Generation

Generation

James A. Wilson

Austin Macauley Publishers

Generation

About The Author*

Dedication

Copyright information ©

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1

Jon

Chapter 2

Rindi

Chapter 3

Jon and Blume

Chapter 4

Leslie

Chapter 5

Blume

Chapter 6

Rindi

Chapter 7

Poco and Calvin

Chapter 8

Jared

Chapter 9

Marlys

Chapter 10

Easter Vacation

Chapter 11

Blume and Katie

Chapter 12

Travis

Chapter 13

Walking in Space

Chapter 14

Going South

Chapter 15

Riot

Chapter 16

Lonnie

Chapter 17

Pivot Point

Chapter 18

Falling Down

Chapter 19

The Back of Creation

Chapter 20

A New Year

About The Author*

"Count me among those who have known for years that James Wilson has a unique ability to paint a vivid narrative with his words. Still, his latest novel is notable for the way broad, unique struggles of a generation play out effortlessly through the trials and triumphs of his characters.

Even among younger readers for whom themes like Vietnam and the space race might seem foreign, fundamental and timeless reflections of human nature abound. Reading Generation as the son of Baby Boomers, James’ portrayal of the period provides valuable new context to the stories I have heard since my own childhood.

Historians can provide important retrospectives, but nothing can substitute the honest imagery of someone with first-hand experience. For that reason, we should be grateful to those writers like James who have saved a time capsule the rest of us can unpack and explore whenever we like."

Chris Agee, former editor of The Western Journal

James Wilson lived every dimension of the Boomer story. As a teen and young adult, he surfed and hitch-hiked around the country, witnessing the real events he fictionalises in Generation. He tells the story of his generation as it has not been told before.

Dedication

Generation is dedicated to the Lord my God and all the Baby Boomers who grew up as a new – utterly new – world thrust itself upon them. Many gave their lives in Vietnam and in the Civil Rights Movement – nothing would be again as it had been.

Copyright information ©

James A Wilson (2018)

The right of James A Wilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788232197 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781788232203 (E-Book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2018)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Acknowledgements

I give thanks for my wife and best friend, Jill, my children Alyssa, Chris, Malorie, and Zoe; for Eleanor Roybal, Frank Maguire and John-David Schofield, my mentors; and for my dad, Graham Wilson – who always had my back. They shape the man I am.

Prologue

The sky was beginning to turn pink along Southern California’s Highway 101 as it approached dawn between the sleeping towns of Camarillo and Thousand Oaks. A man who had been drinking heavily the night before sped along toward home in a white 1963 Chevy Corvair. He was making a reasonably straight line between the roadside borders of close growing oleander and the occasional mission bell, marking what had once been the route of the padres of Spain when they founded the twenty-one missions of old California. He fell asleep at the wheel just in time to miss the big sweeping curve to his right. The car sailed over the curb that was all the barrier there was in that stretch, flip-turned onto its left side, and exploded into flames on impact. The driver never woke to feel pain or anything else as he passed out of this world.

On a military airstrip half a world away – in a place called Bien Hoa in a divided nation called Vietnam – irregular soldiers captured an American military adviser. They bound the non-commissioned officer and poured gasoline over him after forcing him to sit cross-legged on the tarmac. It was dark and the young man – a twenty-year-old from Iowa who wore sergeants’ chevrons on the sleeves of his summer weight United States Air Force uniform – was scared. He knew what they were planning to do to him and it didn’t look as though his buddies would get to him in time. He believed that the Lord His God would take him to heaven when it was over, but he was very afraid of the pain he would feel when they burned him. He could hear the jeeps coming from behind him but he knew they wouldn’t get to him in time. The Viet Cong lit the flare and threw it onto him. He tried to make no sound but the pain was unbearable for a while.

According to the United States government, the first Viet Cong attack on an American installation in South Vietnam would not occur for another month. Some would later accuse government representatives of lying; they called it managing the news. The sergeant’s death would be acknowledged, but the circumstances denied.

And a California teenager fell from the sky and broke his arm when he landed.

