Pomona

Mr Paredes was wearing two ties.

Not at once. A dark blue one with small white anchors, knotted very tightly under a collar slightly too big for him, and in the pocket of his jacket, folded, a red one, with its end sticking out. Frederick saw it as soon as he came into the dining room, and saw Lucía’s face behind her grandfather’s shoulder, and was very careful not to laugh.

“The blue one is mine,” said Mr Paredes, before anybody had said anything. He had stopped just inside the door, a small square man with white hair cut very short and a face like a walnut, and he was looking straight across the room at the corner table by the window. “The red one is in case. My wife said the blue one wasn’t good enough. I said it’s my best one. She said bring the red one in case. In case of what, I said. She said in case.” He looked at his wife. “This is my wife.”

“Yolanda,” said Mrs Paredes.

Taller than her husband and thinner, in a dark green dress with a brooch at the collar, holding her handbag in front of her with both hands the way people hold a handbag in church. She looked at Frederick with the steady face of a woman who had spent a great many years looking at teenagers across a counter and knew what they were going to try.

He had stood up. Theo stood up a second later.

“Good evening. Thank you for coming. I’m Frederick.”

“We know who you are,” said Mrs Paredes.

“Yoli,” said Mr Paredes.

“Well, we do.” She came across to the table and stopped in front of him and looked up, because he was a head taller, and did not curtsy or hold out her hand. Then she said, in Spanish, quickly, “You’re thinner than on the television.”

“Everybody says that,” said Frederick, in Spanish, slowly, because his Spanish was Señora Ruiz’s and went at the speed of a classroom. “My mother says it’s the cameras. She says they add ten pounds to everybody except me.”

Mrs Paredes looked at him. Then she said something to Lucía so fast that he caught only educado, and Lucía went pink and said Abuela, and Mrs Paredes sat down in the chair Theo was holding, without looking at Theo, and put her handbag on her knee.

“Well. Sit down. Everybody. I don’t like people standing over me while I’m sitting. It’s like a hospital.”

---

Mr Paredes had come by train. He told them about it before the menus came, and while the waiter, a young man with a ponytail who had clearly been told who was at the corner table, stood beside him with a pad.

“Two hours and nine minutes. From Pomona. Change at the Plaza. Forty-one stops. I counted. The motorman on the Santa Monica line was a kid. Twenty-five. Never heard of me.” He said it with great satisfaction. “I drove the Pomona line thirty-one years. The Pomona line and the San Bernardino line, which is the same line, only longer. Nineteen seventy-six to two thousand and seven. Thirty-one years, and never once a train to the sea. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I drove east. Every day. Out of the Plaza into the sun, Pomona, Ontario, Rialto, San Bernardino, and back. The sea was the other way. The sea was another man’s line.” He picked up his water. “And today I sat in the front car behind a kid who drives too fast on the curves, and at the end of the track there was the sea. Right there.” He drank. “It was very nice. It was blue.”

Frederick knew his face was doing something. Lucía had seen it. Theo had put his hand over his eyes.

He had found a Pacific Electric timetable of 1961 in a box of his great-grandfather’s things in the library at Columbia Palace when he was eleven, folded, the corners gone soft, and learned the whole of it, every line, and the Pomona line had been on page fourteen.

“Was it the five-car sets?” he said. “On the San Bernardino run? In the seventies? Or the threes?”

Mr Paredes put his glass down. He looked at Frederick for a long time, and then at Lucía.

“Mija,” he said slowly. “You didn’t tell me.”

“Tell you what, Grandpa?”

“That the King was a train man.”

---

Theo timed it on his watch under the table: twenty-six minutes, in which neither of them looked at anybody else, and the soup came and went and neither of them noticed.

The five-car sets had been on the San Bernardino run from 1962, green, with a fault in the brakes that every motorman knew and the company never fixed, so that you had to start braking for Rialto on the far side of the river or you overshot the platform by a car-length. Mr Paredes had overshot it once, in 1977, his first winter, and been reported, and never again. The bridge over the Santa Ana River was a steel truss and sang when you went over it at speed, a long high note you could hear in the cab. His hands moved on the tablecloth, square and brown and spotted, showing the controller: how you held it, how far you notched it out of the Plaza, how you felt the line through your feet. In 1984 he had brought a train into Pomona with a baby on it born between Ontario and Claremont, in the third car, with a nurse who happened to be aboard and a conductor holding up a coat, and the baby was a girl, and had Claremont for a middle name, and still sent him a card every Christmas.

At the end of it, with the main course gone cold, Mr Paredes sat back and loosened the blue tie very slightly.

“Well. I’m glad I wore it.”

“Why?” said Lucía.

“If I’d worn the red one I couldn’t have talked about trains in it. It’s a wedding tie. You don’t talk about trains in a wedding tie.”

Mrs Paredes, who had eaten her fish and listened to all of it without a word, and looked by turns as though she might cry and as though she might hit her husband with the bread basket, said, “Héctor.”

“What?”

“Tell him about November.”

---

The dining room had gone quiet. Most of the sophomores had gone up. Mr Abernathy sat alone at the teachers’ table by the door with a newspaper he was not reading. At the next table, with his back to them, eating a steak very slowly, was Castellanos.

“He doesn’t want to hear about November,” said Mr Paredes.

“Yes, he does. He’s the King. He wrote that letter.” Mrs Paredes looked at Frederick. “I want everyone there to know that the whole of the Realm knows, and is coming. Lucía’s mother cut it out of the newspaper and sent it. We had it on the refrigerator three months.” She put her hands flat on the tablecloth. “So he should know. That’s what knowing is.”

Frederick could think of nothing to say.

