Pomona Again

The Army had turned off half the bulbs at midnight to save the generator, and the ones left made small yellow islands between the tents. Somebody coughing. A baby. A radio somewhere, very low, the tired man still talking. Four hundred people trying to sleep in the open.

In one of the islands, on the rim of the dry fountain, Lucía sat with her knees up and her phone held in both hands against her chest, the way Señora Ruiz had held the folder, looking at nothing. Señora Ruiz sat beside her with an arm round her shoulders.

He went down the steps and across the grass. Castellanos stopped at the edge of the light.

Lucía looked up.

“I got through.”

He stopped.

“At twenty to twelve. In the kitchen. Mrs Okada has a satellite telephone the Governor’s office put in on Thursday, and she’s been letting everybody use it for a minute all night.” She looked at the phone in her hands, still saying No Service. “I’ve been carrying this around for two days like it would work if I looked at it hard enough, and there was a telephone in the kitchen the whole time.” A small strange laugh. “Marcus used it at eleven to ring his mom again. He said Lucía, there’s a phone in the kitchen, and I just ran.”

“Did they,” said Frederick, and could not finish it.

“Grandpa answered on the second ring. He said bueno the way he always does, like you’ve interrupted something, and I couldn’t say anything. Mrs Okada was holding a pan and looking at me and I just stood there.” Her voice was perfectly steady. “And then he said mija. He knew it was me from me not saying anything.”

Señora Ruiz’s arm tightened.

“They’re fine. Both of them. The house is fine. On Thursday it was a long slow roll, he said, like a boat, not like November. Today at two it was harder, and Grandma’s mother’s plate fell off the shelf again, the one in four pieces she’s having mended with gold, and broke into five.” She looked at him. “That’s all that happened in Pomona. A plate broke into five instead of four.”

His legs sat him down on the rim beside her.

“And the lemon tree’s fine. He said to tell you. The lemons are ready and he’s keeping a bag for you, and if you don’t come and get them he’s going to post them to New Westminster, and Grandma says you can’t post lemons, and he says you can post anything with enough stamps on it.”

“I’ll come and get them.”

“No, you won’t. You’re flying home tomorrow.” She almost smiled. “He knows. He’s going to post them. Grandma’s going to stop him and he’s going to do it anyway, at the post office on Garey Avenue, in the tie.”

---

The rest came slowly, in pieces.

Mrs Paredes had come on after him and asked if she was eating, and had a coat, and was with the teachers, and was the King with them. Yes, Grandma, we’re all at the Governor’s house, on the lawn, in tents. A very long silence from Pomona. Then, slowly, a la casa del gobernador, like somebody who did not think she had heard right. Then ay, Dios.

Mr Paredes had been in the yard at two, watering the lemon tree because it was going to be hot, with the Spanish station on in the kitchen behind him through the open window, carrying the King from Santa Monica.

“And he heard you. You said Pomona. You said thirty-one years. You said the six-oh-two.” She was looking at the dark lawn now. “Grandma said he dropped the hose. It went everywhere, all over him, and he just stood there in the water with his mouth open. Then the aftershock came, and he sat down on the grass. The same place he sat in November when the six-oh-two came back.” She stopped. “Grandma had to go out and turn the hose off. He was sitting on the wet grass with the ground shaking, laughing so hard she thought he’d hurt himself.”

Frederick sat very still.

“And then he said,” and her voice went, a little, for the first time, and came back, “tell the King. He made me promise. He said it twice so I’d get it right.”

“What?”

“Tell the King it was the six-oh-two. Not the six-two. He said six-oh-two, and that’s right, and I’ve been waiting forty years for anybody on the radio to get a train time right.”

Frederick laughed.

He could not stop. He put his hands on his knees, and Lucía started too, helplessly, and Señora Ruiz between them looked from one to the other with her mouth pressed very hard together, and then not, and then she was laughing as well, and from the nearest tent somebody said some of us are trying to sleep, in a voice that was not cross at all.

---

Castellanos was waiting at the edge of the light with a stack of water cartons under one arm, held with a rubber band. Mr Abernathy’s, eleven of them now. On top, folded in half, a different one in rounder, larger writing, which had been in the inside pocket of the grey suit since the morning.

“The Governor’s private secretary is sending a bag to New Westminster on the Air Force aircraft from Riverside Field at two. To the Prime Minister’s office, for the committee. Mr Abernathy asked me to put these in it. I said I’d give you the chance to see them first.”

“Theo’s is on top.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did Mr Abernathy see it?”

“No, sir. It’s addressed to the committee.” A pause. “A man doesn’t read his own citation either.”

---

Mrs Okada took him to the study with a lantern. A small woman of about seventy in a cardigan, grey bun, glasses on a cord round her neck. She looked at him a long moment in the lantern light and said nothing about the photograph in the hall, and nor did he. Down a corridor with the window glass swept into heaps along the walls, into a small square room, and she put the lantern on the desk and went.

Books put back on the shelves in piles, not in order. A window with no glass looking at the black hill behind the house and the cracked white dome on top of it, catching the moon.

On the desk, a pile of thick cream paper. At the top of each sheet, embossed so that he could feel it with a fingertip, a crown. Not the Commonwealth’s bear. The Crown. Under it, in small black capitals, GOVERNMENT HOUSE, LOS ANGELES.

He untied the band and laid the cartons out in order in the lantern light, Theo’s folded on top. He did not read Theo’s. He read Mr Abernathy’s, all eleven, from the top.

