When the Killing's Done

  Then there came a morning in August, clear and calm, what fog there was bellying across the water out front of the boat only to fall away to nothing as she sliced through it, as relaxed at the helm as a long-distance trucker cruising the interstate, while Greg and Mickey slept below. She was six months in, six months to the day—she and Greg were going to celebrate by going out to dinner and a movie when they got back that night—and she’d reached a confidence level where she did almost all the piloting, there and back, because why should her divers have to waste their energy when they could be collapsed in their bunks on the way out and slumped over their beers on the way back? Save your energy, she’d told Greg when she’d been on the job a month, squeezing his arm at the biceps as they stood rocking in the cabin and giving him her best imitation of a sex-starved leer, and he’d leered right back, kissed her deep and run a hand over her breasts and then lifted his other hand too and held them there. Sure, he’d said, why not? You know the routine as well as anybody. Just keep your eye on the gauges and listen to the engine—that’s all you need. And it was. No problem. And if anything did go wrong, she had two mechanics aboard, and she’d let them worry about it. A jolt of coffee in the morning to keep her alert, one beer only at night till they were through the shipping lanes. Watch the depth finder. Fix on a point and never deviate because if you run a crooked line you just waste fuel. Easiest thing in the world.

  This morning they were headed for the west end of the island, to the kelp beds at Forney’s Cove, where they’d discovered a mother lode of urchins the day before. Alma was with her Grandmother Boyd in Venice for two weeks, all that nastiness over Greg long forgotten, or buried anyway, because when Kat finally brought her daughter home at four months—just herself, just for the day—her mother melted, and there was never another word about Japs or Nips or Orientals, at least not while Alma was around. The haul had been exceptionally good lately, the urchins of primo quality—they were taking in a thousand a day on average—and almost as plentiful as the pitted volcanic stones that littered the bottom. More and more boats were getting into the act, but they couldn’t begin to imagine any falloff in the catch—not yet. Not amidst all this abundance. Get it while you can, that was her thinking. Pay down the mortgage. Save for the future.

  Greg came up from below, rubbing his eyes, when he heard the engine slow and then clank into neutral. “Here, already, huh?” he said, giving a stretch and a yawn and peering out the window at the kelp fronds spread across the water like so many grasping hands.

  “Sure,” she said, “life’s a treat when you sleep all the time.”

  “How’s the pepperoncini look?” That was his pet term for kelp, because it was the exact color and texture of the little pickled peppers you found in a pint of antipasto at the deli counter.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s a lot of it.”

  He went out on deck to have a closer look—he was watching for the chewed-up leaves that indicated an urchin party was going on down below—and then, after a minute, flagged his arm for her to drop anchor. That was when Mickey crawled up out of the galley, a once-white baseball cap pulled down over his eyes and a mug of coffee clutched like a lifeline in one hand. Like Greg, he wore shorts and a sweatshirt stained with paint, motor oil and the various internal fluids of one sea creature or another. He was short and powerfully built, already balding at thirty, with a winning gap-toothed smile that gave him the look of the class wiseguy, which was precisely what he’d been. If you believed his stories. Unfortunately, he never deployed his smile or any semblance of it before twelve, twelve at least, and when he emerged from the cabin a moment later he was scowling as usual. “Man, I just do not feel like getting in that water this morning,” he said, leaning over the rail and staring numbly down into the gently heaving wash of kelp. “Why don’t you suit up for me, Kat? And I’ll just stay up here and sunbathe. And read what is it—Cosmo? Or Better Homes and Gardens. That’s what we all need, right? Better homes, better gardens?”

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “We need better hauls.” She gave him a grin, then conspicuously checked her watch. “Which means it’s time to fire up the compressor and get my divers down there where all the spiny things are.”

