T. Boyle: When the Killing's Done

She let out a scream. She couldn’t help herself. This thing was alive and flapping there at her feet like some sort of sea bat, as long as her forearm, shivering now and springing up like a jack-in-the-box to fall back again and flap itself across the deck on the tripod of its wings and tail. Wings? It was — it was a fish, wasn’t it? But here was Till, Warren bundled behind him, his face finding the middle passage between alarm and amusement, and he was stepping on the thing, slamming his foot down, hard, bending quickly to snatch the slick wet length of it up off the deck and hold it out to her like an offering in the grip of his good hand. “God, Bev, you gave me a scare — I thought you’d gone and pitched overboard with that scream.”

Warren was laughing behind the sheen of merriment in his eyes. The boat steadied and kept on. “This calls for a toast,” he shouted, raising the beer bottle that was perpetual with him. “Bev’s caught the first fish!”

She was over her fright. But it wasn’t fright — she wasn’t one of those clinging weepy women like you saw in the movies. She’d just been startled, that was all. And who wouldn’t have been, what with this thing, blue as gunmetal above and silver as a stack of coins below, coming at her like a torpedo with no warning at all? “Jesus Lord,” she said, “what is it?”

Till held it out for her to take in her own hand, and she was smiling now, on the verge of a good laugh, a shared laugh, but she backed up against the rail while the sky closed in and the wake unraveled behind her. “Haven’t you ever seen a flying fish before?” Till was saying. He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself, woman?” he said, ribbing her. “This is no kitchen or sitting room or steam-heated parlor. You’re out in the wide world now.”

“A toast!” Warren crowed. “To Bev! A-number-one fisherwoman!” And he was about to tip back the bottle when she took hold of his forearm, her hair whipping in the breeze. “Well then,” she said, “in that case, I guess you’re just going to have to get me another beer.”

She woke dry-mouthed, a faint rising vapor lifting somewhere behind her eyes, as if her head had been pumped full of helium while she slept. In the berth across from her, snug under the bow as it skipped and hovered and rapped gently against the cushion of the waves, Till was asleep, his face turned to the wall that wasn’t a wall but the planking of the hull of the ship that held them suspended over a black chasm of water. Below her, down deep, there were things immense and minute, whales, copepods, sharks and sardines, crabs infinite — the bottom alive with them in their horny chitinous legions, the crabs that tore the flesh from the drowned things and fed the scraps into the shearing miniature shredders of their mouths. All this came to her in the instant of waking, without confusion or dislocation — she wasn’t in the double bed they were still making payments on or stretched out on the narrow mattress in the spare room at her parents’ house where she’d waited through a thousand hollow echoing nights for Till to come home and reclaim her. She was at sea. She knew the rocking of the boat as intimately now as if she’d never known anything else, felt the muted drone of the engines deep inside her, in the thump of her heart and the pulse of her blood. At sea. She was at sea.

She sat up. A shaft of moonlight cut through the cabin behind her, slicing the table in two. Beyond that, a dark well of shadow, and beyond the shadow the steps to the bridge and the green glow of the controls where Warren, with his bunched muscles and engraved mouth, sat piloting them through the night. She needed — urgently — to use the lavatory. The head, that is. And water — she needed a glass of water from the tap in the head that was attached to the forty-gallon tank in the hold that Till had made such a fuss about because you couldn’t waste water, not at sea, where you never knew when you were going to get more. It had got to the point where she was almost afraid to turn on the tap for fear of losing a single precious drop. What was that poem from high school? “Water, water, every where/Nor any drop to drink.”

The mariner, that was it. The ancient mariner. And he just had to go and kill that bird, didn’t he? The albatross. And what was an albatross anyway? Something big and white, judging from the illustration in the book she’d got out of the library. Like a dinosaur, maybe, only not as big. Probably extinct now. But if albatrosses weren’t extinct and one of them came flapping down out of the sky and perched itself on the bow right this minute, she wouldn’t even think about shooting it. Uh-uh. Not her. For one thing, she didn’t have a gun, and even if she had one she wouldn’t know how to use it, but then that wasn’t the point, was it? If the poem had taught her anything — and she could hear the high-pitched hectoring whine of her twelfth-grade English teacher, Mr. Parminter, rising up somewhere out of the depths of her consciousness — it was about nature, the power of it, the hugeness. Don’t press your luck. Don’t upset the balance. Let the albatross be. Let all the creatures be, for that matter. . except maybe the lobsters. She smiled in the dark at the recollection of Mr. Parminter and that time that seemed like a century ago, when poems and novels and theorems and equations were the whole of her life. She could hardly believe it had only been four years since she’d graduated.

Her bare feet swung out of the berth. The deck was solid, cool, faintly damp. She was wearing a flannel nightgown that covered her all the way to her toes, though she wished she’d been able to wear something a little sheerer for Till’s sake — but that would have to wait until they were back home in the privacy of their own bedroom. She was modest and decent, not like the other girls who’d gone out and cheated on their men overseas the first chance they got, and she just didn’t feel comfortable showing herself off in such close quarters with Warren there, even if he was Till’s brother. She’d seen the way Warren looked at her sometimes, and it was no different from what she’d had to endure since she’d begun to develop in the eighth grade, leers and wolf whistles and all the rest. She didn’t blame him. He was a man. He couldn’t help himself. And she was proud of her figure, which was her best feature because she’d never be what people would call pretty, or conventionally pretty anyway — she just didn’t want to give him or anybody else the wrong idea. She was a one-man woman and that was that. Unlike Sandra, who looked as if she’d been around and who’d shown herself off in a two-piece swimsuit when they’d run the boat down to San Pedro the week before — in a breeze that had her in goosebumps all over and wrapped in Warren’s jacket by the time they got back to the dock. But thank God for small mercies: Sandra had been unable to join them this time around. She had an engagement in North Hollywood, whatever that meant, but then that wasn’t Beverly’s worry, it was Warren’s.

She slipped into the head, used the toilet, drained her glass of water and then drained another. Her stomach was queasy. That last beer, that was what it was. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt all the body gone out of it, though she’d washed and set it just that morning. Or yesterday morning, technically. But she was at sea now and she’d have to make do — and so would Till, who expected her to be made-up and primped and showing herself off like one of the movie stars in the magazines. She cranked the hand pump to flush, rinsed her hands — precious water, precious — eased the door open and shut it behind her. As she slid back into bed she was thinking she’d just have to tie her hair up in a kerchief, at least till they got there and she could take a swim, depending on how cold the water was, of course. Then she was thinking of the mariner again and of Mr. Parminter, who wore a bow tie to class every day and could recite “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by heart. Then she was asleep.