Monterey Bay(21)

So, restless with confusion and sour with dreams, she took the only action she could. She gathered information. She left the house and began to explore the town much as she had once explored the manor in the Philippines: mapping it out in her mind’s eye, alert for patterns or aberrations. She went up and around the hill on which they lived, she saw the richest neighborhoods at its peak, the poorest neighborhoods at its base. She went over the hill and down Pacific Street, where she encountered the big, Federalist-looking anomaly that had once housed the state’s constitutional convention. She dipped down into the badlands at the head of the wharf and watched the prostitutes melt away into the old adobes when they saw her approach. She paced the perimeter of the large Chinatown on Washington Street and the smaller one on McAbee Beach. She even went back to the Hotel Del Monte to see if it was still empty of guests, which it was.

The only place she didn’t go was Cannery Row. As long as everything was still so flammable, such proximity seemed unwise. So she went only as close as seemed strategically advisable, to a little outcropping of land at the base of David Avenue beneath which lay a small beach and a small building with what seemed like too many windows. Here, she sat on a rock and read the local paper, absorbing whatever details seemed most relevant: about how there were battles under way between the reigning Italian fishing conglomerate and the unions; about how the Japanese and the Chinese were also in the mix, fighting for a share of what seemed to be a dwindling cache of spoils. Something was happening here. Something much like the cycle of abundance, exploitation, and famine that her father had once taken such pleasure in describing.

The next morning at breakfast, she broke several days’ worth of silence to voice the obvious concerns.

“Permission to speak candidly?” she asked.

“Granted,” her father replied, his eyes boring holes into his toast. They weren’t cooking together anymore. Instead, they were cobbling together ad hoc, unplanned meals or, whenever that felt too intimate, not eating at all.

“The canning industry seems like an unworthy target. Too complex. Too corrupt.”

“Like I said before, my interests lie elsewhere. Dramatically so.”

“Reduction, then. More profit, less labor. And the laws still haven’t caught up. Did you know there are floating reduction plants just offshore? Domiciled at sea to avoid municipal regulations?”

“A compelling opportunity,” he hummed. “But not for me.”

At this, a brief thrill. For the first time since their squid dinner, he was challenging her, goading her into playing along, and the urge to continue was almost irresistible. But she didn’t want to give him what he wanted. She didn’t want to surrender to his momentum, especially when she knew that by the time they finished, everything would probably remain unclear. So she put her dishes in the sink, went outside, and remained standing as she made her usual inspection of the hill, her eyes drawn inevitably to the street at its base. It was why people climbed mountains, she realized, or at least why they should: the clarifying loneliness of altitude, the resulting shift in perspective, the question of her father’s work suddenly paling in comparison with the question of Ricketts’s lab. As if in answer, a familiar cannery whistle: short, long, short. And the impulse that followed was one she was eager to indulge: jumping from the porch to join her neighbors on their downhill sprint, the cannery workers rushing headlong toward the sea as the sardines rushed headlong out of it.

At the Del Mar cannery, she stopped, caught her breath, and let the crowd move ahead. If Arthur had come here from the lab, which was most likely, he would already be inside, which meant she would have to wait. So she waited. She waited beneath the white sky, the air cold and foul. She counted the rats as they zipped between the buildings. She heard more whistles, she watched more cannery workers run. And what would happen, she wondered at some point when the crowds became unmanageable, if they didn’t stop? What would happen if they simply ignored the canneries and just kept running down the full length of the Row, past the Coast Valleys tanks, past Lake El Estero, past the Hotel Del Monte, until they collapsed from exhaustion among the dunes, the sand reluctantly conforming to their bodies? She remembered something her father had once told her about her mother’s death—about how even after the fire had finally consumed her flesh, the bones remained aloft in the mud like leaves on a pond—and this, she cautioned herself, was how it would end if she didn’t start being more deliberate, more clever. Mud and bones and collapse: all of it in service to ambitions that might not even be hers.

“Cigarette?”

She wheeled around. When their eyes met, she expected him to smile, but he just stared at her with a dishonestly straight face, as if he were physically suppressing something. The first few times she had seen him, she hadn’t really noticed his appearance; the magnetism of Ricketts’s presence had made such lesser observations impossible. Now, however, she was able to take stock. Seventeen years old, she guessed, possibly eighteen, short for his age yet solidly built, as if, had it not been for the stunting effects of poverty, he might have been taller than she and a good deal heavier. His clothes were old and colorless and almost insolently ill fitting, and his bearing was humble and nondescript. It was only his hair—wild and orange—that had any hint of extravagance to it, the curls sprouting from his skull like mutant carrots.

“I don’t smoke,” she replied.