T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

And then he’s thinking of the guy who could have passed for a board member of AT&T if you gave him a suit and a haircut, an industrious type who worked the sand just below the railing where beach and pier conjoin, fashioning boats out of discarded cardboard and handing them up to the tourists as they breezed past chattering in Korean, German, Swedish and New Yorkese. Nowadays the bums just spread a blanket in the sand with a cup located like a bull’s-eye in the middle of it, then sit in the shade of the big pilings, passing a pint bottle of whatever it is they drink, till the tourists sink cup and blanket under a rising tide of quarters, dimes and nickels. Jesus. It’s like crabbing or something. Like a sport.

A horn sounds sharply behind him. The light has changed. He looks to the rearview mirror — some asshole with his hat turned backward and his girlfriend and big yellow panting dog crowded in beside him in the front seat of an SUV — and then guns the car, shearing to one side before he rights it and rockets off down the street, not even angry, just. . expeditious. There are two more lights to the marina, both in his favor, and at the first he slows just enough so that it goes red as he passes beneath it, trapping the asshole, who was trying to come up on him, trying to provoke him, and Goodbye, friend. Suck on this . A moment later he’s out of the car and striding along the concrete pathway that runs along the waterfront, already digging out his card key. When he comes within sight of the wire-mesh gate erected at the entrance to the catwalk specifically to keep out unauthorized persons (read bums, and what was that story a couple years back where a seafaring bum had got out to one of the yachts and took it for a joyride down to Ventura, where he wrecked it on the rocks?), Wilson is there waiting for him.

Wilson Gutierrez is twenty-seven, a first-rate carpenter whose mother came over from Copenhagen in the sixties and never left, and whose father, according to the check-one-or-more-boxes feature on the census form, is a white Hispanic from the west side of Santa Barbara via Culiacán, and he pronounces his name Weel-soan , something he’s very particular about, edgy even. His eyes are blue, he wears a black silken goatee and a gold pin thrust through the auricle of his left ear that makes him look as if somebody’s nailed him with a blowgun, he burns under the sun like anybody else, he’s lithe as a weed but built in the shoulders, upper arms and especially forearms—“Like Popeye,” he likes to say, “and it ain’t from no spinach, man, but swinging a hammer all day long because I am am-bi-dextrous and you better believe it”—and Wilson is one of the three charter members of FPA, along with himself and Anise, going all the way back to its founding six months ago in direct response to what was happening out on the islands. At his feet are three visibly swollen black plastic trash bags. “What up, Dave?” he says, swinging round on him with an ear-to-ear smile that lights his face like the screen of an LCD in a darkened store window.

“Not much. You get the stuff?” And then, because he can’t help himself, he’s laughing aloud. “Shit,” he says, bending forward to swipe his card, “it sounds like we’re doing a drug deal or something.”

Wilson, still grinning — or no, grinning wider: “We are.”

“Sort of.”

“Yeah, sort of.”

And then the gate swings wide and they’re hefting the bags — Wilson takes two and he takes one, because to this point they’re Wilson’s and he’s in charge — and heading down the ramp to where the hulls of the boats wink and nod on the remains of the swell the storm has channeled into the mouth of the harbor. Black bags rippling and catching the metallic light in creases and crescents, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing anybody would think twice about, not even Mrs. Janov, coming up the ramp toward them from the Bitsy , a boat he hates not just for its name but for the people who own it, the type who never leave port but seem to have plenty of time to sit out on a deck chair with a drink in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other, scoping out this thing or that and watching, always watching. . for what? Normally he ignores her, just walks right on past no matter what inanities about the weather, the gulls, the gull shit or whatever else she spouts at him, just being neighborly and what kind of burr you have up your ass? But now, because he’s feeling uplifted and right on his mark and maybe the smallest bit furtive, he treats her sealed-up face to a curt nod as he passes, the catwalk swaying beneath them and her flip-flops pounding the boards like twin jackhammers.

In the next moment they’re on board the boat, sliding into the cabin like seals into a tranquil sea, and all is quiet and calm but for the faintest whisper of the drizzle on the cabin top and the salt-flecked windows of the bridge. Wilson sits heavily — or no, he throws himself down on the couch with a sigh — and announces, “Ten thousand tabs, like you said. Think that ought to be enough?”

The boat smells the way boats do when they’ve been sitting in a slip in the rain and cold, the head making itself known, wax and varnish and scale remover competing with the must of fungus and the damp grainy woody sea-stink the cold compacts and ferments and holds there till the sun — or the electric heater — comes to burn it off. He’s already bending to flick on the heater, shifting himself around the table, adjusting to the reduced space that always makes him feel as if everything he’s ever needed is right here at hand, just cast off the lines and head out to sea and forget all the rest. “You want coffee?” he asks, setting the pot on the burner. “I’m going to brew some anyway — man, that shit they served me down at the Cactus was like paint remover.”

“Cream and sugar,” Wilson says, flipping through a six-month-old copy of National Geographic . He’s got his feet up. His eyes are half-closed. He is the type, when he’s not working, that is, and he’s definitely not working now, who can fall asleep anywhere anytime, whether it’s ten-thirty in the morning on a gently swaying yacht in the Santa Barbara marina or five p.m. over a plate of deep-fried calamari on the deck at Brophy Brothers.

“I don’t know,” he says, easing two mugs from their hooks, “this is all just guesswork, of course. They estimate there’s something like three thousand rats out there—”

“That all?”

He shrugs, a gesture that brings both mugs up to chest level, then drops them back to the counter. “Seems low to me too. But the environment’s limited, I guess, not like here where you’ve got people. And garbage. But what’s the deal with them — they’re fat-soluble, right?”

“Yeah, right. Fat-soluble. B-complex and C are the water-soluble ones, meaning you piss them out. Which is why you get scurvy. Or sailors do. Or used to, in the old days. But this stuff gets stored in the body fat or the liver.”

“So one shot should work? They eat this, they’re protected?”

“Hell, I don’t know. All I know is what I found on the Internet. Vitamin K 2, one hundred micrograms per tablet, totally natural. Says they’re a ‘biologically active form extracted from a fermented Japanese soyfood called natto .’ You ever hear of natto ?”

“No, can’t say as I have.” He sets the mugs down on the counter, just then noticing that one of them has a blackened ring worked into it about two-thirds of the way up. Which he chooses to ignore. “Sounds good enough to me, though. I mean, how complicated can it be — it’s just a vitamin, right?” He can feel the first stirring of warmth from the heater. The kettle is just coming on to a boil. Outside, the rain has picked up again, drilling the deck, and he’s suddenly transported back thirty years to the cabin of his father’s boat anchored off Santa Cruz Island, a day like this, his mother at the stove making toasted cheese sandwiches — Swiss on rye with mustard and sauerkraut, her specialty — so that the air grew dense and sweet with the smell of them, and he with a cup of hot chocolate and a stack of comics, cozy, cozy and safe and enclosed. Like now. Like right here and now. “What kind of price did you get, by the way?”