T. Boyle - San Miguel

He came to bed late, stripping down to his underwear wordlessly while she lay there propped up on her pillow, reading. His every motion — pulling the sweater up over his head, bending to his shoes, unbuttoning his shirt — seemed to take forever, as if he were deep undersea and struggling against a heavy current. Earlier, in the kitchen, she’d tried to snap him out of it while she stood over the dishpan, washing up, but it was like talking to a stone. Did he want to listen to a radio program? Or just sit with her by the fire? Did he know that Betsy had added up five columns of three-digit numbers that afternoon — and perfectly too? Was he going to take Pomo for a walk or should she just let him out in the courtyard? He’d shuffled in his seat a bit — there was that much to show that he was alive — but if he answered her at all it was in twitches and grunts.

Now, seeing him there slumped over his discarded clothes as if he couldn’t summon the will to pick them up and lay them over the chair, she closed the book and set it on the night table. She knew what was going through his mind, knew the way he let things get him down. Those two men were out there somewhere in the dark — on his island — and he couldn’t bear the thought of it. “Come to bed,” she said, patting the mattress beside her. “You’ll feel better in the morning — a good night’s sleep, that’s all you need.”

He gave her an absent look, then eased himself down on the bed and pulled back the covers.

“It’s nothing to worry over. Really. I mean it. You heard them — they said it was only a study. And you know how these government studies go. Everything’s a study. And nothing ever gets done.”

“I know,” he said after a moment. “I know. You’re right.”

“We’ll be old folks by the time anything happens. In our rockers, side by side out there on the porch and the girls all grown up and married.”

“The Navy,” he said, his voice submerged. “What would the Navy want with us out here?”

“They probably don’t even know themselves. Bureaucracy, that’s all it is. Somebody shuffling papers in Washington.” It was only then that she noticed he was trembling. “You’re shivering. Are you cold?”

He didn’t answer.

She swept back the covers and held them open for him. “Here, move in close and I’ll warm you.”

“What if they evict us?” he said, sliding stiffly in beside her. “Then what? Where’ll we go?”

“They won’t evict us.”

“But what if they do?”

“No matter what happens,” she said, holding tight to him, “you’ll always have me and the girls. Always. No matter what.”

But he was bitter that night, bitter and blue to the core. “Small comfort,” he said, and he rolled away from her and pulled the covers up over his head.

As usual with these things, nothing much came of it. The Interior men went around the island taking notes — she saw them only once, in the distance, two crouched figures grubbing in the dirt at the base of a stunted bush, no different from the sheep except that the sheep bore wool — and then they were gone. Herbie came out of his funk once they’d left and he wrote a series of impassioned letters to Bob Brooks, the Secretary of the Navy, the Department of the Interior and their local congressman too, whose name nobody seemed to know till one of the Coast Guard men supplied it, and then he went back to being Herbie, bounding from one thing to another like the bees dancing over the geraniums that had somehow managed to struggle through the soil in the courtyard.

Things held. Time moved on. The Nazis took Paris and drove the British Expeditionary Force into the sea at Dunkirk, 1940 became 1941, the sheep went on grazing and she served lamb five nights a week, week in and week out, while Herbie’s moods soared and fell on his own mysterious schedule and the girls grew taller and smarter and saw their test results rank in the highest percentile for their age groups nationwide. The winter was rainy and the spring wet, which made for fat sheep and abundant wool just when demand was growing because of the war in Europe. Summer rose up to loom over them, vast and static, and the girls, let out of school, roamed the island like wild Indians and learned to invent games for themselves. There was the radio, there were letters from her mother, visits from friends and a precipitous falling away of the interest of the press in the Swiss Family Lester in light of the rush of events, which, to her mind at least, came as a blessing.

In the fall of that year, they had a brief spell of sunny weather that rode in on the hot winds off the Santa Ynez Mountains across the channel, mountains they could suddenly see from the yard, revealed to them where no mountains had been for weeks on end. After school each day that week she packed a snack, gathered up towels and a blanket and took the girls down to the beach for a swim, Herbie leading the way and the girls racing the last hundred yards in a pure shriek of elation. Herbie was a great one for swimming and he’d taught both girls to do a creditable breaststroke and Marianne the crawl and butterfly, but mostly they swam in chilly water under a leaden sky, so this was a treat, a real treat, and as long as the weather cooperated they took advantage of it. She’d just come out of the water herself one afternoon, everything slow and lazy, the girls taking turns burying each other in the sand and Herbie propped up on his elbows with a book, when the Hermes suddenly emerged from behind the headland to the east to slide across the harbor on a long glimmering train of light. “Look at that — it’s the Hermes, ” she said, almost as if she were thinking aloud, and in an instant Herbie was on his feet and the girls up out of the sand and waving their arms over their heads. “But that’s odd, isn’t it? I didn’t think they were due for what, three or four days yet?”

They stood in the fringe of surf and watched as the ship came to anchor and a clutch of familiar faces appeared along the rail. The girls jumped in place, kicking up jets of spray and crying out, “The Hermes ! The Hermes !” in a singsong chant. It was a moment of high excitement, and if she thought with a pang of dinner and what she could possibly serve — or eke out — it was a fleeting thought. She waved and grinned and so did Herbie. They kept on waving as the dinghy was lowered and the oars flashed and the sun leapt up off the sea and fractured and regrouped all over again. She recognized the seaman at the oars, but the man in the bow was a stranger — and it looked as if no one was coming ashore but him, since typically the captain and at least two or three others crowded into the boat to come visit with them.

The mystery was resolved a few minutes later, when the stranger bounded out of the boat, neatly sidestepping the outgoing wave so that his boots didn’t even get spattered — boots exactly like Herbie’s, and he was wearing short pants like Herbie’s too. He had a backpack, a tent and two canvas duffels with him, and they helped him haul it up the beach. And who was he? He was Frank Furlong and he was a surveyor.

Herbie bristled. “You’re not one of these land management people, are you? Because I thought I made it clear—”

“No, no, no — I’m a civil engineer. I specialize in remote sites — out of doors, that’s where I want to be, not hemmed in in some office someplace. The Navy sent me out here to survey two possible sites for a beacon, but it’s your guess as good as mine whether in these economic times they’re ever going to get it built.” Even as he spoke he was patting down his pockets in search of something — which proved to be individually wrapped pieces of saltwater taffy, which he solemnly handed to the girls, Betsy first, then Marianne, who just stood there gaping up at him as if they didn’t know enough to say thank you.