“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.”
The Japanese
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.
She was sitting in the rocking chair out on the porch, knitting and listening to the Philharmonic broadcast, Sunday afternoon, a weak sun running to milk in the sky and the temperature tolerable because the wind was down. The girls were out in the meadow throwing a ball and playing keep-away with the dog, whose high joyous yips had been punctuating Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony—“The Pastoral”—for the past ten minutes, and Herbie was at the far end of the porch, dismantling the clock that had suddenly stopped working that morning. What was wrong with this scenario? Nothing. Nothing at all. It was a picture of domestic tranquility and the deepest indwelling peace, one more day in a succession of them, husband, family, home, the sky above and the familiar boards of the porch beneath her feet. And then the announcer came over the air and interrupted the broadcast and nothing was ever the same again.
They listened to the president’s speech the next day, trying to make sense of what had happened. It had been a sneak attack, premeditated, the Japanese ambassador in Washington as false as a three-dollar bill and the emperor’s fleet simultaneously attacking Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines and Wake and Midway Islands, spreading east across the Pacific. She couldn’t believe it. It seemed fantastic, like the Mercury Theatre broadcast that had caused such panic three years back, only the invaders were the Japanese this time, not the Martians.
Herbie couldn’t sit still. He twisted the dial. Paced the room. Muttered under his breath. All the while, the president’s voice came at them, humming, buzzing, fractured with static: Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. She tried to focus on the words, but it was as if the president were speaking from the bottom of a very deep jar, every syllable ringing and resonating till all she could hear was the phrase “a state of war,” but that was enough. More than enough. She got up out of her chair and went to Herbie, to her support, her pillar, and took his hand. “What does it mean?” she asked.
“What does it mean?” The look he gave her was savage. He’d fought in the war to end all wars, given his blood, his flesh, a full year and a half of his life, and here was the next war sweeping them up whether they liked it or not. “It means they’re going to try to evacuate us, that’s what — this is just the excuse they’ve been looking for.”
“But why? Certainly we’re not in any danger, not way out here, are we?”
“The Pacific Fleet’s gone, Elise, don’t you understand? There’s nothing between the Japs and us. And you can bet they’re going to hopscotch island to island till they take Hawaii and then they’ll come for us, for the whole west coast, and we’re defenseless without warships.” He squeezed her hand — too hard, much too hard, almost as if he didn’t know what he was doing — then abruptly dropped it. “But I tell you, I’m not going anywhere.”