Chapter 1

Jon

On the first day of October – a Thursday – Jonathan Randall sat hunched over his drafting board waiting for the bell that ends second period every day to end it this day. He liked his drafting class because the lines he drew of the shapes he conceived were crisp and clean in a different way than the waves he loved. He liked his history class – where everything they talked about happened on a particular day in a particular place and then it was done – for the same reason. He liked things with a beginning, a middle, and an end; the rest was and always would be just plain non-linear, and there was way too much of that in his life. Between living with an alcoholic and spasmodically violent father and the mother who coped with the father by blaming the son – for everything…

None of that mattered today. Jon had a plan. He would be on the water before noon – before the swell could spend itself – he would not have to wait for the next Pacific storm to make a new one.

What did matter was that a great swell of water crossed the Pacific Ocean in the last week of September. It made the Southern California coast. Wherever there were rock reefs on which it could break it made crisp line after clean line of waves to wrap themselves around points of earth wherever they jutted into the water. Young men and women knelt on planks of styrofoam strengthened with internal strips of wood and shaped for maximum speed and manoeuvrability. They paddled into the path of a wave they had chosen at just the right angle of attack. When the speed of the wave matched the speed of the board, the one took the other and the surfer stood and rode on the very back of creation until the wave either spent itself or threw him off into the foaming water.

The bell rang at 10:08 – just as it was supposed to – and he sauntered out into the hallway of the 200 building of William S Harney High School in Van Nuys, California. He had eighteen minutes of morning nutrition break to get himself off campus without looking suspicious enough to get stopped by patrolling teachers. The way to not look suspicious was to train yourself and your friends to look like you had a perfect right to be where you were, doing what you were doing.

Jon put his books in his locker and kept just one so that he looked like a student with an assignment on his mind. He took the exit facing the quad instead of making for the street door, but once out he hung left and out the side gate. He crossed Cedros Street and headed for the blue and white 1958 Chevy Brookwood wagon parked two doors up from the Methodist church on Hamlin. He lit a cigarette while he waited for Lonnie and Blume to get to the car. He saw again the sign taped onto its back window that read, in carefully drawn calligraphy: This room has been hermetically sealed. Anyone opening it will be sucked in and destroyed. It was funny the first few times he had seen it, but Lonnie still cracked up every time he saw his own work.

The sky was dark and full of lowering clouds, heavy with water for the first big storm of the season in the San Fernando Valley. He thought how even the Los Angeles basin gets rain once in a while. He didn’t need to care; he was going to the beach…if his friends would ever get to the car. He stretched his lanky body and yawned; he took another drag on the cigarette.

They came up a couple of minutes later, laughing and shoving each other. Lonnie shook the shock of blond hair from his eyes at the same time he fumbled for the keys to his car. The new girl from Jon’s fourth-period class was along; Blume had asked her. Jon saw her from behind and thought she was nicely curvy in an understated way – he grinned at himself thinking he was doing a commercial for her – and he especially liked the way her nut-brown hair framed almond eyes, in shape and colour, when she turned to face him. She’d brought a friend, a tall girl with dark hair and bangs and a smooth flowing walk. They piled into the Brookwood and Jon scowled at Blume as he called shotgun: You look like a couple of clowns cutting school.

Porter Blumenthal gathered his squarecut frame under waves of wild red curls and freckles and did his best to look serious as he intoned, "Sir, we are a couple of clowns cutting school. We’re going to the beach with the intention of surfing on the waves we will find therein."

Lonnie Russ pushed his black framed glasses back on his nose and said, Jonnnnnn, with that phlegmy dragging sound out of his larynx he reserved for trying to get his best friend to lighten up, Nobody cares where you go at nutrition. They’ve got better things to do than check us for an off-campus pass. You’re not planning a space shot; give it a rest. He settled his athlete’s frame – all 5’7" of it – behind the steering wheel and turned the ignition key to rumble his car into life.

Just give me your admit cards so I can sign them now, Jon rumbled at his friends. And try to remember who makes sure we don’t get busted by Vlasic so that we can take these little excursions in your car. I take shotgun after we get the boards. He bent over the book on his lap and signed for each of their teachers so they would be able to return to class the next day without the vice principal or the registrar getting a hint. They knew better than to move while he worked, but it only took a moment and they pulled away from the curb. Blume introduced the girls as Leslie and Rindi.

