sometimes during the day you would see them, small and mongrelish, trotting through the open field behind the house. We felt like Swiss Family Robinson. Pearl ignored them.
'Would they hurt her?' Susan asked.
'She's too big for them,' I said.
'What if there's a bunch of them?' Susan said.
'We shoot them,' Hawk said.
'The people around here have little slogans about them,' Susan said. 'Like, `You can't shoot them, they were here first.''
'So were the Indians,' I said.
About a quarter mile from the house was a hill that went up sharply at right angles to the much gentler hill we lived on. Each morning, Hawk and Pearl and I walked up to the foot of the hill and looked at it. Actually Pearl dashed. Hawk walked. I shuffled. But after the first week I shuffled without holding on. Pearl would race up the hill, barrel chested and wasp waisted. Bred to run for hours, she rubbed it in every day, looking puzzled that I couldn't do at all what she did so effortlessly. Then we'd walk back to the house and rest. Then we'd walk to the hill and back and rest and walk to the hill and back and rest. We'd do that until noon. Then we'd have lunch. I would take a nap. And in the afternoon we would work on weights. I started with three-pound dumbbells. I would do curls with them, and flies and tricep extensions, and reverse curls. That is, I would do these things with my left hand. With my right I was barely able at first to twitch the three pounds. The consolation was that Pearl couldn't do this either.
In the best of times repetitious workouts are boring. When I could barely do it, the boredom became life threatening. I would reach the foot of the steep hill each time gasping for breath, the sweat soaking through my tee-shirt. I weighed less than 170 pounds and I walked like an old man. I wasn't much of a challenge for Hawk any more than I was for Pearl, but if he was bored he didn't show it.
Susan went with us once every morning and ran up the hill with Pearl. The thought of going up that hill at any speed made me nauseous. Susan took on the responsibility for feeding us. Fortunately she found a place in the upper village that had food to take out. So we dined on an endless assortment of healthful salads and cold roast meats and pasta and fresh bread, and drank wine from the local vineyards.
One of the oddities of life in Southern California was the sense of timelessness that set in. There were no real seasons in California and each day was about like the last one. People were probably startled out here to find that they'd aged. For me the days were barely distinguishable, a repetitive sequence of effort and sweat and exhaustion and failure, briefly interrupted by sleep and food. Drinking some of the local wine each evening became more exciting than anything I'd imagined.
Susan and Pearl and I slept in a very big bed in the master bedroom. I kept the Detective Special on the bedside table. A sawed-off double-barreled.12-gauge shotgun leaned on the wall near Susan's bed. There was a nearly full moon and at this time of night it shined directly into the bedroom, through the French doors on the upstairs balcony. It was almost daylight except for the opalescence of the light.
'Could you do it?' I said.
'Hawk showed me,' Susan said, 'while we were waiting for you to get out of the hospital. Cock both hammers, aim for the middle of the mass, squeeze one trigger at a time. He says it is pretty hard to miss with one of those things at close range.'
'It is,' I said. 'But could you do it?'
She turned her head on the pillow and her big eyes rested on me silently for a moment.
'Yes,' she said. We were quiet together in the bright flower-scented darkness.
'Are you ever going to shave?' she said.
'Not yet,' I said.
'Is this some kind of guy thing?' Susan said.
'I won't shave until I've rehabbed?'
'Not exactly.'
We were silent while Susan thought about this. Then in the bright darkness she smiled.
'You have a plan, don't you,' she said.
'Yes.'
'You are changing your appearance.'
'Yes.'
'So that when you're well you can find the Gray Man and he won't recognize you.'
'Seemed like a good idea. Give me something to aim at.'
'May I suggest that you let your hair grow and comb it differently?'
'You may.'
'I do.'
We lay on our backs, with our shoulders and hips touching.
'You're smart for a Harvard Ph.D.,' I said.
'Yes,' she said. 'l know.'
In the quiet night a coyote howled somewhere in earshot. For a couple of city kids it was a startling sound. Susan made a face. Pearl the Wonder Dog remained asleep. If she heard the yowl she didn't care.
