the lobby of the hotel was a large blackboard with the names of the
guests and their room numbers. They found Cromwell's name and saw that
his room was 213. They went up the stairs and down a corridor. The
carpets in the hotel had once been a bright and vivid green, but they
were now faded in the center to a rich yellow. The smell in the corridor
was not unpleasant, but it seemed very ancient; as if each passing foot
and towel and body had left a tiny fragment of itself behind to blend
with other fragments and to form the odor of the corridor.
When they came to 213 they knocked. A voice sounded inside, muffled and
indistinct. They opened the door and went in.
Cromwell was sitting by the window. He had a light blue blanket over his
shoulders. He was smoking a cigar. Clara was sitting on the window seat
with a robe over her knees.
"Hello," Cromwell said.
The four of them looked quietly at one another for a long moment. Cromwell
blinked. Then he smiled and gestured.
"Sit down," he said.
The room was crowded. Along one wall was a line of old filing cabinets.
The opposite wall was lined with stacks of books which were piled up
carelessly on one another. Objects spilled into the center of the room:
a drying starfish, an abalone iron, a bag of pencils, scratch paper,
an old Dictaphone set with two containers of wax cylinders, a box of
paper clips that glittered brightly on the carpet.
In the back of the room was a crude kitchen arrangement. There was a
small icebox and a hot plate on a table. Waxed milk cartons, cans of
pork and beans, ends of bread, a knife with a rusty edge and a cup of
spoons were also on the table.
The smell of cigar smoke impregnated the room, as if it had been blended
into the paint, soaked up by the books and debris. The ashtrays overflowed
with cigar butts; the older ones dried and hard, the top ones still wet
and soft.
Cromwell puffed quietly as he watched them.
"Sit down on the window seat," Cromwell said. "We're watching the tide
come in. We watch it wash over the rocks."
They sat down and looked out the window. The beach was covered with
smooth rounded rocks. Green water surged in among the rocks, reached up
toward the hotel. Far down the beach two children ran across the rocks,
back and forth, with the fall and rise of the waves. At that hour they
were featureless, angular, somehow antic; like crabs shaken loose of
their shells.
"Pretty soon the waves hit the pilings under the hotel," Clara said. "The
whole place shakes and shivers. But you get used to it. We hardly notice
it anymore. Sort of like it."
She turned and smiled at Georgia. For a moment Georgia was confused. Then
she realized it was the first time Clara had ever looked at her directly,
without attempting to shield the birthmark. Clara held her hands in her
lap and the birthmark was turned toward the room. Georgia smiled back
at Clara.
They watched the tide rise. The waves broke higher on the rocks. When
the first wave reached the pilings the hotel shivered. The planks in the
floor creaked and the doors rasped. A book slid sideways and coIlapsed
in a small cloud of cigar ash.
"The hotel is really well built," Cromwell said. "The shaking doesn't
mean that it's weak. It really rolls with the waves. It's been through
dozens of storms. Stood up through all of them."
In a few moments Hank and Georgia were used to the shivering impact
of the waves. Hank glanced at Cromwell and saw that he had a notebook
in his lap. "I'm revising my book on Hobbes," he said, holding up the
notebook. "The publishers say it finally sold out the first printing
and they think maybe a new edition would go. So I'm working on that."
"How about a drink?" Clara said. "I'll make martinis. We don't drink a
lot anymore, but we always have something around."
She went to one of the tables and began to pour gin and vermouth into
a teapot. She opened the old wooden icebox and chipped off slivers of ice.
"I hear they buried Mike in the Veterans' Cemetery," Cromwell said.
"The one out by Santa Monica."
"That's right," Hank said. "He asked for that in his will."
"How many people were there?"
"Two. Georgia and me."
"Just two?" Cromwell said and his voice was calm and steady. "That's
funny. He almost had the state in his hand and when he died two people
went to his funeral. He was just a little way, just the tiniest slice,
from being the most powerful man in the state. Was his wife there?"
"No," Hank said. "She'd taken the kids and gone back to St. Helena. I
drove her to the air terminal. She was wearing black and had a veil,
but you could see she was relieved. She smiled under her veil when she
thought I wasn't looking."
"I should have gone to the funeral," Cromwell said broodingly.
"It didn't matter," Hank said. Hank paused. "John, tell me why you made
the speech about Moon just three days after Mike died? I still can't
figure it out."
They were all silent. The only sound was the sharp tinkle of the ice
splinters being destroyed in the teapot. Clara poured the martinis into
water tumblers and passed them around. Cromwell took his glass, sniffed
the martinls.
"It was funny having Mike die," Cromwell said softly. His voice was
exploring, tentative, as if this were the first time he had formulated
the thought in words. "The minute I heard about it, something started
to go out of me. It was like a knife slit in one of those big circus
balloons. Those big red and white and blue balloons with pictures and
advertisements on the side. They float by a cable above the circus. The
gas just started to hiss out. I could feel myself shrink. I couldn't
believe it was happening. I believed all the wonderful words and pictures
on the sides of the balloon. And then they all started to crumple;
get wrinkled and crumple. At first I was scared. More than I'd ever
been before in my life. For three days I sat in a hotel room and felt
the pressure going out of me. I was emptied, crumpled, baggy. Then it
was all over. All that was left was a hulk. The bright words and the
wonderful pictures were all tiny and twisted. The hulk was drab and
ugly. But I knew it was me."
