The girl's eyes would grow larger and her knuckles glowed red as she tightened her grasp on the bow and her knees locked tighter around the cello. During the third lesson he had grabbed the bow from her hands and began to talk to her in a low intense voice. "It is like two birds, my child. The bow is a bird and the cello is a bird. Bring them together softly, make the wings barely touch. Do it gently and the birds will make music for you. Forget the muscles of your anm and legs. Close your eyes and do it softly." The girl closed her eyes tightly and brought the bow down on the tight gut. The notes croaked leaden and broken from the polished brown wood of the cello. Her eyes popped open and she looked frantically up at her teacher. He leaned over, and taking the bow and cello from her turned away. "Go tell your father you cannot play the cello. Tell him you have no ear for music, your fingers are stiff and clumsy and you have an empty head and he has scared you too much at home," he said without looking at the girl. When the girl left he flexed his fingers for several minutes and then bending over the cello played for six hours while his family stood on the back porch listening to the rich fat music that flowed underneath and through the door. In his second mood Mike's father was apoplectic and red-faced over the table, pounding savagely with his fist as he told of the iniquities of the capitalists and the cunning evil atrocities of the monopolies. As the dishes chattered on the table he thundered the sins of America's wealthy few. Each of the laws to protect property seemed to be a goad in his flesh. In this mood, the children who could crept quietly from the room, but those under his eye sat silently with their shoulders hunched over, their eyes big in their heads and nodding dumbly like a claque of infants. His father would stand in front of the tiny row of children flourishing a newspaper, waving the crinkled paper in his hand. "Look, here it says that income taxes are to be reduced. See, here it says it. Read," and he would shove the paper under the eyes of the children who looked with glazed, frightened faces at the maze of type. "The income taxes for the rich are to be reduced and all the time people starve in the streets. The filthy sniveling bastards, the vultures. Every ounce of fat on their bodies is a pound d flesh from our bodies." His voice raged and was heavy with a vitriolic hate. The little claque nodded pointlessly and his voice went higher and more bitter. Occasionally his wife would interrupt. "Not in front of the children, John," her flat voice said. "They're too young, they don't understand." "No. Not in front of the children," he roared. "They don't understand hunger or cold? They don't know what it is to belch cold potato soup for thirty days in a row? Do you think they can't see their toes sticking from their shoes?" "But they don't understand," her flat voice went on. "It's too much for children to know." She would bend her head over into her hands and begin to sob, a sound as flat and dull as her voice. Even now Mike could not remember his mother; she was a gray formless shadow, her personality so thinly drawn beside the titanic rages and great hates of her husband that she almost vanished. "They can't learn too young. When children are undernourished in their mother's womb they know these things by intuition," the father said, but now his voice was lower and his face was suddenly tired. They know these things as intuitively as I know my music." He turned and looked at the children and their heads bobbed knowingly at him and then bent back down to inspect their knobby knees, afraid to look at his face. He wadded the paper in his hands, dropped it to the floor and as he walked toward the door he became smaller, more crushed, seemingly almost to shrink in size as he walked. The sudden deflation of pressure, the crumbling of their father would bring tears to the children's eyes and they would sit in the little row, their shoulders shaking delicately, making flat small sounds to match their mother. In the third mood, the best one, Mike's father was tender and kind. He would take a child on each knee and gently talk to them of a world where there was no law and every man was every other man's brother. He talked softly of Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman, kind and generous and loving every man in the world. He talked of St. Simon and of Eugene Debs, whose picture was cut from a newspaper and was growing yellow and dried out over the kitchen sink. He told them of Joe Hill and the Wobblies who went out against the guns and bayonets of a superior enemy because they wanted to see justice done to all people. To the children it was a lovely fairy story where huge men with beards and