  The compressor—Greg had rigged it up himself—was mounted on the deck just to the rear of the cabin on the starboard side, beneath the gunwale, where it would be protected from the wind and spray. She hated to pull the cord and start the thing up because the racket it made—an endlessly repeating loop of blatting exhaust that sounded like a squadron of leaf blowers pulsing out over the sea—destroyed the peace of the morning and the afternoon too. She wore foam earplugs once the boys went down, but they didn’t do much more than dampen the roar so that every word she read in her dog-eared paperbacks and sun-bleached magazines seemed to repeat itself, once on her lips and again in the floating dissociated interstices of her brain. The muffler could use replacing, that was for sure, and she’d nagged Greg about it and he’d made the usual promises, but they were getting while the getting was good and at the end of the day everybody felt as if they’d run a marathon and none of them wanted to think about maintenance—maintenance was a concept better suited to the storm-struck days of January and February, when the urchins were spawning and there were whole weeks filled with rotating spirals of nothing.

  The motor caught on the first pull—Vrrrr-rap-rap-rap—and they had to shout at each other while she paid out the hoses and Greg and Mickey pulled on their wetsuits, flippers, masks and weights. Then they were overboard in a black churn of water, suspended there against the opaque depths for a fraction of a moment before they were gone. For a while, out of habit—or boredom, because what was else was there to do?—she watched their bubbles rise to the surface and then diverge as each went his own way, intent on the clusters of spiny black echinoderms that had only to be pried loose and slipped into the mesh bag that trailed behind them, to the tune of twenty-eight cents a pound.

  A breeze had come up as she leaned there over the rail, dreaming, letting her gaze wander across the surface to the white crescent of beach five hundred yards away and the sun-bleached hills that rose beyond it. The boat swung on its anchor. A chop—white-flecked, sudsing—ran before the breeze and erased the air bubbles. The gas motor that ran the compressor missed, sputtered, then straightened out in a high whine, the exhaust flatulating through the pinprick holes the sea air had worked through the muffler. The breeze was cold, sucking the chill from the waves like a giant air conditioner, and she went down in the cabin to get her sweatshirt. On her way back through the galley she stopped to pour a third cup of coffee and make herself a ham and Swiss on rye with a slice of sweet onion and plenty of mustard, which she seared in the pan so it would be nice and gooey, just the way she liked it, and then she was back on deck. They’d been down twenty minutes—perfect—so she’d have time to enjoy her sandwich and linger over her coffee before they came up and she’d have to winch the bags up on deck. And that was always exciting, a break in the routine, the secret shy animals spilled across the boards, their spines waving and coalescing as if to assess the threat of an alien atmosphere, one of poisonous air rather than sustaining water, before she stored them in the darkness of the hold. Which required care—any prick of the spines, no matter how cursory, always got infected, and if one went in deep and broke off, you could kiss twenty-five dollars goodbye because you were going to need the doctor to dig it out and clean up the wound. Erizos del mar, hedgehogs of the sea, that’s what the Mexicans called them. Or sometimes, just heriditas, little wounds.

  The boat had begun to roll a bit, nothing serious, nothing out of the ordinary, the weather out here as changeable as can be, and with the sweatshirt on and sitting in the sun she was comfortable and the sandwich was good and the coffee still hot. At thirty minutes, neither Greg nor Mickey had surfaced, meaning the pickings were a little slimmer than they’d thought or that the currents down below were banging them around a bit so the going was slower than usua
l. She chewed her way around the sandwich, keeping the center for last, then licked the grease from her fingers, wishing she’d thought to tear off a paper towel for a napkin and then finally just wiping her hands on her shorts, which needed washing in any case. When they’d been down thirty-five minutes she got up to look for their bubbles, tracing the lines of the hoses out twenty feet from the boat, but there was nothing to see but the flecks of foam on the wind-driven water. If they weren’t up in five minutes more she’d give two quick jerks on the hoses, the signal to surface.

