T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

That’s how things stand. So he’s not sweating it. Or at least that’s what he tells himself, because he’s facing six months in jail and a $5,000 fine on each of the two counts, but today he’s not going to think about it. He’s here, out on the water, on an afternoon made to order, doing what he needs to do more of — and for now he’s just going to push the off switch in his brain and open up and appreciate the world in all its glory.

The Anacapa Passage is a little rougher than he’d like, but nothing his stomach can’t handle, given that he hasn’t put anything in it except a slice of dry toast and two Dramamine, and the chop goes flat once he makes San Pedro Point and the big cliffs start knocking down the wind. He stays just offshore, in twenty to thirty feet of water, as they cruise along the southern shore, round the point off Albert’s Anchorage and ease into the cove at Coches. Which, he sees to his satisfaction, they have to themselves. Every once in a while, especially on weekends, he’s come all the way out here only to find that somebody else has beaten him to it, sometimes two or even three boats, but today, a Monday in early June while school’s still in session and it’s nose to the grindstone for the average wage-slave who can only dream about his two weeks off in August, it’s deserted and looking as pristine as if he were the first to discover it, as if he were Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo himself, sailing for the Spaniards four hundred and fifty years ago. He’s thinking about that, about what it must have been like when no one knew what was here, when the world was a mystery and the maps teemed with sea monsters and vast null stretches of terra incognita — anything could have happened, any miracle or horror, each new island more bizarre than the last, a fantasia of imaginary flora and fauna made concrete in the instant it took to record it on the retina — as he cuts back on the throttle and glides in on his own wake. In the next moment, when they’re more or less in the middle of the cove, he swings the boat around to anchor stern-in so they can sit out on the deck and take in the view of the beach and the cliffs that frame it.

The anchor drops. The boat drifts tranquilly out to the end of the line and the line tightens. Satisfied, he settles into the deck chair, and Anise pads up barefoot from the galley and hands him the first margarita, the contemplative one, so cold there’s a rime of frost on the glass. She’s in her bikini, two little black strips of cloth that seem nothing more than an interruption in the blinding white spill of her. Her hair is up and she’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat and retro shades that make her look like she’s stepped out of an old black-and-white movie. “Nice,” she says, easing into the deck chair beside him.

The margarita, the simplest recipe and the best — fresh lime juice, Herradura reposado, triple sec, shaken and poured into a salt-rimmed martini glass — is, he’s thinking, the finest he’s ever had. It kicks in right away on an empty stomach and as he lifts the glass to toast her he’s feeling so relaxed he might as well be asleep. “Yeah,” he says. “As nice as it gets.”

Time compresses. There is no human sound, nothing, not the ticking of a clock or the murmur of a radio, no digital beeps, no sough and wheeze of appliances. He can hear the water trickling along the hull, the cartilaginous creaking of a gull’s wings as it cranks past. The beach glows as if lit from beneath. The cliffs hold everything in.

“You want another?” she asks. “And maybe a sandwich? I’ve got some of that Gruyère you like — on a ciabatta roll. How does that sound?”

He’s put up the canopy to keep the sun off the deck because she’s worried about her skin, milk-white, white as the flesh of the calves they deprive of light and iron so they can serve them up as veal for all the butchers and carnivores out there, and when she comes back from the galley with two sandwiches and the shaker of margaritas — and here’s the first mechanical sound, the faintest click of the ice cubes dropping down out of the ice maker in the depths of the boat — he sees that she’s removed the top of her bikini, and why not? It’s not as if anybody’s coming to lunch.

The sight of her — all that incandescent skin, the heavy ever-so-slightly asymmetrical load of her breasts — stirs him, and why wouldn’t it? He’d have to be comatose not to respond to something like this, like Anise, all but naked. And that’s the beauty of it — they’ve got all day, all night, all day tomorrow and tomorrow night too. No need to rush. “Nice,” he says, the adjective of the day, as she hands him the plate and leans over him to pour the glass full, and he’s thinking of the women’s magazines she leaves lying around, a model all rigged out on the cover and the various come-ons, in neon letters, radiating out from her as if she were Kali of the supernumerary arms. Love Secrets of the Stars, How to Please Your Man in Bed (Guy-Tested!), 63 Ways to Turn On Your Mate . As if it was that hard. All you have to do is take off your clothes, baby, and if he’s not dead he’ll jump your bones.

So there’s a nice little frisson going as he eats his sandwich with a hard-on, sips his second margarita, contemplates the waves and allows the sweet purr of her voice to envelop him as if she were singing, and maybe she is. Soon, when the mood takes him, he’ll get up and slip the bikini bottom down her thighs and take her by the ankles, lift her legs and slide it off her. But right now he’s savoring the moment. Like all women she can sulk and brood for days on end over some imagined slight or a thing so inconsequential — what somebody said to her at work, the color of the dress she knew she shouldn’t have bought — as to make him question her sanity, but he’s never seen her in a better mood than this, so pleased to be here on this deck anchored off her own special island at half-past twelve when everybody else in the world’s at work, three-quarters naked and savoring the moment as much as he is. He hasn’t touched her yet but she’s wet, he knows she is, and he’s thinking maybe they’ll do it right here, right on the deck. .

“You know what this reminds me of?” she asks, stretching her legs all the way out to flex her toes against the rail, the base of the cocktail glass balanced on her sternum, between her breasts. “I mean, out here all alone like this and nothing but open water all the way down to what, L.A.? Mexico?”

“What?” he says. “What does it remind you of?”

“ The Island of the Blue Dolphins . You ever read that book?”

“I don’t know. Sounds familiar.”

“It’s a children’s book, I guess, or what they call young adult now. My mother read it to me when I was a kid, over and over — it was my number one favorite for a year probably.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know. Eleven, twelve maybe.”

He holds on to that a moment, trying to picture her at that age, pubescent Anise, with her honey-colored hair and rounded limbs, breasts just starting to break through as if they’d sprouted from seed, which in a way they had, everything programmed in the genes, her smile, her voice, this gentle graceful irresistible flow of limbs and hair and lips and eyes holding him transfixed in this instant on this deck off the back side of this rocky volcanic island with its skirt of white foam and the cliffs that soak in the sun as if they were molten still. Natalie, his first love, was fourteen when she magically appeared at the desk across from his in Mr. During’s third-period history class at Santa Barbara Junior High, a transfer from Plainfield, New Jersey, where she’d gone to Catholic school and learned to smoke Larks and the odd joint when the nuns were busy doing whatever nuns do. She didn’t look anything like Anise — she was short, even as a newly minted adult of eighteen, which was when he married her, with her mother’s Sicilian complexion that made her look as if she’d just stepped out of the tanning salon no matter the season. To him she was a real exotic, with her black hair and copper eyes and the way she pronounced things like fall and dog (“If it’s dawg,” he’d say, “then why isn’t it lawg and fawg and bawg?”). Exotic can only take you so far, though, and when you marry that young — he was only nineteen himself — you’re asking for disaster. Which was what he got. They lasted two years, during which he was working part-time and getting his associate’s degree at the community college, and then he started up the business with help from his father and she was gone out of his life. “I’ll bet you were sexy,” he says.