T. Boyle - San Miguel

The next few days were an agony. He claimed he couldn’t see what he was eating—“Dark spots, that’s all I see, dark floating spots ”—and kept wandering from room to room in constant search of one thing or another, a nail file, his pipe, the tobacco. “Elise,” he kept calling, “where the hell’s the tobacco? Elise, where’re my slippers? Elise?” He ignored the sailors completely. They would address him at the table or out in the yard and it was as if he didn’t hear them. He showed no interest in the radio programs he used to adore and spent hours staring into the fire. If she asked what was wrong, he said, “Nothing.” When she commiserated over the problems he was having with his eyes, trying to get at the source of it, find a solution, assuage him, cheer him—“What about glasses? Couldn’t you get glasses?”—he cut her off. “It’s not correctable. It’s degenerative. My eyes are shot, Elise. Shot.”

It wasn’t until the end of the first week he was back that he went out to the barn to have a look at the new horse — Hans, a black three-year-old gelding Bob Brooks had sent out on the Vaquero —and when he did he was out there so long she went looking for him, afraid suddenly, though of what she couldn’t say. The barn door stood open. The muted light of late afternoon made inroads into the shadows of the interior so that she could make out the sharp ribs of the rafters and the soft hummocks of the baled hay they had to ship in for the horses. The smell was dull, grassy, as if all the fields she’d ever known had been enclosed and concentrated here beneath the sloping wood-shingled roof. It was very still. She found him in the back stall, brushing Hans and talking quietly to him. She almost backed away to tiptoe out of the barn and leave him to himself, but it was getting late and she’d have to put dinner on the table soon, so she called his name softly, barely breathing it. At first there was no reaction and she was afraid he hadn’t heard her, but then he turned to her, his good hand working over the horse’s flank as if he were smoothing a blanket, and gave her a trace of his old smile. “Fine animal,” he said.

The next morning he saddled up Hans and went out riding. He didn’t come back for lunch and that started up the anxiety in her again, but she told herself it was the best thing for him, just to get out and see over the island and let it come home to him. It was nearly dark when he got back. She’d held dinner for him — his favorite, spaghetti with meatballs fashioned of ground lamb and bread crumbs, with beaten egg to bind them and a good splash of Worcestershire and a sprinkle of dried red pepper for bite — and he came into the kitchen with his head thrown back, making a show of sniffing the aroma. “Just what I want,” he sang out. “No more Jell-O for me, eh?” And he came to her and hugged her and she felt the burden lift ever so perceptibly.

They danced in place for a long moment, Herbie crooning a snatch of a song from the radio in a low moan, his breath hot on her ear. “‘So much at stake, and then I wake up,’” he sang. “‘It shouldn’t happen to a dream.’” She could feel him pressing into her, down below, where he was hard. She swiveled round in his arms, the relief flooding her in a quick erotic jolt. “You had a good ride?”

“The best, the very best. What a piece of horseflesh that Hans is. He — but we’re not missing old Buck now, are we?” And then he pulled her close and kissed her for the first time since he’d stepped off the plane.

The mood carried him through dinner. He joked with the girls, crowed at the sailor boys (“I didn’t see a single Nip out there today — you must have scared them all away”), insisted on pouring out half a water glass of whiskey for each of the adults and even proposed a toast. “To San Miguel, fortress of the Pacific!” But then, just when she thought he’d finally shaken off his anomie or the blues or the effects of the drug or whatever it was, he raised his gloved hand and said, “How about a little striptease? You know what a striptease is, girls? No? Well, watch this.”

He worked the glove off by measures, playing to his audience, and then at the last moment tore it off with a flourish and laid the damaged hand on the tablecloth. It was a shock, something the girls didn’t need to see, or not in that way, not as if he were rubbing their noses in it. The two fingers were gone almost to the knuckle and the skin there — the stump — was burnished and red as if the flesh had been scalded. “Look, girls,” he said, splaying his good hand out beside it and then curling the fingers under, “eight of them. And how many legs does a spider have? You know, Marianne?”

Marianne looked as if she were about to cry.

“Come on, you know.”

In a very small voice: “Six?”

“No,” he said, “not six. Eight. Look”—and he bunched the fingers and moved both hands forward so they crept across the tablecloth—“I’m a spider now. Do you like spiders?”

“That’s enough, Herbie,” she heard herself say. Both girls had gone pale. The sailors shifted their eyes.

“I’m a spider,” he repeated. “But I don’t guess I’ll be spinning any webs soon, do you?”

* * *

The shearers appeared a week later and Bob Brooks and Jimmie with them. The Navy had opened up the channel to commercial boats after the initial scare — they had no choice if the wartime economy was to go on — and the Vaquero had been given permission to go about its business. She and Herbie had always looked forward to shearing, despite the tumult and the burden of extra work. It brought society to their little corner of the world twice a year, at least for a week or so, and it not only marked time in the way of the seasons and the great global shifting of the tides and the orbit of the moon round the earth and the earth round the sun, but reaffirmed their purpose — it was necessary, profitable, undeniable. This was what they were here for, to earn a living for themselves and for Bob Brooks and Jimmie and the shearers too. And if she looked forward to it more than ever this time, almost as if it were a holiday, she told herself it was for Herbie’s sake, but that wasn’t the whole truth of it. The truth was that she needed help, desperately.

At first, Herbie threw himself into the work in his onrushing manic way, shouting and jeering and joking, delighted with himself and with his old friends, flying so high she thought he’d never come down. But as the week wore on, she could feel the enthusiasm leaching out of him, the poles of his temper drifting toward equipoise and then tipping off-balance again, sinking, sinking. He complained of the dust—“I can’t see the hand in front of my face out there,” he said, and then let out a bitter truncated laugh. “But I guess it’s not really a hand, anyway, is it?” And then he found he couldn’t grip the lambs properly, not with one hand inoperable. And he was exhausted, worn, out of shape. She watched him sink down beside Bob Brooks at the long plank table she’d set up in the courtyard to accommodate everybody at lunch. “I’m just no good, Bob,” he said. “I guess you can’t expect to lie up in a hospital for a month and then go out and wrestle sheep, can you?” By the fourth day he was merely looking on. On the fifth, he mounted Hans and went off into the hills, turning his back on them all.

Bob Brooks took her aside that night after dinner. Herbie hadn’t been there to preside over the table and everyone had tried to keep up the pretense that everything was all right, but the raucous ongoing fiesta atmosphere of the first few nights had settled into an ordeal of silences and polite requests for the salt or the hot sauce, and as soon as the plates were cleared the four shearers and Jimmie disappeared into their room and the sailors — displaced temporarily — into the tent they’d set up in the far corner of the courtyard.