T. Boyle - San Miguel

“You’re blue,” she said. “You’re just blue, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding now, lifting his chin and dropping it as if it weren’t a part of him at all, “I’m blue.”

The shearers came at the end of April and they were a force of nature all their own, a human storm of wants and confusion and noise out of all proportion to their numbers. There was a dog that barked all the time. The sheep paraded through the yard. There was dust everywhere. They were four and they stayed a week, only a week, because the flock was so reduced now (twelve hundred, Herbie said, a quarter what it once was), but the week seemed like a month. She stood over the stove, which never went cold, even for a minute. She pumped water till her right arm was made of iron. Chopped stovewood. Washed dishes.

Herbie was outdoors all day long, sweating and swearing along with them, and she barely saw him till he collapsed in bed at night, but it was all right, she kept telling herself, it was only for a week, and this was the way Bob Brooks paid his bills — if it weren’t for the shearing she and Herbie wouldn’t be here at all. The wool piled up while she soaked beans and boiled rice and made lamb in every conceivable way she could think of. The shearers slept in the back bedrooms, at the far end of the house, and they ate like twenty men. At night they played cards, drank red wine from gallon jugs, sang in high hoarse voices to tunes that thumped along to a rattling singsong beat. One of them played guitar.

And then, as suddenly as the storm arose, it died away and they were gone. The sheep were let back into the pasture but for the ones going to market, the wool was stuffed into sacks and the shearers turned in their tokens (twenty-five cents for each ram shorn, fifteen cents for each ewe), received their pay from the bankroll Bob Brooks had handed Herbie the day after the wedding and took the boat back to shore. And Jimmie went with them, for a holiday, his own pay thrust deep in one pocket and a grocery list as long as his arm in the other. Peace descended. And Herbie, riding high on the hard physical labor and the satisfaction of seeing it to a successful conclusion — his first time as overseer and all had gone well — was her old Herbie, the Herbie who saw the joy in every form and example of God’s creation and took her by the hand out over the hills to point it all out to her.

The sex came back. Came roaring back. He was insatiable. And it wasn’t just in bed, but anywhere he found her, whether it was the living room or the kitchen or once even out on the porch. We’re not going to become nudists, are we? she protested, toying with him, and he grinned his grin and pointed out that they were all alone with the sun and the sand and the sheep and if the sheep had anything to say about it, besides baa, that is, he’d let her know. One afternoon, a week after Jimmie and the shearers had left, he announced he’d be out till dark and not to wait dinner for him, and she just nodded, telling herself they couldn’t expect to be together every minute of every day and that she had plenty to do, all sorts of things, letters to write, books to read, knitting, sewing, crocheting. She watched him go out the door, then she finished up in the kitchen and sat at the table there, writing a letter to her mother. Half an hour later she was in the living room, lost in one of her books, when she glanced up and there he was, framed in the doorway, his chest bare and his shorts barely containing him. Before she could say a word he pulled her up out of the chair and pinned her to the wall, his mouth hot on hers and his hands at her breasts. The surprise of it, the erotic jolt, shot through her. She touched her tongue to his, felt him, moved against him, her hips in slow rotation. They were like that, in an embrace, intimate, an intimate moment, when suddenly the outer gate flung open with a sharp raking clatter.

“Someone’s here,” she said.

“It’s the wind.”

She could feel his heart pounding against hers, both of them flushed, listening now. An instant later the gate crashed back again and he said, “See, I told you. I’ve got to fix that latch, damn thing’s always blowing open,” and that was fine, that was all right, until they heard the first footfall on the porch.

A moment later — and she’d instinctively pushed herself away from him, without thinking, really, because it wasn’t as if they’d been caught in flagrante delicto and what if they had, they were husband and wife, weren’t they, and in the sanctum of their own home out in the middle of nowhere? — Bob Brooks’ face appeared in the window.

“Bob!” Herbie shouted, breaking away from her and rushing pell-mell for the door so that she was left there to smooth down her dress and watch the shift in Bob Brooks’ expression as he began to register just what he’d interrupted. An instant, that was all it was, and then he was grinning and holding two fifths of Canadian Club whiskey up to the window for her inspection, the real thing, in real bottles with the actual label and the seal still intact. What could she do but smile back at him and fold over the fingers of her right hand in a complicit little wave?

* * *

The day was nice, the sun high still and the breeze down, so they sat outside and had their highballs, whiskey and rainwater out of the cisterns at either end of the house, the rainwater preferable to what came out of the ground because it didn’t carry the heavy mineral aftertaste. “It’s swell whiskey, Bob,” Herbie said, clinking glasses with him, then with her. “Aces. The best. Where’d you get it?”

He was sprawled out on the ground, his elbows propped on the step behind him, his feet splayed in the dirt. His Army boots were worn smooth and his legs, tanned by the sun, showed the pale flecked topography of his scars, shrapnel there and shrapnel in his side and scattered up into the muscle of his rib cage too. She and Bob Brooks were on either side of him, sitting in the only two good chairs they possessed, glossy teak deck chairs salvaged from the wreck of the SS Harvard . That was one of the benefits of living on an island that projected out into the shipping lanes, she supposed: the furniture came to you. They had the safe from the SS Cuba too, which had gone aground here in 1923, and it was a permanent feature of the living room, as familiar to her now as her books and pictures and the sofa Herbie had fashioned from what appeared to be a coffin (empty, he assured her) that had washed up on shore one morning, though how anybody had ever got the safe up that hill, sled or no, was a mystery to her. It must have weighed five hundred pounds.

Bob Brooks just shrugged — and he was every bit as good-looking as Herbie, with the same boyish face and a full head of hair, none of which had turned gray, even though he was the same age as Herbie — forty-two, that is, a time when the average man has begun to show his age. “I have my secrets,” he said.

“You’re not turning to rum running now, are you?”

“No, but whiskey running, now there’s an idea. I’ll take this any day”—and he held the glass up to the sun to inspect it—“over rum. All the rum in the world, for that matter.”

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?”