T. Boyle: When the Killing's Done

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 way 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?