He stops at a five-bar gate, and she gets out and opens it, closes it again behind the truck. When she’s climbed back in, he says, “Eddie seems all right.”
Eddie had claimed he wanted a nap, stayed behind at Caleb’s place, a small blue house on stilts, almost at the water’s edge. Marian thinks he is considerately giving them space but also supposes he’s not anxious to spend time with the man Marian had chosen over Ruth.
Marian says, “I’d be lost without him.” She smiles, pleased with herself.
“Navigator jokes. Is that what we’ve come to?” A man on a horse crosses the dirt road ahead of them, lifts a hand. His vaquero saddle is small and flat, cushioned by a wool blanket. “That guy was on Utah beach,” Caleb tells Marian. “You can see his hat sits funny because his ear got shot off.” All the other paniolos are native Hawaiian, he says, but they tolerate him because he’s good with horses and only half white and because word of his war has gotten around.
The ranch house, low and long and built from blocks of coral and roofed with red tiles, sits beneath the mountains on an undulating lawn of vibrant, electric green. The branches of immense monkeypod trees hover in perfect domes.
Caleb drives past, into a narrow valley and through a maze of paddocks, stops at a barn.
* * *
—
Caleb puts rope bridles on the horses but no saddles. He takes off his boots before he mounts and makes Marian do the same. She understands why when, after they ride back the way they’d come, makai, and cross the road onto a beach, he rides straight into the sea. The roan shoulders of her short, willful mare move in front of Marian’s knees. Her bare feet swing below the animal’s belly as she breaks into a rushed, jolting jog, anxious not to be left behind, whinnying at Caleb’s horse, chasing after it into the water. Marian hasn’t been on a horse since she left Barclay. She bounces off-balance, rights herself. The mare wades through the low surf, straining against the drag, white spray breaking against her chest. When Marian is submerged to her waist, she feels the animal become buoyant. Her lower body lifts off, and she is stretched out along the horse’s back, reins loose, clutching the coppery mane. The mare’s head is high out of the water, and she snorts softly in rhythm with her churning legs.
“She’s swimming!” Marian calls out to Caleb, giddy.
He turns. His same old amusement flashes from under his hat, his certainty that she loves him. “What tipped you off?”
She can feel the horse’s ribs and muscle and beating heart, familiar since she was a child. She is still that child, still climbing mountains on old, dear, dead Fiddler, alone or with her body pressed against her brother’s, his heart beating, too, his lungs working. Another self entirely is submerged in the cool Pacific Ocean, the water gently but persistently tugging at her, lifting her off the horse, separating her from the animal that is swimming so earnestly, so industriously. Where does the mare want to go? Wherever Caleb’s horse is going. They swim parallel to the shore. Soon Caleb will turn back in.
Her body marks a junction. Toward the sea. Toward the mountain. Toward the sky. Toward the horse. Toward the man.
* * *
—
Caleb’s bedroom is upstairs under a peaked roof, bare rafters. Outside, the palms toss their long, heavy fronds; the surf susurrates on the reef. The dark world curls around the little blue island house.
“Do you think I’ve gone soft?” Caleb says.
Marian has settled horizontally on the bed, up by the pillows, on her side, naked in the breeze that comes through the jalousie windows. His head rests in the crook of her hip. “Anything would seem soft after your war,” she says.
Three years in the worst of it without a scratch—North Africa, Italy, D-Day, France, Germany. Good luck so miraculous it had taken on the weight and gloom of a curse. New guys would touch him in hopes that whatever spooky voodoo protection he had going on would rub off, then go out and get killed their first day, sometimes right beside him. He’d told her his intact body had started to feel shameful. At least if he’d been shot or blown up he could have stopped, alive or dead. But on and on he went, never even getting trench foot, waiting for some kind of end. He’d grown reckless, but it hadn’t made any difference. The war refused either to swallow him or to spit him out.
She adds, “I think soft’s all right.”
“Sometimes I miss the war, and I hate myself for it.”
“A lot of people miss things about it.”
“Do you?”