When the Killing's Done

  The thought came and went. She flapped her arms savagely. “Get out!” she shouted, rushing at them, whirling, clapping her hands. “Get!” They blinked at her—there must have been a dozen or more of them—and then, very slowly, as if it were an imposition, as if they were obeying only because in that moment her need was stronger than theirs, they crept back into their holes. But she was frantic now, snatching the blanket up off the cot without a thought for the rattling dried feces that fell like shot to the floor and wrapping it around her even as she fumbled through the cans on the shelf—peaches in syrup, Boston baked beans, creamed corn—and the utensils tossed helter-skelter in a chipped enamel dishpan set on the counter.

  She ate standing. First the peaches, the soothing thick syrup better than anything she’d ever tasted—syrup to lick from the spoon and then from her fingertips, one after the other—then the creamed corn, spooned up out of the can in its essential sweetness, and then, finally, a can of tuna for the feel of it between her teeth. Only when she was sated did she take the time to look around her. The empty cans, evidence of her crime—theft, breaking and entering—lay at her feet. She sank down on the cot, pulling the rough blanket tight round her throat, and saw, with a kind of restrained interest, that the walls were papered over with full sheets torn from magazines, from Life and Look and the Sunday rotogravure. Pinups gazed back at her, men perched on tanks, Barbara Stanwyck astride a horse. A man lived here, she decided, a man lived here alone. A hermit. A fisherman. Someone shy of women, with whiskers like in the old photos of her grandfather’s time.

  She found his clothes in the trunk in the corner. Two white shirts, size small, a blue woolen sweater with red piping and a stained and patched pair of gabardine trousers. Without thinking twice—she’d pay him back ten times over when they came to rescue her—she slipped into the trousers and the less homely of the two shirts and then stepped back outside to see if she could find him. Or one of the men who must have lived in the other shacks, because if there were four shacks there must have been four men. At least. And now, standing outside the door with her face turned to the nearest shack, some hundred feet away, she did, in fact, call out “Yoo-hoo!”

  No one answered. The only sounds were the ones she’d become inured to: the sifting of the wind, the slap and roll of the breakers, the strained high-flown cries of the birds. She went to each of the shacks in succession, and though she found signs of recent habitation—a bin of rat-gnawed potatoes, a candle melted into a saucer, more canned goods, crackers gone stale in a tin, fishing gear, lobster traps, two jugs of red wine and what might once have been sherry turning black in the unmarked bottle beneath a float of scum—she didn’t find anyone at home. It was as if she were one of the wandering orphans of a fairy tale arrived in some magical realm where all the inhabitants had been put under a spell, turned to trees or animals—to rats, black rats with no fear of humans. Finally, after searching through all four of the habitations and calling out in the silence of futility, over and over again, she went back to the first shack, opened another can of peaches, ate them slowly, one by one, the juice running down her chin, then stretched out on the cot, wrapped herself in the blanket, and slept.

  There was so much she didn’t know. How could she? She was marooned, she’d seen her husband go down in the grip of a rising swell in the open sea (though she wouldn’t admit it to herself, wouldn’t give up that slowly unraveling skein of hope, not yet), she’d never been to the islands before in her life and had no idea where she was or what to expect, and the shack she was in might have dropped down from the sky intact for all she knew. It was a shack and she was in it and it would provide shelter until she was rescued—that was all she needed to know.

  Of course, the shack she’d chosen hadn’t dropped down from the sky, though there was certainly something of the numinous in its manifestation there on the bluff in her moment of need. The fact was, it had been created by human agency, by people who had wants and aspirations and very definite monetary goals, as Alma knew full well. Because her grandmother’s story was her touchstone, because she’d read through the newspaper accounts, researched the archives and written papers on the subject in high school and college both, she could say with absolute certainty that Beverly had washed up at Frenchy’s Cove on West Anacapa, the largest and most westerly of the three islets. The shacks—or cabins, as they were originally designated—had been built in 1925 by investors from Ventura, who’d hoped to run a sport fishing camp on the location. They were constructed of board and batten, with simple effects, designed to suit the rugged sorts who might come out to the island for the fishing but didn’t necessarily want to spend their nights in a cramped berth on a yawing boat.

