When the Killing's Done (6 page)

Here was the nightmare all over again, but this time there was a difference because she was saved, she’d saved herself, and she kept close to shore, trembling, yes, exhausted, thirsty, but no longer panicked. There wouldn’t be sharks, not this close in, not with the sea full of seals, armies of them barking from the rocks and sending up a sulfurous odor of urine and feces and seal stink. The sea was calmer now too, much calmer—almost gentle—and from time to time she tried floating on her back, head propped on the chest and elbows jackknifed behind her, but invariably she had to roll over and pull herself up as far as she could in an effort to escape the cold. Fog clung to her. Great fields of kelp, dun stalks and yellowed leaves, drifted past. Tiny fishes needled the water around her and were gone.

As the morning wore on, the world began to enlarge above her, birds uncountable lifting off into the fog and gliding back again like ghosts in the ether, the cliffs decapitated above skirts of guano, shrubs and even flowers so high up they might have been planted in air. She let the current carry her, periodically forcing herself to unfurl her legs and paddle to keep on course, telling herself that at any moment she’d come upon a boat at anchor or a beach that spread back to a canyon where she could get up and away from the sea. How far she’d drifted or how long she’d been in the water, she had no way of knowing, the cold sapping her, lulling her, killing her will, every seal-strewn rock and every black-faced cliff so exactly like the last one she began to think she’d circled the island twice already. But she held on, just as she had when the
Beverly B.
went down a whole day and night ago, because it was the only thing she could do.

It must have been late in the morning, the sun lost somewhere in the fog overhead, when finally she found what she was looking for. Or, rather, she didn’t know what she was looking for until it materialized out of the haze in a cove that was no different from all the rest. A rust-peached ladder, so oxidized it was the color of the starfish clinging to the rocks beneath it, seemed to glide across the surface to her, and when she took hold of it she let the chest float free, pulling herself from the water, rung by rung, as from a gently yielding sheath.

The universe stopped rocking. The sea fell away. And she found herself on a path leading steeply upward to where the fog began to tatter and bleed off till it wasn’t there at all. Above her, opening to the sun and the chaparral flecked with yellow blooms that climbed beard-like up the slope, was a shack, two shacks, three, four, all lined up across the bluff as if they’d grown out of the rock itself. The near one—flat-roofed, the boards weathered gray—caught the flame of the sun in its windows till it glowed like a cathedral. And right beside it, where the drainpipe fell away from the roof, was a wooden barrel, a hogshead, set there to catch the rain.

She was in that moment reduced to an animal, nothing more, and her focus was an animal’s focus, her mind stripped of everything but that barrel and its contents, and she never felt the fragmented stone of the path digging into her feet or the weight of the sun crushing her shoulders, never thought of who might be watching her in her nakedness or what that might mean, till she reached it and plunged her face into its depths and drank till she could feel the cool silk thread coming back up again. It was only then that she looked around her. Everything was still, hot, though she shivered in the heat, and her first thought was to call out, absurdly, call “Hello? Is anybody there?” Or why not “Yoo-hoo?” Yoo-hoo would have been equally ridiculous, anything would have. She was as naked as Eve, her blue jeans gone, Till’s sweater jettisoned, her underthings torn from her at some indefinite point in the shifting momentum of her battle against the current and the waves and the sucking rasp of the shingle. When she touched herself, when she brought her hands up to cover her nakedness, they were like two dead things, two fish laid out on a slab, and she fell to her knees in the dirt, hunched and shivering and looking round her with an animal’s dull calculation.

In the next moment she rose and went round the corner of the house to the door at the front, thinking to clothe herself, thinking there must be something inside to cover up with, rags, a bedsheet, an old towel or fisherman’s sweater. But what if there were people in there? What if there was a man? No man on this earth had seen her naked but for the doctor who’d delivered her and Till, and what would she say to Till if there was a man there to see her as she was now? She hesitated, uncertain of what to do. For a long moment she regarded the door in its stubborn inanimacy, a door made of planks nailed to a crosspiece, weather-scored and unrevealing. Beside it, set in the wall at eye level, was a four-pane window so smeared as to be nearly opaque, but she shifted away from the door, cupped her hands to the glass and peered in, all the while feeling as if she were being watched.

