T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Katherine was about to say that she wasn’t feeling well at all, that she was worn out from worry and travel and not a little irritated and that she was stunned and disconcerted to find the doctor’s henchmen daring to interfere with her seeing her husband and that furthermore she demanded to know just where she stood, but she never got the chance. Because at that moment, as the doctor slouched there in disarray and O‘Kane shuffled his feet in the dirt and the declining sun coppered the branches of the trees, the monkey suddenly plopped down from above and landed squarely on Hamilton’s head, digging its fingers into his scalp and hissing like a cornered cat. But that wasn’t all: in the next instant it was joined by another, which came sailing out of thin air to adhere, caterpillar-like, to the doctor’s shoulder. “Screeee-screeee!” they jeered, boxing furiously at one another with leathery fists while the doctor’s pince-nez flew in one direction and his collar in the other. And then, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, they were gone again, hurtling through the branches like phantoms.

Katherine couldn’t help herself. She was furious, maddened, out for blood, but at the sight of the punctilious little doctor’s utter helplessness in the face of such primitive energy, she had to laugh. To his credit, the doctor laughed too. And O‘Kane, the bruiser, who’d gone absolutely pale at the sight of the tiny hominoids that couldn’t have weighed a twentieth of what he did, joined in, albeit belatedly and with a laugh that trailed off into a whinny.

“They just won’t listen to reason,” Hamilton snorted, facetious and gay, the pince-nez dangling jauntily from his throat, his collar crushed underfoot. The monkeys rode high in the treetops, chittering and screeching. O‘Kane shuffled his feet. Katherine pressed a handkerchief to her face, suppressed a sneeze. “Ha!” Hamilton exclaimed, “I know the type, don’t think I don’t,” and he let out an extraneous laugh. “The devils, the very devils — they’re even worse than my patients.”

That was when the gaiety went out of the air, as thoroughly as if it had been sucked into a vacuum. Katherine’s face was burning. Now, suddenly, she felt nothing but outrage. “I want to see my husband,” she said, and her voice was small and cold.

Hamilton frowned. He was hateful, ridiculous, a smear of monkey urine on his sleeve, lint in his hair — he was a man and he was going to deny her. “I’ve been meaning to write you,” he said.

O‘Kane had been dreaming of Rosaleen — or someone like her, a silvery succubus of feathery lips and needful flesh hovering just out of reach — when he was awakened, as he was every morning, by the strangled croaking wheeze of Sal Oliveirio’s bedraggled rooster. This was succeeded by the lowing of cows and a garbled disquisition in Italian featuring three or four voices, and then, after a bit, by a smell of woodsmoke and the potent aroma of coffee and eggs sizzling in the pan. He didn’t get up right away — he wasn’t on duty till eight this morning — but lay there staring at the ceiling and the thin veneer of light on the windows, hoping to fall back into the dream. He had a hard-on — It seemed he always had a hard-on lately, day and night, and that was because he was living the life of a monk in his cell — and he stroked himself with a slow yearning rhythm, thinking of Rosaleen, the girl on the train, Katherine, until the moment of release came and he could lie still again.

But he couldn’t get back to sleep, and that was annoying because sleep was a refuge from boredom and he was bored, he had to admit it — itchy and restless and bored. It was the middle of July and he’d been in California for seven weeks now, living in a ground-floor room in the servants’ quarters of the big stone house, while the servants — wops, mostly, but there were a couple of Spaniards or Mexicans mixed in — crowded into the cottages out back. Mart was in the room next to him, but Nick and Pat had moved into town when their families came out to join them — and Rosaleen was supposed to have come with them, two weeks ago now, but O‘Kane had put her off. He told her it was because he hadn’t been able to find a decent place for her and the baby, and that was the truth — he hadn’t. Of course, he’d been into town exactly four times since he’d arrived, and when he was there — at night, in the company of Mart and Roscoe LaSource, the chauffeur — he wasn’t looking for apartments.

He felt bad about that, and he missed his son — and Rosaleen too, and maybe even his parents and Uncle Billy and his sisters into the bargain — but he wanted to experience California on his own, wanted to suck everything he could out of this otherworldly place where lizards licked over the rocks and the flowers were like trees and the ocean stretched all the way to China. It was just what he’d imagined, only so much richer and more complex, as if what he’d pictured California to be was just the first page in a whole encyclopedia of imaginings. There were ferns twenty feet tall, trees that shed bark instead of leaves, palms as thin as lampposts, and flowers, flowers everywhere — the whole world was flowers. It was drier than he would have guessed — it hadn’t rained a drop in the whole time he’d been here, if you discounted the mist that settled on everything and made a lingering dream of the mornings — and he’d never realized that Riven Rock and all these grand estates were going to be so far from town, five miles at least. Maybe he ought to buy a bicycle — or sprout a pair of wings. Christ, as it was he felt as much a prisoner as poor Mr. McCormick, and that was what he missed most — the saloons, the shops, the pavement, streetlights, civilization.

He’d never lived in the country before, never awakened to roosters and cows, never spent so much time with foreigners — Italians, that is. They were everywhere, shambling along the dirt lanes in baggy pants and sweat-stained shirts, hewing stones, trimming hedges, hoeing up weeds in the orchards, not to mention slapping the hind end of every cow and goat in the county six times a day and pounding the laundry in big tubs out in the courtyard or creeping through the house with mops and brooms and a look of greasy resignation. But they were all right, the Italians. Most of them spoke English, or at least a version of it he and Mart could untangle, and he sat most nights on a rock in the middle of the orange grove with Sal and Baldy and some of the others, passing a jug of red wine or a jar of that liquid fire they called grappa. And their women weren’t half bad, the young ones especially. They were more the bucolic type than Miss Ianucci maybe, but one or two of them really managed to get his attention.

And the oranges. They were right there hanging from the trees, no different from apples or peaches back East, and not a day passed when he didn’t get up in the morning and saunter out in the perfumed air and pick himself two or even three of them and shuck the peels while he walked, the sun in his face, hummingbirds hanging over the flowers like bits of colored foil suspended in the air and the mountains standing up in front of him all wrapped in mist like an oil painting.

But still, he couldn’t help thinking of Rosaleen as he heaved himself out of bed, slapped some water on his face and swept his hair back with the comb while he studied his chin in the mirror and debated whether he could get by without a shave. Maybe he should send for her — the McCormicks were paying for it. Then he could get a place downtown, on one of those streets up by the old Mission with all the shade trees, and he’d be close to the saloons and the lunch counters and the Chinese laundry, and he’d get it steady every night and never have to wake up to the damn chickens and feel so lonely and cored out. That’s what he was thinking as he stood at the mirror knotting his tie and beginning to entertain notions of breakfast, Sam Wah’s flapjacks and three eggs cooked in butter with a slab of fried ham and the fresh-baked bread he could already smell, when he happened to glance down at the letter on the bureau. It was from Rosaleen and it had come two days ago, and though he’d read it through six times already, in his present frame of mind he couldn’t resist idly picking it up. And once it was in his hand, he almost involuntarily unfolded it and smoothed it out on the cool marble surface: