When the Killing's Done (2 page)

Yes. That was the story. That was how it went. And no matter how often she told her own version of what had happened to her grandmother in the furious cold upwelling waters of the Santa Barbara Channel in a time so distant she had to shut her eyes halfway to develop a picture of it—sharper and clearer than her mother’s because her mother hadn’t been there any more than she had, or not in any conscious way—Alma always drew her voice down to a whisper for the payoff, the denouement, the kicker: “Nana was two months’ pregnant when that boat sank.”

She’d pause and make sure to look up, whether she was telling the story across the dining room table to one of her suitemates back when she was in college or a total stranger she’d sat next to on the airplane. “Two months’ pregnant. And she didn’t even know it.” And she’d pause again, to let the significance of that sink in. Her own mother would have been dead in the womb, washed ashore, food for the crabs, and she herself wouldn’t exist, wouldn’t be sitting there with her hair still wet from the shower or threaded in a ponytail through the gap in back of her baseball cap, wouldn’t be teasing out all the nuances and existential implications of the story that was the tale of the world before her, if it weren’t for the toughness—in body, mind and spirit—of the woman she remembered only in her frailty and decrepitude.

Of course, she felt the coldness of it too, the aleatory tumble that swallowed up the unfit and unlucky while the others multiplied. And if there were a thousand generations of shipwrecks in the same family, would their descendants develop gills and webbed toes or would they just learn to stay ashore and ignore those seductive unfettered islands glittering out there on the horizon? She was alive, in the crux of creation, along with everything else sparking in the very instant of her telling, and one day she’d have children herself, add to the sum of things, work the DNA up the ladder. Her mother’s father was dead. And his brother along with him. And her mother’s mother should have been dead too. That was the thing, wasn’t it?

The month was March, the year 1946. Alma’s grandfather—Tilden Matthew Boyd—was six months home from the war in the Pacific that had left him with a withered right arm shorn of meat above the elbow, nothing there but a scar like a seared omelet wrapped around the bone. Her grandmother, young and hopeful and with hair as dark and abundant as her own, broke a bottle over the bow of the
Beverly B.
while Till, restored to her from the vortex of the war in a miraculous dispensation more actual and solid than all the cathedrals in the world, sat at the helm and the gulls dipped overhead and the clouds swept in on a northwesterly breeze to chase the sun over the water. Beverly was happy because Till was happy and they ate their sandwiches and drank the cheap champagne out of paper cups in the cabin because the wind was stiff and the chop wintry and white-capped. Warren was there too that first day, the day of the launching, a walking Dictaphone of unasked-for advice, ringing clichés and long-winded criticism. But he drank the champagne and he showed up two weekends in a row to help Till tinker with the engines and install the teak cabinets and fiddle rails Till had made in the garage of their rented house that needed paint and windowscreens for the mosquitoes and drainpipes to keep the winter rains from shearing off the roof and dousing anybody standing at the front door with a key in her hand and a load of groceries in both her aching arms. But Till had no desire to fix the house—it didn’t belong to them anyway. The
Beverly B.
, though—that was a different story.

She was a sleek twenty-eight-foot all-wood cabin cruiser, solid-built, with butternut bulkheads and teak trim throughout, a real beauty, but she’d been dry-docked and neglected during the war, from which her owner, a Navy man, had never returned. Till spotted the boat listing into the weeds at the back of the boatyard and had tracked down the Navy man’s quietly grieving parents—their boy had been burned to death in a slick of oil after a kamikaze pilot steered himself into the
St. Lo
during the battle of Leyte Gulf—in whose living room he’d sat with his hat perched on one knee while they fingered the photographs and medals that were their son’s last relics. He sat there for two full hours, sipping tepid Lipton tea with a bitter slice of lemon slowly revolving atop it, before he mentioned the boat, and when he did finally mention it, they both stared at him as if he’d crawled up out of the pages of the family album to perch there on the velour cushions of the maplewood couch in the shrouded and barely lit living room they’d inhabited like ghosts since before they could remember. The mother—she must have been in her fifties, stout but with the delicate wrists and ankles of a girl and a face infused with outrage and grief in equal measures—threw back her head and all but yodeled, “That old thing?” Then she looked to her husband and dropped her voice. “I don’t guess Roger’ll be needing it now, will he?”

