T. Boyle - San Miguel

“Are you thirsty?” she asked. “Hungry? Has your ship gone down, is that it?”

“Bao yu,” he repeated. “You take.”

He handed her the loop of wire and she had no choice but to take it from him. What she was holding — and it was heavier than it had looked — was dried abalone, that was what it was, and this man was one of the coolies Will had told her about, men brought out to the deserted islands off the Pacific Coast to live in crude huts for months at a time, collecting, boiling, pounding and drying abalone for shipment back to China. And here he was, presenting her with abalone she didn’t want, abalone he might very well have taken from these very shores, from her own private stock, stolen abalone. He was watching her closely. This wasn’t merely a gift — he wanted something in return.

“You give,” he said.

She was no longer feeling generous. “Where did you get these?” she demanded, imagining some hidden encampment infesting the surface of the island like an open sore.

He lifted his chin, still smiling, and shot his eyes in the direction of the harbor. There was a boat there, and how had she missed it? His boat. A sprawling low-slung junk with sails furled and a triangular red-bordered flag gyrating in the breeze atop the middle mast. She’d seen boats like it in the harbor at San Francisco, boats that brought Chinese goods and spices and the coolies to work the railroads and live one atop the other on Grant Avenue as if that was the way they preferred it. She was amazed all over again — had this man actually come all the way across the sea from China to stand here on the porch of her assumed house and bargain with her? The thought was staggering. No, it was comical, absurd. What did she have that he could possibly want?

“ What do I give?” she asked. “What do you want?”

“You give meat,” he said, and it all became clear. He wanted mutton, wanted lamb, of course he did. If you ate nothing but fish, fish three meals a day, you’d want anything else, anything you could get, viands especially — but to offer her abalone, dried abalone, no less, when she lived atop a trove of it, was ridiculous. And he wanted lamb in return?

“No, I do not give meat,” she said, unconsciously aping his fractured syntax. “And I thank you for this”—and here she tried to return the abalone but he took a step back, thrusting both hands in his pockets and shaking his head in denial—“but I’m afraid we really have no use for it.” His eyes were wide, his smile gone. “You see,” she began, and she was going to explain that they had all the fresh abalone they wanted, that they owned it and owned the land he was standing on and that he was welcome, as a visitor, to a cup of tea and perhaps some cornbread or the platter of cookies Ida had baked just that morning, but there would be no trading in the offing, especially of meat, which they needed for themselves, for their own benefit and welfare and profit, when she was startled by a movement at the gate across the yard — there was a second Chinaman now, dressed identically to the one on the porch, and he too had a string of dried abalone. The second man — he was older, much older, a thin white beard trailing away from his chin — came across the yard to her, the chickens rushing his ankles in the hope of feed and then scattering just as quickly when they saw their mistake, and he was smiling too.

“No,” she was saying, holding up the palm of one hand to discourage him, when both men turned their heads at the rhythmic clatter of hooves thundering up the road. In the next moment, Will came hurtling across the yard in a storm of flying clods, even as the second Chinaman, the old one, froze in place. Will was riding Mike, the horse Edith had left on, and the first thing that went through her head was that Edith was injured, thrown in a ditch somewhere, her leg broken, her arm — or maybe she’d suffered a concussion, maybe she’d been disfigured or worse, much worse.

The horse was lathered. Will’s face showed nothing. “You,” he said, pointing first to the man in the yard and then swinging round to indicate the one on the porch, “and you. Both of you.” He’d raised his voice by degrees and he was shouting now, red-faced and angry. “I want you to clear out of here, go back to your boat.”

Neither man moved. They were watching him closely, watching his lips, their expressions blank.

“Now!” Will shouted, wheeling round on the horse. “Don’t you understand English? I said, Get out! ” Mike stamped, blew, his sides heaving. The sun made everything look hard and unreal.

“Will, it’s all right,” she said, calling to him from the porch, though she could barely project her voice. She felt the relief wash over her: this had nothing to do with Edith. He’d seen the boat. He’d come to protect her, to rescue her. “They’re harmless. They don’t know what you’re saying, they don’t understand, they — they want to trade. They want meat, that’s all, Will.”

But her husband wasn’t listening. He was in one of his rages. “Poachers!” he shouted, and he made as if to drive the horse at the old man. There was a scramble of legs, the old man frantically backpedaling until his feet got tangled and he went down hard in the mud. She exchanged a look with the first Chinaman in the instant before he stepped off the porch and took to his legs. What she saw there in his face, the hurt and surprise, the fear, made her feel ashamed.

“Will,” she said again.

He jerked the horse round and leaned down to glare at her. “You keep out of this,” he said. “They have no right, no right!”

She watched till they were out of sight, Will squared up on the horse and driving the two men before him down the road to the harbor, the water shining in the distance, the embankment looming over them like a dark jagged cloud. At some point she realized she was still holding the string of abalone at her side. She could smell them, fruit of the sea, an astringent smell, a smell of iodine and what’s left behind when the life is gone. Across the yard, the chickens had gathered to fight over the second string, the one the old man had dropped in the mud. “Here, chick-chick,” she said, coming down the steps. “Here, chick, here.”

She slept late the following morning, slipping in and out of her dreams, vaguely aware of a dull intermittent banging from below, as if Will were rebuilding the house from the inside out. Her dreams were of flight, of escape, eagle dreams, but each time she soared the banging brought her back down again. It was maddening. She’d lain awake through the small hours, unable to sleep, the pain in her chest speaking to her in an intimate whisper of the place beyond, all her fears for Edith and her husband and her own dwindling self concentrated in the shadows the lamp couldn’t touch.

She went through the motions of dressing, her limbs heavy as spars — she had a vision of the wrecks spread across the bottom of the ocean, the tide shifting them twice a day, timbers lifting and falling again in silent protest — and then she went down the stairs to the kitchen. Ida was sitting at the table there, leafing through a magazine, a cup at her elbow. “Oh,” she said, “you’re up.” And then: “Can I fix you something — eggs, flapjacks? Toast? Would you like some toast?”

It was gray beyond the windows. The wind was blowing. There was a smell of coffee gone cold in the pot. “Toast,” she said. “And make me some coffee. Fresh. I don’t want anybody’s dregs.” She stood there a moment in the doorway, running her eyes over the room, everything dirty, irredeemably dirty, the pans blackened inside and out, the cupboards finger-smeared, breakfast dishes piled up on the counter in a pool of whitening grease. It was disgusting. Life was disgusting. “I’ll take it in the parlor,” she added, already turning to make her way down the hall, and if there was no please and thank you in the exchange, so much the worse. Ida had begun to irritate her. The way she simpered. The way she made up to Will as if he were some sort of terrestrial god, the sole authority on every matter, president, general and chief justice all wrapped up in one. Even the way she looked with her smooth wide brow and the hair that trailed down her neck no matter how many times she pinned it up, her pursed little doll’s mouth and sharp green eyes that never missed a thing. And besides, did prisoners in the jailhouse worry about rules of comportment? Survivors of a shipwreck? Where was the please and thank you in that?