When the Killing’s Done is my thirteenth novel, published by Viking in February of 2011.  The novel takes up some of the environmental themes of earlier novels such as A Friend of the Earth and The Tortilla Curtain,and stories like “Carnal Knowledge,” “Top of the Food Chain,” “Tooth and Claw” and a host of others.  It is set in the past decade on the California Channel Islands, where a rather testy turf war was fought between animal rights activists and the biologists of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy over the elimination of non-native species of plants and animals, and this provided the inspiration for the book.  In fact, I still preserve a yellowing newspaper headline from six or seven years ago (it’s pinned beneath a magnet on the refrigerator door), which reads: EAGLES ARRIVE AS PIGS ARE KILLED, a reference to the reintroduction of the bald eagle and the eradication of the feral pig.  In my telling, the animal rights activists, led by Dave La Joy, a local businessman, and his folksinger inamorata, Anise Reed, are opposed to the taking of life under any circumstances, while the more practical people of the Park Service, under the direction of the biologist Alma Boyd Takesue, favor elimination of the aliens in the interest of preserving the native species.  Thus, for instance, the rats which prey on native ground-nesting birds must go, as must the sheep and feral pigs, which denude the hillsides.  What this all amounts to is a series of dramatic confrontations between those who say nay and those who say yea, but, as readers will I hope discover, such distinctions become increasingly more complex and ethically challenging.  Just how precious is any given life—and who gets to decide?
 

The epigraph is from Genesis 1:28:
And God blessed them and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The following excerpt comprises the first two chapters, as they first appeared in McSweeney’s, and serves as an historical counterpoint to the current story, which unfolds as above.
 
Excerpt from When the Killing's Done
 
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EXCERPT FROM WHEN THE KILLING'S DONE:

 

THE WRECK OF THE BEVERLY B.
T. Coraghessan Boyle

1

 

Picture her there in the pinched little galley where you could barely stand up without cracking your head, her right hand raw and stinging still from the scald of the coffee she’d dutifully—and foolishly—tried to make so they could have something to keep them going, a good sport, always a good sport though she’d woken up vomiting in her berth not half an hour ago.  She was wearing an oversized cableknit sweater she’d fished out of her husband’s locker because the cabin was so cold, and every fiber of it seemed to chafe her skin as if she’d been flayed raw while she slept.  She hadn’t brushed her hair.  Or her teeth.  She was having trouble keeping her balance, wondering if it was always this rough out here, but she was afraid to ask Till about it, or Warren either.  She didn’t know the first thing about handling a boat or riding out a heavy sea or even reading a chart, as the two of them had been more than happy to remind her every chance they got, and Till told her she should just settle in and enjoy the ride.  Her place was in the kitchen.  Or rather, the galley.  She was going to clean the fish and fry them and when the sun came out—if it came out—she would spread a towel on top of the cabin and rub a mixture of  baby oil and iodine on her legs, lie back, shut her eyes and bask till they were a nice uniform brown.   

It was only now, the boat pitching and rolling and her right hand vibrant with pain, that she realized her feet were wet, her socks clammy and clinging and her new white tennis shoes gone a dark saturate gray.  And why were her feet wet?  Because there was water on the galley deck.  Not coffee—she’d swabbed that up as best she could with a rag—but water.  Salt water.  A thin bellying sheet of it riding toward her and then jerking back as the boat pitched into another trough.  She would have had to sit heavily then, the bench rising up to meet her while she clung to the tabletop with both hands, as helpless in that moment as if she were strapped into one of those lurching rides at the amusement park Till seemed to love so much but that only made her feel as if her stomach had swallowed itself up like in that cartoon of the snake feeding its tail into its own jaws. 

The cuffs of her blue jeans were wet, instantly wet, the boat riding up again and the water shooting back at her, more of it now, a shock of cold up to her ankles.  She tried to call out, but her throat squeezed shut.  The water fled down the length of the deck and came back again, deeper, colder.  Do something! she told herself.  Get up.  Move!  Fighting down her nausea, she pulled herself around the table hand over hand so she could peer up the three steps to where Till sat at the helm, his bad arm rigid as a stick, while Warren, his brother Warren, the ex-Marine, bossy, know-it-all, shoved savagely at him, fighting him for the wheel.  She wanted to warn them, wanted to betray the water in the galley so they could do something about it, so they could stop it, fix it, put things to right, but Warren was shouting, every vein standing out in his neck and the spray exploding over the stern behind him like the whipping tail of an underwater comet.  “Goddamn you, goddamn you to hell!  Keep the bow to the fucking waves!”  The ship lurched sideways, shuddering down the length of it.  “You want to see the whole goddamn shitbox go down . . . ?”      

