When the Killing's Done

by Boyle, T. C.

  When finally he does get to the water, riding a cascade of rock and mud—and what’s it been, five minutes, ten?—it’s all he can do to keep from being swept away himself. As it is, he plunges in up to his waist before he can catch hold of the embankment with one hand and the crown of a slick streaming willow with the other and still he can feel the current tugging at him as if it’s alive. There are shouts from above. Tumblings of pebbles, sticks, brush. He looks up, outraged, to see that two of them—Cammy and Josh—are working their way down to him. Don’t they understand? Don’t they realize the danger? “Go back!” he roars, never so furious in his life.

  It is then, even as he jerks his legs from the water and lurches upright in the clinging unstable mud that keeps giving way underfoot as if he’s on a treadmill, as if he’s running in place in a waking nightmare, that the magnitude of what’s going down begins to hit him. If she’s hurt—Kelly, and all he can think of is the way she went over the side as if she’d been snatched by the collar, helpless, utterly helpless—there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do. To the Coast Guard. The cops. The newspapers and the membership of FPA and everybody out there who’s going to do the hard calculus that measures the fate of the animals against human suffering, human life, and what are they going to do, interview her in her hospital bed? Autograph her cast?

  It’s a mess. A fucking disaster. And he’s moving now, humping low along the waterline, clinging to whatever he can catch hold of, frantic to find her, save her, get her out of this and back to the boat, wrap her in blankets, feed her hot soup, anything, brandy, crank the heater, and the one thing he won’t allow, won’t even think of, is the darker apprehension that Kelly, with her eager face and pear shape and the patch she wears on her sleeve—Animals are not ours to eat, wear or experiment on—is beyond any help he or anyone else can give her.

  The rain has slackened to a drizzle, the light fading from the sky, the harsh clawing rush of the river the only thing he’s ever known—bonecold, aching, sick in his soul—by the time they find her. She glows against the dark tumbled backdrop of torn brush and brutalized trees, pale as a mushroom, because what the water has done, the force of it, is strip the clothes from her so that there’s no trace left of her sweatshirt, her shorts or the khaki rain slicker either. He’s the one fighting the current to reach her while the others form a human chain and pay out the rope somebody found in the bottom of a daypack, and he’s the one to touch her, her cold naked flesh, and see the way the rocks have treated her and how her face rides low in the water while a willow branch, caught in the crevice of her underarm, waves back and forth in an imposture of animation.

  She’s been carried all the way down to where they started, where the resuscitated river undercuts the rock on one side and sweeps wide to fling its refuse on the other—if only they’d known they could have gotten to her sooner. But they didn’t know and they had to work their way down-canyon foot by foot, scanning the banks and calling her name till the voices died in their throats. Is there irony in that? He doesn’t know. All he knows is the moment and the moment is as bleak and sorrowful as anything he’s ever had to live through on this earth. When he takes hold of her, thinking of how Cammy kept saying she knew CPR—she’d been in junior lifeguards when she was in high school and trained on dummies, that’s what she kept repeating, her eyes tearing, her breath coming fast—he has to brace himself against the bottom, the heavy freight of the water at his back, pushing him, jerking his legs out from under him, though it can’t be more than five feet deep here, and that’s another irony. He wraps an arm round her shoulder but can’t really get much purchase—she’s stuck fast, tangled in the branches, that’s what it is—and his impulse is to be gentle with her, but gentle does nothing, and so he tugs, actually tugs at her as if this is a game, a contest of wills, as if she’s tugging back. From the bank, Suzanne’s voice, thick with phlegm: “Is she okay?”

  He is racked with the cold, hypothermic, losing it, but he will not give up, jerking and twisting at the soft obstinacy of her till all at once she breaks free, a disjointed branch of the willow coming with her in a cortege of gently nodding leaves, but he can’t hold her, her face revolving to fix a censorious stare on him as the current tears her away. There’s a cry from shore, frantic activity, but he’s lost his hold on the rope too and what’s left of the tree gives way under his frantic clutch. He’s adrift. Churning his feet, windmilling his arms, fighting it, but the river has him and the river is going to do what it will. Something clutches at his groin beneath the surface and then there’s a hard fist of wood coming up on him to pound the side of his head and then there’s another and another and now the river has him by the neck and his face is being pushed down in the murk and for one annihilating moment he can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t find his way up.

