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.
Brooks came to her in the living room where she was listening to the radio sotto voce after having put the girls to bed. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.
“No, please,” she said, indicating the chair nearest the fire, Herbie’s chair.
He sat heavily — he was exhausted too — and the dog came up to him and put his head in his lap. “I just wanted to know if everything’s all right,” he said after a moment.
She looked up. “You mean Herbie?”
“Yes.”
“He’s still recovering, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“He told me he had to go patrol for Japs,” Brooks said.
“Yes, he does a lot of that. He takes it very seriously.”
“But isn’t that what the sailors are here for? Especially at a time like this, when we need every man we’ve got—”
“He doesn’t trust them. They’re just boys, he says.”
“Yeah, well, we were just boys too when they sent us marching through France and we came out all right. Can’t he let it go?”
“You know Herbie.” She waited for an affirmation, but he didn’t say anything. He was stroking Pomo’s ears, rubbing them between his forefingers as if he were assaying a grade of fine fabric. She wanted to open up to him, to tell him how strange Herbie had become, how worried she was, how she couldn’t sleep thinking about it, how every day seemed to close like a fist on any hope she had, but she drew back. He was the boss here and as sympathetic as he was, he still expected a return on his investment, expected everything to be in order — he wasn’t running a nursing home, but a ranch, a working ranch. He was the boss and to say anything more would have been a betrayal. “It was the accident,” she said. “The drugs they gave him. And this business of the war has him on tenterhooks”—she gave a laugh—“all of us, really. Who wouldn’t be? But he’s getting better by the day. And Hans, Hans has been a godsend.” She drew in a breath and lifted her eyes to his. “It’s just a matter of time and he’ll be back to his old self, believe me.”