The month was March, the year 1946.  Seaman First Class 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.  Beverly, young and hopeful and with hair as dark and abundant as any combed-out movie star’s, 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’s 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 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, and 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 out there 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, tuna fish 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 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 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 which 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.
She sat up.  A shaft of moonlight cut through the cabin behind her, slicing the table in two.  Beyond that, a dark well of shadow, and beyond the shadow the steps to the bridge and the green glow of the controls where Warren, with his bunched muscles and engraved mouth, sat piloting them through the night.  She needed—urgently—to use the lavatory.  The head, that is.  And water—she needed a glass of water from the tap in the head that was attached to the forty-gallon tank in the hold that Till had made such a fuss about because you couldn’t waste water, not at sea, where you never knew when you were going to get more.  It had got to the point where she was almost afraid to turn on the tap for fear of losing a single precious drop.  What was that poem from high school?  “Water, water, every where/Nor any drop to drink.”

The mariner, that was it.  The ancient mariner.  And he just had to go and kill that bird, didn’t he?  The albatross.  And what was an albatross, anyway?  Something big and white, judging from the illustration in the book she’d got out of the library.  Like a dinosaur, maybe, only not as big.  Probably extinct now.  But if albatrosses weren’t extinct and one of them came flapping down out of the sky and perched itself on the bow right this minute, she wouldn’t even think about shooting it.  Uh, uh.  Not her.  For one thing, she didn’t have a gun, and even if she had one she wouldn’t know how to use it, but then that wasn’t the point, was it?  If the poem had taught her anything—and she could hear the high-pitched hectoring whine of her twelfth-grade English teacher, Mr. Parminter, rising up somewhere out of the depths of her consciousness—it was about nature, the power of it, the hugeness.  Don’t press your luck.  Don’t upset the balance.  Let the albatross be.  Let all the creatures be, for that matter . . . except maybe the lobsters.  She smiled in the dark at the recollection of Mr. Parminter and that time that seemed like a century ago, when poems and novels and theorems and equations were the whole of her life.  She could hardly believe it had only been four years since she’d graduated.      

Her bare feet swung out of the berth.  The deck was solid, cool, faintly damp.  She was wearing a flannel nightgown that covered her all the way to her toes, though she wished she’d been able to wear something a little sheerer for Till’s sake—but that would have to wait until they were back home in the privacy of their own bedroom.  She was modest and decent, not like the other girls who’d gone out and cheated on their men overseas the first chance they got, and she just didn’t feel comfortable showing herself off in such close quarters with Warren there, even if he was Till’s brother.  She’d seen the way Warren looked at her sometimes, and it was no different from what she’d had to endure since she’d begun to develop in the eighth grade, leers and wolf whistles and all the rest.  She didn’t blame him.  He was a man.  He couldn’t help himself.  And she was proud of her figure, which was her best feature because she’d never be what people would call pretty, or conventionally pretty anyway—she just didn’t want to give him or anybody else the wrong idea.  She was a one-man woman and that was that.  Unlike Sandra, who looked as if she’d been around and who’d shown herself off in a two-piece swimsuit when they’d run the boat down to San Pedro the week before—in a breeze that had her goosebumps all over and wrapped in Warren’s jacket by the time they got back to the dock.   But thank God for small mercies: Sandra had been unable to join them this time around.  She had an engagement in North Hollywood, whatever that meant, but then that wasn’t Beverly’s worry, it was Warren’s.

She slipped into the head, used the toilet, drained her glass of water and then drained another.  Her stomach was queasy.  That last beer, that was what it was.  She ran her fingers through her hair and felt all the body gone out of it, though she’d washed and set it just that morning.  Or yesterday morning, technically.  But she was at sea now and she’d have to make do—and so would Till, who expected her to be made-up and primped and showing herself off like one of the movie stars in the magazines.  She cranked the hand pump to flush, rinsed her hands—precious water, precious—eased the door open and shut it behind her.  As she slid back into bed she was thinking she’d just have to tie her hair up in a kerchief, at least till they got there and she could take a swim, depending on how cold the water was, of course.  Then she was thinking of the mariner again and of Mr. Parminter, who wore a bow tie to class every day and could recite “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by heart.  Then she was asleep.

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 was 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 cabin 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 in his chair 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 was 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 to 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 in 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. 

In the sequel she was on the bridge, trying to make Till and Warren understand about the water in the cabin, water that didn’t belong there, water that was coming in through a breach in the forward hatch that was underwater itself before it shook free of the weight of the waves and sank back down again.  But Till wasn’t listening.  Till, her rock, the man who’d survived the mangling of his arm and the fiery blast of shrapnel that was lodged still in his legs and secreted beneath the constellation of scars on the broad firmament of his back, sat slumped over the controls, distracted and drawn and punching desperately at the starter as Warren, wrapped in a yellow slicker and cursing with every breath, fought his way out the door to the stern while the wind sang through the cabin and all the visible world lost its substantiality. 

Disbelieving, outraged, Till jerked at the controls, but the controls wouldn’t respond.  The boat lolled, staggered, a wave rising up out of nowhere to hit them broadside and drive down the hull till she was sure they were going to capsize.  She might have screamed.  Might have cried out uselessly, her breath coming hard and fast.  It was all she could do to hold on, her jaws clamped, the spray taking flight up and over the cabin as Warren pried open the hatch to the engine compartment, some sort of tool clutched in one hand—Warren, Warren out there on the deck to save the day, but what could he hope to do?  How could anybody fix anything in this chaos? 

