They quarreled and made up and quarreled again. Herbie was out all day, from first light to last, looking for work, anything to sustain them and pay off the maternity loan Bob Brooks had advanced them though he was short himself. There was no work, no work of any kind, however menial or ill paying or inconsequential. Hoboes were riding the rails. Men stood on the street corners three-deep selling pencils and apples to finesse the humiliation of begging outright. “What does she weigh?” Herbie kept asking. “Have you weighed her today? This morning? What about now?”
When finally they were free to go and they drove up to Ventura in Bob Brooks’ car to catch the Hermes, her ten-pound four-ounce daughter asleep in her arms and her husband at the wheel beside her, she felt as if she weren’t in a car at all but an airplane, soaring high over everything. All she could think of was the sleigh bed with the cradle at the foot of it and the newly functional stove there that threw out heat till the room was as warm as any steam-heated maternity ward or furnished apartment. The sea smelled like paradise, the gulls were winged saints. And if the Hermes was on patrol for bootleggers and it took them all day before they finally rounded the point and motored into Cuyler Harbor, what did it matter? They were home.
It was dark by the time the captain lowered the dinghy and had one of the sailors row them ashore. He was a new man, this sailor, someone they hadn’t met before, and she couldn’t see much of him in the dark beyond the soft pale glow of his cap and the red glare of the cigarette he held clenched between his teeth. He didn’t say a word till they reached the verge of the breakers and he eased up on the oars. “We’ll have to time this just right,” he said as they bobbed there in the darkness, the surf roaring and the long white hem of the wave-tips flaring out on either side of them. “Because we wouldn’t want any risk, you understand, to the baby, that is.”
They were wearing life jackets, all three of them, Marianne so tiny hers was like a cradle she’d been tied into, cat’s cradle, a nest of string Herbie had fussed over for the past half hour. He paused now in the middle of a monologue about the wonders of the island to thank the man for his concern, then gave him detailed instructions about where it was best to get in and how to gauge the waves. The sailor said nothing. Herbie scrambled up to the bow to flash a light ahead of them. As soon as he flicked it on, the grand sweeping semicircle of the beach sprang to life as if they were seeing it on a movie screen, faintly brown, faintly yellow, the surf foaming white and the road up to the house a jagged black slash in the distance.
Then they were ashore, the sailor springing out to haul the boat up out of the surf and Herbie there, knee-deep in the water, to take Marianne from her and make sure of her. They were quick and efficient as they unloaded their things, baby clothes, provisions, the accumulation of two months and more ashore, the sailor pitching in without a word. When everything was out of the boat, he asked if they needed help getting it up the hill and Herbie just said, “Thank you again, but we can manage. We do live here, you know.”
There was a moment of silence, Marianne asleep in her arms, the surf hissing over the sand and rattling its freight of shells and pebbles and whatever else it had picked up on the incoming tide. The sailor drew once more on the cigarette so that his face flared briefly, almost anonymously — he could have been anyone — then flicked the butt away on a streamer of red sparks. “Yeah,” he said finally, “to each his own, I guess. But good luck, huh?”
“Luck to you too,” Herbie said.
In the next moment the dinghy was afloat again, riding up the crest of an incoming wave, the oars fanning out like the legs of a water strider and the sailor’s white cap the only thing visible until the boat was swallowed up in the shadows. Herbie bent for his rucksack, then flashed the light ahead of them and they started up the road in the narrow tunnel carved out of the night. He was shaking his head, a flickering movement in the darkness, his face ghostly in the quavering beam of the flashlight. “God, it’s good to be done with all that, isn’t it? All that fuss and bother and everybody running around like it’s their last day on earth. I swear I’ll never leave this place again,” he said, “no matter what, I don’t care.” He stopped a moment and they both looked back to where the Hermes, lights glowing fore and aft, rode the black void of the sea. “Goodbye, world,” he sang out, “as far as I’m concerned you can all go to hell.”
She stumbled, the baby clutched tight, and he put out an arm to steady her.
“You all right?”
“Yes,” she murmured and it was a frisson, the faintest delectable tingle of satisfaction, to realize it was true, maybe the truest thing she’d ever uttered.
The Japanese
In the old days it was the Chinese, or so Jimmie told her. They had come out here, to all the islands, really, but to San Miguel in particular, to harvest the abalone, though it didn’t belong to them because they were foreigners and they didn’t hold the lease on the place, anyway. And they’d poach sheep too and leave behind the charred remains of what they couldn’t eat — the fleece meant nothing to them, just a throwaway, putrid, with the skin still on it and all over maggots. Now it was the Japanese. Their trawlers and long-liners came all the way from Japan because the channel was rich in the fish they craved, the tuna and mackerel and halibut they’d overfished in their own waters. Jimmie didn’t like them. Herbie didn’t like them either. For her part, she was indifferent — she’d never met a Japanese in her life and it was no secret that everybody had good and bad in them no matter where they came from.
So it was a surprise late in that spring, her second spring on the island, Marianne growing and gurgling, with her at all times, even in the kitchen, even then, asleep in a wicker basket and the pot boiling on the stove, when a sleek white fishing boat motored into the harbor flying the flag of the Japanese nation. The flag, it seemed to her, was beautiful, simpler and more austere than the Stars and Stripes: a red circle to represent the rising sun against a bright snapping field of white. She needed the binoculars to see it clearly, and as she hoisted the baby and started down the hill to greet them as she would have greeted any of their rare visitors, whether it be the Coast Guard boys, amateur boaters out of Santa Barbara or whalers from as far away as Norway, she felt no apprehension. They would ask something of her (meat, water) and give her something in return (fish, most likely) and she’d invite them to the house for tea and a meal and if they didn’t have any English they’d communicate with facial expressions and gestures. She was glad of the company, always glad.
Herbie had gone out earlier that morning to the southwest side of the island where the elephant seals had their rookery, just to keep an eye on them, he said. He took a gun with him and a safari hat and a pack with a canteen of water and the sandwiches she’d made him. It was three or four miles from the ranch house to the beach where the big bloated males kept their harems, the females two-thirds their size and spread out around them like so many sacks of grain. She’d been out there with Herbie to look at them half a dozen times, and they were appealing enough, she supposed, these things that appeared out of the sea each year as if by magic and had been hunted nearly to extinction for their blubber the same as whales till lamps went to kerosene and coincidentally spared them, but she wasn’t as attuned to them as Herbie was, Herbie the hunter. He wasn’t going to donate the skeleton to the museum, he kept insisting, he was going to sell it, because in these times they needed all the income they could scrape up, what with Bob Brooks cutting his salary to the minimum and precious little money available anywhere, and wasn’t that the truth? It was, she supposed, and she knew they were lucky to have any employment at all and to live out here away from the soup kitchens and the hoboes and Okies and everybody else going hungry in a world shrunk down to nothing. They weren’t self-sufficient, far from it — the garden a failure, the necessities shipped in from the coast — but they could always eat lamb when others did without. And fish. And the occasional lobster or abalone, which she pounded flat, soaked in evaporated milk, rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried, with her own tartar sauce to perk it up.