T. Boyle: When the Killing's Done

When she woke again it was daylight and Till’s berth was empty. She tried to focus on the deck but the deck wouldn’t stay put. A great angry fist seemed to be slamming at the hull with a booming repetitive shock that concussed the thin mattress and the plank beneath it and worked its way through her till she could feel it in the hollow of her chest, in her head, in her teeth. On top of it, every last thing, every screw and bolt and scrap of metal up and down the length of the boat, rattled and whined with a roused insistent drone as if a hive of yellow jackets were trapped in the hull. And what was that smell? Mold, hidden rot, the sour-milk reek of her own unwashed body. Before she could think, she was leaning over and spewing up everything inside her into the bucket she’d kept at her bedside for emergencies — the last of it, sharp and acerbic as a dose of vinegar, coming on a long glutinous string of saliva. She shook her head to clear it, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. Then she got up, fumbling for her blue jeans and a sweater, Till’s sweater, rough as burlap but the warmest thing she could find, and how had it gotten so cold?

It took her a while, just sitting there and picturing dry land, a beach on the island, a rock offshore, anything that wasn’t moving, before she was able to get up and work her way into the galley. She filled the percolator with water, poured coffee into the strainer directly from the can without bothering to measure it — she could barely stand, let alone worry about the niceties, and they’d want it strong in any case — and then she set the pot on the burner, but it kept tilting and sliding till she hit on the idea of wedging it there with the big cast-iron pot she intended to make chowder in when they got where they were going. If they ever got there. And what had happened? Had the weather gone crazy all of a sudden? Was it a typhoon? A hurricane?

She looked a fright, she knew it, and she’d have to do something about her hair, but she worked her way up the juddering steps to the bridge and flung herself down on the couch there — or the bench she’d converted to a couch by sewing ties to a set of old plaid cushions she’d found in her parents’ garage. The bridge was close, breath-steamed, smelling of men’s sweat and the muck at the bottom of the sea. Till was right there, just across from her, sitting on his bench at the controls, so near she could have reached out and touched him. The wheel jumped and jumped again, and he fought it with his left hand while forcing the throttle forward and back in the clumsy stiff immalleable grip of the other one. Warren leaned over him, grim-faced. Neither seemed to have noticed her.

It was only then that she became aware of the height of the waves coming at them, rearing black volcanoes of water that took everything out from under the boat and put it right back again, all the while blasting the windows as if there were a hundred fire trucks out there with their hoses all turned on at once. And here was the rhythm, up, down, up, and a rinse of the windows with every repetition. “Where are we?” she heard herself ask.

Till never looked up. He was frozen there, nothing moving but his arms and shoulders. “Don’t know,” Warren said, glancing over his shoulder. “Halfway between Anacapa and Santa Cruz, but with the way this shit’s blowing, who could say?”

“What we need,” Till said, his voice reduced and tentative, as if he really didn’t want to have to form his thoughts aloud, “is to find a place to anchor somewhere out of this wind.”

“That’d be Scorpion Bay, according to the charts, but that’s”—there was a crash, as if the boat had hit a truck head-on, and Warren, all hundred and eighty Marine-honed pounds of him, was flung up against the window as if he were a bag full of nothing. He braced himself, back pressed to the glass. Tried for a smile and failed. “That’s somewhere out ahead of us, straight into the blow.”

“How far?”

Warren shook his head, held tight to the rail that ran round the bridge. “Could be two miles, could be five. I can’t make out a fucking thing, can you?”

“No. But at least we should be okay for depth. There’s a lot of water under us. A whole lot.”

She looked out ahead of them to where the bow dipped to its pounding, but she couldn’t see anything but waves, one springing up off the back of the other, infinite and impatient, coming and coming and coming. Her stomach fell. She thought she might vomit again, but there was nothing left to bring up. “What happened to the weather?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the wind, but it wasn’t a question really, more an observation in search of some kind of assurance. She wanted them to tell her that this was nothing they couldn’t handle, just a little blow that would peter out before long, after which the sun would come back to illuminate the world and all would be as calm and peaceful as it was last night when the waves lapped the hull and the sandwiches and beer went down and stayed down in the pure pleasure of the moment. No one answered. She wasn’t scared, not yet, because all this was so new to her and because she trusted Till — Till knew what he was doing. He always did. “I put on coffee,” she said, though the thought of it, of the smell and taste of it and the way it clung viscously to the inside of the cup in a discolored slick, made her feel weak all over again. “You boys”—she had to force the words out—“think you might want a cup?”

Then she was back down in the galley, banging her elbows and knees, flung from one position to another, and when she reached for the coffeepot it jumped off the stove of its own volition and scalded her right hand. Before she could register the shock of it, the pot was on the deck, the top spun off and the steaming grounds and six good cups of black coffee spewed across the galley. Her first thought was for the deck — the coffee would stain, eat through the varnish like acid — and before she looked to her burn she was down on her hands and knees, caroming from one corner of the cabin to the other like the silver ball in a pinball machine, dabbing at the mess as she went by with a rag that became so instantaneously and unforgivingly hot she burned her hand a second time. When finally she’d got the deck cleaned up as best she could, she fell back into the bench at the table, angry now, angry at the boat and the sea and the men who’d dragged her out here into this shitty little rattling sea-stinking jail cell, and she swore she’d never go out again, never, no matter what promises they made. “There’ll be no coffee and I’m sorry, I am,” she said aloud. “You hear that?” she called out, directing her voice toward the steps at the back of the cabin. “No coffee today, no breakfast, no nothing. I’m through!”

The pain of the burn sparked then, assailing her suddenly with an insidious throbbing and prickling, the blisters already forming and bursting, and she thought of getting up and rubbing butter into the reddened flesh on the back of her hand and between her scalded fingers, but she couldn’t move. She felt heavy all of a sudden, heavier than the boat, heavier than the sea, so heavy she was immovable. She would sit, that was what she would do. Sit right there and ride it out.

That was when the water started coming in through the forward hatch. That was when her feet got wet and she began to feel afraid. That was when she thought for the first time of the life jackets tucked under the seats in the stern that was awash with the piled-up waves — and that was when she pulled herself along the edge of the table to look up into the bridge and see her husband and brother-in-law fighting over the controls even as she heard the engines sputter and catch and finally give out. She caught her breath. Something essential had gone absent in a way that was wrong, deeply wrong, in violation of everything she’d known and believed in since the moment they’d left shore. The ghost had gone out of the machine.