When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle Read Free Book Online Page 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