San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  They were quiet a moment, sipping. A meadowlark folded its wings to drop into the yard and investigate something at the base of the fence. A shimmer rose from the earth where the sun beat at it.

  “And how about the court case?” Herbie said, squinting against the light and arching his neck to glance up over his shoulder at them. His hair stood up from his head, shining in a nimbus of sunlit fire. His eyes had never been deeper or bluer. “How did that turn out? They’re not going to send you to jail, are they?”

  “Whoa, now—I was just a witness. A character witness at that.”

  “Just ribbing.”

  “Actually, it could have been worse. The attorney got the charge reduced to manslaughter, and then, of course, the men in that skiff were poachers—two Japs and a Portugee, off a whaling boat—and the jury took that into account.”

  She was feeling blessed, the sun on her face, the men’s voices murmuring round her, the clouds stalled in the sky—there were no murders here, no courts, no forms and regulations to observe. She felt sorry for Bob Brooks, even though he was a millionaire—or the son of a millionaire, though who could know what anybody or anything was worth since the crash? He owned the leases from the government on both San Miguel and San Nicolas and he had property in Carpinteria and a home and an office in Los Angeles, and that meant his life was complicated in a way hers wasn’t—he had to go to court and attend business meetings and run from one place to another while she got to stay put, out here, where everything held steady.

  “I hate the Japs,” Herbie said. “They stole from me and I don’t forgive that. Was it a Jap that got killed?”

  “No, the Portugee.”

  “So much the worse. But if your man had shot all three of them it would have been no more than they had coming—and I tell you, if any of them tries anything out here, I’ve still got the Remington. And the .22, if I want to just put a scare into them. Or blow their hats off.” Herbie tipped back his glass, then got up to pour refills, and she had to put a hand over hers and tell him she was going to wait till later because she still had to fix dinner, or had he forgotten?

  “That’s okay,” pouring first for Brooks, then for himself, “just hunky-dory—that just leaves all the more for us, right, Bob? But you just wait till I get my guns back because I don’t care if they bring a whole army out here, I can hold them off—”

  Brooks leaned back in the chair, the fitted joints letting out a sharp squall of protest, and held the glass to his nose, inhaling. “Good stuff, isn’t it, Herb? But I didn’t just bring you whiskey. Un-uh. I’ve got a surprise for you down there at the landing—and judging from the weight of the box, you’re going to need some horsepower to haul it up here.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did. Bought the note back from Hugh Rockwell, so you’re square with him. My gift to you—really, it’s the least I can do.” A widening grin, a glance for her. “And you did just get married, didn’t you, or am I missing something here?”

  Herbie spun round, balanced on one leg, before going down on his knees and bowing his forehead to the ground, both palms pressed flat to the dirt before him. “Salaam,” he said, “o wise one, o great and wise. I’m salaaming you, Bob. Salaam, salaam. That’s the best news I’ve had in a month.” And then he spun again, snatching his glass off the porch and plunking himself back down in the dirt with his legs crossed and the glass raised high. “A toast! Another toast! Here, Elise, give me your glass—no, no, you’ve got to. To Bob! To the greatest boss on God’s green earth—or brown earth or umber or whatever damned color it is!”

  * * *

  That night, long after Brooks had gone to bed—woozy from the whiskey, though he’d had two portions of her lamb stew and half a loaf of fresh-baked bread to sop it up—Herbie sat over his guns in the living room. He cleaned and oiled them and then hung them one at a time on an ascending grid of nails he drove into the wall beside the stove where the fireplace was going to go—once they found the time for it, because what was a home without a hearth? She sat beside him, knitting, listening to the wind on the roof and the distant murmur of the surf. From time to time he’d hold up one of the guns—rifles, that is—and tell her about its features and provenance, the Mannlicher and Lebel carbines he’d got in France, the Hotchkiss, the Mauser, his Jacob’s elephant gun.

  “Elephant gun? What on earth do you need an elephant gun for?”

  “You never know, might be a whole herd of them grazing up on Green Mountain day after tomorrow.”

  “No, really.”

  He shrugged. “I just like the way it looks and feels. And I might go to Africa someday, on a big-game hunt, who knows? You have your books, I have my guns. It’s a collection, that’s all. And it’s worth a pretty penny, believe you me. Worth more than anything else in this house.”

  “Big game? Aren’t you the one who wouldn’t kill a mouse?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Well, if it is, you’ll have to explain it to me.”

  “The mice are—well, they’re here. Africa’s not.”

  “But the elephant seal, what about that?”

  “That’s different.”

  And so it went, the clock marching them past ten and then eleven until finally she pushed herself up, stretching, and asked if he wasn’t coming to bed.

  There was the smell of the gun oil, sharp and alien, the white rag smoothing over the gleaming barrel, his hand in motion, back and forth, back and forth, hypnotic. “In a minute,” he said.

  “You won’t stay up too late, will you?”

  “No,” he said.

  She set her knitting aside, moved to the door of the bedroom. “I’ll be waiting,” she said. But he didn’t answer. He didn’t even look up.

  She closed the door behind her very softly and went on into the cold room to bed.