  Then suddenly the pushing stops and he feels himself flung atop a vast bristling sieve of debris, the current sucking away beneath him. He snaps open his eyes, thrashes his head back and forth to clear it. Kelly is right there beside him, so close he could reach out and touch her. She’s on her back, her limbs splayed, her face turned to the sky. Her breasts sag away from her rib cage, her pubic hair smudges her crotch. And her skin, her skin is flayed and raw, the meat showing through in a long scything gash that runs from knee to hip. One foot, the one nearest him, has managed to retain its hiking boot. There’s something—a scrap of material, blue, polka dots—cinched round one thigh. Her fingers are clenched. What he wants is to push himself up, up and away from her, to get out of this, to run, but he can’t—it’s as if his muscles are locked, as if he’s had a stroke, as if the sky has fallen in on him and he can’t get out from under its weight. And so he lies there for the longest moment of his life, studying the tight twist of her laces, the sock shredded at the ankle, the waffled grid of the sole of her boot that’s been washed so clean it might have been new from the box.

  He does get up finally, of course he does, and when he gets up Josh and Cammy are there, picking their way through the black tangle of branches while the other two, Suzanne and Toni, look on helplessly from the far embankment. There’s the sound of the water, the smell of it. Josh’s face is expressionless, his skin the color of lard. Cammy, the slicker gone, her clothes clinging to her like shrink-wrap, her feet bare as a penitent’s, is crying, crying still, and she left her shoes behind so she could swim, so she and Josh could swim across no matter the risk and be here to help, to pitch in with her CPR and her red-rimmed eyes.

  “She’s dead,” Josh says, his voice as cold as he can make it because he’s on the cusp of breaking down himself, “isn’t she?”

  “What the fuck you think? Look at her, for Christ’s sake.”

  And here’s Cammy, bending to roll her over and pump at her shoulderblades, as if that’s going to do any good, and maybe his voice is harsher than it has to be, maybe he should just let her play out the charade and focus on what comes next, but he can’t. “Get off her!” he’s shouting, yanking at her arm till it feels as if it’s going to twist off in his hand, and when she rises under the pressure of it he flings her away from him, his heart slamming at his ribs and every curse he can think of spilling uselessly out of him.

  Cammy. The stick girl. The pretty-face. The child. She’s as rangy and lean as one of his greyhounds, but she comes at him so fast he can’t even get his hands up to protect his face. Her fist is a projection of her will, stabbing at him three times in quick succession till he catches her wrists and she clenches her face to spit at him. “You,” she sobs. “It’s all you—you killed her. You!”

  Josh’s voice seems to be caught in his throat. “Hey,” he says. Just that—“Hey,” soft as a leaf falling.

  What are they fighting over? What’s the use of it? What’s the use of anything?

  Cammy subsides. He releases her wrists. The night drops down. The corpse at his feet seems to swell and grow till it sucks in all the available light. The faces of the two people in front of him blur so that Josh c
ould be Cammy, and Cammy, Josh. A squadron of bats materializes from nowhere to ricochet through the emptiness overhead.

  “What we have to do,” he says finally, because he’s rational now, they’re all rational, they have to be, “is get her out of here. I mean, wrap her in something”—and though he’s wet through and numb in his fingers and toes he’s already pulling the slicker up over his head—“and carry her back to the boat. And then we’ll see what we can do about, you know . . . whatever it takes . . .” he trails off.