  Unfortunately for the investors, the rugged sorts never materialized, the venture failed and the cabins sat unoccupied until a squatter named Raymond “Frenchy” LaDreau moved in and took possession three years later. He lived there alone, making his living off the sea, entertaining the occasional visitor and begging water from every ship that anchored in the cove, whether it be a working boat out of Santa Barbara or Oxnard or a pleasure craft come across the channel for the weekend. What his thoughts and expectations were or whether he was lonely or at peace, no one can say, but he stayed on until 1956, in his eightieth year, when his legs failed him after he took a fall on the shifting stones of the path up from the beach and was forced to return to the mainland for good. He was the owner of the shirt and trousers Beverly was wearing and the cans she’d opened, and he would have been present and accounted for and happy to offer them himself, except that he was away on one of his extended trips to the coast at the time and had no way of knowing he was needed. When finally he did get back, all he felt was outrage over the violation of his space and his things, but it was nothing new—it had happened before, the shacks set there on the bluff like a provocation to the kind of people who think the world exists for them alone, and it would happen again. He would have to buy more peaches, that was all, more beans and creamed corn, and maybe, if he thought of it in the rush and hurry of the hardware store in Oxnard, a padlock.

  Beverly woke that first day to the declining light and creeping chill of evening. She sat up with a start, uncertain of where she was, and there were the rats, gathered round, staring at her. They were leisurely, content, taking their ease, draped over the chair pulled up to the counter, nestled in the refuse on the floor, hunched over their working hands and the things they’d stolen to eat. Enraged suddenly, she shoved herself violently from the bed, casting about for something she could attack them with, drive them off, make them pay—and here it was, a shovel set in the corner. The rats fell back as she snatched it up and began flailing round the room, the heavy blade falling, digging, caroming off the walls. Within seconds, they were gone and she was left panting in the middle of the room, the shirt binding, the pants grabbing at her hips and the sea through the window as hard as stone.

  She went out the door then, the rage still building in her, muttering to herself, letting out a string of obscenities she never until that moment realized she knew, and began tearing through the heap of driftwood stacked behind the shack. Without thinking, without regard for her unprotected hands or the sobs rising in her throat, she flung one log after another over her shoulder and onto the flat between the shacks. When all of it was heaped in a towering pyre and the sweat stung at her eyes and soaked her hair till the ends hung limp, she went barefoot down the path to the beach and scoured the sand for anything that would burn and she hauled that up too. There was newspaper, rat-shredded, in a cardboard box just inside the door of the second shack. The matches she found in a jar atop the woodstove.

  She waited till it was full dark, hunched over her knees in the too-tight shirt and the blue sweater with the red piping that smelled of a strange man’s sweat, eating pork and beans from the can and savoring each morsel, before she lit her signal fire. And when she lit it and fed it and kept on feeding it, the flames rose thirty feet in the air, visible all the w
ay to the mainland she could just make out through the gauze of fog as a series of drifting unsteady lights, as if the stars had fallen into the sea. The fire raged, sparked, tore open the night. Someone would see it, she told herself, someone was sure to see it. That first night she even called out at intervals, a hollow shrill gargle of sound that was meant to pierce the fog, ride out over the sea and strike the hull of whatever boat might be passing in the night to see her fire and hear her call. The second night, she saved her breath. By the third night she’d used up nearly all the wood she could scavenge and thought of setting the shacks afire—or the chaparral. At the end of the first week, she was resigned. She scattered rats, ate from the cans, drank from the barrel. When she wasn’t gathering wood she lay in bed, dozing, thumbing through the yellowed newspapers to weigh the news of events that had been decided years ago, politics, economics, war stories, and would the Allies take Monte Cassino and push through to Rome, would the Marines land at Guadalcanal, would Tojo triumph or turn his sword on his own yellow belly?

