Page 8 of The California Dreamers

7

Do right by Cap

2002

The island

Day 1, early afternoon

I looked up right as another trickle of water fell. This one hit my forehead and I blinked, swiped at my eyes. When I opened them I saw someone above, lying in a Jacob’s ladder–style hammock high in the trees and holding a dripping handkerchief.

I called softly, “Hello, Magnus.”

He jumped down from his hammock, kicking up tawny dust like a magician reappearing in a cloud of smoke after his act.

But there was no performer’s smoothness. He took a few halting steps toward me, then stopped a body length away, clutching his wet bandana. Surely, he’d heard us earlier, wind or no.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

Griff shifted nervously beside me; he thought I was getting into the heavy stuff, that I meant hurt by me. By my absence.

“His knee,” I explained, gesturing at Mag’s leg. “He’s bleeding.”

Griff inspected the slash of garnet on Mag’s shin. “How’d you do that?”

“It’s nothing. I went to the lookout and bit it a little climbing down the shortcut.”

“Bit it a little”—a classic Mag-ism. An oxymoron, like saying, “Wiped out…sort of.”

I observed my big brothers, fraternal twins who could pass for identical if you weren’t looking carefully enough. Both were tall, broad shouldered, their straight blond hair well past their collarbones. But Mag’s locks were rougher, hanging loose, and Griff’s baby fine, still ponytailed. Mag had always held his shoulders higher, his hands closed, had always looked at the world through eyes slightly narrowed.

How long had I been staring? “I have twins,” I blurted. “Did you know?”

Mag shook his head.

I set my backpack on the ground and pulled a snapshot from my wallet. In the picture, Jack and Bear sit on the porch, oblivious to me and my camera. They’d found a rusted toy train in the south field, and I’d given them an old toothbrush and can of mineral oil to shine it up. They’re hunched over the ancient toy, Jack scrubbing a wheel, Bear waiting for his turn. You can almost see his little hand twitching with impatience.

I handed Mag the photo. “That’s Jack and that’s Barry. Bear. They’re six here. Eight now.”

Mag examined the picture for a long time. Anyone else would smile, offer up the requisite cute or sweet . “Do they go to school?”

“Yes.”

Mag looked again, searching for evidence of the classroom in his nephews. What would the stamp of formal education look like? Cap had spoken of school as something that “marked you” forever. He handed the snapshot to Griff, who dipped his face close to it politely but didn’t say anything.

“We can’t afford an infection,” Griff said, clearing his throat and giving me back the photo. “I’ll get the first aid kit from the shed.”

Now we seemed to be out of small talk. I fought the urge to fill the silence, to ask if Mag would sit and elevate his scratched leg, to ask, Did you hurt anything else? Do you want a fresh Kleenex from my pack? Anything to drown out the lonely drip , drip , drip of the cloth in his hand.

“So you made it,” he said at last.

“Looks that way.”

He bent to dab at his cut. “Griff and I made a bet.”

“He bet he could get me to come here?”

“The other way around. I knew you’d do right by Cap.” He straightened again and shrugged, but it was a monumental gift, more shocking than a hug.

We gazed over toward the work shed, where Griff was taking his sweet time, and I thought of the blue urn inside. “I’m so sorry he had reporters hounding him his last few months, because of that museum thing. Cap.”

After showing me the museum poster on the bus shelter, Griff had recounted the miserable chain of events. Cap had collapsed on the beach, and someone called a medic who happened to surf—so he recognized the bumper of the Gull as the one displayed on a banner outside the Brand Museum advertising the exhibit, the distinctive, dented chrome blown up to massive proportions. Days later, the first reporter showed up outside his crummy hospital room.

“You know about that, then. Yeah. It wasn’t fun.” Mag sighed, regarding me for a heartbeat or two with understanding, then quickly collecting himself and turning his attention to his cut, swabbing it roughly with his bandana. “We tried to distract him from that whole…mess. Played his records to drown out visitors. Moved the Gull as much as he let us, once he came home. We offered to drive inland, but he didn’t want to leave the coast for his last…near the end.” He paused. “We stayed east for three months when the picture was on the cover of Time , and it made everyone miserable. Oh, did you know we were on Time ?”

I nodded. I’d wondered how they had dealt with Time . Dreamers appeared on the cover in 1992, six years after I’d left, along with a roundup of other shots depicting “families in America.” I’d seen it on the farm and my dinner had nearly come up—but it was only a wire service image, and no article or identifying details had accompanied it.

Dreamers had caused trouble back when I’d lived in the van, too, forcing us to change our lifestyle, to think of the outside world far more than Cap wanted in order to stay one step ahead of those few people who recognized us in the picture.

But our problems had been nothing like what Mag described now. It seemed the family’s luck had run out.