It seemed like it shot the morning going to Blume’s house to get the boards and then to the gas station – everybody chip in your fifty cents – and then they were on the freeway north with the windows down and the wind in their hair and the radio blasting Beach Boys on KFWB. Lonnie had wedged Rindi between himself and Jon on the front seat while Blume shared the back with Leslie. Jon grinned as he realised Rindi had been placed in the spotlight spot Leslie thought belonged to her.

My dad just started a job teaching at the community college – Pierce – and my mom works in the counselling office. We wanted to be close to the base my brother shipped out from. He’s an advisor in South Vietnam – Air Force. We came out from Des Moines, she managed to get out over the wind. And it’s Marinda – but I’ve always been Rindi, she added.

Jon Randall, he said. "My dad was in the army in the war, he’s an accountant who drinks a lot and my mom stays at home wishing she were somebody from Gone with the Wind. Dad says the army did it to him and Mom says it was me." He was amazed that Rindi said so much to someone she just met – and just as surprised at himself.

Then they were in Malibu Canyon, taking the curves and watching the live oaks sweep past on the steep slopes. Jon thought again how really cool there was this wild place with deer and fox and rocks to climb in the middle of Los Angeles County, but he kept it to himself because he had not found anyone yet he wanted to share it with – besides his best friend, Lonnie. He smiled as Lonnie hollered, Nerdling– his signature call for passing cars on winding roads, because anyone who drove slower than he wanted was obviously a nerd-needing-to-be-passed. He swung out to the left lane to pass the Ford convertible in front of them. Jon looked back as Blume laid a protective hand on the boards nestled in the back of the Brookwood, sticking their tails out the back window.

They made Secos – Leo Carillo State Beach – before eleven-thirty. Lonnie parked the car in front of the hamburger stand and they waited for a space between the cars on the Coast Highway before they crossed with the boards slung under their arms. They had trunks on under their Levis so they could strip when they got on the sand. They were ready to go – the girls too.

The swell was strong. The waves were sharp and overhead, one set after another cresting the rock reef offshore, breaking in long clean lines with the whitewater curl advancing rightward; the wind was offshore too. And OH MY GOD! As Jon looked harder, he saw they were more than overhead; there were some ten footers out there – even more – he had never seen it this big at Secos. He had never seen it this big anywhere. The jutting rock he always lined up on was mostly under water! This was the day of a lifetime!

The paddle out was farther today. He drove past the break so he could just sit in awe before cracking in. Lonnie and Blume went right for it but Jon wanted to sit and breathe deep of the ocean air and watch this miracle unfold in front of him for a moment. He did not believe in God – at least not in some wimpy god who would let his own son get nailed to a cross like some of his parents’ friends talked about – but he believed in creation. He knew creation was worked with big hands when he set the angle of his board just right and paddled like there was nowhere else and it caught him and took him and he stood for that elevator drop. When he made the hard right so he could look over his shoulder at the wall of water, he rode – he knew he was riding on the back of creation. He knew he was riding something bigger than he would ever be and life was good and it even made sense for a little – for as long as the ride lasted before he kicked out over the back or jumped or fell on his face in the foam of the shore break.

He looked and breathed and felt the sun’s heat kneading into the muscles of his back and shoulders for awhile. Satisfied, he levered his legs back onto his board and rose to his knees to paddle into the break. He was in time for another set; he set himself and drove for the second wave of the line. It began to peak and then he was in it and his board accelerated and he stood as it began to drop. He backed off just enough to lean into the turn before the nose could pearl at the bottom and he was raking along the wall and rising back up and shouting his joy. He cut back and took the drop again – it was two feet over his head – and he rocketed along until he outran the curl. He turned the board right again and slipped over the back of the wave and went with the motion and sat as he slipped down over the back. He was paddling out again before he even looked for the next wave; he made it around the break and was ready to crack into another one.

Lonnie and Blume were taking more waves than he did – they always did – for them the motion was an end in itself. Jon loved the speed and the twisting in and out with the water wall as much as they did, but it was just as important to him to sit and remember his ride a bit before launching into another one. He watched the beach for a moment, picking out where Leslie and Rindi were sitting on a spread out beach towel and taking the sun. He let his mind drift to remember sitting his board at another break where bluffs lined the beach, and he’d tried that day to imagine what it was like to be an explorer waiting his chance to land on that shoreline – watching for a break through which his long boats could go from the anchorage – wondering what kind of country and what kind of people lived on top of those bluffs. Then he was back to now and angling his board for the next wave of the next set.