  The rats persisted, gnawing, thieving, slipping in and out of their cracks, thumping in the night, and she persisted too—her fires, of necessity, smaller, but beacons nonetheless, urgent smoldering pleas for help, for release. She saw boats suspended in the distance with their tiny quavering sails and she waved her arms like a cheerleader, fashioned flags from sticks and the tatters of an old faded-to-pink towel and waved them too, but the boats never grew larger or drifted out of frame, as static as figures on a canvas tacked to the very farthest wall in the most enormous room in the world. No one came. No one landed. No one existed. And where was Till? Where was he? He would have come for her by now, if he was alive, and how could he possibly have died in America, aboard his own boat off the lobster-rich Channel Islands, when the Japs hadn’t been able to sink him in the whole wide blinding expanse of the Pacific?

  The answer was too hard to hold on to so she let it go. She let it all go. Even the rats. And then, on the first day of what would have been the third week of her imprisonment in a place she’d come to loathe in its changeless, ceaseless, ongoing and never-ending placidity and indifference and sheer brainless endurance, a Coast Guard cutter, free as a cloud, rounded the point and motored into the cove.

  And what did the Coast Guard find? A sunburned woman unused to the sound of her own voice, her hair stringy and flat and her eyes focused on nothing. She was the wife of a drowned man, a widow, that was all. She climbed into the rowboat and the sea shifted beneath her and kept on shifting until the big boat, the cutter, sliced across the channel under the downpouring sun, until the shore, with its sharply etched houses, swaying palms and glinting automobiles, rose up to take her in and hold her as firmly and securely as she could ever hope to be held again.

  The Wreck of the Winfield Scott

  Though Alma is trying her hardest to suppress it, the noise of the freeway is getting to her. She can’t think to slice the cherry tomatoes and dice the baby carrots, can’t clear her head, can barely hear Micah Stroud riding the tide of his emotions through the big speakers in the front room. Normally, aside from the odd siren or the late-night clank of the semitrucks fighting the drag of the atmosphere on the long run up the coast, the sound is continuous, white noise, as naturally occurring a phenomenon and no different in kind from the wind in the eucalyptus or the regular thump of the surf at Butterfly Beach, and she’s learned to ignore it. Or at least live with it. But this is rush hour, when every sound is magnified and people accelerate randomly only to brake half a second later, making use of their horns an estimated eighty-seven percent more often than at any other time of day—a statistic she picked up from the morning paper and quoted to everybody at work in support of her conviction that mechanized society is riding its last four wheels to oblivion, not that anybody needed convincing. And her condo—over-priced and under-soundproofed—occupies the war zone between the freeway out front and the railroad tracks in back, a condition she’s been able to tolerate for its access to the beach and the cool night air, and the option, which she almost always takes, even when it rains, of sleeping with the window open and a blanket wrapped tightly around her through all the seasons of the year.

  Today, however—tonight, this evening—she’s on edge, denying herself the solace of a glass of wine. Or sake on the rocks, which is what she really wants. Sake out of the bottle she keeps chilled in the refrigerator, poured crackling over the ice cubes in a cocktail glass, one of the six special glasses remaining from the set of eight she inherited from her grandmother, clear below, frosted above, with the proprietary capital B etched into its face. She swallows involuntarily at the thought of it, thinking Just half a glass, a quarter. The carrots—slick, peeled and clammily wet in the cellophane package—feel alive beneath her fingers as she steadies them against their natural inclination to roll out from under the blade of the knife. On goes the tap with a whoosh, the tomatoes tumbling under the spray in the perforated depths of the colander. A horn sounds out on the freeway, a sudden sharp buzz of irritation and rebuke, and then another answers and another. She pictures the drivers, voluntarily caged, one hand clamped to the wheel, the other to the cell phone. They want. All of them. They want things, space, resources, attention to their immediate needs, but they’re getting none of it—or not enough. Never enough.

  Of course, she’s one of them, though her needs are more moderate, or at least she likes to think so. And no, the sake isn’t a serious temptation—she can do without. Has to. Because if anything defines her it’s self-control. And drive. And smarts. People look at her and think she’s some sort of uptight science nerd—the people who want to tear her down anyway—but that’s not who she is at all. She’s just focused. Everything in its time and place. And the time for sake—in her grandmother’s etched glass with the B for Boyd front and center—is after the lecture. Or information session. Or crucifixion. Or whatever the yahoos want to make it this time.