  The Matchlock

  It was growing light beyond the windows by the time he eased into bed beside her and he was up an hour later, no change visible in him except that he was accelerating through every motion he spun out with his hands and every syllable streaming from his lips. “Where’s Bob?” he kept asking. “Is Bob up? Because Bob has a boat to catch and lucky for him the Vaquero’s making the round trip or he’d be stuck out here, though there’re worse fates, aren’t there? Stuck out here? Imagine that!” he sang out, running an arm round her waist and pecking a kiss to her ear where she stood at the cutting board, slicing potatoes and onions for home fries. He sailed round the kitchen, fussing over the coffee pot, hauling in stovewood, cutting out thick strips of bacon to lay in the pan just to hear them sizzle, and he twice went out to the barn to see to the horses and three times trotted into the living room to admire the arrangement of his guns, all the while bawling down the length of the porch for Bob Brooks: “Come on, Bob—haul your lazy carcass out of bed!”

  When Brooks did emerge from the back bedroom it was past eight and he came up the length of the porch and into the kitchen in his bare feet, walking gingerly. His hair was mussed. He hadn’t shaved. He was dressed in the same clothes as the day before, denim trousers and a flannel shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up, and the minute he pulled back the kitchen door Herbie was there, dancing round him with a cup of coffee held out in offering. “Drink up,” Herbie crowed. “This’ll put the life in you, strongest coffee in the history of the world because I made it myself and I knew you’d be in sore need of it after last night—”

  Brooks accepted the cup, blowing gently into it and shaking his head ruefully. “I never could keep up with you, but then who could?”

  She was standing at the stove, manipulating the cast-iron frying pan with one hand, the spatula with the other. “Good morning, Bob,” she said, looking back over her shoulder. “Sleep well?”

  “Like a rock.”

  “Rocks don’t sleep,” Herbie put in. He
was at the table now, pulling back a chair, three places set, napkins, knife, fork, spoon and cups all around. “They’re inanimate. Never been awake. And if you’ve never been awake, how can you be asleep?”

  “Like a dead man.”

  “Dead man’s not asleep, he’s dead.”

  “All right, Herb, have it your way—you’re too rhetorical for me this morning, too rhetorical by half. Suffice it to say I slept well, Elise, and I ought to after that meal you served up—”

  Herbie, seated now, his heel tapping and the cup to his lips: “And that sleeping potion.”

  “Sleeping potion?”

  “Canadian Club, wasn’t it? And by the way, if there’s any chance of getting any more of that, let’s say a couple cases, you just let me know.”

  It went on like that throughout breakfast, Herbie and Bob Brooks trading quips, and Brooks, to give him credit, was a good sport all the way, never impatient or condescending or anything like that. They were friends, old friends, from their days at Walter Reed Hospital after the war, when they were in the business of recuperating, though she never did find out what Brooks’ complaint had been. Herbie, she knew, had been wounded when a mortar round hit one of the trenches and she knew that he’d suffered shell shock, but she had no real sense of what that meant. A shell landed. There was a concussion. Fragments went up. And then you recovered or didn’t. Maybe at first you flinched when you heard a sudden noise, a car backfiring, fireworks on the Fourth of July, but you got on with life. Herbie certainly had. He was smart and capable, afraid of nothing and as full of life as any man she’d ever known—and that included her father and her brothers too—not at all like that sad pathetic man in the Virginia Woolf novel she never could remember the title of.

  At one point, Herbie, in the midst of an encomium to one of his guns—the Japanese matchlock, the tanegashima with Japanese lettering, kanji, carved into the stock—sprang up from the table to dart into the other room and fetch it for them so they could see for themselves, and Bob Brooks, seated across from her, looked up from his plate and said, “He seems in good spirits. You’re doing wonders for him, you are.”

  “Him too,” she said. “He’s doing wonders for me.”

  “Glad to hear it. More than glad: overjoyed. He’s had it rough these past few years, traveling for that machine company, going one place and another with no fixed address half the time—he needed to get away from all that. Needed a fresh start.”

  She didn’t know what to say to this: Brooks was the one in charge here, the one pulling the strings, the boss, and as natural as he was, she sensed she had to be wary, or at least circumspect, around him. “We’re grateful for it,” she said.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” he protested, holding up his hands, “I don’t mean it that way at all. You’re doing me a favor, both of you—it’s just that, well, I’ve had some losses, like everybody else, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep up the operation out here. Even if Herb can come up with the amount we agreed on to buy in—” He must have seen the look on her face, because he broke off there and added, quickly, “But all this is premature, and I wanted to let you know, just in case, and what I mean is let’s keep this between us, just you and me, because there’s no sense in putting any more pressure on him than he’s already got.” A quick smile. “And you never can tell when things are going to turn around.”

  And then Herbie was back in the room, showing off the gun, rare treasure, a hundred years old, at least, and did they see these marks here, these slashes and the black ink worked into them? “You know what it says—as far as this Jap that sold it to me claims, anyway?” He was soaring. He gave them a minute, the three of them suspended there in the swelling light of the morning, birdsong running at the windows and the distant muted complaint of the sheep lost somewhere just above the threshold of hearing. She sat very still. Guns. He had guns and she didn’t know the first thing about them. Except that hunters used them and there were hunters out here in the Wild West, hunters up and down the coast and all across Arizona, Nevada, Texas, shooting things.