Cromwell paused. He watched a wave foam in around the rocks. He lifted
the glass and drank. Carelessly he pulled the blanket over his head so
that it formed a cowl. He peered out at them.
"Go on, John," Clara said. "Tell us the rest"
"The three days were terrible," Cromwell said softly. "I kept trying
to patch up the leak, to hold in the pressure. Actually I held my
hand over my groin as if I had been ruptured; trying to hold everything
together. And then at the end of three days it was all over. The pressure
was gone. I was back to normal. I was a carcass that Mike had taken and
blown up. Oh, he didn't do it against my will. I went along. I asked to
have all the wrinkles taken out; to be blown up so tight. I wanted to
sail up above the state and see all the faces looking up at me and their
mouths gaping as they read the words and saw the pictures. I loved it. I
didn't know what all the words were or just exactly what the people saw,
but it was me. Do you understand that? It was me: John Cromwell. They
could paint anything they wanted on the side. I didn't care. I was just
grateful that I could free-float; that everybody could see me. Except
it wasn't really me. It was Mike's balloon they were seeing."
"Part of it was you, John," Clara said. "Really it was."
"Maybe so, maybe so," Cromwell said. "Maybe a few of the words and a
few of the pictures. But nobody would have seen them if it hadn't been
for Mike Freesmith. He put the pressure in; he took the wrinkles out;
he made me free floating. When the whole thing was collapsed I could
see that. What was left after the pressure leaked out was old and
familiar. Old, familiar, half-drunk John Cromwell. A kind of bum. A bum
who had a trick: he could orate. A bum who had an itch to see people
change when they listened to him. And when they changed, the itch became
a great glorious sensation. The itch was just a minor affliction; without
Mike the itch wouldn't have bothered more than a few hundred people in
the state. But Mike made the itch something big."
"But why did you make the speech about Moon?" Hank asked again.
"Because when the three days was over, I was me again," Cromwell said. "I
shrugged back into the old rubbery carcass and the wrinkles all fell in
place. And I knew that one of the first things I had to do was to take
Professor Moon off the hook. So I had the State Central Committee buy
television time and I made the speech. I didn't consult anybody. I just
made the speech and admitted that at Fresno I had been wrong about Moon
and I apologized. You should have seen the State Committee. They were
sitting in the broadcasting studio and they thought I'd gone crazy. They
waved their hands, turned red, gave me body English, scribbled notes;
anything to get me to stop."
"They think it lost the election for you," Hank said. "They think you
might have won if you hadn't made that speech."
"That isn't why he lost," Clara said. "He lost because he didn't follow
Mike's plan. John went down and fired all of Mike's research staff the day
after he made the Moon speech. They thought he was crazy. They told him
they could still win the election for him. But he fired them anyway. God,
was I proud."
"She's right," Cromwell said. "The Moon speech didn't make any
difference. I still got forty-five per cent d the vote. Just like Mike
said I would . . . just by being a Democrat But I didn't pick up any
of the undecided vote. For that you have to do something special. And
I wouldn't do what Mike had planned."
"And Mike was right again," Georgia whispered. "He said if you were the
Democrat you'd get forty-five per cent of the votes. Without doing a
thing. And you didn't do a thing and you got just forty-five per cent."
No one spoke.
The tide passed high water. Its grip on the pilings was weaker. Over the
ocean the clouds parted for a moment and a long narrow band of light fell
on the water. The light caught a huge shifting clot of kelp. The kelp was
blood red and delicate. It writhed as it was washed by the undertow and
great swirls of the kelp boiled to the sudace and then were pulled down
again. The rest of the ocean was smooth and gray, like poured lead.
"Mike was right about a lot of things," Hank said. He watched Cromwell.
"He was right about the people being stupid and irrational. He was right
about their being afraid."
Cromwell drank his glass empty. He held the glass up to the window,
and watched the bluish film of gin gather into tendrils and slowly form
a large drop in the bottom of the glass. He drank off the drop.
"Mike was right about that and lots more," Cromwell said. "They're stupid,
frightened, panic-stricken. But they're also wise, courageous, steady.
Sometimes they're vicious, sometimes they're generous. They're everything
. . . and so they have to be what Mike said they were too. Play a tune
well enough, Hank, and someone always comes forward to dance."
"But why did they always act one way for Mike?"
Hank asked. "Always the same. Always scared. Always fearful."
"Because he was certain," Cromwell said. "It's the one thing you can't
fake. You have it or you don't. The people look up, sniff around . . . "
His hands moved, formed and impressed the idea. "They smell out the man
with certainty. And if you have it they'll believe you. They'll behave
as you tell them."
"Because their own uncertainty is so great," Hank said bitterly. "They're
so unsure."
"That's right. They'll believe because they don't have anything else.
Or they believe in themselves too little."
"How did they ever protect themselves from the Mikes?" Hank asked.
His voice, thin with strain, asked for something.
"Because there are always some who disbelieve. At some point the disbelievers
come together and fight the believer," Cromwell paused. He pulled the blanket
tighter around his shoulders and instantly he looked very old. His voice
came softly. "Sometimes the disbelievers fight alone. A lonely disbeliever
who disbelieves so much . . . so much that you drowned him."
It was loose in the room. Georgia looked up sharply; Hank curled his
fingers together into a large double fist and crushed it between his
knees. He looked up slowly.