T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

She’s talking to a bony seventyish woman in a pink silk blouse the size of a football jersey about the feasibility of preserving island botanical specimens in mainland gardens, when Tim appears out of nowhere to take hold of her elbow—“Sorry,” he mouths to the woman, “emergency”—and guide her to the door. “I just called Hana Sushi and they’re serving till ten. You want that sake —that sake rocks, crisp on the palate, with the faintest nose of Hokkaido forest breezes and underlying hints of vanilla and pomegranate — or not?”

“But I need to say goodbye to Frieda—”

“With deep overtones of pineapple and, I don’t know, wet schnauzer?”

“But Frieda—”

“Call her from the car.”

“I can’t do that,” she’s saying, but they’re already out the door and into the night, where the parking lot stands all but empty and the clouds crouch low over a rejuvenant drizzle. She’s thinking I’ll send her a note , thinking she’s had enough for one day, thinking of the sushi bar wrapped in its soft calm glow of the familiar, jazz softly leaking through the speakers and Shuhei and Hiro poised there to joke and gossip and whip up something special just for her, thinking of halibut and yellowtail and albacore tuna from the depthless sea, and sake in a clear beaded glass, with ice.

She’s fifty feet from the car, its chassis moth-colored and palely glowing against the deeper darkness, when she realizes something’s wrong. Everything seems blurred, even with her glasses on, but they’re walking faster now, Tim aware of it too, and even when they’re standing there right beside the car, she still can’t make out what the marks are. They seem to be black bands of some sort — spray paint?

Tim, a shadow beside her, one facet of a deeper complication, lets out a curse, his voice strained with surprise and outrage. “Aw, shit! Shit! They graffitied the car!”

Great looping letters, coming into focus now as her eyes gradually adjust. Die , she reads. Gook , she reads. And, finally, Bitch .

I f there’s one thing he hates, it’s a runny yolk. And toast so dry it shatters like a cracker before you can spread the butter. And rain. He hates the rain too. Three days of it now, making a mess of the streets and keeping shoppers out of the stores (pathetic numbers, absolutely pathetic, in all four units, and with the Christmas season coming on no less), depressing people, drooling like bilge down the plate-glass window at the Cactus Café, where he eats breakfast five days a week and they still can’t figure out what over fucking easy means. His dried-out toast is cold. The coffee tastes like aluminum foil, and it’s cold too, or lukewarm at best. And the newspaper has one stingy little article about what went down at the museum last night, tucked away in the Community Events roundup for Tuesday, November 20, 2001, the date in bolder type than the headline, as if to indicate that everything included beneath it would be just as mind-numbing and inconsequential as it had been the day before and the day before that. Under the headline “Protest at Museum Lecture,” there’s a scant two paragraphs that don’t begin to get at the issue, and worse, don’t even mention him or FPA by name, let alone set out the counterarguments he’d thrown right in the face of that condescending little bitch from the Park Service who was fooling nobody with her gray-eyed squint and her all-black outfit as if she were going to a funeral or a Goth club or something and all her tricked-up images of the cute little animals that just have to be saved in the face of this sudden onslaught by all these other ugly little animals, made uglier by somebody’s Photoshop manipulations, as if the birds wouldn’t last another week when a hundred and fifty years had gone by in complete harmony and natural balance with all the other birds and plants and the rats too, something Alma Boyd Takesue, Ph.D., didn’t bother to mention.

Suddenly he’s jerking his head around — and there’s Marta, fat Marta with her two-ton tits and big pregnant belly that isn’t pregnant at all, only just fat, bending over some other guy’s table by the door, flirting with him, for Christ’s sake — and before he can think he shouts out her name, surprising himself by the violence of his voice. Everybody in the place, and there must be thirty of them, half he recognizes and half not, looks up in unison, as if they were all named Marta, and what does he think about that? He thinks, Fuck you, collectively . He thinks he might have to find another goddamn diner where they know the difference between—

And here she is, her face drawn down around a mouth shrunk to the size of a keyhole beneath the flabby cheeks, coming to him as swiftly as her too-small feet can carry her, trying to act as if she cares. “Is everything okay?” she asks before she’s halfway to him so everybody can hear her doing her job, even Ricardo, the cook, who’s giving him a hooded look from behind the grill, a cigarette in one hand, spatula in the other.

“No,” he says, still too loud, and they’re still looking, all of them, because they’re a bunch of sad-assed pathetic voyeurs with nothing better to do, and fuck them. Really, fuck them . “No, everything isn’t okay. Because I come in here every day, don’t I? And you people still don’t know what over easy means? Shit, if I wanted sunny-side up, if I wanted a runny yolk, that’s what I would have ordered.”

She’s already reaching for the plate, already apologizing—“Sorry, sir, I’ll have the cook” and all the rest of the mollifying meaningless little phrases she dispenses a hundred times a day because the cook’s a moron and to call her incompetent would be a compliment — but he can’t help saying, snarling, and why is he snarling? “Take it away and do it right or don’t do it at all.” And, to the retreating twin hummocks of her butt: “And the toast is like that shit they give babies, what do you call it — Zwieback — and I don’t want Zwieback, I want toast.” She’s at the swinging door to the kitchen now, making a show of upending the plate in the trash while Ricardo shrinks into the Aztecan nullity of his face and everybody else in the place pretends to take up their conversations where they left off and he can’t help adding, his voice lower now, the rage all steamed out of him though the heat’s still up high, “Simple toast. Is that too much to ask?”

After breakfast, he heads out into the rain, picturing his umbrella back at home leaning up against the doorjamb, but it’s not a problem because the moisture has the effect of puffing up his dreads, giving them body, frizzing them out — especially on top, at the roots, where he’s been noticing a little too much scalp in the mirror lately — and this is more drizzle than real rain anyway. He pauses a moment outside the diner to shift the newspaper under one arm and pull up the collar of his black nylon jacket, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden, as if the upturned collar were an affectation out of the dim past and an old Clash concert at the Bowl. Which, he supposes, it is. Glancing up, he catches some balding geek giving him a covert look through the rain-scrawled window, but the show’s over and he’s not going to get himself worked up over runny eggs or this jerk or anything else, and yes, he took his blood-pressure medicine and no, he didn’t take — will never take — the Xanax Dr. Reiser talked him into as a tool to combat the rage that seems to sweep up on him inexplicably like a rogue wave on a flat sea, which really isn’t anger so much as impatience with people and the multifarious ways they can and will screw up just about anything, given the chance, over and over again.