Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
Danny began to feel the beating of time. He looked at his friends and saw how with them every day was the same. When he got out of his bed in the night and stepped over the sleeping paisanos, he was angry with them for being there. Gradually, sitting on the front porch, in the sun, Danny began to dream of the days of his freedom. He had slept in the woods in summer, and in the warm hay of barns when the winter cold was in. The weight of property was not upon him. He remembered that the name of Danny was a name of storm. Oh, the fights! The flights through the woods with an outraged chicken under his arm! The hiding places in the gulch when an outraged husband proclaimed feud! Storm and violence, sweet violence! When Danny thought of the old lost time, he could taste again how good the stolen food was, and he longed for that old time again. Since his inheritance had lifted him, he had not fought often. He had been drunk, but not adventurously so. Always the weight of the house was upon him; always the responsibility to his friends.
Danny began to mope on the front porch, so that his friends thought him ill.
“Tea made from yerba buena will be good,” Pilon suggested. “If you will go to bed, Danny, we will put hot rocks to your feet.”
It was not coddling Danny wanted, it was freedom. For a month he brooded, stared at the ground, looked with sullen eyes at his ubiquitous friends, kicked the friendly dogs out of his way.
In the end he gave up to his longing. One night he ran away. He went into the pine woods and disappeared.
When in the morning the friends awakened and found him missing, Pilon said, “It is some lady. He is in love.”
They left it there, for every man has a right to love. The friends went on living as they had. But when a week passed [125] with no sign of Danny, they began to worry. In a body they went to the woods to look for him.
“Love is nice,” said Pilon. “We cannot blame any man ‘ for following a girl, but a week is a week. It must be a lively girl to keep Danny away for a week.”
Pablo said, “A little love is like a little wine. Too much of either will make a man sick. Maybe Danny is already sick. Maybe this girl is too lively.”
Jesus Maria was worried too. “It is not like the Danny we know to be gone so long. Some bad thing has happened.”
The Pirate took his dogs into the woods. The friends advised the dogs, “Find Danny. He may be sick. Somewhere he may be dead, that good Danny who lets you sleep in his house.”
The Pirate whispered to them, “Oh, evil, ungrateful dogs, find our friend.” But the dogs waved their tails happily and sought out a rabbit and went kyoodling after it.
The paisanos ranged all day through the woods, calling Danny’s name, looking in places they themselves might have chosen to sleep in, the good hollows between the roots of trees, the thick needle beds, encircled by bushes. They knew where a man would sleep, but they found no sign of Danny.
“Perhaps he is mad,” Pilon suggested. “Some secret worry may have turned his wit.”
In the evening they went back to Danny’s house and opened the door and went in. Instantly they became intense. A thief had been busy. Danny’s blankets were gone. All the food was stolen. Two pots were missing.
Pilon looked quickly at Big Joe Portagee, and then he shook his head. “No, you were with us. You didn’t do it.”
“Danny did it,” Pablo said excitedly. “Truly he is mad. He is running through the woods like an animal.”
Great care and worry settled on Danny’s house. “We must find him,” the friends assured one another. “Some harm will fall upon our friend in his craziness. We must search through the whole world until we find him.”
They threw off their laziness. Every day they looked for him, and they began to hear curious rumors. “Yes, Danny was here last night. Oh, that drunk one! Oh, that thief! For [126] see, Danny knocked down the viejo with a fence picket and he stole a bottle of grappa. What kind of friends are these who let their friend do such things?”
“Yes, we saw Danny. His eye was closed, and he was singing. ‘Come into the woods and we will dance, little girls,’ but we would not go. We were afraid. That Danny did not look very quiet.”
At the wharf they found more evidence of their friend. “He was here,” the fishermen said. “He wanted to fight everybody. Benito broke an oar on Danny’s head. Then Danny broke some windows, and then a policeman took him to jail.”
Hot on the path of their wayward friend, they continued. “McNear brought him in last night,” the sergeant said. “Some way he got loose before morning. When we catch him, we’ll give him six months.”
The friends were tired of the chase. They went home, and to their horror they found that the new sack of potatoes that Pilon had found only that morning was gone.
“Now it is too much,” Pilon cried. “Danny is crazy, and he is in danger. Some terrible thing will happen to him if we do not save him.”
“We will search,” said Jesus Maria.
“We will look behind every tree and every shed,” Pablo guaranteed.
“Under the boats on the beach,” Big Joe suggested.
“The dogs will help,” the Pirate said.
Pilon shook his head. “That is not the way. Every time we come to a place after Danny has gone. We must wait in some place where he will come. We must act as wise men, not as fools.”
“But where will he come?”
The light struck all of them at once. “Torrelli’s! Sooner or later Danny will go to Torrelli’s. We must go there to catch him, to restrain him in the madness that has fallen upon him.”
“Yes,” they agreed. “We must save Danny.”
In a body they visited Torrelli, and Torrelli would not let them in. “Ask me,” he cried through the door, “have I seen Danny? Danny brought three blankets and two cooking pots, and I gave him a gallon of wine. What did that [127] devil do then? My wife he insulted and me he called bad names. My baby he spanked, my dog he kicked! He stole the hammock from my porch.” Torrelli gasped with emotion. “I chased him to get my hammock back, and when I returned, he was with my wife! Seducer, thief, drunkard! That is your friend Danny! i myself will see that he goes to penitentiary.”
The eyes of the friends glinted. “Oh Corsican pig,” Pilon said evenly. “You speak of our friend. Our friend is not well.”
Torrelli locked the door. They could hear the bolt slide, but Pilon continued to speak through the door. “Oh, Jew,” he said, “if thou wert a little more charitable with thy wine, these things would not happen. See that thou keepest that cold frog which is thy tongue from dirtying our friend. See thou treatest him gently, for his friends are many. We will tear thy stomach out if thou art not nice to him.”
Torrelli made no sound inside the locked house, but he trembled with rage and fear at the ferocity of the tones. He was relieved when he heard the footsteps of the friends receding up the path.
That night, after the friends had gone to bed, they heard a stealthy step in the kitchen. They knew it was Danny, but he escaped before they could catch him. They wandered about in the dark, calling disconsolately, “Come, Danny, our little sugar friend, we need thee with us.”
There was no reply, but a thrown rock struck Big Joe in the stomach and doubled him up on the ground. Oh, how the friends were dismayed, and how their hearts were heavy!
“Danny is running to his death,” they said sadly. “Our little friend is in need, and we cannot help him.”
It was difficult to keep house now, for Danny had stolen nearly everything in it. A chair turned up at a bootlegger’s. All the food was taken, and once, when they were searching for Danny in the woods, he stole the airtight stove; but it was heavy, he abandoned it in the gulch. Money there was none, for Danny stole the Pirate’s wheelbarrow and traded it to Joe Ortiz for a bottle of whisky. Now all peace had gone from Danny’s house, and there was only worry and sadness.