He was a blotch of yellow in a world stripped of color, there one moment and gone the next, a big breaching wave flinging him back against the cabin door and pouring half an ocean into the rictus of the engine well.  Till snatched a look at her then, his face drained and hopeless.  Warren, the figure of Warren, flailing limbs and gasping mouth, slammed at the window and rose impossibly out of the foam, the slicker twisted back from his shoulders—inadequate, ridiculous, a child’s jacket, a doll’s—and then he was down again and awash.  In the next instant Till sprang to his feet, twisting up and away from the controls, the wheel swinging wildly, lights blinking across the console, the scuppers inundated, the bilge pump choking on its own infirmity.  He took hold of her wrist, jerking her up out of her seat, and suddenly they were through the door and into the fury of the weather, the wind tearing the breath out of her lungs, the next wave rearing up to knock her to her knees with a fierce icy slap, and she wasn’t sick anymore and she wasn’t tired or worn or dulled.  Everything in her, everything she was, howled at its highest pitch.  They were going to drown, all three of them, she could see that now.  Drown and die and wash up for the crabs.

“What do you think you’re doing?”  Warren, unsteady, hair painted to his face, made to seize Till’s arms as if he meant to dance with him, even as Till shrugged him off and bent to release the skiff.

“It’s our only chance!” Till roared into the wind, his legs tangled and rotating out of sync like a drunken man’s.  He flailed at the shell of the skiff, jerked the lines in a fury.

“You’re nuts!” Warren shouted.  “Out of your fucking mind!”  He was staggering too, fighting for balance, and so was she, helpless, the waves driving at her.  The boat heaved, dead beneath their feet.  “We won’t last five minutes in this sea!”

But here was the skiff, released and free and riding high, and they were in it, Warren leaping to the oars, no thought of the life jackets because the life jackets, for all their newness and viability and their promise to keep men and women and children afloat indefinitely even in the biggest seas, were tucked neatly beneath that bench in the stern of the Beverly B. and the Beverly B. was swamped.  Stalled.  Going down. 

Heavily, like a waterlogged post in a swollen river, the boat shifted away from them.  They’d painted her hull white to contrast with the natural wood of the cabin—a cold pure unblemished white, the white of sheets and carnations—and that whiteness shone now like the ghost image on a negative of a photograph that would never be developed.  Unimpeded, the waves crashed at the windows of the cabin and then the glass was gone and the Beverly B. shifted wearily and dropped down and came back up again.  The decks were below water now, only the cabin’s top showing pale against the dimness of the early morning and the spray that rode the wind like a shroud. 

Beverly was there to witness it, huddled wet and shivering in the bow of the skiff, Till beside her, but she wasn’t clinging to him, not clinging at all because she was too rigid with the need to get out of this, to get away, to get to land.  No regrets.  Let the sea have the boat and all the time and money they’d lavished on her, so long as it spared them, so long as the island was out there in the gloom and it came to them in a rush of foam and black bleeding rock.  They rode up over two waves, three, and they were on a wild ride now, wilder than anything the amusement park would ever dare offer, and all at once they were in a deep pit lined with walls of aquamarine glass, everything held suspended for a single shimmering moment before the walls collapsed on them.  She felt the plunge, the force of it, and all of a sudden she was swimming free, the chill riveting her, and it was instinct that drove her away from the skiff and back to the Beverly B. for something to hold fast to—and there, there it was, rising up and plunging down, and she with it.  The wind tore at her eyes.  The salt blistered her throat. 

She didn’t see Warren, didn’t see where he was, but then she’d got turned around and he could be anywhere.   And Till—she remembered him coming toward her, his good arm cutting the black sheet of the water, until he wasn’t coming anymore.  Where was he?  The waves threw up ramparts and she couldn’t see.  He was calling her, she was sure of it, in the thinnest distant echo of a cracked and winnowed voice, Till’s voice, sucked away on the wind until it was gone.  “Where are you?” she called.  “Till?  Till?” 

The waves took her breath away.  Her bones ached.  Her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.  A period of time elapsed—she couldn’t have said how long—and nothing changed.  She clung to the heaving corpse of the Beverly B. because the Beverly B. was the only thing there was.  At some point, because they were binding her feet, she ducked her head beneath the surface to tear off her tennis sneakers and release them into the void.  Then she loosed her blue jeans, the cuffs as heavy as lead weights.   

When finally the Beverly B. cocked herself up on a wave as big as a continent and then sank down out of sight, she fought away from the vortex it left in its wake and found herself treading water.  The waves lifted and released her, lifted and released her.  She was alone.  Deserted.  The ship gone, Till gone, Warren.  She could feel something flapping inside her like a set of wings, her own panic, the panic that whipped her into a sudden slashing breaststroke and as quickly subsided, and then she was treading water again and she went on treading water for some portion of eternity till there was nothing left in her arms.  Till’s sweater dragged at her.  It was too much, too heavy, and it gave her nothing, not warmth, not comfort, not Till or the feel or smell of him.  She shrugged out of it, snatched a breath, and let it drift down and away from her like the exoskeleton of a creature new-made, born of water and salt and the penetrant chill. 