Over the course of the fall and winter, Till had devoted himself to the task of refitting that boat, haunting the boatyard and the ship chandlery and fooling with the engines until he was so smudged with oil Beverly told anybody who wanted to listen that he half the time looked like he was rigged out in blackface for some old-timey minstrel show. Her joke. Till in blackface. And she used it on Mrs. Viola down at the market and on Warren and the girl he was seeing, Sandra, with the prim mouth and the sweaters she wore so tight you could see every line of her brassiere, straps and cups and all. Careful, that was what Till was. Careful and precise and unerring. He never mentioned it, never complained, but he’d given his right arm for his country and he was determined to keep the left one for himself. And for her. For her, above all.

He had to learn how to make it do the work of his right arm and wrist and hand, punching tickets for the Santa Monica Boulevard line while people looked on impatiently and tried to be polite out of a kind of grudging recognition, the dead hand clenching the ticket stub and the newly dominant one doing the punching, and he learned to use that hand to fold his paycheck over once and present it to her like a ticket itself, a ticket to a moveable feast to which she and she alone was invited. At night, late, after supper and the radio, he’d let the hand play over her nakedness as if it knew no impediment, and that was all right, that was as good as it was going to get, because he was left-handed now and always would be till the day he was gone. And when they launched the
Beverly B.,
he was as gentle and cautious with his boat as he was with her in their marriage bed, the right arm swinging stiffly into play when the wheel revolved under pressure of the left. The first few times they never took her out of sight of the harbor. Till said he wanted to get a feel for her, wanted to break her in, listen to what the twin Chrysler engines had to say when he pushed the throttle all the way forward and watched the tachometer climb to 2,800 RPM.

Then came that Friday evening late in March when she and Till and Warren motored out of the harbor on a course for the nearest of the northern Channel Islands, for Anacapa and the big one beyond it, Santa Cruz, because that was where the fish were, the lingcod as long as your arm, the abalone you only had to pluck off the rocks and more plentiful than the rocks themselves, the lobsters so accommodating they’d crawl right up the anchor line and dunk themselves in the pot. A man at work had told Till all about it. Anybody could go out to Catalina—hell, everybody did go out there, day-trippers and Saturday sailors and the rest—but if you wanted something akin to virgin territory, the northern islands, up off of Oxnard and Santa Barbara, that was the place to go. They’d brought along the two biggest ice chests she’d been able to find at Sears, Roebuck, both of them bristling with the dark slender necks of the beer bottles Warren assured her would have vanished by the time all those fish fillets and boiled lobsters were ready to nestle down there between their sheets of ice for a nice long sleep on the way home.

“We’ll have fish for a week, a week at least,” Till kept saying. “And when they’re gone we can just go out again and again after that.” He gave her a look. He was at the helm, the weather calm, the evening haze with its opalescent tinge clinging to the water before them and the harbor sliding into the wake behind, the beer in his hand barely an encumbrance as he perched there like some sea captain out of a Jack London story. “Which,” he said, knowing how sensitive she’d been on the subject of sinking money into the boat, “should cut our grocery bill by half, half at least.”

She’d made sandwiches at home—liverwurst on white with plenty of mustard and mayo, ham on rye, tunafish salad—and when they settled down in the cabin to take big hungry bites out of them and wet their throats with the beer that was so cold it went down like mountain spring water, it was as if they’d fallen off the edge of the world. After dinner she’d sat out on the stern deck for a long while, the air sweet and unalloyed, everything still but for the steady thrum of the engines that was like the working of a sure steady heart, the heart at the center of the
Beverly B.
, unflagging and assured. There were dolphins, aggregations of them, silvered and pinked as they sluiced through the water and raced the hull to feel the electricity of it. They seemed to be grinning at her, welcoming her, as happy in their element as she was in hers. And what was that story she’d read—was it in the newspaper or
Reader’s Digest
? The one about the boy on his surfboard taken out to sea on a riptide and the sharks coming for him till the dolphins showed up grinning and drove them off because dolphins are mammals, warm-blooded in the cold sea, and they despise the sharks as the cold agents of death they are. Did they nose the boy’s surfboard past the riptide and back into shore, guiding him all the way like guardian angels? Maybe, maybe they did.