SERGEANT THOMAS BRANNIGAN, PROTECTION OFFICER. 31 MAY 2029. 0946 TO 1002: AT THE FOOT OF THE FERRIS WHEEL, SANTA MONICA PIER, ASSISTED THE OPERATOR TO TURN THE WHEEL BY HAND WITH THE SEA WITHDRAWING. 1005 TO 1014: ON THE INSTRUCTION OF SERGEANT CASTELLANOS, WHO ACTED ON THE KING’S REQUEST, DESCENDED THE BLUFF STAIRS AGAINST THE CROWD, CROSSED THE BEACH, AND TOOK FROM MR D. FERRANTE AN ELDERLY MAN WHOM MR FERRANTE WAS CARRYING. RETURNED FOR MR FERRANTE. HELD HIM AGAINST THE STAIR RAIL WHILE THE SEA ROSE TO MR FERRANTE’S MOUTH. WITNESSED BY: THE WRITER, FROM THE TOP OF THE BLUFF; MISS L. PAREDES; SEÑORA C. RUIZ; THE KING.

MR DANIEL FERRANTE, TEACHER OF HISTORY, ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL.

THE OPERATOR OF THE FERRIS WHEEL, NAME UNKNOWN. A TALL MAN WITH A GREY PONYTAIL AND A RING OF KEYS. HE LOCKED THE BOX BEFORE HE RAN.

TWO SURFERS, NAMES UNKNOWN.

A NURSE, NAME UNKNOWN, WHO CARRIED A CHILD SHE DID NOT KNOW UP NINETY-EIGHT STEPS. WITNESSED BY: MR T. HARTIGAN; MISS L. PAREDES. THE WRITER DID NOT SEE THIS AND SAYS SO.

He stacked them again in the same order, Theo’s on top, still folded.

He took a sheet of the cream paper. At Columbia Palace there was paper like it, with COLUMBIA PALACE under the crown, for letters other people drafted and he signed. He had never written on it himself. He picked up the Governor’s heavy black pen and wrote To the committee, and stopped.

Rosalind Aird would know how to address a committee. Dame M would. Lord Whitlock would, and would set every word down square. None of them had been on the pier.

He wrote what he knew.

These are the ones Mr Abernathy saw. He has written them down with the times, and who saw what, and has said where he did not see. I have not changed anything he wrote.

There is one more, on top, folded, written by Mr Hartigan, my Page, about Mr Abernathy. Mr Abernathy has not seen it and does not know it exists. He would not write his own. He stood at the foot of the Ferris wheel on the pier with the sea going out and his hand cut and would not go until both of us on the wheel were down, because we were his homeroom and he had counted us on. I saw it. I was in the car at the top.

These are the others that I saw myself, whose names I do not know:

One after another, in order, the way he read his father the stations.

A girl of about twelve, on the corner of a street near Twenty-Second Street in Santa Monica, on Friday afternoon, with a blue cool box, who gave water to everybody who walked past, and two bottles to me.

A young woman in a T-shirt that said SANTA MONICA LIFEGUARDS, in the gym at Franklin Middle School, on Friday at two, who helped me lift an old man out of a crowd and carried him out with me and did not ask who I was.

A boy of about fourteen with a crowbar, and two men from the houses next door, and a woman with a spade, who dug for Señora Esperanza Ruelas on Twenty-Second Street for an hour and a half before the firemen came. Her son and her granddaughter, Rosa, dug too. I do not know if family can be recommended. If they can, they should be.

A woman from the kitchens of this house, in a white apron, who has been serving soup since Thursday at four.

Staff Sergeant Duarte and the Fourteenth Engineers, who got under their trucks.

The crew of a Royal American Coast Service helicopter, four of them, who refuel here at night and have been taking people off roofs in Oxnard since Thursday. One of them is called Ray. He was bitten by a dog he was rescuing.

Half a page.

The black hill and the cracked dome. Four hundred people on the lawn beyond the corner of the house. The road north to Oxnard and Ventura, the hospital car parks, the crews in the air at midnight over the roofs.

He wrote one more line.

There are thousands of others. I did not see them. Nobody did. I would like the committee to know that this list is only the people who happened to be near a King.

He looked at the pen a long moment. Not George R., the way he signed messages. He wrote it the whole way, in the hand like a fence in a wind, as it went on the boxes and on every instrument in his name.

George R. I.

He had never written the I. Imperator. Raj had sent a thousand tents. It seemed wrong, tonight, to leave any of them out.

---

Castellanos put the cartons and the sheet into a large brown envelope Mrs Okada had found, sealed it, and wrote across the front in capitals: THE PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE, FOR THE COMMITTEE, BY HAND.

“The aircraft goes at two, sir. I’ll give it to the Governor’s man myself.”

“Thank you.”

Castellanos looked at him.

“Sir. The I.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never done the I.”

“No.”

Castellanos nodded once, slowly, and went out with the envelope, down the corridor between the heaps of glass, towards the drive.

Frederick blew out the lantern, because Mrs Okada had told him to, and went back through the hall, past the Kings on the walls and on the floor, William without his frame and Victoria with her torn skirts, to his father, straight now at the window, and the newspaper photograph taped beside him. PORTRAIT TO FOLLOW.

“I sent the list, Papa,” he said, very quietly. “I signed it the whole way. With the I.” The painted corner of the mouth, up. “You’d have taken it out. You’d have said it was showing off.”

The painting went on looking at something to the left of the painter.

He went out through the door with no glass in it, past the empty deckchair, across the dark lawn to the tent by the dry fountain, where Theo was snoring, exactly as the Governor had said.