strong knotted muscles were infinitely kind to women and children. The children smiled at one another and boldly squeezed their father's arm and ran their fingers over the curly black hair on the back of his hands. He rocked back and forth, and when he had finished his airy tales he would begin to hum a strange exciting song to which they added their piping, small voices . . . "Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye workers of the world . . ." When the four children played by themselves, they fought to play Joe Hill. The winner would be chased by the other three who were "Salt Lake City Special Deputies," and Joe Hill would dodge around the house throwing imaginary balls of wet phosphorus into wheat fields, binding bundles of dynamite to railroad car wheels, throwing kerosene on cribs of corn. Finally the deputies would capture Joe Hill and would stand him against the house with a bandage over his eyes. As they crouched down with their sticks leveled to fire, Joe Hill would strip the bandage from his eyes and look straight at them. Then they would make popping noises with their tongues and Joe Hill would buckle against the side of the house and finally slide in a crumpled heap to the ground. Then they would start the game over and someone else would be Joe Hill. Mike thought of a Christmas many years before. They had never had presents or a Christmas tree, for Father had stated that they were symbols of a corrupted ideal. Even when Father had a good job at the studios or the Hollywood Bowl or in a string quartet, they did not have presents, but spent Christmas Day behind the curtains of the home watching the other children in the neighborhood run their cheap, painted bicycles and toys up and down the sidewalk. This Christmas Mother had promised them a Christmas tree and presents and the children had carefully not mentioned this to their father. It was late Christmas Eve when Mike had been awakened by a sound like tiny crashing cymbals from the living room. He had walked quietly to the door and opened it the slightest crack to see into the room. The first thing he saw was a small Christmas tree upside down in the far corner of the room and around it in perfect little splashes of blue, red and green glass were the shattered Christmas tree ornaments. They lay beautiful and sparkling on the floor, each one smashed into a circle of fragments. The glass head of a reindeer was the only intact piece in the wreckage. Mike's father was standing in the middle of the room, his hand still in the air after throwing the Christmas tree against the wall. He was smiling, a thin, gray smile that had nothing of humor in it, but much of pleasure and self-righteousness. His mother was standing crouched over in front of the tree facing the center of the room where his father stood. Her lips were drawn tight and thin so that her teeth showed. She was talking in a low fierce voice, just opening her teeth enough to let the words out. All Mike could remember of her face was the lips and chin and the white teeth. "God damn you, John Freesmith. If I had the strength I'd claw your eyes out," she whispered at him. "You've beat them down so often with your crazy talk of injustice and your beautiful bloody revolution that's going to make all men brothers they don't know where or what to stand on. You're making them confused, almost crazy. You just keep cutting the ground out from underneath them." A fleck of spittle ran down her chin and with an incredibly sharp motion she jerked her hand across her lips and went on talking. "I don't care about the food and this house, but you have to leave them something to live on. When they're older let them become anarchists or revolutionaries and begin to hate, but now those ideas are just dry bones that mean nothing to them. Oh, for the sake of Jesus Christ, let them have something." Mike's father stood startled in the middle of the room, his eyes bulging slightly as he listened. Occasionally he looked at the shattered Christmas tree in the corner and flexed his fingers with that quick expert way he had. Finally he began to talk. He talked of the brotherhood of man again and how Christmas had corrupted the ideal, but Mike could tell he was uncertain. He hesitated over the words and tried to rephrase the arguments in a new and more persuasive way. Mike's mother stood listening to the words flow from his mouth and finally she gave a shudder and turning toward the broken tree buried her face in her hands. Then the old flat dull cry began to tear out between her hands and as soon as both Mike and his father heard it they both knew she had surrendered. Suddenly his father's words became confident again and began to flow faster and after Mike had closed the door and crawled in bed he could hear the confident