It was an amazing day. He rode six or eight waves, all of them long and all of them long enough for multiple turns and cutbacks and re-shooting that made him cry out his joy. Twice there was enough of a curl for him to crouch back in the wave and ride under it before he shot out in front and up and over the back again. He was not the natural athlete Lonnie was, but this day everything he touched turned to gold and he had not wiped out yet.

His board was long and slim; it didn’t have much rocker, so whip-turns were really hard to do, but it was very fast. When it bit into the wave again after he made his turn, the board and the water made a quick slapping sound like shisssh, shisssh, shisssh as he rocked along, rising and dropping along the wall. He loved that sound.

He loved it even more the way the booming sound of the breaking waves crescendoed as the water fell from his ears. It sounded an even deeper boom when he paddled in and stretched himself on another beach towel next to the girls. The sun soaked into his body – he had enough tan left from the summer to not worry about getting a burn that Mother would notice at home tonight – and he dried his hand on the towel enough to smoke without wetting the paper. Rindi said something out of the side of her mouth about him giving himself cancer and he laughed. With all of the lies, his parents’ generation told everybody he didn’t believe he was going to get cancer. Besides, he was not yet seventeen years old!

Leslie lit one up too. They waited for Lonnie and Blume to come in so they could get lunch at the stand across the highway. When they did, Jon wolfed his food because he was ready to get back out there. He had never gotten a cramp from being in the water too soon after eating either, never mind what Mom and science teachers said. Past one. For the plan to work they had to be home by the same time they would have returned from school any other day – to avoid parental suspicions. They had time for one more good time out there and still be able to get back to Blume’s house for a shower and put their school clothes back on. He waded out ’til it was thigh high and hopped on his board to stroke past the break again.

He marvelled at the steadiness of the offshore wind, how it held the walls and kept them up. He had already ridden two good ones when he saw the monster wave coming; he was perfectly positioned for it; maybe there was a god of the sea after all. He knelt, bent, and began to pull for shore. The rhythm of his stroke felt good; the pull tightened the muscles in his back and ribs as well as in his arms and he put a little more into it at the last – as he felt the board rise under him in the grip of the wave.

Without looking back, he knew it had to be an eleven-footer – the biggest he had ever mounted outside of a dream. He leaned forward and the board began to slice downward. He pushed up and was on his feet. He leaned back as the trough came up to meet him; turning right, scuttering along its flank and rising. He looked back and there was no curl at all – the wind was holding it up – and then he leaned an inch too far and the wind caught under his board. Before he could think it, he was airborne – two feet above the tip of the wave, his board falling away just before he fell himself, dropping toward the back of the wave as it slid under him. The board landed edgewise on the water and he watched – seemingly in slow motion – as the nose rose to meet him. He came down on the edge of the nose.

He got his left arm under him to protect his ribs and even managed to get his hand out to fend it off; his hand hit the nose of the board with a sickening crunch as it bent backwards from the impact. His wrist felt like a hot iron had been slashed into it. He went below the surface and clutched his wrist to his chest in his other hand. OH MY GOD! He didn’t know anything could hurt like this. He kicked his way to the surface and looked for his board while he struggled to be still and quiet in the face of searing pain. It began in his wrist and laced hot fingers around his whole arm; even his ribs felt the fire. He wished to God he could pass out from it!

His board floated just a few feet away. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to be still; he draped his violently throbbing left arm over it and began to pull for shore with his good right. Nobody seemed to notice him until he got into the shore break and was able to stand. He cradled his left arm again while Blume ran and grabbed his board and Lonnie helped him onto the beach. I think I broke my arm, he was able to grunt before he lowered himself to the sand and began to groan. The first slashing pain had subsided a bit but it still felt like his arm was bound and bathed in fire – a throbbing fire that lanced even into his armpit.

We’ve got to get you to a doc, Lonnie gasped.

No! No way! Jon bit out the words. "I’d rather have a broken head than let you guys get busted and get to listen to the wicked witch of the west scream at me for four hours into the bargain when she finds out I cut school for this."