She tried floating on her back but the wind drove the sea up her nose and into her mouth so that she came up coughing and spewing.  Had she drifted off?  Was she drowning?  Giving up?  She fought the rising fear with her spent arms and the feeble wash of her spent legs.  After a time, she lost all feeling in her limbs and she went down with a lungful of air and the air brought her back up, once, twice, again.  She thrashed for a handhold, for anything, for substance, but there was no solid thing in all that transient medium where the dolphins grinned and the flying fish flew and the sharks came and went as they pleased.

And Till?  Where was Till?  He could have been right there, ten feet away, and she wouldn’t have known it.  She closed her eyes, snatched a breath, let herself drift down and let herself come back again.  Once more.  Could she do it once more?  She’d never known despair, but it was in her now, colder than the water, creeping numbly up from her feet and into her ankles and legs and torso, overwhelming her, claiming her degree by degree.  Water, water every where.  Just as she was about to surrender, to open herself up, open wide and let the harsh insistent unforgiving current flow through her and tug her down to where the waves couldn’t touch her ever again, the ocean gave her something back: it was a chest, an ice chest, floating low in the water under the weight of its burden.  A silver thing, silver as the belly of her fish.  Sears & Roebuck.  Guaranteed for life.  She claimed it as her own, and though she couldn’t get atop it, it was there and it sustained her as the wind bit and the sun rose up out of the gloom to parch her lips and scorch the taut white mask of her upturned face.

 

2

 

She had never been so thirsty in all her life.  Had never known what it was, what it truly meant, when she read in the magazines of the Bedouin tumbling from their camels and their camels dying beneath them or the G.I.’s stalking the rumor of Rommel’s Panzers across the dunes of North Africa and water only a mirage, because she’d lived in a house with a tap in a place where the grass was wet with dew in the morning and you could get a Coca-Cola at any lunch counter or in the machine at the service station around the corner.  If she was thirsty, she drank.  That was all. 

Now she knew.  Now she knew what it was like to go without, to feel the talons clawing at your throat, the tongue furred and bloating in the tomb of your mouth, barely able to swallow, to breathe.  There was ice in the chest—and beer, chilled beer, the bottles clinking and chirping with the rhythm of the waves—but she didn’t dare crack the lid, even for an instant.  It was the air inside that kept her afloat and if she lifted the lid the air would rush out and where would she be then?  The bottles clinked.  Her throat swelled.  The sun beat at her face.  But this was a special brand of torture, reserved just for her, worse than anything devised by the most sadistic Jap commandant, and she kept wondering what she’d done to deserve it—the ice right there, the beer, the sweet cold sparkling pale golden liquid in the bottle that would shine with condensation just inches away, and she dying of thirst. 

She swallowed involuntarily at the thought of it, the lining of her throat as raw as when she’d had tonsillitis as a girl and twisted in agony with the blinds closed and the starched rigid sheets biting into her till her mother came like an angel of mercy with ginger ale in a tall cold glass, with sherbet, Jell-o, ice cubes made of Welch’s grape juice to suck and roll over her tongue and clench between her teeth till all the moisture was gone.  Her mother’s hand reached out to her, she saw it, saw it right there framed against the waves, and her mother’s face and the dripping glass poised in her hand.  It was too much to bear.  She gave in and wet her lips with seawater, though she knew she shouldn’t, knew it was wrong and would only make things worse, and yet she couldn’t help herself, her tongue probing and lapping as if it weren’t attached to her at all.  The relief was instantaneous, flooding her like a drug—water, there was water inside her.  But then, almost immediately, her throat swelled shut and her cracked lips began to bleed.

To bleed.  That was the secondary problem: blood.  Both her elbows were scraped and raw and there was a deep irregular gash on the back of her left hand, the one the scalding coffee hadn’t touched.  How it had got there, she couldn’t say, and she was so numb from the cold she couldn’t feel the sting of it, though clearly it would need stitches to close the wound and there’d be a scar, and for some time now she’d been idly examining the torn flesh there, thinking she’d have to see a doctor when they got back and already making up a little speech for him, how she’d want a really top-notch man because she just couldn’t stomach having her skin spoiled, not at her age.  But she was bleeding in the here and now, each wave washing the gash anew and extracting from it a pale tincture of pinkish liquid that dissolved instantly and was gone.  That liquid was blood.  And blood attracted sharks.

Again the flap of panic.  Her legs trailed behind her like lures, like a provocation, like bait, and she couldn’t see them, could barely feel them.  If the sharks came—when they came—she’d have no defense.  She was trapped in a childhood nightmare, a vestigial dream of the time before there was land, when all the creatures there were floated free amidst the flotilla of shining jaws that would swallow them.  She tried to hold her hand up out of the water.  Tried not to think about what was beneath her, behind her, rising even now from the lazy depths like a balloon trailing across the sky at dusk.  But she had to think.  Had to terrify herself just to stay alive.

