“I hate the Japs,” Herbie said. “They stole from me and I don’t forgive that. Was it a Jap that got killed?”
“No, the Portugee.”
“So much the worse. But if your man had shot all three of them it would have been no more than they had coming — and I tell you, if any of them tries anything out here, I’ve still got the Remington. And the.22, if I want to just put a scare into them. Or blow their hats off.” Herbie tipped back his glass, then got up to pour refills, and she had to put a hand over hers and tell him she was going to wait till later because she still had to fix dinner, or had he forgotten?
“That’s okay,” pouring first for Brooks, then for himself, “just hunky-dory — that just leaves all the more for us, right, Bob? But you just wait till I get my guns back because I don’t care if they bring a whole army out here, I can hold them off—”
Brooks leaned back in the chair, the fitted joints letting out a sharp squall of protest, and held the glass to his nose, inhaling. “Good stuff, isn’t it, Herb? But I didn’t just bring you whiskey. Un-uh. I’ve got a surprise for you down there at the landing — and judging from the weight of the box, you’re going to need some horsepower to haul it up here.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. Bought the note back from Hugh Rockwell, so you’re square with him. My gift to you — really, it’s the least I can do.” A widening grin, a glance for her. “And you did just get married, didn’t you, or am I missing something here?”
Herbie spun round, balanced on one leg, before going down on his knees and bowing his forehead to the ground, both palms pressed flat to the dirt before him. “Salaam,” he said, “o wise one, o great and wise. I’m salaaming you, Bob. Salaam, salaam. That’s the best news I’ve had in a month.” And then he spun again, snatching his glass off the porch and plunking himself back down in the dirt with his legs crossed and the glass raised high. “A toast! Another toast! Here, Elise, give me your glass — no, no, you’ve got to. To Bob! To the greatest boss on God’s green earth — or brown earth or umber or whatever damned color it is!”
* * *
That night, long after Brooks had gone to bed — woozy from the whiskey, though he’d had two portions of her lamb stew and half a loaf of fresh-baked bread to sop it up — Herbie sat over his guns in the living room. He cleaned and oiled them and then hung them one at a time on an ascending grid of nails he drove into the wall beside the stove where the fireplace was going to go — once they found the time for it, because what was a home without a hearth? She sat beside him, knitting, listening to the wind on the roof and the distant murmur of the surf. From time to time he’d hold up one of the guns — rifles, that is — and tell her about its features and provenance, the Mannlicher and Lebel carbines he’d got in France, the Hotchkiss, the Mauser, his Jacob’s elephant gun.
“Elephant gun? What on earth do you need an elephant gun for?”
“You never know, might be a whole herd of them grazing up on Green Mountain day after tomorrow.”
“No, really.”
He shrugged. “I just like the way it looks and feels. And I might go to Africa someday, on a big-game hunt, who knows? You have your books, I have my guns. It’s a collection, that’s all. And it’s worth a pretty penny, believe you me. Worth more than anything else in this house.”
“Big game? Aren’t you the one who wouldn’t kill a mouse?”
“That’s different.”
“Well, if it is, you’ll have to explain it to me.”
“The mice are — well, they’re here. Africa’s not.”
“But the elephant seal, what about that?”
“That’s different.”
And so it went, the clock marching them past ten and then eleven until finally she pushed herself up, stretching, and asked if he wasn’t coming to bed.
There was the smell of the gun oil, sharp and alien, the white rag smoothing over the gleaming barrel, his hand in motion, back and forth, back and forth, hypnotic. “In a minute,” he said.
“You won’t stay up too late, will you?”
“No,” he said.
She set her knitting aside, moved to the door of the bedroom. “I’ll be waiting,” she said. But he didn’t answer. He didn’t even look up.
She closed the door behind her very softly and went on into the cold room to bed.
The Matchlock
It was growing light beyond the windows by the time he eased into bed beside her and he was up an hour later, no change visible in him except that he was accelerating through every motion he spun out with his hands and every syllable streaming from his lips. “Where’s Bob?” he kept asking. “Is Bob up? Because Bob has a boat to catch and lucky for him the Vaquero’s making the round trip or he’d be stuck out here, though there’re worse fates, aren’t there? Stuck out here? Imagine that!” he sang out, running an arm round her waist and pecking a kiss to her ear where she stood at the cutting board, slicing potatoes and onions for home fries. He sailed round the kitchen, fussing over the coffee pot, hauling in stovewood, cutting out thick strips of bacon to lay in the pan just to hear them sizzle, and he twice went out to the barn to see to the horses and three times trotted into the living room to admire the arrangement of his guns, all the while bawling down the length of the porch for Bob Brooks: “Come on, Bob — haul your lazy carcass out of bed!”
When Brooks did emerge from the back bedroom it was past eight and he came up the length of the porch and into the kitchen in his bare feet, walking gingerly. His hair was mussed. He hadn’t shaved. He was dressed in the same clothes as the day before, denim trousers and a flannel shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up, and the minute he pulled back the kitchen door Herbie was there, dancing round him with a cup of coffee held out in offering. “Drink up,” Herbie crowed. “This’ll put the life in you, strongest coffee in the history of the world because I made it myself and I knew you’d be in sore need of it after last night—”
Brooks accepted the cup, blowing gently into it and shaking his head ruefully. “I never could keep up with you, but then who could?”
She was standing at the stove, manipulating the cast-iron frying pan with one hand, the spatula with the other. “Good morning, Bob,” she said, looking back over her shoulder. “Sleep well?”
“Like a rock.”
“Rocks don’t sleep,” Herbie put in. He was at the table now, pulling back a chair, three places set, napkins, knife, fork, spoon and cups all around. “They’re inanimate. Never been awake. And if you’ve never been awake, how can you be asleep?”
“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.