But Clare climbed into the back with him and once they’d settled themselves in the truck bed with their legs extended and their backs to the cab, Clare tapped on the rear window and gave the thumbs-up sign, and soon they were rumbling through town. There were several tarps in the bed of the truck, folded and tied loosely with rope. Ansel tightly refolded two of the tarps so each had a cushion beneath him. Then when Hurd turned the truck onto the highway and they gained speed, he took another of the tarps and wrapped it around them for warmth.
They didn’t talk. The road noise was too keen and constant for that. He looked back at the highway trailing behind them. He looked off at the passing fields and groves and houses. He looked up at the splintered beams of light that found their way through the massing black clouds. There was a beauty here, but he could only view it as a traveler would.
The highway descended south out of town, curving beside a creek that fed into the San Luis Rey River. Oaks and white sycamores lined the banks. From the rains the week before, deep ridges cut the bluffs where water had flowed through reddish soil. Hawks were out hunting, and Ansel spotted two of them perched on broken limbs within a few yards of each other. The truck hummed along. Ansel experimentally took a slightly deeper breath and didn’t feel the tickling cough-trigger. He breathed deep, and still nothing. It was as if the cough command had slid away. He felt something he could hardly remember feeling. He felt warmly . . . what? Not happy exactly, but contented. Clare was looking off the other way, and Ansel was regarding the soft swirl of his hair when the boy suddenly turned to him with a wide pure smile, and Ansel found himself nodding at the boy, nodding yes to everything he had been, and had become, and would one day be. He wondered if this wasn’t as pure as love could be, the admiration of a son by a father, and then he wondered if in leaving he would lose Clare’s regard forever.
Perhaps twenty minutes later the countryside gave way again to clusters of houses, and a sign and then another. Clare shed the tarp and stood to peer over the cab. Ansel also stood. He had never seen the ocean before, and was surprised to sense it an instant before it lay before him, the way you could sometimes sense the presence of a wild animal. Vast and imperturbable, shimmering with silver light, the water covered everything in the distance, from one end of the earth to the other.
Clare grinned at him. “It’s swell, isn’t it, Dad? Isn’t it swell?”
Hurd pulled the truck slowly to a stop by the train station, which perched on a bluff within view of a long wooden pier that ventured a hundred yards into the waves. “It is,” he said. “I’m glad we saw it.”
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Hurd said, staring off at the water as Ansel and Clare swung down from the truck. Ansel couldn’t stand for Clare to leave now, so he was glad they began walking alongside him to the platform. “Ida likes to come here once a summer and douse herself,” Hurd said. “She brings home buckets of shells. Me, I just sit under an umbrella and take in the sights.” He gestured toward the expanse of cold sand and wagged his eyebrows. “In the summertime, there are plenty of sights.”
Clare stuffed both hands in his pockets as he strolled along, and kept his eyes on the ocean, grinning. The salty air made his cheeks red and his hair more boyish, flapping a bit in the breeze. “We should come here again when you get back, Dad,” he said. “We could go in the water.”
“Sure,” Ansel said. “I’d like nothing more than that.”
Clare watched the waves and Ansel could see him imagining the future as it could never be.
Hurd issued from the station wearing a smile. “Wonder of wonders,” he said. “Train is on time.” He made a show of looking at his watch. “But we won’t be, Clare, if we don’t get a move on.” He nodded and winked at Ansel instead of shaking his hand, then told Clare he’d go bring the truck around.
A shorebird screeched and the ocean rolled forward and sucked away. Hurd wheeled the truck to the near corner of the parking lot.
“Okay then,” Clare said and stuck out his hand, but Ansel put one hand on the sleeve of the boy’s coat and tapped the boy’s shoulder with his other, so there was none of the skin to skin contact forbidden by Dr. Quigley’s Rules to be Observed. Clare seemed confused by this, but nodded and tried to grin and then he was walking away. But he turned back once.
“Hey, Dad,” he called. “Check on Mom’s radio. Mom and I covered it up pretty well but she seems worried about it.”
“Sure,” Ansel said. “I’ll be sure to do that. And you be sure to keep up with your studies.”
The boy nodded. He liked school; the studies were no problem for him. “See you at the wedding!”
Ansel nodded.
Hurd’s information notwithstanding, the train was late, but Ansel didn’t mind. When he’d looked toward the parking lot, the packinghouse truck was turning out onto the street and for a moment the form behind the wheel seemed more Clare’s than Hurd’s, but that was impossible, or at least unlikely, and besides, they were beyond him now. All of that was beyond him. He waited a long time on the platform, lost in his thoughts, idly watching the storm advance above water that was a pale, gemlike green only when it rose up near the shore and the light showed its emptiness. By the time the rain began to sluice down, he’d found himself a seat in a nearly vacant passenger car. The rain fell with such force that even as he watched, a channel formed in the sand and a stream of silty water churned down the beach into the sea, where waves pushed the new water back onto the sand. The train began to move.
76
Clare gazed at the dashboard and said, “Dad let me drive a truck like this in Kansas.”
Uncle Hurd’s expression slowly opened, and Clare wondered if he thought the idea coming to him was his own. “Okeydoke, then,” he said, “why not?” and slid over so Clare could take the wheel.
Clare had driven a truck like this, but only over the rutted farm roads of Kansas. Still, he turned from the parking lot and shifted through the gears without difficulty, and they were on their way. Clare discouraged Hurd’s happy yakking, which was hard for him to take when he was picturing what his father might do in Kansas, by concentrating on the open road.
When the rain began, Hurd merely reached across the seat, switched the wipers on, and said, “Maybe your dad will take some of this rain with him.”
Clare acknowledged that he should.
The wipers smeared the window and made a pulsing click-clicking sound that felt somehow connected to the beating of a heart.