For as long as the ice chest had been there she’d maneuvered around it, straddling it like an equestrian as it rode beneath the clamp of her thighs, pushing it all the way down to tamp it with her feet and perch tentatively atop the tenuous wavering shelf of it, lying flat with its lid tucked between her abdomen and breasts so that her back was arched and her legs could spread wide for balance.  Now she tried to huddle atop it, to kneel beneath the full weight of her limbs and torso as if she were praying—and she was praying, she was—struggling to hold her gashed hand clear of the water and balance there like an acrobat stalled on the high wire, but the waves wouldn’t allow it.  She kept slipping down while the cooler bobbed up and away from her so that she had to swim free and snatch it back in a single searing beat of white-hot terror, thinking only of a mute streaking shape lunging out of the depths to snatch her up in its basket of teeth.   

She’d seen a shark only once in her life.  It was on the Santa Monica pier, just after Till had come home from overseas.  They’d walked on the beach for hours and then promenaded all the way to the end of the pier, her arm in his, the stripped pale boards rocking gently beneath their feet and the sea air deliciously cool against their skin.  She was so alive in that moment, so attuned to Till and his transformation from the recollected to the actual, to the flesh, to the hand round her waist and the voice murmuring in her ear, that the smallest things thrilled her with their novelty, as if no one had ever conceived of them before.  A paper cone of cotton candy, so intensely pink it was otherworldly, seemed as strange to her as if it had been delivered there by Martians from outer space.  Ditto the tattooed man exhibiting himself in his bathing trunks in the hope of spare change and the eighty-year-old beauty queen in the two-piece—even the taste of the burger with chopped raw onions and plenty of catsup they ate standing under the sunstruck awning of the stand at the foot of the pier that was like no other burger she’d ever had.  Her feet weren’t even on the ground.  They were there in the flesh, both of them, she and Till, strolling along like any normal couple who could go home to bed anytime the urge took them, day or night, or go get a highball and listen to the jukebox in the corner of some dark roadhouse or drive slow and sweet along Ocean Boulevard with the windows down and the breeze fanning their hair.  It was her dream made concrete.  But then, right there in the middle of that dream, was the shark.

There was a crowd gathered at the far end of the pier and they’d gone toward it casually, out of idle curiosity, people looping this way and that, little kids squirming through to the front for a closer view, and there it was, more novelty, the first shark she’d ever seen outside of a picture book.  It was suspended by its tail on a thick braid of cable that held it, dripping, just above the bleached boards of the dock.  The fisherman—a Negro, and that was a novelty too, a Negro fisherman on the Santa Monica pier—stood just off to the left of it while his companion, another Negro, took his photograph with a Brownie camera.  “Hold steady now,” the second man said.  “Less have a smile.  C’mon, give us a grin.”

A woman beside her made a noise in her throat, an admixture of disgust and fascination.  “What is it?” the woman said.  “A swordfish?”
The first man, the fisherman, smiled wide and the camera clicked.  “You see a sword?” he asked rhetorically.  “I don’t see no sword.”
“It’s a dolphin,” somebody said.

“Ain’t no dolphin,” the fisherman retorted, enjoying himself immensely.  “Ain’t no tunafish neither.”  He bent close to the thing, to the half-moon of the gill slit and the staring eye, and then cupped a hand over the unresisting snout and tugged upward.  “See them teeth?”

And there they were, suddenly revealed, a whole landscape of stacked and serrated teeth running off into the terra incognita of the dark gullet, and it came to her that this was a shark, the scourge of the sea, the one thing that preyed on all the rest, that rose up in a blanket of foam to ravage a seal or maim a surfer and ignite an inflammatory headline out of La Jolla or Redondo Beach that everybody forgot about a week later. 

“What this is, what you looking at right now?  This a great white shark, seven feet six inches long.  As bad as it gets.  And this one’s not much more than a baby.  Hell, they five feet long when they come out their mother.”

The crowd pressed in.  Till’s eyes were gleaming, and this was a thing he could appreciate, a man’s thing, as bad as it gets.  There was only one question left to ask and she heard her own voice quaver as she asked it: “Where did you catch it?”

A pause.  A smile.  Another click of the camera.  “Why, right here, right off the end of the dock.”

The image had stayed with her a long while.  She’d asked Till about it, about how that could be, what the man had said—right off the dock, right there where she’d been swimming since she was a little girl—and he’d tried to reassure her.  “They can turn up anywhere, I suppose,” he said, “but it’s rare here.  Really rare.”  He gave her a squeeze, pulled her to him.  “Where you really find them,” and he pointed now, out into the band of mist that fell across the horizon, “is out there.  Off the islands.”

