T. Boyle - San Miguel

She wanted to give him the conventional response, wanted to say she was fine, but instead she pulled the door wide for him and ushered him in, saying, “Crushed with boredom, because nothing ever changes here, you ought to know that. But come, sit at the table and I’ll fix you something. Are you hungry? Would you like tea? I can make you toast — and we’ve got some strawberry jam left from the last time the boat came in.” If there was a flutter in her voice, it had nothing to do with calculation, not yet, anyway. She was excited, that was all — transported — because here was something new, a break in the routine, the vast towering wall of the day suddenly crumbling to dust around her.

“Don’t go to any trouble,” he murmured, hovering, awkward, a bedroll under one arm and his coat patched at the elbows. In the next moment he was trying to ease himself into the chair at the stained table by the window, the space cramped, his legs too long, the slant roof of the kitchen angling down to confine him, and then he was seated. “I fried up some abalone on the boat this morning, so I…” He trailed off, then patted his pockets till he came up with what he was looking for — a bottle — and set it on the table. “Want a drink?”

“A drink?” Her stepfather didn’t allow her to take spirits. He didn’t allow her to associate with the opposite sex or go to school or pursue her musical studies or experience anything anyone would call living because he wanted her under his wing, wanted her to cook and clean and make his bed for him while he went horseback over the hills and sat playing cards at night and drinking from his own bottle. “What is it,” she asked, “whiskey?”

“Rum,” he said, pulling the cork with his teeth. “Fetch a glass. Two glasses.”

He watched her, grinning, as she eased down in the chair across from him and lifted the glass to her lips. So this is rum, she was thinking, the rising vaporous odor tearing her eyes, caustic, poisonous, like nothing so much as a solvent, and then the liquid itself burning her lips, her tongue, the back of her throat. She clamped her jaws tight. Let out a gasp of surprise. Next thing she knew she was blotting her eyes with the corner of her apron.

He laughed aloud. “No, no,” he said, “you don’t sip it, you just toss it down like this, watch.” He sat up straight in the chair and jerked his head back, draining the glass in a single gulp. “Go ahead, try it again.”

She laughed too because it was funny, tossing rum in the kitchen at four in the afternoon — he was a tosspot, that’s what he was. She’d always wondered where that expression came from and now she knew. It was funny. Hilarious. And then she followed suit, a tosspot herself, and the shock of it very nearly seized her up — it was as if a rake had gone down her throat, or one of those enameled back-scratchers they sell in Chinatown, and the heat was inside of her now. Again she felt her jaws clamp. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come.

“Good stuff, huh?”

“It’s horrible. I don’t understand how anyone could drink it.”

He shrugged, his eyes gone vague. “It’s a taste,” he said, acknowledging the point. “You get used to it.”

“Used to it?” She could feel the effects already, at least she thought she could, a lightening of her limbs, the flutter of some organ deep inside her she never knew she had, a sense that the air had grown dense around her so she could get up and walk on it if she wanted. “I thought you were supposed to like it.”

“Here,” he said, and he was pushing himself up from the table in a scramble of limbs and holding out a hand to her, “let’s try flavoring it for you.” She followed his lead as he pulled her across the room to where she kept the basket of oranges, grapefruit and lemons Charlie Curner periodically brought out from shore and stood beside him, watching, while he shoved the carcass of the lamb aside with the palm of one hand and sliced two oranges and a lemon in half. The carcass didn’t seem to trouble him, nor the blood on the board either. He gathered up the fruit in one hand and spun round as if he were on a holy mission — and this was funny too, everything comical suddenly — before darting back to the table for her glass and making a show of squeezing the juice into it. “Now,” he said, tipping the bottle over the glass to fill it to the brim, “try it this way. And maybe, if it’s still too strong, mix a spoon of sugar in.”

If the light changed when the sun pulled back from the house and the barn threw its shadow across the yard, she hardly noticed. There was nothing in the world but Robert Ord and the glass before her, though she knew in a vague way that she would have to get up and see to the stove and dinner and set an extra place at some point. All in good time. In the meanwhile, there was Robert Ord and Robert Ord was a gentleman, or the best succedaneum the island could provide, and he let her sit there at her own table as if she were the guest — he insisted on it — while he got up to squeeze the bright orange and yellow rinds over her glass and tint the mixture with the dark burnt sugarcane rum, lovely rum, beautiful rum, rum that no longer smelled of chemicals but of tropical isles and the faraway. The rum was a breeze. It fanned her. Lifted her. She felt as if she were floating.

Then, somehow, her stepfather was there, Adolph peering over his shoulder and Jimmie there too, goggling at her from the open doorway. “Bob!” her stepfather bawled, striding across the room to slap him on the back even as Robert struggled unsteadily to his feet. In the next moment they were crowding into the room, handshakes all the way around, and if Robert was slow with his speech, no one noticed, at least not at first. They were all too enraptured by the novelty of seeing him there where they’d expected no one, firing one question after another at him: What news? How long had he been out? Had he seen Nichols last time he was ashore? He hadn’t brought any newspapers with him by any chance? A bottle? Did he have a bottle?

It was this last inquiry that caused him to reach down to the table, take up the bottle of rum by its neck and hold it to the light. Dark stuff, dark as molasses, and only an inch of it left to swish round the heel of the bottle. “I’ve got,” he began slowly, so very slowly, “this one… and then”—he swayed over his feet and spread a palm on the wall to steady himself—“there’s a couple more on the boat.”

That was when they all four looked down at her where she sat entrenched in the chair that was pushed up so tightly to the table she could scarcely move, not that she wanted to move. Her elbows were propped on the tabletop and her hands formed a brace for her chin, which suddenly seemed impossibly heavy. The silence pounded in her ears. Her stepfather looked to Robert, then to the bottle, and then, finally, to her. “What’s in that glass?” he said.

“Juice.”

“Juice, my eye.”

She clarified: “Orange juice. And lemon.”

He was drawing himself up. His hands were dirty, his forearms, dirt up under his nails and worked into his hair, his trousers stained with dried-up mud and his shirt feathered with trail dust. They’d been out riding to the far end of the island, checking the stock there, seeing to things in the season when there wasn’t much to see to. His eyes narrowed. A look of fury came over his face. And when he lunged forward to snatch the glass from her hand and lift it to his nostrils, sniffing, it was no more than she’d expected. “You’re drunk,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“Don’t you lie to me. You, you — you’re disgusting.”

“She—” Robert began, and it was as if his mouth were full of cornbread and he couldn’t risk forming his words properly, “I mean to say she was, or I did, I offered her a little drink—”