T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

“If I was, I didn’t know it.”

“Yeah, sure — tell me another one.”

“I didn’t. Really.” She rotates the base of the glass, a pink circle of condensation left beneath it like a wet kiss against her skin, her hand balanced on the swell of one breast. “Too isolated. Way too isolated.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to this, but he’s feeling the slow seep of the tequila settling in him, taking him out of himself, and he’s going to get up, any minute now, and run his hand down her leg.

“Anyway, it’s fiction, but it’s basically a true story. About the last woman left out on San Nicolas Island? Indian, that is. Chumash. The Spanish padres took everybody off the island in the eighteen-thirties or forties or whenever, and she was left behind. And it’s great, a great story, like Robinson Crusoe. How she survived.”

“What’d she do, hide when they came to get them?” He holds up his glass, examining it a moment in the light, then snakes out the tip of his tongue to get at the salt crystals caked on the inside of the rim. “That’s what I would have done.”

“No, she wasn’t hiding — she wanted to go.”

“Or was it like in those fables where she disobeyed her parents or snuck off to have a smoke or something? Maybe she was playing with herself. That must have been verboten, right? Or did the Indians encourage that sort of thing?”

“No, nothing like that. It was her little brother. They were all on the ship, just setting sail, when she discovered he wasn’t there. He was only like three or four or something and he got lost in the shuffle. Or maybe he was hiding — I don’t remember. I don’t think the story gets into that. The point is, when she saw he wasn’t there she jumped overboard and swam back to the island to rescue him. And since the wind was up, the boat couldn’t come back for her.” She pauses, takes a sip, levels her eyes on him. “Sad story, though — he died like a month later. The wild dogs got him.”

“Wild dogs? On San Miguel?”

“Feral dogs, left there by the Indians years before. They’re gone now, of course—”

“Yeah, of course. Probably picked off one by one by Alma Boyd Takesue.”

“But anyway, she tamed two of them and she had a pair of pet ravens too. And that was it for company till she was rescued eighteen years later — they took her to Santa Barbara where she got sick and died within six weeks because she had no immunity, of course, being away from people for so long. You didn’t get this in school?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. Yeah. I guess.”

“I remember her dress,” she murmurs, her eyes gone distant over the rim of the glass. He’s watching her throat as she swallows, watching her breasts. “It was made of cormorant feathers so it shimmered in the light.”

“Really,” he says. “Feathers?”

She nods. “The pope has it now. In the Vatican. They took it to the Vatican—”

“Really,” he says.

“Yeah, really.” She’s looking at him now, a soft slow unambiguous smile playing across her lips.

“I wonder,” he says, rising from the grip of the deck chair, “what she did about sex?”

Two days and two nights, and then back to the coast, to real life and all the hassles that come with it, to the piss-poor numbers for the month of May at the Camarillo store for reasons no one can fathom, least of all Harley Meachum, and to the trial he’s entitled to as a citizen of the United States of America who’s been arrested on federal property on charges no sane law enforcement agent would have brought in the first place. He’d been hoping for a jury trial, a chance to speak to the underlying issues and maximize the press coverage, to explain himself, look people in the eye and let them know who the real criminals are, no mistake about it, until his lawyer, Steve Sterling — whom he’s retained on the recommendation of Phil Schwartz, the wizard who handles whatever might happen to come up vis-à-vis LaJoy’s Home Entertainment Centers, contracts, rental agreements, the odd lawsuit thrown at him by one litigious moron or another — disabused him of the notion. There will be no jury. No convocation of his fellow citizens from all walks of life and a grab bag of educational levels to weigh the evidence and sit in deliberation, because the counts against him don’t carry a stringent-enough penalty to warrant it — that would require a felony, and he can only imagine what he’d have to do to wind up with a felony charge. Save something, he supposes. Pick up a rat, dust it off and set it back on its feet again.

No, this will be a bench trial. That is, a roving federal magistrate will come to the Santa Barbara courthouse to set up shop for the week and hear his case and whatever else they’ve got on the docket. According to Sterling, this is a real break — otherwise they’d have to trot all the way down to L.A. — and that’s what he’s been telling anybody who’ll listen. A break. A real break. He does nothing more than go for a hike on property everybody in America owns in common, and he has to shout hosannas and kiss the sky for the great and all-sustaining break they’re giving him: no L.A. “Isn’t that something?” he tells Marta as she sets his two eggs over easy down in front of him, and Justin, the bartender at the Coast Village Grill, as he knocks back an anticipatory vodka cranberry. “Aren’t I the lucky one?”

Sardonic comments aside, he’s in a mood as he comes up the steps of the courthouse at seven forty-five a.m., Anise on one side of him, Sterling on the other. He was up two hours before the alarm rang, his stomach churning and his head cavernous and windy. He skipped breakfast — too tense to eat — downed two quick gulps of sulfurous coffee on his way to the car before upending the cup in the bushes, then got into it with Anise because he had to sit outside her apartment and lay on the horn for fifteen minutes before she hauled her sorry ass out the door. When she finally did appear, no hurry, no worry, she paused to frame her face in the passenger’s side window and give him a look that didn’t have a particle of contrition or even consideration in it, and for a second he thought she was just going to turn and walk away.

“Sorry,” she said, sliding into the seat beside him with a cardboard Kinko’s box wedged under one arm and a purse the size of a suitcase draped over the other. “I had to get the flyers together.”

“I don’t give a shit what you had to do!” He was already shouting, instantly shouting, slamming the car in gear and lurching out into traffic. “And why for shit’s sake didn’t you put the fucking things together last night like I told you? Huh? Tell me that!”

She didn’t have anything to say to this. The flyers were his idea. He’d chosen a heavy stock the color of pumpkin rind, for its visibility — you don’t just crumple up and toss paper like that, at least not before you give it a glance and absorb the message, which was the whole idea — and downloaded a very clean close-up of a pure white hog he could have sworn was grinning, its skin as smooth and supple as a human’s, its ears cocked inquisitively and its eyes lifted to the lens, which he’d enclosed within a red circle with a prohibitory slash through it and the legend Stop the Slaughter stamped across the top of the page. The rats were gone, the rats were history, but the pigs were next on the agenda.

“Because I’m the one facing jail time here, not you. And I hope you got your beauty sleep, because I was up all night. Shit. I mean, can’t you think about me for a change? Even for one fucking minute? Even when everything’s on the line — I could go to jail, you know that?”

She was sitting erect beside him, her posture flawless, her eyes secreted behind a pair of oversized sunglasses with lime-green frames. Her diction was very precise. “You’re not going to jail.”