T. Boyle - San Miguel

“Girls?” she prompted.

“Thank you,” they said in chorus.

“You’re very welcome, little ladies. And if your mother allows it — and your father — maybe we’ll just find another little piece of taffy for later on.”

Before she could think she said, “Won’t you join us for dinner? It’s nothing fancy, I warn you—”

“Fancy? I wouldn’t know fancy if it came up and bit me.” He was squinting against the sun, his eyes a pale rinsed-out blue. She saw that he hadn’t shaved in a day or two, whitish stubble crowning his chin and climbing up into his sideburns. His hair hadn’t gone fully over to gray yet, but to see him there in his hobnailed boots, short pants and soft-collared shirt, he might have been Herbie’s twin, minus the epaulettes. “Most nights when I’m out on the job,” he said, bending to heft the pack, “it’s pork and beans out of the can.”

* * *

The first night they invited Frank to pitch his tent in the courtyard, out of the wind, but by the second night he was installed in Jimmie’s room and frequenting the Killer Whale Bar with Herbie. Herbie took to him right away, once his initial suspicions were allayed, and even went out in the field with him when he could spare the time. She was glad of it. Herbie needed a little male companionship — Jimmie hadn’t been around in months and Bob Brooks’ visits were sporadic at best — and for the week and a half Frank was with them, his mood just took off like George Hammond’s airplane, and when George flew in the three of them sat out in the bar for hours, their voices running up and down the ladder and the sharp bursts of their laughter rolling across the courtyard till the windows rattled in sympathetic vibration.

One night after George had flown back home, she, Herbie and Frank were in the living room listening to the radio, the girls in bed and the wind blowing a gale. At some point the radio went out — the wind, Herbie said — and they sat by the fire, talking in low voices and listening to the wind-borne sand scratch at the windows. “Sounds like a thousand cats out there trying to get in,” Frank said, getting up to poke the fire.

“Where are the cats?” Herbie asked, turning to her.

“Mr. Fluff’s in with the girls,” she said. “The others are out prowling, I guess.”

“On a night like this?”

“Don’t worry, they can take care of themselves. And who knows, they might even catch a mouse or two. Did you know, Frank, that Herbie has a soft spot for mice, if you can believe it?”

“Mice? You’re not serious, are you?” Frank shot a look over his shoulder, the poker arrested in his hand. “I hate to say it, but they’re dirty animals. Turn your back a minute and they’re up on the counter getting at your plate. And believe me they’re hell when you set up camp and then you’re gone all day in the field. They gnaw, that’s the worst of it. Leave anything around, and I don’t care what it is — a hammer, your underwear, your toothbrush even — and they’ll chew it up.”

“Everything’s got a right to live,” Herbie said.

The fire sent up a burst of sparks. Frank prodded it again — more sparks — then propped the poker against the wall and settled back in his chair. “Yeah, I guess,” he said, “but the cat’s right seems to interfere with the poor mouse’s, doesn’t it?”

“The Law of Nature,” Herbie said. “People too. Look at the Japs. Or the Krauts. Or the Duce.”

“You look at them. It just makes me sick even to think about what’s going on in the world today. But you people — at least you’re protected from it.”

They all sat there a moment and thought about that, about how far out of the sphere of things you’d have to go, geographically and spiritually both, to be safe, truly safe. If it was possible even. After a while Frank said, “You ever get lonely out here — or depressed, I mean? With this weather. A night like this?”

“No,” she said too quickly.

“Sure,” Herbie admitted. “But it’d be the same thing anywhere, wouldn’t it?”

Frank shrugged as if to say, “Point taken,” leaned back in the chair and propped an ankle on one knee, exposing the underside of his boot. She saw that the heel was worn down to nothing and the sole rubbed so thin it couldn’t have provided much more protection than a sheet of paper and it made her think of all those hundreds of miles he’d tramped in desolate places, up granite mountains and across deserts strewn with cactus, through canyons and riverbeds. Things underfoot. The horizon receding. Can of beans and a fire of twigs.

“You know,” he said, “I got so low once — this was two, three years ago, when I was living in San Pedro and couldn’t get work and my wife was at me all the time and then I had this accident where I lost sixty percent of the sight in my right eye, just like that, pow —I really thought seriously about doing myself in.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You? You’re one of the cheerfullest people I’ve ever met—”

He just shook his head ruefully. “I even bought a gun, a pistol, what they call a.38 Special? And I planned out how I would do it in the dunes someplace so nobody’d have to clean up the mess, let the gulls take care of it, you know? But I didn’t do it. And things got better between Marjorie and me, though that’s gone sour since, I’m sorry to say — and then I got this job up here… but here, let me show you—”

He got up then and left the room. A moment later he came back with something wrapped up in a scrap of stained cloth. He bent forward to set it on the coffee table so they could contemplate it a moment, then unwrapped it to reveal the gun itself, snub-nosed, blue-black and glistening with oil. “I’ve been carrying it around with me for years, telling myself it’s for protection when I’m out on a job someplace, but that’s just a lot of gas. I know what I bought it for. And I don’t want it in my life anymore.” He glanced up at Herbie, who sat there perfectly motionless, as if to move would be a violation of trust.

“I want you to have it,” Frank said. “For your collection. It’s not much, I know, but let’s call it my way of thanking you — thanking both of you — for all your kindness, for taking me into your home just like I was a member of the family. It’s meant a lot to me. It really has.”

Frank was gone by Halloween, so that it was just the family for dinner, doughnuts and apple cider, after which the girls — who’d both dressed as Snow White, the heroine of the only movie they’d ever seen — got a lesson in trick or treat. They went up and down the porch, rapping at each door, behind which Herbie had stashed a dish of sweets, and just when they began to get the hang of it he sprang out at them draped in a sheet, gyrating and moaning and stamping over the floorboards in full display. “I’m the ghost of Captain Waters,” he roared while the dog howled and the girls dissolved in shrieks, “and I’ve come to reclaim my own!” For her part, she drew exaggerated circles under her eyes with a stick of charcoal and came as the wicked queen, but it was Herbie who stole the show.

There was turkey for Thanksgiving, a dressed bird George flew out to them—“At least the foxes won’t get this one,” he said, “though I guess I’m depriving the goose of a playmate, isn’t that right, Herbie?”—along with all the trimmings. Herbie printed up a menu which began with “Cream of Celery Soup” and ended with “Apple Pie, Home-Brewed Beer, Pipe and Tobacco,” and they did their best to make the day festive. As for Christmas, neither of them had really had a chance to give it much thought when news came that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and all bets were off.