Jonnnnnn! Don’t be a jerk. You’re bad hurt, son; you can’t play with this. Your plan for the day just went into the toilet. We have to get you to the emergency room. Santa Monica Hospital is the closest one I know. We’re gonna get you into my car…

I said no, damn it! I’ll go to a doctor, but not before school is out. His nose dripped when he breathed and he wiped it on his trunks. He gasped, It probably rained all day in the valley and I can say I slipped in some water after I left school. You can take me to Valley Presbyterian around 3:30 and we’ll call my mom from there.

Jonnnn! You need to get over this! You fell outta the sky and you’re hurt bad. Back the truck up; it is over.

By this time Blume was up on the sand with the boards, his and Jon’s. What are you saying? You want to hang out on the beach with a bent wrist – it looks dislocated – I didn’t learn how to put it back in the Boy Scouts and I don’t think Lon did either. You got mush for brains, boy!

Wait. It was Leslie. My father has a house a couple of miles south of here – near Paradise Cove. We can take him there. My father might even be at home. He’ll know what to do. Get him into the car.

They were there in what seemed no time at all. Jon was finding everything fuzzing out until they hit the long curving drive to the house – he kept hearing Lonnie’s voice saying, You fell outta the sky and you’re hurt, – and then it seemed like he was bouncing down the side of a hill until they stopped in front of a garage door. Leslie took them through a white picket gate with a wooden trellis over it and bougainvillea draping it. They went down a short walkway and she let them in through a massive carved oak door. She called down the entry hall for her father and they heard a chair scraping in another room followed by a baritone grunt of acknowledgement.

Then a man with bristling salt and pepper hair and a square-cut muscular build was standing in the entry to a sunken living room, beckoning them to come in and gesturing for his daughter to come and give him a hug. Gerald Coosman looked them over and Jon looked with him; it distracted him from the pain as he tried to see as the older man would. There was the one built like Gerald with the tightly curled red hair and freckles, the blond kid with the big grin and the big black glasses, the tall dark-haired young lady with the air of elegance about her, and his own daughter with her almond shaped eyes – onyx green – and the curled light brown hair that bounced on her shoulders. Leslie was almost always smiling but it never managed to hide the steely determination she had inherited from her father – so obvious now that they stood together. And then there was Jon himself, the tall angular kid holding his left arm across his heart with his right – grimacing in pain but making no sound.

Gerald got him to the curved sofa against the partition that masked a stairwell to the lower level of the house. He grunted as he sat down. Gerald gently pulled the arm out by the elbow so that he could take a look. I was a Corpsman in the navy; I haven’t forgotten what I’m doing, he said. His fat fingers were gentler than they looked as he moved over Jon’s mangled wrist. This looks like a dislocation but you’ve snapped your radius bone and pushed it right around into the ulna. We need to get you to a doctor right away. He looked up at Jon’s face for the first time. You got a mother or a father we can reach? I can have them meet us at the ER in Santa Monica.

Jon winced as he tried to pull his hand away. You don’t understand. We cut school today to go surfing, he looked over at Leslie, who didn’t seem to mind that he was finking on her to her father, I planned the whole thing and I can’t split for the doctor until it would be the right time for this to happen on the way home from school. Otherwise everybody gets busted and it’s my fault.

Lonnie and Blume and the girls interrupted each other to exclaim that things were past that. Lonnie said, Jon, none of us care about that. How mad are our folks going to be when they see what happened to you?

Look, Jon gritted out through his teeth, I made a plan. I am not going to bail out on my plan. I am not going to get all of us into a month of detention at school when there is a way to avoid that.

Rindi raised her hand looking for a space to speak into. That’s nice but the situation is that your plan is up the rainspout. We just need to live with that. Besides, she added, no one but you is hanging onto your plan now.

I am not going to listen to my mother on a tirade for the whole night and be grounded for a month when all I have to do is tough this out for a couple of hours. You don’t know what it’s like to listen to her – and maybe get the stuffing kicked out of me when Dad finds out. And I’m not ready to leave home and go live with foster parents, if they’d even take me like this. We’re just going to wait until we can go home on time. It probly rained all day in the valley; I can say I slipped on a wet sidewalk after school.

It did start raining – hard – this morning right before noon. I was there at the studio all morning, said Gerald. But you got to be crazy to do a stunt like this. He had a deeply-scarred cannon of a voice that came from three decades of smoking three packs a day. What happened, anyway?

