Matthew Abergel grew up in Salinas, California, and now lives in Sacramento and San Francisco. He has participated in Laguna Writers’ monthly manuscript group since its inception.

From up here, a few stories above the intersection of Main and Alisal streets, old man Pappas saw the good and the bad. The bums. The new bank, where he’d opened an account to be hospitable. The low-riders. The Mercedes—goddamm Germans taking over, killing old Thompson’s Cadillac sales. He picked up his coffee, saucer in one hand, cup in the other. Good china—he always liked the sound good china made. But Chinatown was gone. He looked north, up Main Street.

Like the fields after harvest, the chop suey joints and cathouses had been plowed under. It would stop crime, increase property values, the city had said. They were right. Still it was sad, to see it all go. That’s how it worked here. Plant. Pick. Plow the rest into the dirt. Start again.

He craned his neck toward the northwest. That patch of white—was that the old Market Street house? Maybe it was time to sell, build something else. But that was where it had all started. Better not tell the city—they’d make it historical, pass a law protecting the termites!

No matter how many buildings he bought around town, he knew they’d keep saying it. Those Greeks made their money bootlegging. Those Greeks come over with ten bucks in their pocket, and less than ten words a’ English in their heads. Set up shop in that old house with three bottles of uzo and some chipped cups. They weren’t so smart. Prohibition—that’s what did it. A steady supply of Greek communion wine—God-awful stuff unless you really needed a drink. Charged enough for it too!

Ah, well, it was just rumors now. The talk of the town. Talk went around fast in a town like Salinas.

To think—that’s all this place was for hundreds of years: La Salina. The salt marsh, or salt mine. That was all the early Spanish colonizers had seen of value in this narrow, foggy, soggy valley. There were Indians, a few, but they had nothing the Spanish wanted but free labor and cheap souls to save. The salt was sent over the hills to Monterey, the capital of colonial Alta California, and from there, out to the empire.

Eventually the Spanish, then the Mexicans, then the Yankees turned the land to purposes other than gathering salt. They grazed livestock on the abundant grasses; they filled in the marshes and sloughs and found that beans grew thick and strong with little need of irrigation, with a growing season that lasted longer than anyplace anyone had ever seen. The earth never froze. The sun never blazed.

The mountains, the Santa Lucias to the west, the El Gabilans to the east, had always before seemed like obstacles to be overcome on a traveler’s way to someplace else—Monterey or Mission San Juan Bautista—but later came to be regarded as the strong arms of a kindly god embracing the valley in safety and mildness while the Pacific Ocean at the valley’s mouth puffed fog across the land, causing everything to grow as if it belonged here, as if to grow were the only option.

Old man Pappas still marveled at the black richness, like coffee grounds, of the farmers’ fields. He was not a farmer himself. He’d come from an island of rock where a few tufts of grass were occasionally lucky enough to grow like the straggly white hairs of an old man’s ear. Goats—small goats, at that—were known to lose their footing and plummet to their death as they climbed higher to reach the loose, windblown weeds on which they subsisted.

And yet, strangely, life had hung on there. Since the days of the poets, since the time when Ulysses navigated the choppy channels between those islands, Greeks had lived there, and lived long too—his uncle to 105, his father to 99. But then the twentieth century had come, its wars and atrocities, and though Greece prevailed, things got worse before better, and meanwhile America called. Old man Pappas, still a young man, thought maybe all the Greek gods of old had boarded ships for California. So that’s what he did, boarded a ship with his young bride, and let the wind carry him like a seed to this place, Salinas, La Salina, where he sprouted roots and prospered.

But they were wrong. He hadn’t come with ten dollars in his pocket. It was only six and some change.