  “‘Moon in water, blossoms in sky,’” he said. “Can you imagine? Moon and blossoms? What does that have to do with hunting or war or self-defense even? ‘Aim true,’ that’s what it ought to say.” And then he clucked his tongue, snatched the gun up and held it to his shoulder, leveling on some imaginary target beyond the window. “Aim true,” he said and clicked the trigger on nothing.

  “Herbie! Not in the house. What if it went off?”

  But he just laughed. “It’s not even a flintlock, Elise, it’s a matchlock. You need to light the match first. Isn’t that right, Bob?”

  Brooks was holding tight to his grin. “That’s right,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Afterward, when Herbie went down to the beach to see their guest off, he took the gun with him, and through the rest of the morning, at regular intervals, she heard the clean sharp snap of its firing as he worked his way down and then back up again. Snap, snap, snap.

  Orca

  It was August, well into her third month, by the time she realized she was pregnant. Her breasts were tender. She’d begun to bloat in her face and upper arms and around her hips and she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d got up in the morning without feeling queasy, as if the island were a ship pitching in the sea, and yet still it never occurred to her that she might be pregnant. Young women got pregnant, women in their teens and twenties, not her. She was close to forty—surely the natural mechanism by which these things occur must have shut itself down years ago. Dried-up. That was the term that came to her. And though she and Herbie had never discussed having a family, she’d assumed the question was moot in any case. She was too old. Too dried-up. A December bride rescued from spinsterhood and assigned the place of helpmeet, companion, cook and laundress, with the sex thrown in as a bonus.

  But she was wrong. Gloriously wrong. The realization came to her in an electric flash that practically incinerated her where she stood at the stove over a pot of beans and a skillet of indifferently frying fish. It was late in the afternoon, warm, the doors and windows thrown open despite the flies that sailed in and out at will. Herbie was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea from one of the china cups they’d received as a wedding gift and staring into a finger-worn copy of Field and Stream. She tried to think back to when she’d last menstruated, to her last sanitary napkin, a supply of which she’d taken pains to remember amongst a thousand other things to pack and bring along because she couldn’t just stroll down to the corner pharmacy when she ran out, could she? But how long had it been? She couldn’t remember. And because she couldn’t remember she felt a thrill run through her: she was pregnant. Of course she was. And against all odds.

  She looked to Herbie and there he was, his back to her, sipping, absorbed in his magazine. His hair had grown grayer. The backs of his ears were sunburned—red, bright red, redder than the tomatoes she would have had if the birds hadn’t pecked the vines right down to the ground, just as Jimmie had said they would. She watched the muscles move in his shoulders as he shifted to turn the page. Her man. Her mate. And what would she say to him: Herbie, I think I’m going to have a baby? Or no: I’m going to have a baby. Definitely. No doubt about it.

  She waited, though, till after dinner, when they were sitting on the porch in the teak deck chairs and she’d had a chance to consult Thornton’s Medical Encyclopedia and thrill to the lines about the placenta and umbilical cord developing within her to nourish the embryo, the fetus, the child there, and how her breasts were swelling toward their function of providing milk because she was a mammal and that was what mammary glands were for and how her cervix would dilate so that the baby could pass through the birth canal and out into the world to become a daughter or son—her daughter, her son. She’d known all this, of course, as anyone does in passing, but till now—till this moment—it had been stri
ctly theoretical, information about the body and its processes that had nothing to do with her and never would, and she’d known it in the way she knew that the kidneys filtered blood and the two-chambered heart pumped it and the brain thought and the stomach contracted when you were hungry. Information. The news as delivered in a biology text.

  The wind rattled the gate as if someone were there, but no one was—Jimmie was still back on the mainland because Bob Brooks couldn’t afford to have him here and he wouldn’t be needed till shearing in any case. So it was just the two of them, just Herbie and her. She smelled the sea, clean and cold. Felt the warmth of the sun on her face, her legs, her blouse and skirt and the blooming breasts and spreading abdomen they clothed and hid from view. She set down her book—a novel she couldn’t seem to focus on—and in a voice so soft and tentative she could barely hear herself, she said, “Herbie, I think I’m going to have a baby.”

  The look on his face. As if she’d said, They’re dropping gold coins from an airplane!

  “You’re not!” he said, coming up out of the chair so fast it pitched back and collapsed behind him. “You wouldn’t kid me, would you?”

  She felt her face flush. “I’m—as far as I can tell, that is. From . . . from things. And the medical encyclopedia.”

  He was standing over her, rocking back on his heels, his arms folded and his stare fixed on her, and then he reached out and laid a trembling hand on each of her shoulders as if he were blessing her. She felt his fingers there, the gentlest touch, and then they were gliding down the length of her arms till he took her hands in his and squeezed them tight. “You haven’t been having your period?”

  She shook her head no.

  “And you’ve been sick in the mornings—aren’t you supposed to be sick in the mornings?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A little.”