Again they stumbled over each other until Lonnie was finally able to crank out what had happened at the beach. Jon was just as adamant about not yet going to a doctor when he finished as when they walked into the house. Well, I can splint and immobilise it for you until you get ready to go…I s’pose you have to arrive at the doc in your friend’s car to maintain the mystique, don’t you. At least you’re not in shock; if you were gonna be you would be by now. He rose from the couch. Leslie, why don’t you get some pop and snacks from the kitchen while I get some paint sticks and bandages from downstairs? It looks like we have some time to kill before you go back over the mountains.

Gerald had not forgotten his Corpsman training – practiced under fire in the Solomon Islands battles of World War II. While he splinted Jon’s wrist and forearm Blume said to Leslie, Hey, I thought you said your dad was a writer; where’d he learn to do this stuff?

Leslie answered, He parlayed getting shot off a ship into writing television shows. And, she shot a forefinger at him, you can tell them all about how you won the war some other time, Daddy – and that goes for your epic journey from news man to Hollywood con man too. Right now we have some current events to deal with.

Gerald looked at the grandfather clock next to dark-varnished wood book shelves along the wall that extended from the entry when his doctoring was finished and announced there was really no time for sea stories. It was already close to time for the youngsters to head for the emergency room and make whatever arrangements Jon had in mind to patch himself up and maintain the fiction of how they had spent their day. You’ll have to remove that splint before you walk into the ER if you want to stick to your story. They’ll know by the bruising and inflammation of your arm that the break happened several hours ago, but I don’t think they’ll say anything. He shook his head at Jon and rumbled, I admire your guts, young man, but the jury is still out on your brains.

Blume said, Jury’s in, Sir; we already know he’s a dipstick.

Lonnie nursed the Brookwood back through Malibu Canyon without passing anyone, taking the curves as gently as he could. When they stopped at Blume’s house to unload the boards, Jon used the phone to call his mother and tell her that he had been injured and would have to meet her at the Valley Pres emergency room. He told her that he was calling from the pay phone at Casa Burger on Ventura and Beverly Glen. Her reply that she would see him there in a few minutes was even more clipped than usual for her when speaking to her son.

Fifteen minutes later they all walked into the emergency room. Marlys Randall was already there and waiting in the waiting room. With her was a uniformed police officer and the boy’s Vice Principal of Harney High School. They stood.

Jon could not keep the shock from his face. Vlasic! And a cop?

Jonathan, I need to tell you that something terrible has happened. Her voice was thick with the residue of tears. Your father was killed early this morning in a one-car accident near Camarillo. He was on his way home after working very late. He was killed instantly. Mr Vlasic and Officer Caruso have been kind enough to stay with me while we attempted to locate you. We have been attempting to locate you since one o’clock this afternoon. Would you care to tell us where you have been? You have most certainly not been in school.

What happened? Jon stammered.

He apparently lost control of the car – perhaps falling asleep at the wheel; you know how hard he works. He missed a curve; the car went into the centre median and it appears the gas tank exploded. I cannot imagine a more terrible way to die – many miles from everyone who loved him. She stopped and her bloodshot eyes bored into him. I asked you a question and we are all waiting for your answer.

It was clearly up now. He marvelled at how little he cared that the father he hated was dead. He was not sad; he was not elated – it was just a burden gone. But he was in for it now. There was nothing to do but say it out, his way.

I cut school and borrowed Lonnie’s car to go to the beach. I was surfing all day and I landed on the edge of my board when I wiped out. I think I have broken my wrist. I really need to see a doctor before you tell me how disappointed you are in me. He would still try to protect his friends.

Vlasic spoke before Jon’s mother could react to him – spoke in the formal tone he used when wielding the power of the administrator. Mr Randall, it is admirable that you seek to protect your friends. However, we tried to contact Mr Russ and Mr Blumenthal when we were unable to locate you. They have not been on campus since the end of second period either. And you ladies?

They go to Grant; they’re not Harney students, Jon said as he looked quickly at Leslie and Rindi. You need to split for home now, before your parents start worrying. And I guess I’m sorry I got you guys caught up in this. Jon was thinking furiously as he tried to apologise to Lon and Blume while pushing the girls back toward the exit door and still keeping his eyes fixed on the Vice Principal and his mother; the next thing he said had to be perfect. Why is the police officer here? Are you going to have me arrested or was Dad drunk again? He decided perfection was to let go and be uncool for a moment. That just might take attention from the girls long enough.