Inside, she could make out a crude kitchen counter with a dishpan and an array of what looked to be empty bottles scattered atop it, and beyond that, a sagging cot decorated with an army blanket. A second window, facing north, drew the glare in off the ocean. She tapped at the glass, hoping to forestall anyone who might be lurking inside. Finally, she tried the door, whispering, “Hello? Is anybody home?”

There was no answer. She lifted the latch and pushed open the door to a rustle of movement, dark shapes inhabiting the corners, a spine-sprung book on the floor, shelves, cans, a sou’wester on a hook that made her catch her breath, fooled into thinking someone had been standing there all along. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, the shapes manifesting themselves all at once—furred, quick-footed, tails naked and indolently switching, a host of darkly shining eyes fastening on her without alarm or haste because she was the interloper here, the beggar, she was the one naked and washed up like so much trash—and she let out a low exclamation. Rats. She’d always hated rats, from the time she was in kindergarten and her mother warned her against going near the garbage cans set out in the alley behind their apartment building—“They bite babies,” her mother told her, “big girls too, nip their toes, jump in their hair. You know Janey, upstairs in 7B? They got in her cradle when she was baby. Right here, right in this building.” Her father reinforced the admonition, taking her by the hand and probing with one shoe in the dim corners of the carport so she could see the animals themselves, the corpses of the ones he’d caught in spring traps baited with gobs of peanut butter. In secret, in the dark, they would lick and paw that bait—peanut butter, the same peanut butter she ate on white bread with the crusts cut off—until the guillotine dropped and the blood trailed from their crushed heads and dislocated jaws.
Rats
. Disease carriers, food spoilers, baby biters. But what were they doing here on an untamed island set out in the middle of the sea? Had they swum? Sprouted wings?

The thought came and went. She flapped her arms savagely. “Get out!” she shouted, rushing at them, whirling, clapping her hands. “Get!” They blinked at her—there must have been a dozen or more of them—and then, very slowly, as if it were an imposition, as if they were obeying only because in that moment her need was stronger than theirs, they crept back into their holes. But she was frantic now, snatching the blanket up off the cot without a thought for the rattling dried feces that fell like shot to the floor and wrapping it around her even as she fumbled through the cans on the shelf—peaches in syrup, Boston baked beans, creamed corn—and the utensils tossed helter-skelter in a chipped enamel dishpan set on the counter.

She ate standing. First the peaches, the soothing thick syrup better than anything she’d ever tasted—syrup to lick from the spoon and then from her fingertips, one after the other—then the creamed corn, spooned up out of the can in its essential sweetness, and then, finally, a can of tuna for the feel of it between her teeth. Only when she was sated did she take the time to look around her. The empty cans, evidence of her crime—theft, breaking and entering—lay at her feet. She sank down on the cot, pulling the rough blanket tight round her throat, and saw, with a kind of restrained interest, that the walls were papered over with full sheets torn from magazines, from
Life
and
Look
and the Sunday rotogravure. Pinups gazed back at her, men perched on tanks, Barbara Stanwyck astride a horse. A man lived here, she decided, a man lived here alone. A hermit. A fisherman. Someone shy of women, with whiskers like in the old photos of her grandfather’s time.

She found his clothes in the trunk in the corner. Two white shirts, size small, a blue woolen sweater with red piping and a stained and patched pair of gabardine trousers. Without thinking twice—she’d pay him back ten times over when they came to rescue her—she slipped into the trousers and the less homely of the two shirts and then stepped back outside to see if she could find him. Or one of the men who must have lived in the other shacks, because if there were four shacks there must have been four men. At least. And now, standing outside the door with her face turned to the nearest shack, some hundred feet away, she did, in fact, call out “Yoo-hoo!”

