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

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