Mr Paredes turned his water glass round on the tablecloth, once, twice.

“I was in the yard,” he said, in English, and then the same words in Spanish, as though he were not sure which language it had happened in. “Thursday morning, a quarter after eight. With the hose, doing the lemon tree, because it was going to be hot. Yoli in the kitchen, the Spanish station on the radio. And there was a noise.” He stopped. “People ask what it sounded like and I say a train. They think I say that because I’m a train man. I say it because it’s true. A freight, a hundred cars, coming from the east, from very far away, getting closer, and it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop. And then it’s under you.”

The glass had stopped turning.

“The ground went like the sea. That’s the other thing people don’t believe. I saw the grass go up and down like water, and the fence go, and the lemon tree going backwards and forwards like a man waving, and I was on the ground, I don’t know how, and the hose going everywhere, and Yoli screaming in the kitchen, and every dish we ever had coming out of the cupboards at once. And it went on. A minute and a half, they say. You don’t know how long that is till the ground’s doing it. It’s a year.”

“And then it stopped,” said Mrs Paredes.

“And it was quiet. No birds. No cars. Everything off. Then the dogs, every dog in Pomona at once. Then the car alarms. Then the people.”

Lucía was looking at the tablecloth.

“Our house was all right,” said Mrs Paredes. “The chimney. The kitchen. Forty-three years of dishes.” She almost smiled. “I had a plate from my mother’s wedding. It’s in four pieces. I’m having it mended. A man in Claremont does it with gold.” She was quiet. “The house next door was not all right. The Okafors’. Old brick, from before the first war. And the front came off. Just came off, like a door, and you could see inside, the stairs and the pictures and a bed, and Mrs Okafor on the stairs.”

Nobody spoke.

“Héctor got her out. With Mr Villaseñor from across the street, and the boy from the end with the motorbike. About an hour. She broke her leg. She’s with her daughter in Fontana.” She looked at her husband. “He doesn’t tell that part.”

“The boy with the motorbike did the lifting. I’m seventy-three.”

“You were seventy-two.”

“I was seventy-two,” said Mr Paredes, “and I held a torch.”

---

They told the rest more quickly, the way you go faster down the last of a hill.

Nine days without water, six without power. The fire station on Garey Avenue had come down with the trucks inside it, and the firemen had dug their own trucks out with their hands before they could dig anybody else out. Mrs Paredes’s school, where she had cooked lunch for twenty-six years, had stood, every wall, because it was built after 1988, and for three weeks it was where everybody went, for water and food and the lists on the gym wall in marker of who had been found and where. She had gone back into the kitchen she retired from four years before and cooked in it for three weeks with the other women from the street, on gas from a tank a man from the Army had brought.

And there had been the funerals.

None of them said how many. They said the Hendersons’ boy, and old Mr Kim from the laundry, and the two girls from the church choir, and Father Tomás’s brother, and the family at the end of Holt Avenue, all of them, one name after another in a low voice at a corner table by the sea, and Frederick listened to every one with his hands holding the edge of the table underneath, and did not let go.

“Héctor wore the tie to all of them,” said Mrs Paredes. “The blue one.”

“It’s my best one.”

A long silence. Mr Paredes picked up his fork, looked at the chicken, which had gone cold an hour before, and put the fork down.

“You know what I’ll remember when I’m dead? About November? Apart from the noise, and the yard, and Mrs Okafor on the stairs?”

Frederick shook his head.

“The trains came back on the ninth day. The Pomona line. Same day as the water. They’d been checking the bridges. And on the ninth day, at six in the morning, I was in the yard doing the lemon tree, which is fine, by the way, it lost half its branches and it’s got more lemons than ever, and I heard the first train. Going west. To the Plaza. Same as always. The six-oh-two.” He looked at Frederick. “And I sat down on the grass in my yard and cried like a baby. Seventy-two years old. Because the six-oh-two was running. Because somebody was driving it.”

He picked up the fork again.

“That’s November. Now eat your dinner. It’s gone cold. Yoli, tell the boy with the ponytail to warm it up, it’s a disgrace. And give me the red tie. I want to show the King the red tie.”

---

They left at ten. Mr Paredes said he was taking the train back, all two hours and nine minutes of it, and Mrs Paredes said they were taking a taxi, she had called one, and he said he was seventy-three and would go home the way he wanted, and she said he would go home the way she wanted or not at all, and they took the taxi, and he looked out of its back window all the way down Ocean Avenue towards the pier, where the interurban station was, with an expression of enormous dignified grievance.

In the hotel doorway Mrs Paredes turned and looked up at Frederick once more.

“You’re a good boy,” she said, in Spanish. “Your mother should be proud of you. Tell her I said.”

“I will.”

“Tell her a cook from Pomona said. And eat more. You’re too thin. They’re not feeding you in that palace.”

The taxi went. Lucía stood on the pavement with him and Theo under the palm trees in the warm dark, with the sea at the bottom of the bluff and the lights going round on the wheel at the end of the pier, and watched it all the way down Ocean Avenue until it turned the corner.

“He’s going to talk about this for the rest of his life,” said Lucía.

“So am I,” said Frederick.

“I’m glad you said the thing about the five-car sets. He’s never had anybody to say that to. Grandma won’t let him. She says nobody wants to hear about the brakes.” She put her hands in her pockets. “He’s going to tell everybody on Holt Avenue the King knew about the brakes at Rialto.”

“I didn’t know about the brakes at Rialto.”

“I know,” said Lucía. “But you listened like you did.” She went in and up the stairs without running, because Marisol had asked, and from the next doorway along, in the dark, where he had been standing all along, Castellanos said quietly, “Sir. It’s ten past ten,” and they went up.