No one answered. The only sounds were the ones she’d become inured to: the sifting of the wind, the slap and roll of the breakers, the strained high-flown cries of the birds. She went to each of the shacks in succession, and though she found signs of recent habitation—a bin of rat-gnawed potatoes, a candle melted into a saucer, more canned goods, crackers gone stale in a tin, fishing gear, lobster traps, two jugs of red wine and what might once have been sherry turning black in the unmarked bottle beneath a float of scum—she didn’t find anyone at home. It was as if she were one of the wandering orphans of a fairy tale arrived in some magical realm where all the inhabitants had been put under a spell, turned to trees or animals—to rats, black rats with no fear of humans. Finally, after searching through all four of the habitations and calling out in the silence of futility, over and over again, she went back to the first shack, opened another can of peaches, ate them slowly, one by one, the juice running down her chin, then stretched out on the cot, wrapped herself in the blanket, and slept.

There was so much she didn’t know. How could she? She was marooned, she’d seen her husband go down in the grip of a rising swell in the open sea (though she wouldn’t admit it to herself, wouldn’t give up that slowly unraveling skein of hope, not yet), she’d never been to the islands before in her life and had no idea where she was or what to expect, and the shack she was in might have dropped down from the sky intact for all she knew. It was a shack and she was in it and it would provide shelter until she was rescued—that was all she needed to know.

Of course, the shack she’d chosen hadn’t dropped down from the sky, though there was certainly something of the numinous in its manifestation there on the bluff in her moment of need. The fact was, it had been created by human agency, by people who had wants and aspirations and very definite monetary goals, as Alma knew full well. Because her grandmother’s story was her touchstone, because she’d read through the newspaper accounts, researched the archives and written papers on the subject in high school and college both, she could say with absolute certainty that Beverly had washed up at Frenchy’s Cove on West Anacapa, the largest and most westerly of the three islets. The shacks—or cabins, as they were originally designated—had been built in 1925 by investors from Ventura, who’d hoped to run a sport fishing camp on the location. They were constructed of board and batten, with simple effects, designed to suit the rugged sorts who might come out to the island for the fishing but didn’t necessarily want to spend their nights in a cramped berth on a yawing boat.

Unfortunately for the investors, the rugged sorts never materialized, the venture failed and the cabins sat unoccupied until a squatter named Raymond “Frenchy” LaDreau moved in and took possession three years later. He lived there alone, making his living off the sea, entertaining the occasional visitor and begging water from every ship that anchored in the cove, whether it be a working boat out of Santa Barbara or Oxnard or a pleasure craft come across the channel for the weekend. What his thoughts and expectations were or whether he was lonely or at peace, no one can say, but he stayed on until 1956, in his eightieth year, when his legs failed him after he took a fall on the shifting stones of the path up from the beach and was forced to return to the mainland for good. He was the owner of the shirt and trousers Beverly was wearing and the cans she’d opened, and he would have been present and accounted for and happy to offer them himself, except that he was away on one of his extended trips to the coast at the time and had no way of knowing he was needed. When finally he did get back, all he felt was outrage over the violation of his space and his things, but it was nothing new—it had happened before, the shacks set there on the bluff like a provocation to the kind of people who think the world exists for them alone, and it would happen again. He would have to buy more peaches, that was all, more beans and creamed corn, and maybe, if he thought of it in the rush and hurry of the hardware store in Oxnard, a padlock.

Beverly woke that first day to the declining light and creeping chill of evening. She sat up with a start, uncertain of where she was, and there were the rats, gathered round, staring at her. They were leisurely, content, taking their ease, draped over the chair pulled up to the counter, nestled in the refuse on the floor, hunched over their working hands and the things they’d stolen to eat. Enraged suddenly, she shoved herself violently from the bed, casting about for something she could attack them with, drive them off,
make them pay
—and here it was, a shovel set in the corner. The rats fell back as she snatched it up and began flailing round the room, the heavy blade falling, digging, caroming off the walls. Within seconds, they were gone and she was left panting in the middle of the room, the shirt binding, the pants grabbing at her hips and the sea through the window as hard as stone.