He had never seen his mother move that fast – she closed the few feet between them and swung hard with her right hand to slap him across the face. How dare you take that tone with me when your father worked night and day for your good! This good man is dead because of you and you dare to accuse… As she raised the back of her hand for a slap shot at the other side of his face, he steeled himself to take it and hold down the impulse to retaliate.

Mr Vlasic stepped between them. Mrs Randall! You are very upset and you have a right to be, but everyone handles their grief in their own way. I am sure Jonathan is just as distraught as you, and having difficulty showing it. Let’s all calm down and get that arm seen to, and then we can determine the best course of action. He glanced at the police officer. Officer Caruso, you can see the boy is safe – if not sound. I think we can take it from here. I thank you for making and taking the report, and for your kindness in remaining with Mrs Randall.

Jon was thankful his quick thinking to provoke his mother got the girls out of the way before they became the object of Vlasic’s administrative attention. He had never felt pain like the pain he felt when the doctor set his wrist – even with a potent drug like the Demerol they gave him – not even in the initial crack out there on the water at Secos. And the reckoning with Mother was still to come. But his quick plan had worked.

Mr Vlasic delivered a long and professorial lecture when they were back in the waiting room – the kind he always did before he lowered the boom on a boy who had failed to live up to his standards of behaviour. He said, Mr Randall you cannot seem to appreciate how important it is for your generation to live up to the tremendous sacrifices your parents’ generation has made for you – from surviving the Great Depression to bringing about victory in the greatest war ever fought and against the greatest evils ever encountered in the history of mankind. He cleared his throat, I regret, – as he always did – that I was not personally permitted to fight in the war. I remind you, Jon, – as he always reminded the student body of Harney High whenever he addressed a school assembly – how knowledge is exploding in our time and how much better educated this Baby Boomer generation will be and the resources of knowledge and achievement with which you are endowed – because of the sacrifices of the older generation. He expressed again how it saddened him and others when young people failed to exercise the wisdom and the opportunities into which they had been born.

He did another thing, one for which Jon was totally unprepared. Mr Randall – as disappointed as I am in your behaviour – I cannot bring myself to add to the pain of losing your father this day by imposing school discipline on you. I have decided that the broken arm you sustained during your ill-considered trip to the beach is sufficient punishment for you. I want you to stay home tomorrow – it will be considered a sick day and therefore an excused absence. You will return to school on Monday and there will be no further questions asked. Mr Russ and Mr Blumenthal, I should suspend both of you for five days commencing on Monday, but since I know it was Randall who planned this and since your loyalty to him in his injury is commendable, I will simply consider today an unexcused absence for the three of you and that will end the matter so far as I am concerned. Is that acceptable?

Jon could only rub the new plaster cast on his left arm and think about the pain prescription he needed to get filled before leaving the hospital. His friends gasped out their thanks and backed out of the emergency room before Vlasic had a chance to change his mind. The greatest day of Jonathan Randall’s life was now shot to hell – as he knew he would discover in even greater detail as soon as he was home.

When they walked through the door of the home on Halbrent Avenue, Marlys spoke for the first time since the Vice Principal had stepped between them at the hospital. You needn’t worry that I will strike you again. I can assure you that the last thing I want to do is to touch you under any circumstances. You are the most ungrateful and unnatural child I have ever heard of. Her tears now flowed freely; her voice had thickened. Your father’s burnt body lies dead in a mortuary because of you. I am a widow at age forty because of you. I do not know how you managed to leave your school today without being detected, but you are devious enough to do anything imaginable. Understand that I hate you with everything that is in me. You may have won the sympathy of your vice principal, but your lies will not get past me. You will go nowhere but to school and to your father’s funeral for the next month. When that month is past, you will find yourself a job – and I don’t mean mowing lawns or selling newspapers – and begin to earn your keep around here. Your father left life insurance. But none of it will go to you except what it takes to keep a roof over your ungrateful head. And if you should leave this house in the next month for any purpose other than school you will find the doors locked and the locks changed when you return home. Now get out of my sight; I am ashamed to be related to you. You disgust me.