People died of shark bite.  They died of thirst.  Of hypothermia.  She was dressed in nothing but bra and panties, naked to the water and the water sucking the heat from her minute by minute, and she clung there and shivered and felt the volition go out of her.  Let the sharks come, she was thinking, dreaming, the cold lulling her now till she was like the man in that other Jack London story, the one who laid himself down and died because he couldn’t build a fire.  Well, she couldn’t build a fire either because water wouldn’t burn and there was nothing in this world that wasn’t water.

She woke sputtering, choked awake, a cold fist in her throat.  She was coughing—hacking, heaving, retching—and the violence of it brought her back again.  Sun, sea, wind, waves.  Sun.  Sea.  Wind.  Waves.  The ice chest bobbed and she bobbed with it.  And then, all at once, there was something else there with her, something new, a living thing that broke the surface in a fierce boiling suddenness that annihilated her, the shark, the shark come finally to draw the shroud.  She shut her eyes, averted her face.  She didn’t draw up her legs because there was no point in it now, the drop was coming, the first rending shock of the jaws, sadness spreading though her like a stain in water, sadness for Till, for her parents, for what might have been . . . but the next moment slipped by and the moment after that and still she was there and still she was whole, bobbing along with the ice chest, bobbing.

The next splash was closer.  She forced open her eyes, tried to focus through the drooping curtains of her swollen lids.  Her pupils burned.  The blood pounded in her ears.  It took her a moment to understand that this wasn’t a shark, wasn’t a fish at all—fish didn’t have dog faces and whiskers and eyes as round and darkly glowing as a human’s.  She stared into those eyes, amazed, until they sank away in the wash and she looked beyond the swirl of foam to the sun-scoured wall of rock rising out of the mist above her.

 

Anacapa is the smallest of the four islands that form the archipelago of the northern channel islands and the closest to the mainland, a mere eleven miles from its eastern tip to the harbor at Oxnard.  It parallels the coast in its east/west orientation, from Arch Rock in the east to Rat Point on the western verge, and is, geologically speaking, a seaward extension of the Santa Monica Mountains.  In actuality, Anacapa comprises three separate islets, connected only during extreme low tides, and it is of volcanic origin, composed primarily of basalt dating from the Miocene period.  All three islets are largely inaccessible from the sea, featuring tall looming circumvallate cliffs and strips of cliff-side beach that darkly glisten with the detritus ground out of the rock by the action of the waves.  As seen from the air, the islets form a narrow snaking band like the spine of a sea serpent, the ridges articulated like vertebrae, claws fully extended, jaws agape, tail thrashing out against the grip of the current.  Seabirds nest atop the cliffs here and on the tableland beyond—Xantus’ murrelet, the brown pelican and Brandt’s cormorant among them—and pinnipeds racket along the shore.  Average rainfall is less than twelve inches annually.  There is no permanent source of water.

Beverly knew none of this.  She didn’t know that the landfall looming over her was Anacapa or that she’d drifted some six miles by this point.  She knew only that rock was solid and water was not and she made for it with all the strength left in her.  Twice she went under and came up gasping and it was all she could do to keep hold of the ice chest in the roiling surf that had begun to crash round her.  All at once she was in the breakers and the chest was torn from her, gone suddenly, and she had no choice but to squeeze her eyes shut and extend her arms and ride the wave till the force of it flung her like so much wrack at the base of the cliff.  Stones rolled and collided beneath her knees and the frantic grabbing of her hands, she was tossed sideways and the breath pounded out of her, but her fingers snatched at something else there, sand, the floor of a beach gouged out of the rock.  It was nothing more than a semicircular pit, churning like a washing machine, but it was palpable and it held her and when the wave sucked back she was standing on solid ground.  She might have felt a surge of relief, but she didn’t have a chance.  Because she was shivering.  Dripping.  Staggering.  And the next wave was already coming at her.

The foam shot in, sudsing at her knees, driving her back awkwardly against the punishing black wall of the overhang.  She found herself stumbling to her left, even as the next breaker thundered in, and then she was crawling on hands and knees up and away from it, the rock pitted and sharp and yet slick all the same, up and out of the water and onto a narrow perch that was no wider than her berth on the Beverly B.  She hugged her knees to her chest, clamped her hands round her shoulders, shaking with cold.  Her hair hung limp in her face.  The waves crashed and dissolved in mist and everything smelled of funk and rot and the protoplasmic surfeit of all those galaxies of wheeling, biting, wanting things that hadn’t survived the day.  She didn’t think about Till or the boat or Warren, her mind drawn down to nothing.  She just stared numbly at the wash as it stripped the beach and gave it back again, torn strands of kelp struggling to and fro, a float of driftwood, the suck and roar, and then she was asleep.

When she woke it was to the sun and the beach that had grown marginally bigger, a scallop of blackly glistening sand emerging from the receding tide, the teeth of the rocks exposed now and the wet gums clamped beneath them.  She’d been in the shadows all this time, huddled on her perch, tucked away from the tidal wash and the sun too, but now the sun had moved out into the channel and the heat of it touched her and roused her.  For a long while she sat there, absorbing the warmth, and if she was sunburned it didn’t matter a whit because she’d rather be burned than frozen, burned anytime, scorched and roasted till she peeled, because anything was better than the cold locked up inside her, a numbness so deeply immured in her she might as well have been a corpse.  She gazed out on the sea with a kind of hatred she’d never known, hating the monotony of it, the indifference, the marrow-draining chill.  And then, abruptly, she was thirsty.  Still thirsty.  Thirstier than she’d been out there on the sea when she was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life.

