T. Boyle - San Miguel

“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 match lock. 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.

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 strictly 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.