  But it’s not as easy as all that. While Toni and Suzanne work their way over the hump on the far side on their own—and it’s a minor miracle no broken bones come out of that—he and Josh wrap the body in their rain gear and try to secure the ends as best they can with the strap cut from his daypack and an extra pair of shoelaces. The footing is unsteady, the load awkward in the extreme, Josh on one end, him on the other, Cammy in the middle. What’s inside—the shuttered flesh, the pooling blood—keeps slipping, loosening, readjusting itself, and to get it—her—up atop the pillar of rock takes all the strength he has in him. There’s a suspended moment, each breath a kind of choking for release, and then he’s easing her down the far side to where Josh stands barely visible beneath him. “Careful, now, careful—you got her?”

  Voices in the dark. The rush of the water, the pounding of the waves. Now he and Cammy are down there too and the three of them form a six-legged monster lurching through the sand, every step impossible, but they manage to haul her to the crest of the beach, just above tide line, and set her down as gently as if she were alive still and sleeping her hurts away. Toni Walsh and Suzanne emerge beside them suddenly, faces floating peripherally in the darkness. Oh, my God, Suzanne is saying, over and over. He leaves them there, their voices grating like the rasp of dried-up leaves. The night is absolute. He can’t see the boat. He wades into the surf and risks calling out. “Wilson! Wilson, you out there?”

  Nothing. There should be a light, at least. He strains to see, looking for the faintest pale faded green hint of the running lights, thinking he needs a flashlight to signal and will anybody have thought to bring a flashlight, any of them? Suzanne, maybe. She thought to bake cookies. She was the one who had the coil of rope neatly braided at the bottom of her pack, the spare laces, gum. He’s about to turn back, the waves slapping at him and the shiver running through his body like an electric current, when he thinks he spots something there in the near distance, a deeper, blacker hole cut out of the night. What he doesn’t yet realize is that he’s fooling himself, because there’s nothing there to see, nothing at all.

  El Tigre

  The morning after the concert—Sunday, thankfully Sunday—she can’t quite understand what’s happening to her. To push back the covers, to swing her legs to the floor in the stillness of dawn, to feel the carpet alive under the grip of her toes and catch the rich roasted scent of the coffee her mother’s already brewing in the kitchen downstairs and then feel that vacancy in her core, that probing deep down that drives her to the bathroom, to her knees, to vomit for the second—or no, the third—day in a row, is wrong, deeply wrong. It can’t be a hangover because she had only the two glasses of wine and that wouldn’t account for the previous day or the day before that when she’d had no more than two or three sakes with her mother and Ed, just to be convivial. Is she becoming hyper-sensitive to alcohol, is that it? Or is it the flu? And then a lyric from one of Micah Stroud’s covers pops into her head—I got the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu—and the next thing she knows she’s pulling on her shorts and a T-shirt and heading down the stairs as if nothing’s happened at all.

  “You look tired,” is the first thing her mother says to her as she shuffles into the kitchen. Apparently Ed isn’t up yet, but there’s a place set for him at the table—coffee cup and saucer, orange juice, half a grapefruit glistening pinkly under the glare of the kitchen lights, which are up full, and the newspaper laid out beside it in offering. “Did you have trouble sleeping? Because personally I don’t think I slept more than five minutes—it’s the noise of that freeway. I don’t know how you put up with it.”

  Alma’s at the refrigerator, staring without enthusiasm at the milk and juice in their bright cartons, a block of cheese rippling with plastic wrap, something on a plate going brown around the edges, too exhausted suddenly to respond.

  “If you want to know the truth, you look like you haven’t been getting enough sleep—it’s the job, isn’t it? It’s wearing you down. You always were a worrier, even as a little girl, in way over your head, as if you could personally heal every sick animal on the block and, I don’t know, save every mouse and lizard the cat dragged in.”

  Her mother—a pair of brown-shelled eggs have appeared in her hands and she’s separating them over a mixing bowl—doesn’t really expect an answer. She’s just talking to hear herself, awake and moving around her daughter’s kitchen at a lonely hour on a gray-shrouded morning.

  “Is this for Ed?” Alma asks, settling into a chair at the table. “The juice, I mean?”

  “I can make you eggs—you want eggs? You do eat eggs, don’t you?”

  “No,” she says, irritated suddenly, “I don’t want any eggs.”

  “You don’t have to snap at me.”