  What she didn’t know was that the jury-rigged compressor, ratcheting over the steel plate to which Greg had screwed it, had begun, ever so slightly, to work loose. This produced excessive vibration, which in turn caused the muffler to separate at the jointure by a fraction of an inch so that the exhaust began to leach back toward the intake. Because the boat had turned against the wind and because the compressor was located in the space between the cabin bulkhead and the gunwale, the carbon monoxide was trapped there until it began to drift into the intake. Greg wasn’t breathing oxygen. Nor was Mickey.

  Finally, at forty minutes, she tugged twice—hard—on Greg’s air hose and a moment later felt him coming up as she pulled the hose to her, and that was all right, no cause for alarm—the basket must have been full to overflowing and hard to maneuver and she was guiding him in and keeping the hose clear of it. She was watching the water intently now, watching for bubbles, for his limbs beating up out of the depths with the basket she’d have to hook up and winch in, when he suddenly bobbed to the surface like a piece of driftwood, Greg, her husband, her lover, his long silken hair come loose from the grip of his hood and flailing round him like weed, and—this was strange—no bag in sight. Stranger still, he wasn’t working his flippers or raising his head from the water to give her a fogged-over grin and a thumbs-up. He wasn’t moving at all.

  The rest was a blur, a bad dream in which she couldn’t move, couldn’t react, her feet stuck in quicksand, her hands glued to her sides, but she pulled at the hose till the hose strained and went slack again, and even as she darted into the cabin to radio Mayday she saw Mickey rise on the far side of the boat, his limbs splayed and his head down in the water. In the next moment she was over the side and the chill gray slap of the ocean meant nothing to her because she was lifting Greg’s face from the water, tearing off his mask, pressing her lips to his, mouth to mouth—but no, she had to get him on deck, that was what she had to do, get him on deck and pump the water from his lungs, because he was drowning, that was it, and Mickey was drowning too. Flailing with all her strength against the chop and the hull that seemed to bob and duck away from her as if it were alive, as if this were a game, she caught hold of the rail in back with one lunging hand and held fast to Greg—to his face, his head, the collar of his wetsuit, any part of him she could grasp hold of—with the other. Frantic, barely able to breathe herself, she tried again and again to get him up and out of the water, but there was no purchase, nothing but the yielding swollen waves and the slick hull, so that finally, wedging his arm awkwardly against the rail on a rising swell, she vaulted up on deck and tugged at the sleeve of his wetsuit, but he slipped back on her, sinking away and then rising again on the next swell that swept in to fill the void.

  She was shivering, breathless, but she went in again and again and still she couldn’t maneuver the insensate weight of him up on deck. She didn’t have the strength. The boat wouldn’t cooperate. The waves kept pulling her back, slapping her in the face, scorching her lips and needling her eyes. She panted and strained, crying out in her frustration. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered. Because Greg wasn’t drowning or Mickey either, and no amount of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation could have brought them back, because they were both dead. Dead of carbon monoxide poisoning long before she’d become alarmed, before she’d tugged on Greg’s hose, before she’d gone into the cabin for the sweatshirt or made herself the sandwich. The wind had shifted, the boat swung on its anchor, the muffler worked free at the joint. And before they were down ten minutes they were gone.

  Two other boats—another urchin fisherman and a day-tripper—were there in minutes, men shouting and leaping into the water, taking hold of Greg and Mickey and her too and hauling them on deck, the wind crying out and the sun fixed like a rivet in the sky to mark the time, ten-thirty in the morning, August 3, 1984, the moment she became a widow like her mother before her, and Alma, fifteen years old and browning under the sun at Venice Beach while the musclemen spilled out of Gold’s Gym and the freaks and punks and street musicians plied their trade along the boardwalk, lost her father forever.

  Afterward, after three encores, a valedictory ovation that must have lasted ten minutes and the ritual strewing of long-stemmed roses at Micah Stroud’s feet by a sisterhood of squealing fans who made her feel nothing but old, Alma finds herself drifting up the aisle and out the big wooden doors, her mother expanding at her side.

