T.C. Boyle - When the Killings Done

Table of Contents

ALSO BY T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

Novels

The Women
Talk Talk
The Inner Circle
Drop City
A Friend of the Earth
Riven Rock
The Tortilla Curtain
The Road to Wellville
East Is East
Worlds End
Budding Prospects
Water Music

Short Stories

Wild Child
Tooth and Claw
The Human Fly
After the Plague
T. C. Boyle Stories
Without a Hero
If the River Was Whiskey
Greasy Lake
Descent of Man

VIKING
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First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright T. Coraghessan Boyle, 2011

All rights reserved

Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

Publishers Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Boyle, T. Coraghessan.
When the killings done / T. Coraghessan Boyle.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47588-1

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For Kerrie, who tramped the ridges and braved the ghosts

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 .

Genesis 1:28

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Lotus Vermeer, Marla Daily, Kate Faulkner, Rachel Wolstenholme, Marie Alex, Jim Perry, Jay Brennan, Stephanie Mutz and Mike DeGruy for their kind assistance with the research for this book. In addition, I would like to express my debt of gratitude to the historians and memoirists of the Channel Islands, whose accounts proved invaluable to the unfolding of this narrative, particularly those of Michel Peterson, Marla Daily, John Gherini, Tom Kendrick, Clifford McElrath, Margaret Eaton and Helen Caire.

Portions of this book appeared previously, in slightly different form, in McSweeneys, Orion and The Iowa Review .

The Northern Channel Islands

PART I

Anacapa

The Wreck of the Beverly B .

P icture 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 shed dutifullyand foolishlytried to make so they could have something to keep them going, a good sport, always a good sport, though shed woken up vomiting in her berth not half an hour ago. She was wearing an oversized cable-knit sweater shed fished out of her husbands locker because the cabin was so cold, and every fiber of it seemed to chafe her skin as if shed been flayed raw while she slept. She hadnt 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 didnt 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 outif it came outshe 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 coffeeshed swabbed that up as best she could with a ragbut 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... ?

Yes. That was the story. That was how it went. And no matter how often she told her own version of what had happened to her grandmother in the furious cold upwelling waters of the Santa Barbara Channel in a time so distant she had to shut her eyes halfway to develop a picture of itsharper and clearer than her mothers because her mother hadnt been there any more than she had, or not in any conscious wayAlma always drew her voice down to a whisper for the payoff, the denouement, the kicker: Nana was two months pregnant when that boat sank.

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