In that moment her eye jumped to the gleam of metal at the near end of the cove.  The ice chest.  There it was, upright in the sand, its lid still fastened.  She sprang down from the rock, slimed and filthy, her limbs battered and her tongue made of felt, and ran to it, tore back the lid and saw that the ice was gone and the bottles smashed—all but one, the precious last remaining dark brown sweating bottle with the label soaked off and sand worked up under the cap.  Lifting the beer to the sun, she could see that it was intact, its bubbles infused with light and rising in a slow hypnotic dance.  Beer.  Cold beer.  But she had no opener, no churchkey, no knife or screwdriver or tool of any kind.  And where was Till?  Where was he when she needed him?

She remembered how casually he would slam the neck of his beer against the edge of the counter or the work bench in the garage and how instantly the cap would fly up and away and the cold aperture of the bottle came to his lips, all in a single fluid motion, as if the opening and the draining of the bottle comprised the same continuous physical process.  Overhead, chased on a draft, a gull appraised her, mewed over her torn and abraded flesh, and was gone.  She looked wildly around her for something, anything, to make a tool of, but there was nothing but sand and driftwood and rock. 

Rock. Rock would do it.  Of course it would.  And then she was smoothing her hand over the wall of the overhang, feeling for a rough spot, a ledge, any kind of projection, and here, here it was, the cap poised just so and the weight of her burned hand coming down on it, once, twice . . . and nothing.  She worked at it, frantic now, angry, furious, but the best she could do was flatten the ridges till the cap was even more secure than when she’d begun, and it was too much, she couldn’t take a single second more of this—and then it was done, the neck shattered and gaping and she draining the whole thing in three airless gulps and if there was glass in it and if the glass cut her open from esophagus to gut she didn’t give a damn because she was drinking and that was the only thing that mattered.

But the beer was gone and the thirst was there still, rattling inside her like a field of cane in a desert wind, and was it any surprise she was light-headed?  She’d always been a capable drinker, proud of her ability to match Till beer for beer, but this one hit her hard and before she knew it she was down in the sand, sitting there cross-legged like a statue of the Buddha, as if that was what she’d meant to do all along.  The sun seemed to have shifted somehow in the interval, dropping down close to the flattening gray surface of the sea where the fog could take hold of it and snuff it out like the burned-up butt of the cigarette she suddenly wanted as much as she wanted water.  She stood shakily and went to the ice chest.  It was right where she’d left it not ten minutes ago (or had it been longer?  Had she dozed off?), but now the incoming tide was running up the beach to take it from her all over again.  Seizing it by one corner, she dragged it awkwardly across the sand to the declivity beneath the overhang, then worked it up to her perch six feet above the beach.  Inside, amidst the litter of broken bottles and stripes of sand and weed, there was a  liquid that might have been a mix of beer and meltwater, that might have been potable, that might have quenched her thirst, but when she thrust a finger into it and licked that finger all she could taste was salt. 

Dusk fell, aided and abetted by the fog, which closed off the beach even as the tide ran in, and though the water was up past her knees, she probed the scalloped ledges at both ends of the cove, looking for a way out.  She braced herself, one foot up, then the other, straining for a handhold.  Working patiently, her face pressed to the rock, she got as high as fifteen or twenty feet above the beach, but after she fell for the third time, coming down hard amidst the litter and the cold shock of the water, she gave up.  It was no use.  She was trapped.  A single pulse of panic flickered through her, but she suppressed it.  She wasn’t afraid, not anymore—that was behind her.  All she felt was frustration.  Anger.  Why had she been spared only to wash up here to die of thirst, hunger, cold?  Where was God’s hand in that?  Where was His purpose?  Finally, when it was fully dark and the fog settled in so impenetrably as to close off even the stars, let alone the running lights of any boat that might have been plying the channel looking for them, for survivors—and here she saw Till and Warren, wrapped in blankets in a gently rocking cabin, the glow of the varnished wood, lanterns a-sway, mugs of hot coffee pressed to their lips—she held fast to the ice chest and willed herself asleep.

In the morning, at first light, there was the sound of the gulls that was like the opening and closing of a door on recalcitrant hinges, but there was no door here, no bed or room or clothes or warmth, and she couldn’t see the gulls for the fog.  She shivered into the light, slapping at her thighs and shoulders and huddling in the cradle of her arms, and then the thirst took hold of her.  It roused her and she rose to her feet, fighting for balance, the tide having receded and risen all over again, reducing her world to this rock and the wall above her.  She wanted a pitcher of water, that was all, envisioning the white bone china pitcher in the kitchen at home, a hand-me-down from her mother she brought out for special occasions, and it took her a long moment to realize that there was a persistent cold drip tapping at her shoulder and that she’d been shifting unconsciously to avoid it.  She lifted her face and saw that the cliff was wet, the fog whispering across the rock above her, condensing there, dripping, dripping.