monotone drone on through the dreary Christmas night . . . Miss Bell was quivering. Her neck was pink and on her cheek Mike could see a round bright spot. He put a hand over her breast and squeezed. She shuddered and a tiny, sharp yelp of pleasure came unexpectedly out of her mouth. She turned and stretched out beside him on the bed and put her arms around him. "You won't forget me," she whispered harshly, "I won't let you. I just won't let you. Ever, ever, ever . . . " Her fingers dug into his back. Mike laughed, his hands full of her flesh, automatically caressing. He laughed for he had already forgotten her, quite literally for a moment he could not remember her name and he had no memory of her face or body or actions. She was already forgotten and he was thinking of other things. CHAPTER 3 Across the Grapevine Highway 99 between Los Angeles and Bakersfield cuts directly across the Tehachapi Mountains in a twisting narrow road which was known as the Ridge Route. At the bottom of almost every elevation there was the huge burned-out hulk of a truck which wore out its brake-shoes on the descent and had to crash off the road. On the Bakersfield side of the Ridge Route, beyond the Grapevine, is a smooth long strip of asphalt which drops gently toward Bakersfield for twenty miles without a turn in the road. Here is where the great semi-trailers are in the most danger, for the slope is so gradual that unless the driver drops down into a lower gear every few miles he is soon going so fast that his brakes are crisped black at the first touch and the truck runs away. On the long slope the runaway trucks reach eighty or ninety or even one hundred miles an hour before the driver will run the truck off the road. The straight rows of eucalyptus trees that line the road are scarred and battered by the accidents and occasionally an entire tree will be destroyed or stunted. In the summer the wrecks are marked by enormous clots of alfalfa that look as if they had been exploded over the landscape. In the spring the wrecks will scatter carrots down the road and occasionally an egg truck will crash and gobbets of egg yolk are splattered over the fields, the roadside cafés, the black asphalt and passing cars. When one of the milk trucks crashes there is a sudden eruption of milk running down the side of the road and then, with incredible speed, the flies arrive in great dense clouds. Hank Moore and Mike came down the Grapevine in Hank's Model-A on their way to Stanford. Hank kept his long thin fingers on the gearshift and when it wobbled too much he double-clutched and slid it into second gear. Then the Ford would tremble, the rear wheels would shriek against the asphalt and the car would slow down to forty-five miles an hour. "How much money have you got, Hank," Mike asked. "About five hundred bucks," Hank said. Mike whistled. "Where did you get that?" he asked. "I had it. Had it around for a long time." "I'm damned. Old Hankus with all that money and no one knew it. You're a funny one. Live by yourself in a boardinghouse, don't have a family, only work a little bit and you've got five hundred' bucks. I work every Saturday and all summer and all I've got is two hundred bucks. And fifty of that my mother gave me. I don't know where she got it. Come on, Hank. Where did you get that money?" Hank looked over at Mike and grinned. "Maybe I'll tell you later. But I didn't steal it. It's mine. I earned it." "How long will my two hundred bucks last at Stanford?" "Not very long. Tuition is $115, room and board at Encina is $120 a quarter. Books will cost a little. You haven't got enough to last even a quarter." "I'll make it do. I've got ways. I understand you can sign a note for the tuition and pay it off when you graduate. So I'll have enough for the first quarter." The eucalyptus trees whirred by, big shreds of bark hanging from their boles, putting a pungent oil smell out into the air. They passed a truck going very slowly and as they went by they saw huge round bottles labeled ACID nestled in excelsior on the bed of the truck. "Look, Mike. I don't want a lot of talk and crap about money when we get up there," Hank said, and his voice was sharp. "I'm going to have enough other things to worry about. We'll pool our money and I'll let you know when we start to run out. When that happens we'll talk about money. Not before. O.K.?" "That wouldn't be fair. You're the guy with most . . . " Mike started to say. "Don't give me that crap, I said," Hank cut in. "Just say yes or no. If I put in more money than you I'll get a good return on it. One way or another."
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters by James Swallow, Larry Correia, Peter Clines, J.C. Koch, James Lovegrove, Timothy W. Long, David Annandale, Natania Barron, C.L. Werner