  “You were right,” her mother’s saying as they emerge into the softness of the night and the first diaphanous drizzle of the fall, everything moist and sweet after the arid atmosphere of the theater, of the season, of the parched hills and withered vegetation that put a strain on the whole ecosystem, “he is special, really special. I mean, I loved it. And the girl singer he had with him—what was her name? The one he called up out of the audience? She was something too. Not really a Joni Mitchell type, but more maybe Buffy Sainte-Marie—”

  “Who?”

  “You know—she was a folksinger? From the sixties? I’m sure I played her around the house when you were growing up. Your father liked her, I remember. Or at least at first, before he heard Janis.” A laugh, rich with the pleasure of the recollection. “But how could you listen to anybody after you hear Janis?”

  The streetlights tease out the mist, droplets elongated to silvering streaks darting toward the slick pavement, and she should feel renewed, exhilarated—Micah Stroud and the first rain of the season, her birthday, her mother, the islands hovering in the mist and everything she’s worked and hoped for moving forward to completion—but she doesn’t. She feels weak, drained, faintly nauseous—and it has nothing to do with Anise Reed, or at least that’s what she tells herself. Of course, the moment she saw her rise from her seat she was seized with hatred and resentment—and jealousy, jealousy too—which had the effect of pulling her right out of the concert and thrusting her all over again into the animus of her life, or at least the life she was leading lately. And Alicia. Alicia there too, complicit with them, a charter member of the gang. Even worse, she had to admit to herself that Anise Reed wasn’t half-bad, her voice purer than it had a right to be and something close to magical when she blended it with Micah’s. He backed her on two of her own songs and then, incredibly, kept her there onstage in all her barefooted big-haired glory to beat a tambourine against one palm and lean into the mike on the choruses and harmonize with him.

  Micah Stroud, Anise Reed, Dave LaJoy, Alicia Penner, Wilson Gutierrez.

  They’re at the car now, the faint lines where Ed had bent over the hood to erase the graffiti with rubbing compound and a whole lot of elbow grease still showing in evidence of what she’s up against, and she feels so sad suddenly, so overwhelmed, that she just drops her arms to her side and stands there in confusion while cars back out around her and her mother catches herself in the middle of a reminiscence about a concert she once attended at the Hollywood Bowl with Alma’s father, with Greg, to ask her what’s the matter.

  But the thing is, she can’t answer because she doesn’t know.

  “Alma?” Her mother’s voice is like the soft beating of a wing in the dark. “Are you all right?”

  And there it is again, the weakness, the feeling of helplessness and exhaustion, the nausea rising in her as if something’s come unstoppered, and she’s barely aware of opening her arms to her mother’s embrace and of holding her there in the rain and the flaring red flicker of the brake lights of a hundred cars wh
ile the night passes overhead and Micah Stroud sits alone in his dressing room, bathed in sweat.

  In the morning, she feels nauseous all over again, nauseous for no reason, leaning over the toilet till whatever it was—whatever it is—comes up in a quick liquid burn to float there briefly before vanishing in a descending coil of water.

  Willows Canyon

  He pays cash for the wire cutters, five pairs, standing in line with an assortment of off-duty housewives, daytime drunks and chipper retirees at Home Depot, the most anonymous place in the world, and nobody looks at him twice. Or maybe they do, because of the dreads, but so what? He’s a citizen just like them, a man with ready cash and a need for a particular tool for a particular job and he’s waiting his turn without complaint, though all the customers in front of him—seven, to be exact—are leaning into carts piled up like houses on wheels with every sort of crap imaginable, stainless-steel toilet paper dispensers, closet organizers, bug zappers, ceramic garden trolls. The indolent fat woman at the checkout counter lifts the scanner as if it’s a set of barbells. The intercom rattles on mercilessly. Jets—the airport is right around the corner—blast overhead at ever-shorter intervals. Everybody wants to stop and chat.