T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

The door flings open on a smell of the open sea and in the next moment Josh is backing his way in, dragging Kelly along with him, but he can’t manage it all on his own and Wilson gets up to help. Dead weight. The expression comes home to him in a way it never has, never could have, until now. She’s half-in the door, half-out. The boat dips, rises. There’s a smell of something else now, of feces, urine. And then the poncho, a cheap rubberized thing not worth the cost of it, already peeling in places, splits down the side as Josh, bending to the task, tries to get a purchase on it, and there she is, Kelly, sprawled across the stain-resistant carpet, staring up at him all over again.

The digital display on the dash of the car reads 2:15 by the time he swings into the driveway and flicks the remote to roll back the gate. He’s so exhausted he can barely turn the wheel, headlights raking over the lawn and nothing there, no humped-over thieves of the night or overfed housecats on the prowl, just grass, lush and deep and evenly cut, and when he pulls up to the garage and kills the engine he can only sit there, incapable of mustering the strength to push open the door. He can picture the entry hall, the steps up to the bedroom, his bed with its cool sheets and overstuffed pillows and the off-white bedspread his mother crocheted for him, but he remains where he is, frozen there, listening to the heat ticking out of the engine till the motion sensor over the garage abruptly kills the light. Thinking of Anise — he’s got to call her, no matter how late it is — and then of the dogs, locked up all this time in the house, he pushes open the door and the light clicks back on again. Then he’s out on the pavement, standing in his own driveway, at his own house, safe behind the locked gate. He breathes in the night air, lets his head roll back on the fulcrum of his neck so that the sky comes to life above him, the stars on full display and the rain blown out to sea. If it even rained here. Everything is silent, but for the faint muffled whimper of the dogs at the front door.

Of course, there’s shit in the entry hall but he’s got no one to blame for that but himself — he thought he would have been back six or seven hours ago. The dogs are there to greet him, thrashing round his legs before slipping guiltily out into the night, and he leaves the door ajar and goes into the kitchen to see if they need food. Their kibble bowl is empty. Ditto the water bowl. He pours dry food out of the bag, refills the water bowl from the tap, and then leans back against the counter, utterly drained. His mouth is dry, his lips cracked. He pours himself a glass of water and then, unbidden, the idea of food steals into his head — there’s Asiago in the reefer, tomato, avocado, half a loaf of oatnut bread — and right after, the thought of liquor. A shot of something to deaden him. The liquor cabinet gives up its glints of glass, brown, clear and green, and he thinks first of tequila before he remembers the white rum in the freezer. The first shot clears his head, the second starts up his heart again. The sandwich is in the microwave and the dogs clacking their nails on the tile floor and noisily lapping water when he picks up the phone and punches in Anise’s number.

It rings three times and goes to her voice mail. There’s a maddening pause followed by a repeated guitar figure and her strong soaring soprano singing distantly in the background before her recorded voice delivers the standard greeting: “Hi, this is Anise. I’m not here right now. Please leave a message at the beep. Or tone. Or whatever.”

He dials her home phone and lets it ring, seven, eight, nine times, then hangs up and tries the cell again. Finally, just before the recording clicks in, she answers. “You know what time it is?” Her voice is drugged, sleep-thickened.

“I just got back.”

A pause. “Just?”

“It was a fucking nightmare. The worst. You can’t imagine — you’re lucky you weren’t there, you were the smart one.”

“You didn’t get caught, did you?”

“Worse, much worse.”

“What?” All the lethargy is gone from her voice now. He can picture her sitting up in bed, her eyes squinted and her lips pursed in concentration. “Did you wreck the boat or somebody fell overboard or what?”

“Somebody died.”

“Died? What do you mean died?”

“Kelly.” He’s angry suddenly, angry again. All this because of some spastic uncoordinated overweight college girl who couldn’t keep her balance to save her life, literally. Carrying a placard around in a parking lot is one thing and going into the backcountry is another. He doesn’t know what he was thinking. He should have stuck with Wilson. Just him and Wilson. And no reporters either. “She’s dead,” he says. “She fell”—and he’s seeing her all over again, the drained flesh and disarranged limbs, flat white where everything else was dun and gray and green—“out on the island. At Willows. There was nothing we could do. .”

There’s a muffled exclamation on the other end of the line, a selfreflexive curse, muttered low. “Were the police—? Or the Coast Guard?”

He doesn’t want to get into it, doesn’t even know why he called. Or no: he called because he needs to hear her voice, needs comfort — needs, above all, to get this out of him, because no matter how exhausted he is he won’t be able to sleep, he knows that already. “I want you to come over.”

“Come over? I can’t come over. I was in the middle of sleeping, I’ve got work tomorrow. I’m singing at Cold Spring, don’t you remember? The early gig? Five p.m.?”

There were two cop cars waiting at the marina when he pulled into the slip, lights revolving as if they’d just made a traffic stop, and it was the Coast Guard escorting him in for good measure. An ambulance was there too, its own lights chopping up the scene in alternating slices of amber and red, and a rotating cast of gapers and gawkers and half-dead bums roused from the bushes by the prospect of a show. Sterling, looking alert and dressed officially in three-piece suit and tie, kept the police at bay — and kept him from spending the night in jail on a report of criminal trespass radioed in by Alma Boyd Takesue, through Ranger Richard Melman, on behalf of her colleague Annabelle Yuell of the Nature Conservancy. All three of them, even Wilson, were cited and released on their promise to appear in court, at the same time Sterling, a fine sheen of bluster and outrage on his face, insisted on their filing a police report citing Alma and the foreign hunters on the grounds of assault and battery, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress in preventing them from taking the injured — that is, dead — girl to the hospital. Alma was on the island. Sterling was right there standing at the desk in the police station, immovable, his face carved of stone. The report was filed. Josh went home. Wilson went home. Dave went home.

“I need to talk to you,” he says.

“Tomorrow.”

“You don’t understand — we’re screwed, it’s over. Toni Walsh — you should have seen the look on her face. She’s going to crucify me.”

There’s a silence on the other end of the line.

“Come over,” he says.

“Sleep on it, Dave.”

The finality in her voice infuriates him. “No”—he’s shouting suddenly, and the dogs, alarmed, back away from their dish in a scramble of frantic clacking paws—“you fucking sleep on it! I need you. Don’t you hear me?”

A pause. Then, utterly unruffled, calm as a sedative, her voice seeps back to him in a slow drip of unforgiving syllables: “Good night, Dave. See you in the morning.”

He wakes, embittered, just after noon. At what hour he finally did fall off to sleep after lying there staring at the ceiling and listening to every least crepitation of the house as if it were amplified ten times over, he can’t say, but the moment he blinks open his eyes, all the misery and dislocation of the previous day rush in to repossess him. The morning’s gone. If Anise called — or Wilson or Sterling or anybody else, the AP wanting a statement, the Hog Butchers’ Journal , Harley Meachum telling him all four stores burned to the ground simultaneously — he didn’t hear the phone ring. And he’s too sore, mentally and physically, even to think about checking his messages. Fuck them, that’s what he’s thinking. Fuck the world. Fuck them all.