  “I’m not snapping at you—”

  “Yes you are.”

  “No,” she insists, and she reaches across the table for Ed’s juice, sliding the glass to her with a soft whisper of friction. “It’s just that I’m not hungry, that’s all.”

  The eggshells are on the counter. The clock on the stove reads 6:17. Her mother sets down the whisk deliberately and turns to study her. Three steps in her clogs and she’s hovering over her, laying a hand on her forehead and peering into her eyes. “You feeling all right?”

  It is then, just as she’s about to confide that in fact she’s not feeling all right because she’s just been sick in the toilet upstairs and her head feels as if it’s about to lift off her shoulders and float across the room, that the truth of the situation comes home to her, the obvious conclusion any biologist who’s studied the life processes for the past decade and a half would have drawn in an instant.

  “Mom?” She speaks her mother’s name aloud, but her voice seems elastic, stretched-out, pulled like taffy. The truth—the fact—is surging up in her in an uncontainable rush but the words to express it seem to be stuck fast in her throat.

  Her mother just stares at her. “Yes?” she says. “What?”

  “How did you know, I mean, when you first got pregnant?”

  In her hurry to get to Longs drugstore the minute they open—eight a.m. on Sundays—she hardly gives a thought to anything but the astonishment of the moment, of what’s happening to her, or could be happening to her. It’s a walk of three blocks, past the place where she hit the squirrel—nothing there but a stain on the pavement now—then across the freeway bridge and into the long winding strip of the lower village. She takes extra care at the crosswalk, holding herself as if she’s already cradling a newborn in her arms, thinking only that she’s got to know for sure, though her mother accepted it as a fait accompli. Her mother just hugged her, bending awkwardly to press a cheek to hers in a ferment of heat and emotion. Then she straightened up and let out a laugh. “I had my suspicions,” she said, her hands on her hips and her head cocked to one side, beaming, absolutely beaming, “but I didn’t want to say anything. And for the life of me I don’t know why they call it morning sickness—I must have puked morning and night for six months straight till I thought it would have been easier to scale Mount Everest in a bikini than carry you around a single day more, but your father was sweet about it. He was good that way. Totally supportive. And did he love you from the minute you came out. Doted on you.” There’d been more, a whole rhapsody about giving birth at home with the help of a midwife because a sterile overlit hospital room was no place to enter the world—they’d had a birth party that night, did she know that? And they’d
filmed it too—“You could see your little head emerging, a soft red little thing so tiny I thought I was giving birth to a mango”—but unfortunately, somewhere along the way the tape had got lost.

  It’s not till she has her hand on the home pregnancy kit, studying the directions in the too-bright aisle while women whisper by in running shoes and tennis clothes, averting their eyes, that she finally thinks of the prospective father, of Tim. Tim, who’s islanded at the moment, beyond the reach of cell phone service, stalking goldens. She can see his face floating there before her as she scans the package (Accurate Digital Results 5 Days Sooner; 99% Accurate), see the way he draws down his mouth when he’s surprised or puzzled, and he will be surprised, no question about it, because they’ve never discussed the possibility of having a child, or not seriously anyway. They use birth control, rigorously, and while they gave up condoms for Tim’s sake, she never fails—never, no matter how swept away they are—to insert her diaphragm. They’re both committed environmentalists. Dedicated to saving the ecosystem, preserving what’s left, restoring it. To bring a child into an overpopulated world is irresponsible, wrong, nothing less than sabotage . . .

  But then why does she feel so elated? Why does she feel enormous suddenly, dominant, vastly superior to all these other women who aren’t weighing pregnancy kits in their hands? Because she’s a living thing, that’s why, and living things reproduce. The only discernible purpose of life is to create more life—any biologist knows that. She’s thirty-seven years old. The clock is ticking. She’s a unique individual with a unique genetic blueprint, representative of a superior line, in fact—in cold fact, without prejudice—and so’s Tim, with his high I.Q. and mellow personality and his long beautifully articulated limbs, and they have an obligation to pass their genes on if there’s any hope of improving the species.