  The anger starts in her shoulders, radiating down her arms to her fingers, the knife, the mute unyielding vegetables. Furious suddenly, she flings down the knife and stalks into the front room to crank up the stereo, staring angrily out the window at the off-ramp and the rigid column of invasives Caltrans planted there to mask the freeway from her—and her from the freeway, though she expects the pencil pushers in Sacramento didn’t really have her welfare in mind when they ordered the hired help to plant oleander, in alternating bands of red, white and salmon pink, along both shoulders. If there’s a bird or a lizard or a living creature other than Homo sapiens out there, she can’t see it. All she can see, through the gaps in the bushes, is the discontinuous flash of light from the coruscating bumpers and chrome wheels and streaming rocker panels of the endless line of carbon-spewing vehicles inching by, thinking Seven billion by 2011, seven billion and counting. And where are we going to put them all?

  While she’s standing there, Micah Stroud cruising high on his Louisiana twang over a low-pressure system of furious strumming and dislocated bass, one of the cars detaches itself from the flow—or lack of flow—and rockets down the off-ramp right in front of her. It’s a white Prius, humped, ugly, forgettable but salvatory, and unlike any of the other white Priuses on the road, this one contains her familiar—her boyfriend, that is, Tim Sickafoose—and he’s staring right at her with a look of startled recognition, waving now, even as the car slides out of sight and into the drive.

  By the time he comes through the door, she’s back in the kitchen, keeping things simple: toast the pita, dice the carrots, slice the tomatoes, toss the salad. Hummus out of the plastic deli container, feta in a thick white slab so perfect the goat might have given birth to it. Somewhere on its farm. With all the other goats. Naa, naa, naa.

  They are not the kind of lovers, she and Tim, who peck kisses when they enter rooms or hang from each other like shopping bags in public. They give each other space, time to adjust. Before she can breathe “Hey,” the usual greeting, he’s at the table, cracking a beer, his backpack s
played open on the floor beside him.

  The view out the kitchen window is of raffia palms against a white stucco wall draped with bougainvillea, at the base of which a heavily mulched bed of clivia and maidenhair fern bows to an overwatered lawn of Bermuda grass so uniformly and unwaveringly green it pulls the color out of everything. Beyond the wall, a stand of eucalyptus that gives off a fierce mentholated funk in the rainy season so that everything smells of fermenting cough drops, and beyond the eucalyptus a gap for the railroad tracks, then the faded-to-pink roof tiles of the hotel that gives onto the ocean—the ocean she can’t see from here and can just barely make out from the upstairs bedroom. This is a view that irritates her. A view that’s as wrong as it can be, and not simply because it’s wasteful and cluttered and composed entirely of alien species, but because it defeats the whole point of living within sight of the ocean.

  “Music’s pretty loud,” he observes.

  She turns around now, her hands arrested in the act of halving tomatoes. “I left my iPod at work.”

  He has nothing to say to this, though she knows he hates Micah Stroud and Carmela Sexton-Jones and all the other new-wave folkies she plays in random shuffle through most of the day at her desk. When they’d first met, the first week they were together, she’d put on a CD she thought he might like and he’d waited through the better part of a sixteen-ounce can of Guinness before passing judgment. “I don’t know how to say this without being too blunt or anything,” he said, giving her his mildest look to show that he was only trying to be sincere, “but how can you listen to this . . . whatever you want to call it? I mean, give me rock and roll any day, the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Queens of the Stone Age.” It was a challenge, a testing of the waters, and she didn’t blame him for it—in fact, it was to his credit, because people didn’t have to echo each other like twins to get along in a relationship—but still she stiffened. “At least they’re committed,” she said, “at least they sing about something other than sex and drugs.” “What’s wrong with sex?” he’d countered, too quickly, the faintest shadow of a grin creeping across his lips, and she knew she’d been had. He counted off a beat, letting the grin settle in. “Or, for that matter, drugs?”