The last of the sun was tangled up in the mist ahead of them, due west and west the sun doth sink, the lines of a nursery rhyme scattered in her head. She lifted her feet to the varnished rail and studied her toes, seeing where the polish had faded and thinking to refresh it when she had the chance, when the boys were fishing in the morning and she was stretched out in the sun without a care in the world. The engines hummed. A whole squadron of dark beating birds shot up off the water and looped back again as if they were attached to a flexible band, and not a one of them made the slightest sound. She lit a cigarette, the wind in her hair, and watched her husband through the newly washed windows as he held lightly to the wheel while his brother sat on the upholstered bench beside him, talking, always talking, but in dumb show now because the cabin door was shut and she couldn’t hear a word.

She finished her cigarette and let the butt launch itself into the wind on a tail of red streamers. It was getting chilly, the sky darkening, closing round them like a lid set to an infinite iron pot. One more minute and she’d go in and listen to them talk, men’s talk, about the pie in the sky, the fish in the sea, the carburetors and open-faced reels and lathes and varnishes and tools and brushes and calibrators that made them men, and she’d open another beer too, a celebratory last beer to top off the celebratory three—or was it four?—she’d already had. It was then, just as she was about to rise, that the sea suddenly broke open like a dark spewing mouth and spat something at her, a hurtling shadowy missile that ran straight for her face till she snapped her head aside and it crashed with a reverberant wet thumping slap into the glass of the cabin door and both men wheeled round to see what it was.

She let out a scream. She couldn’t help herself. This thing was alive and flapping there at her feet like some sort of sea bat, as long as her forearm, shivering now and springing up like a jack-in-the-box to fall back again and flap itself across the deck on the tripod of its wings and tail. Wings? It was—it was a fish, wasn’t it? But here was Till, Warren bundled behind him, his face finding the middle passage between alarm and amusement, and he was stepping on the thing, slamming his foot down, hard, bending quickly to snatch the slick wet length of it up off the deck and hold it out to her like an offering in the grip of his good hand. “God, Bev, you gave me a scare—I thought you’d gone and pitched overboard with that scream.”

Warren was laughing behind the sheen of merriment in his eyes. The boat steadied and kept on. “This calls for a toast,” he shouted, raising the beer bottle that was perpetual with him. “Bev’s caught the first fish!”

She was over her fright. But it wasn’t fright—she wasn’t one of those clinging weepy women like you saw in the movies. She’d just been startled, that was all. And who wouldn’t have been, what with this thing, blue as gunmetal above and silver as a stack of coins below, coming at her like a torpedo with no warning at all? “Jesus Lord,” she said, “what
is
it?”

Till held it out for her to take in her own hand, and she was smiling now, on the verge of a good laugh, a shared laugh, but she backed up against the rail while the sky closed in and the wake unraveled behind her. “Haven’t you ever seen a flying fish before?” Till was saying. He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself, woman?” he said, ribbing her. “This is no kitchen or sitting room or steam-heated parlor. You’re out in the wide world now.”

“A toast!” Warren crowed. “To Bev! A-number-one fisherwoman!” And he was about to tip back the bottle when she took hold of his forearm, her hair whipping in the breeze. “Well then,” she said, “in that case, I guess you’re just going to have to get me another beer.”

She woke dry-mouthed, a faint rising vapor lifting somewhere behind her eyes, as if her head had been pumped full of helium while she slept. In the berth across from her, snug under the bow as it skipped and hovered and rapped gently against the cushion of the waves, Till was asleep, his face turned to the wall that wasn’t a wall but the planking of the hull of the ship that held them suspended over a black chasm of water. Below her, down deep, there were things immense and minute, whales, copepods, sharks and sardines, crabs infinite—the bottom alive with them in their horny chitinous legions, the crabs that tore the flesh from the drowned things and fed the scraps into the shearing miniature shredders of their mouths. All this came to her in the instant of waking, without confusion or dislocation—she wasn’t in the double bed they were still making payments on or stretched out on the narrow mattress in the spare room at her parents’ house where she’d waited through a thousand hollow echoing nights for Till to come home and reclaim her. She was at sea. She knew the rocking of the boat as intimately now as if she’d never known anything else, felt the muted drone of the engines deep inside her, in the thump of her heart and the pulse of her blood. At sea. She was at sea.