He suspected the peculiarity of buying two at once was actually an advantage, since nobody who needed a shotgun to commit suicide or rob somebody would need two.
When he went into the store, he was almost disappointed that he didn’t need to say anything to the clerk except that he was paying cash. He supposed that having a story to tell had made him look self-assured. He bought a cleaning kit while he was at it because they always test-fired the damn things at the factory and left them dirty.
The sun was getting low by the time he finished. He took a turn and drove toward the sunset for a few blocks. He figured he should at least see the Pacific if he was this close to it. The street came out on a winding road through a kind of suburb, but still the ocean didn’t turn up. Finally, he accepted his failure and checked the map. Sure enough, around here the coastline wasn’t to the west at all but to the south, which was damned inconvenient for visitors who were accustomed to thinking of the relationship of the sun and the continent and the ocean as pretty well stabilized.
He turned left, found the ocean immediately, and was glad. He stood on a broad lawn under some fifty-foot palm trees and stared past the white sand at the endless blue that extended out past the slow rolling waves, and across the world. It made the air smell different and dropped the temperature ten degrees. What he was looking at seemed as infinite as the sky. The word infinite was full of frustration; it was just another word for 'so far you can’t see it.' There was something that made him want to see beyond the horizon.
As he walked back to the car, Jake tried to formulate his complaint. If seeing was detecting light, and light could curve, then under certain circumstances a person ought to be able to follow the surface of the ocean past the horizon, around the whole world. Then he realized that what he would see at the end of it was himself, from behind. If infinity was looking at his own ass, he supposed he could pass it up. He felt satisfied with his decision not to give up on the Pacific, and relieved that he hadn’t been unable to find the biggest thing on earth.
When he made it back to the apartment building again, Jane was there to help him unload. When they had everything inside, she closed the door and locked it, and he set about unboxing the two shotguns on the kitchen table. She picked one up and sighted it, then pumped the action and clicked the trigger a couple of times and looked into the chamber. After that she let Jake sit at the table to clean and oil them while she went into the bedroom with the baby monitors.
Jane watched the street through the bedroom window as she put the batteries into the monitors and put tape over the little glowing ON lights. It was dark before she saw the last of the police cars drive off. She went out the door, walked around the side of the building, put one of the baby-monitor transmitters into an empty flowerpot, and set it in the bushes beside the building. Then she walked until she found the bathroom window. She had noticed that the bathroom window in the apartment she had rented had louvered slats that could be cranked open. She examined the bathroom window of Harry’s apartment, found that it was the same and that the glass slats didn’t fit any better than hers did. She was able to push one of them up out of its holder just enough to fit the second transmitter in and set it on the sink. Then she went back to her own apartment, set the two receivers on the kitchen counter, and turned them on.
When Jake was satisfied that neither shotgun would blow up in his face if he had occasion to pull the trigger, he put them inside the hall closet. He saw that Jane had made the only bed and put the other blanket on the couch. She came out of the kitchen, picked up the shotguns, and pushed four shells into each one. He approved of her not putting a shell in the chamber. She also had enough sense to lay them flat on the floor by the door instead of propping them up. Then she went back into the kitchen to cook two frozen dinners of steaks and mashed potatoes and broccoli, and he approved of this even more, so he left her alone. By now Jane had virtually disappeared; she was living entirely inside her head.
After dinner they washed the two dishes he had bought, and Jake sat on the couch. He had expected Jane to sit down with him, but she brought the two little baby monitors into the living room, got down on the floor, and started doing stretching exercises like dancers did while she listened to the static. As he watched her, he thought about how odd it was to watch children grow up. Miraculously, the little seven-pound animals that looked like hairless monkeys changed into something that looked like this, and what was in their heads at the end of the process seemed to get farther and farther away from what you would expect.
He couldn’t keep silent any longer. 'I had a funny thing happen today,' he said. 'I couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean.'
'Remind me not to let you navigate.' He could see her move her lips, returning to her counting.
'I found it eventually, through sheer persistence. But it reminded me of the Herndons. Did any Herndons come up with you?'
'There were two. Betty was my age—valedictorian of my class, I think—and she had an older brother. He had a streak of gray when he was about fifteen, and everybody thought he was handsome and mysterious. Actually, I guess he looked like a skunk.'
'Paul, that was. He’s an engineer or something way out west. Maybe around here.'
'Is, that why the Pacific Ocean reminded you of the Herndons?'
'No. The part about being mysterious did. The one I was thinking of would be Paul’s grandfather’s sister. Amanda was her name. People always said the money came from some Herndon who invented something in the 1800s, but you’d never hear it from them. There used to be rumors about them when I was a kid.'
'What kind of rumors?'
'Well, there was never a dumb Herndon. Some people used to say that the good Lord chose to have every Herndon born with a complete knowledge of the principles He uses to make the universe work.'
'Come on,' said Jane. She stopped doing push-ups and looked at him.
'The secret would have been safe with them. They were, every last one of them, too inert to do anything about it and too secretive to tell anybody who wasn’t another Herndon.'
Jane sat up, laughing. 'You know, that’s true.'
'Of course it is. And things always seemed to go just fine. They bought railroad stock, and the railroads went up. They were the sort of people who would have their lawn infested by sables.'
'I still don’t see what this has to do with the ocean.'
'I was talking about Amanda. She was a grown woman by the time I remember her. But when she was little, maybe two years old, she was swinging on a swing in the front yard. The sun was right in her eyes, and one of the neighbors heard her say, ’Daddy! Move the sun!’ And he smiled at her and stood there and stared up at the sun for a long time, and that was that.'
'That was what?'
'Well, you have to think about it. What was he doing?'
'What was he doing?'
'People said later that he did it. He moved the sun about an hour forward. They say the city people didn’t seem to notice it, since the position of the sun didn’t mean much to them. That evening they just looked at their watches one extra time to be sure the hand was on the number that said, ’Go to bed,’ and that was that. The story goes that the scientists with their equipment sure did, but they hushed it up because they couldn’t explain it. The farm folks talked about it for some time, but there wasn’t much they could do about it except add Herndons to the list of things they couldn’t control, like rain and frost.'
'That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.'
'Well, you know how these things get going. Little Amanda also told several reliable and veracious children that there were two moons, not one. But people remained divided on that issue since it could have been her idea of a joke, and she never said it again after she reached the age of discretion.'
'You made all that up, didn’t you?' she asked. 'Admit it.'
'Not at all. Myself, I’ve always thought the story had to do with daylight savings time. Once you reached the point when the president of the United States could tell you what time it was, as though the sun, the moon, and the rotation of the earth were mere distractions, people realized that anything could happen. There was no limit, or any reason to have one.'
She smiled. 'Do you really think that’s what it’s about?'
'Maybe,' Jake said. 'But maybe it’s only about love.'
'And maybe it’s about talk.' Now she began to do her sit-ups.
'Well, I’m at the stage of life where I’m examining the things I’ve picked up along the way and trying to distribute them where they’ll do some good. This is how I got them, so I talk.'