Neither of them knew, although it would be on the evening news, that a young man named Jack Weinberg had been arrested at the University of California at Berkeley for unauthorised political activity on land controlled by the campus. The trustees had banned all political advocacy on campus and Weinberg was publicly defying the ban, although he was not enrolled at the university. When he was handcuffed and placed in a police car, three thousand angry students surrounded the car. He was released without having been transported to jail. The free speech movement was underway.

Jon went down the short hall to his room and shut the door. He knew she would not come in as well as he knew he would scrap out for dinner tonight if he got hungry. He took the pack of cigarettes out of the cavity beneath his bottom drawer and opened the window. He climbed through it and then up the jacaranda tree that grew alongside of the house. He stepped to the roof – as long as he was careful she never heard him on the roof – and sat close enough to the peak that no one would see unless they were looking for him – and she would not go out in the front yard tonight. He smoked and tried to figure out how he might have done it differently to protect his friends and still get to the beach and that amazing and wonderful swell that was so much more important than anything the idiots of Harney High School could teach him that he could not learn from a good text book. Yes, his father’s death was unforeseeable, unpreventable and unmanageable – even for him – but still. How had it gone so wrong?

He thought of a father who had beaten and screamed at him whenever he was drunk ever since Jon could remember. At least until Jon learned how to avoid him. And until he had gotten big enough to protect himself from a falling down drunk if he had to. He thought of a mother whose voice sliced into him deeper than his father’s fists ever had. Until he learned not to hear and never let her touch his heart. Until he learned to be cool and to stay cool every minute of every day. Except when he was in the water and riding on the back of creation.

He smoked and he wondered how – if there was a god – it could go so wrong when he tried so hard to get it right.

Chapter 2

Rindi

Rindi thought about October while she waited for the funeral of her new friend’s father to begin. October was beginning to unfold as October does. Temperatures drop and the winds kick up – even in the Valley. Rain comes in spits and starts, and the leaves on the ash and the liquid amber begin to turn colours. It was nothing like the deep and colour-splashed tableau that unfolded in Iowa, but it was still October, and it was still a season of great beauty for beginnings and endings.

She threw up a quick prayer of thanksgiving to the God who had healed her, and another of praise for giving her the family she had – Daddy and Momma and Keith, the brother she adored, and for the gift of this church where they fit so well after being uprooted from Des Moines. She thanked Jesus especially for Pastor Jared, and the privilege of introducing him to the Randalls just when they needed a pastor the most – even if they didn’t know it.

She stole a look at Lonnie Russ, seated next to her and waiting as she was. She already knew him well enough to know it was a season of great beauty for him as well, but one he ecstatically disliked. He disliked it because it was the end of baseball for another year; he disliked it ecstatically because he had an insatiable need to treat his life as a joy filled game. Whatever he did had an element of ecstasy in it.

She could imagine Lonnie greeting every day with the infectious grin that spread all over his face and a hand to sweep his jutting hair from in front of his eyes. She was amazed that she knew so much about him after having just met him the day of the great and disastrous trip to the beach. But he was much more talkative than the average teenager of 1964 – as she was – and he was unusually empathetic – as she was – and he had reached out to her even on the drive to Secos.

Baseball was, from the beginning, life for Lonnie; he had made that clear. At the beach that day he told her he was born with what the players call soft hands. When a ground ball came anywhere in the neighbourhood of second base, it gravitated into his hands and remained there until he unloaded it to wherever it needed to go next. He was not big enough to play the corners, nor was he gifted with a strong throwing arm – that ruled out shortstop and the outfield – but he had tremendous range and could flag down a ball from behind the second base bag to three quarters of the way to first, and from the infield grass to short centre or right field. His myopic eyesight required the big glasses that he wore, but when he played it was as though he didn’t need to really see the ball; his soft hands simply opened and the ball came to them. It was like that in the surf too.

He loved to surf, loved what his best friend called riding on the back of creation, loved the sea sounds and the sounds of the sea birds and the dog-tired feeling in his muscles and his bones when he came in from a whole day on the water and slept the sleep of deep peace that comes from physical exhaustion. But when he came in from a day of playing baseball, he dreamed. He still slept the sleep of perfect peace from being physically spent, but he dreamed big and the world made sense in his dreams. Baseball made sense to Lonnie as surfing made sense to Jon. Rindi thought he would do nicely for a stand-in brother until the Air Force brought Keith back from his duty