T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Before they were out of the harbor, Todd was pouring a second round of drinks, and when Lucinda Cherwin demurred with a smile, pointing out that it was only ten-fifteen in the morning and they had all day — and night, for that matter — Todd’s face darkened. “Pussy,” he snapped. And then, for the benefit of the group: “All pussies and lubbers go below. Right?” He leaned into Jonas, grinning tightly. “Am I right?”

What can be forgiven and what cannot? By the time they were five miles offshore, all four guests were in the cabin and Todd and Laurie were on deck in the cockpit, which was open to the sun, the canvas sides and hardtop having been stowed away, and they were arguing about something. Loudly. Violently. There was a punishing thump from the deck above and then Laurie came down the steps to the cabin, bleeding at the corner of her mouth. She was crying — at least Sylvie Ryserson claimed she was, but that was in retrospect — and she went into the head and locked the door and wouldn’t let anyone in. In the meanwhile, Todd was gunning the boat, swerving tightly to port and then jagging to starboard for no reason except that he felt like it, and things started to rattle in the lockers and slide across the cabin floor. Lucinda Cherwin began to feel nauseous and her husband, Jonas at his side, went up on deck to try to reason with Todd, but Todd just sat at the helm, his face frozen, ignoring them.

“Will you listen to me?” The veins stood out in Ed’s neck. He was a contractor, used to giving orders. “I tell you this is bullshit and I don’t care what’s going on between you and your wife but I want you to turn this thing around and take us back. Lucinda’s sick. We’re all sick. Do you hear me?”

Todd never even looked up. He just jerked at the wheel as if he were towing a water skier and threw them both against the rail.

“Todd, come on, man, this isn’t right,” Jonas pleaded, fighting for balance. They were old friends. He was trying to be reasonable. “You know it isn’t. Now you’re going to have to either straighten out or take us back — I mean, you’ve got Lucinda terrified—”

The upshot was that Todd finally did nose the boat around — at speed, in a savage looping turn that very nearly swamped them — and he didn’t say a word all the way back to the marina. When they’d unloaded their bags, the engines running, the air blistered with the reek of diesel and the boat still rocking on its dying wake, Jonas, who was furious at this point, stepped off the boat and shouted up at him, “You can be a real fucking jerk, man, you know that?” Todd looked up from the console then — he had a drink in his hand, another drink — and gave them all the finger. “You’re pussies,” he roared so that people on neighboring boats swung round to stare at him, “pussies, that’s all. All of you!”

No one looked back. If they had, they would have seen that Laurie was out on deck and that she was flying at him, cursing, her hair cartwheeling in the air and her fists drumming at his naked shoulder with its tattoo of a cartoon skunk wrapped round it, even as he shoved her away. What the point of contention was, no one ever knew. But the Anubis , on autopilot, went aground at China Beach ninety minutes later with no one aboard. Speculation has it that at some point in the crossing the violence escalated and the couple, locked together in a rage, tumbled overboard, while the boat, under speed, receded in the distance. The husband’s body, without a mark on it aside from abrasions on both forearms, was recovered that evening in the vicinity of where the couple was presumed to have gone overboard. The wife wasn’t found until the following winter, when her body, face up and still clad in the bikini, washed ashore at Prisoners’ Harbor.

Alma would have missed the story, but for her mother. Her mother found it on the Internet, printed it out and mailed it to her without comment, the headline— Body Found at Santa Cruz Island —underlined in red.

Winter lingered through the end of March, but the rain fell off abruptly and the snowpack wound up being just eighty percent of normal, which meant water woes down the road. Meteorologists talked of the effects of global warming, as if any one season was reflective of anything other than itself, and the Press Citizen ran a number of alarmist articles about the shrinking polar caps, the rising sea level in the Seychelles and the threat of tsunami along the California coast — and all to the good if it got people thinking. Then it was April, a steady swelling sun climbing higher each day, and though Alma knew she should be praying for a last good soaking storm, she couldn’t help feeling uplifted by the opportunity to walk the beach and get some sun on her face and legs. It felt especially good after the grimness of the winter and all she’d been through, the court business over with now, dissolved like a tablet in water, as if it had never been there at all. Maria Campos had proven true to her word — the judge dismissed all charges, not only against her but Frazier, Clive and A.P. too. And why? Because they had no merit, because they weren’t real, and the district attorney saw that, knew that, and declined to prosecute.

April was followed by a gray May, and now, in the first week of June, the sun has vanished and the real gloom has set in. June gloom. That’s the prevailing weather pattern this time of year, the marine layer lingering throughout the day, sometimes clearing in late afternoon, sometimes not at all. It’s the time of seasonal affective disorders for people living along the coast, and she can relate to that, absolutely. This is a La Niña year, so the water is colder than usual, which results in a thicker soup hanging over the condo and the beach and most of downtown, not to mention her office and all of Ventura and Oxnard. The way she’s dealing with it is to get out of the office as much as she possibly can, and for that the island has become her refuge — especially the main ranch, which gets more sun than Scorpion.

She’s there now, lying down in the back room at the field station, trying to close her eyes. Just for a minute. It’s six-thirty in the evening and dinner is about ready, judging from the inescapable scent of sizzling garlic, ginger and green onions arising from the kitchen where the two remaining fox girls — Marguerite and Allison — are concocting a tofu and rockfish stir-fry. She can hear the murmur of voices in the main room, laughter, somebody strumming a guitar. There’ll be a dozen or so for dinner — Frazier, Annabelle, an assortment of hunters (pig boys and fox girls, they’ve been pairing off for the past year now and who could blame them?), the odd biologist, archaeologist, maintenance man, the whole thing very collegial, catch as catch can, tonight you cook, tomorrow I cook.

They’ll be drinking wine. Wine is the sacrament here, and after tramping the backcountry all day, it’s a necessary sacrament. She can picture them there, sprawled around the room, tipping the bottle over a makeshift assortment of glasses, joking, buzzing, gossiping, talking field biology, talking politics and scandal and sex and anything else that comes into their heads in the absence of TV and cell phones. Her friends. Her family. The people who’ve worked with her and under her to pursue rigorous lines of scientific inquiry and not coincidentally eliminate 5,036 feral pigs in just fifteen months, with no sign of a single survivor detectable anywhere on the island. In a minute, she’ll push herself up and go out to join them. She’ll eat — she can’t remember ever having been so ravenous as she’s been the past few weeks — but she won’t join them in a glass of wine, not even the smallest most innocuous little drop.

It’s a struggle, elbows, arms and wrists as weak as if they’ve been de-boned, but she works herself into an upright position and in the next moment her feet are finding their way into the sandals, though the Velcro straps are too much for her and for now at least they’ll have to remain unfastened. She sits there a moment watching the flies gather at the window, their world turned alien on them, the sweet generous air that floated them on its wafting currents to soup pots and trash cans and tender bits of carrion gone as hard and impermeable now as rock, and how could this have happened, what mystery has intervened? They can’t know. They can only fumble and buzz and die, paradise right there before their eyes and unattainable for all that. If she were in Guam still, there’d be a gecko to climb the wall and feast on them, but here the reptiles are more circumspect. But dinner’s ready, definitely, and in the next moment she’s on her feet and moving across the parched floorboards, through the doorway and into the main room, where everybody looks up as one and everybody seems to be grinning.