What she didn’t know was that forty years earlier a man named H. Bay Webster had leased the island from the federal government for the purpose of raising sheep, but that the sheep had failed to thrive because of overgrazing and lack of water, and that finally, in their distress, had been reduced to licking the dew each from the other’s fleece in order to survive.  Not that it mattered.  All that mattered was this drip.  She held her tongue out to it, licked the rock as if it were a snow-cone presented to her by the lady behind the concession stand at the county fair.  And when one of the little green shore crabs came within reach, a flattened thing, no more than two inches across, she crushed it beneath her foot and then fed the salty cold wet fragments into her mouth. 

It took her a long while after that to get her courage up, because she knew now what she had to do though her whole being revolted against it.  She kept praying that someone would come for her, that the prow of a ship would ease out of the fog or a rope come hurtling down from above, anything to spare her getting back into that killing water.  The funny thing was that she’d always liked swimming—she’d joined the swim team in school and trained so relentlessly her hair never seemed to be really dry her whole senior year—but now, as she climbed down from the rock, clutched the ice chest to her and fought through the surf, she hated it more than anything in the world.  Instantly, she was cold through to the bone and thrashing for warmth, then she was fighting past the breakers and out into the sea.
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.

 

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. 

She went out the door then, the rage still building in her, muttering to herself, letting out a string of obscenities she never until that moment realized she knew, and began tearing through the heap of driftwood stacked behind the shack.  Without thinking, without regard for her unprotected hands or the sobs rising in her throat, she flung one log after another over her shoulder and onto the flat between the shacks.  When all of it was heaped in a towering pyre and the sweat stung at her eyes and soaked her hair till the ends hung limp, she went barefoot down the path to the beach and scoured the sand for anything that would burn and she hauled that up too.  There was newspaper, rat-shredded, in a cardboard box just inside the door of the second shack.  The matches she found in a jar atop the woodstove.
She waited till it was full dark, hunched over her knees in the too-tight shirt and the blue sweater with the red piping that smelled of a strange man’s sweat, eating pork and beans from the can and savoring each morsel, before she lit her signal fire.  And when she lit it and fed it and kept on feeding it, the flames rose thirty feet in the air, visible all the way to the mainland she could just make out through the gauze of fog as a series of drifting unsteady lights, as if the stars had fallen into the sea.  The fire raged, sparked, tore open the night.  Someone would see it, she told herself, someone was sure to see it.  That first night she even called out at intervals, a hollow shrill gargle of sound that was meant to pierce the fog, ride out over the sea and strike the hull of whatever boat might be passing in the night to see her fire and hear her call.  The second night, she saved her breath.  By the third night she’d used up nearly all the wood she could scavenge and thought of setting the shacks afire—or the chaparral.  At the end of the first week, she was resigned.  She scattered rats, ate from the cans, drank from the barrel.  When she wasn’t gathering wood she lay in bed, dozing, thumbing through the yellowed newspapers to weigh the news of events that had been decided years ago, politics, economics, war stories, and would the Allies take Monte Cassino and push through to Rome, would the Marines land at Guadalcanal, would Tojo triumph or turn his sword on his own yellow belly?

The rats persisted, gnawing, thieving, slipping in and out of their cracks, thumping in the night, and she persisted too—her fires, of necessity, smaller, but beacons nonetheless, urgent smoldering pleas for help, for release.  She saw boats suspended in the distance with their tiny quavering sails and she waved her arms like a cheerleader, fashioned flags from sticks and the tatters of an old faded-to-pink towel and waved them too, but the boats never grew larger or drifted out of frame, as static as figures on a canvas tacked to the very farthest wall in the most enormous room in the world.  No one came.  No one landed.  No one existed.  And where was Till?  Where was he?  He would have come for her by now, if he was alive, and how could he possibly have died in America, aboard his own boat off the lobster-rich Channel Islands, when the Japs hadn’t been able to sink him in the whole wide blinding expanse of the Pacific? 

The answer was too hard to grasp so she let it go.  She let it all go.  Even the rats.  And then, on the first day of what would have been the third week of her imprisonment in a place she’d come to loathe in its changeless, ceaseless, ongoing and never-ending placidity and indifference and sheer brainless endurance, a Coast Guard cutter, free as a cloud, rounded the point and motored into the cove.

And what did the Coast Guard find?  A sunburned woman unused to the sound of her own voice, her hair stringy and flat and her eyes focused on nothing.  She was the wife of a drowned man, a widow, that was all.  She climbed into the rowboat and the sea shifted beneath her and kept on shifting until the big boat, the cutter, sliced across the channel under the downpouring sun, until the shore, with its sharply etched houses, swaying palms and glinting automobiles, rose up to take her in and hold her as firmly and securely as she could ever hope to be held again.


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