I imagined a scene like in a movie, reporters hurling questions when anyone opened the Gull’s door:

Is it true you live in your van?

Is it true you kept your kids out of school? Did you ever ask them if they wanted to go?

Mr. and Mrs. Merrick, how did you elude social services?

On and on…

“Was Cap aware of what was going on?” I asked.

“Sure. Livid at first.”

“Only at first?”

“Later he seemed…resigned.” Mag balled up his bandana. “He said if anyone’s foolish enough to waste six dollars on surf pictures in a museum, or scribble articles about us and our van, instead of just going in the water themselves, we should pity them. Not hate them.”

It occurred to me there was another family member I’d never see again. The Gull.

“How’s the Gull running?” I asked, my voice so pained I felt silly.

“She’s at the yard in San Jacinto.”

The yard , otherwise known as the RV graveyard. I didn’t want to picture her on concrete blocks among thousands of motorhome carcasses. Bled and dead. A rush of wind blew through camp, shaking the tree branches encircling us and lifting the leaves at my feet in a mini whirlwind. Absently, I knelt to catch one, thinking of the Gull in flight, on the road. I split the leaf in two, like wings.

Mag added, “She’s not beyond repair. We were just getting the cash together for a new engine and paint job.”

I rose eagerly. “How much do you need?”

“Why, you going to make a donation?”

“I could give you some. Sure. What does a new engine cost, a thousand?”

Mag waved me off. “You don’t need to worry about it, seriously.”

“But I want to—”

“Look at the parade marshal.”

I turned; Dyl was here, just stepping out of a tree’s shadow.

And his arrival was a parade.

He dragged a makeshift litter, two long branches webbed crosswise with reeds, holding a basket trap brimming with silver-white fish. Behind this, two sand-colored kittens followed. High above him, also drawn by the day’s catch, three gulls wheeled.

Closer up, Dyl’s hair was as thick and lush as ever, still as wildly curly as mine would be if I didn’t iron it straight. But unlike when he was a boy, and I’d struggled to comb it, even after working Mama’s orange oil into the tangles, it was now unsnarled. And leaf-less. My little brother had grown into a handsome man.

Mag took a canteen from the picnic table and tipped water onto his cut. “You going to say hello to Ronan?”

“It’s all right. We saw each other when he was fishing.”

“Hello, Ronan,” Dyl said dutifully, and his voice was a man’s. Of course it was. He was twenty-six now, though I’d locked him in my memory as a boy. He’d once been almost like my son, but this baritone-voiced adult wouldn’t look at me, hadn’t even glanced in my direction.

“Now who’s uncivilized?” Mag mocked Dyl for his greeting.

I focused on the kittens, who were keeping a safe distance but hadn’t taken their round eyes off the fish, which Dyl now laid out and salted in a wide metal pan. Our dinner, I assumed. I held my hand out, palm up, but the cats wouldn’t come near.

After Dyl finished prepping the fish, Mag shot him a dirty look: Talk to her .

Reluctantly, Dyl came and sat near me. He pulled his green-and-white field journal from his pack and busied himself scribbling intensely.

I waited to speak until he closed the journal; I would never win a quiet contest with Dyl.

“It’s beautiful here.” I stared straight ahead at a beam of sunlight sifting through the dark trees. “Like Karana’s island.”

“Who’s Karana?” Dyl asked.

A dagger. He knew who she was.

But after the hurt subsided, a wave of tenderness washed over me. Dyl’s knit brows and sullen expression were exactly like Jack’s in the rearview mirror the time Lou and I’d missed his Oregon Trail: The Musical! performance as Meriwether Lewis because the truck blew a tire.

“Karana is a character in this book I love,” I told him, daring a glance his way.

“Oh.”

“ Island of the Blue Dolphins ,” Mag said, walking past toward the shed. “He still has it.”

So at least my cherished old copy wasn’t at the bottom of the ocean, tossed by Dyl in anguish, or anger, after I left. It was something. I hopped up and wandered over to a tin of fish bones Dyl had saved, gesturing at the cats. “May I?”

He nodded. I sat back on my heels and held out two scraps of fish, palms up, the treats nearly on my fingertips. I looked sideways, not at their four alert eyes. Give the vulnerable in this world time to know you, to assess their risks, before going closer.

We’d calculated risks constantly in the old life. Unconsciously, like breathing. Talk to that stranger or walk away? Park the van by those dunes or under that tree? Use the campground showers at 1:00 a.m., when the site hosts are asleep, or when they’re busy selling cords of firewood?

Trust me, cats. It felt important. An example for the human I really wanted to win over. Inch by inch, they crept closer, then they lapped from my hands, bolting back the fish as they shot back into the trees. Four eyes, bright in the dusk, watched me suspiciously, waiting to see if they’d made a mistake. But Dyl refused to face my way.