When the Killing's Done (31 page)

Sus Scrofa

F
rom dreams of exhaustion—her dreamself so depleted she can’t think, her legs gone to stone, her arms leaden, her two hands so weak she’s barely able to fold back the blankets and crawl into bed—Alma wakes to the first hesitant gathering of light. It quivers on the ceiling above her, not quite ready to cohere, the trees beyond the open window dark still, gaunt, stiff-kneed. From the direction of the sea there’s a soft continuous wash that’s indistinguishable from the murmur of the freeway whispering at the wall behind her, broken only by the distant solitary cry of a bird suspended over the waves. She lies there, adjusting to the world, nagged by the feeling that something’s out of place, until very gradually she becomes aware of a rich penetrating aroma wending its way through the hall to rise up the stairs, slip under the crack of the door and wrestle her back to her childhood: bacon crackling in the pan, giving up its salts and nitrates and heavy freight of animal fat.

It takes her a moment to understand: this
is
her childhood. As unlikely as it might seem, especially in a vegetarian household at—she squints in the direction of the digital clock—six thirty-two in the morning, a parental figure is stirring in the kitchen, sorting through pots and pans, adjusting the coffeemaker and toaster oven, laying thin strips of cured pig flesh in a cross pattern in the depths of a Farberware frying pan, sans top. There will be spatters of grease all over the stove, the floor, the teapot, and the smell of seared meat, like the odor of cigarette smoke in a non-smoking room, will linger in the corners, in the carpet, in the folds of the drapes, for weeks, months maybe. Before she’s even pushed back the covers and set her feet on the floor, she’s upset—or no, not upset, because this is her mother, after all, arrived unannounced with her stepfather last night at dinnertime, but put off her rhythm. Put out. Agitated. Or—but what’s the use? The facts are these: Tim’s out on the island, her mother’s in the kitchen, and she’s got a breakfast meeting in Ventura at seven forty-five.

Katherine “Kat” Boyd—she dropped Takesue after the death of her husband and elected to keep her maiden name on remarrying, because that was who she was and what she felt comfortable with—is fifty-nine, short, square, suffering from adult-onset diabetes and a creeping addiction to vodka and diet tonic. She keeps her peach-colored hair cut in a pageboy, which makes her look younger than she is—people mistake her for fifty, or fifty-five, anyway—and she favors blue jeans and T-shirts, the uniform of her generation. For twenty-two years she taught third grade at Coeur D’Alene Elementary in Venice, before retiring to Scottsdale. She has an antipathy for the ocean, a fear and dislike bordering on hatred, and she’s seen enough fog to last her a lifetime. Right now, she’s got so much bottled-up energy she doesn’t know what to do with herself, so she’s cooking. Alma won’t touch the bacon—she hasn’t eaten meat since her conversion to vegetarianism in the seventh grade under the influence of her best friend, a girl from India whose parents were both doctors and who persisted in wearing a red caste mark on her forehead through the end of junior high—but Ed will. And she might have some herself.

Though she isn’t really conscious of it, in a way she’s laying claim to her turf, because why should she feel like a stranger in her own daughter’s kitchen? She’s rearranged the cups on the hooks beneath the cupboard, facing in rather than out, run the dishwasher, mopped the tile floor and then mopped it again to get rid of the streaks and adjusted the radio to a station she can hum along to. Cat Stevens—the Muslim apologist—is singing “Peace Train” at the moment, and he was preceded by the Carpenters and before them whoever did “Up Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon.” The bacon pops and sizzles in a gratifying way. She pokes it with a fork, then removes it piece by piece to drain on a paper towel. Turning down the heat under the pan, she mixes in tomatoes, peppers and onions for
huevos rancheros
, to which she’ll add a generous shake of Tabasco once the eggs firm up. And then, when Alma has gone off to work and Ed is propped up in front of the TV with his eggs and bacon and his morning Bloody Mary, she’ll preheat the oven and separate the eggs for the cake batter.

Upstairs, in the bathroom, Alma shucks her robe and steps into the shower. For a moment steam rises around her, but the shower’s never hot enough, some glitch with the water heater, and now, suddenly, it goes cold. Lurching back and away from the icy spray, the shock electric, instant gooseflesh, she raps her elbow sharply on the aluminum handle of the shower door and lets out a clipped reverberant curse. Her mother must be running hot water, filling the teapot, or God forbid, switching on the dishwasher, in which case the rest of the shower will be an exercise in masochism, her feet cold against the tiles, cold spray splashing her ankles . . . she’s about to pound the wall and shout out to her when the hot water suddenly comes back and she’s ducking her head under the stream and spinning a quick pirouette to distribute the warmth. Though she does her best thinking in the shower—something to do with the calming effect of trickling water and the opening of the pores—she nonetheless strictly limits herself to five minutes, regulating the time on the diver’s watch Tim gave her for her birthday last year. It’s hardly enough to get her hair shampooed, rinsed, conditioned, rinsed again and combed out with the spray-on detangler—especially when the flow goes stone cold for fifteen seconds—but she won’t waste water, not during the ongoing and eternal drought brought on by deforestation, global warming and user demand that grows exponentially by the day because the developers have to turn a profit and the condos keep on coming. Guilt—that’s what defines her usage. Guilt over being alive, needing things, consuming things, turning the tap or lighting the flame under the gas burner.

The minute hand shifts, the seconds beat on, and she rinses for the second time and shuts down both handles with nine seconds to spare. Shivering, she towels off briskly before running Tim’s electric shaver over her legs and digging out a dry towel to wrap her hair in. All the while, even through the steam and the cloying scent of the various perfumes the manufacturers have somehow managed to work into their allegedly unscented hair-care products, she smells incinerated flesh, and what do they cure bacon with anyway? Salt and carcinogens, what else? Faintly, through the misted-over slab of the bathroom door, she can hear her mother, in the kitchen, singing along with the easy-listening station.

The night before, just as she’d been sitting down to dinner with a film she’d picked up at the video store on her way home from work (keep it simple, stir-fry and brown rice,
Madame Bovary
, in the Jean Renoir original), the doorbell had rung. She’d hit the stop button just as Emma, busty, square-shouldered, with the little puckered mouth and razor eyebrows of the thirties, was coming on to the country doctor in a bucolic farmyard with its lowing cattle and a cadre of piglets straining at the teat, thinking it was somebody selling something, only to pull back the door on her mother and gaunt alcoholic stepfather, both of them cradling sacks of groceries. Her mother had insisted on cooking—“We’re both of us starved and you know how I hate road food”—and ten minutes later the three of them were standing in the tiny kitchen, she with
sake
on the rocks and her mother and Ed with tall glasses of vodka adulterated only by a splash of diet tonic and a paper-thin twist of lemon peel while her mother whipped up a quick spaghetti sauce, “Vegetarian for you, hon, eggplant, peppers and mushrooms, with some turkey sausage on the side for your father. Or Ed, I mean.”

It wasn’t until they were seated at the dining cum kitchen table and the third round of drinks had been poured, the stir-fry and rice folded into a Tupperware container and isolated in the back of the refrigerator for future reference and the pasta steaming on their plates, that her mother wondered aloud where Tim was. “Is he working late or what?” She cocked her head over the plate of spaghetti and gestured with her glass, the ice cubes softly clicking. “Everything okay between you?”

“Yes,” Alma said, feeling as if she were somehow evading the truth or the essence of it, though she wasn’t and she and Tim were, in fact, as close as they’d ever been, closer even. “Fine. He’s out on the island this week.”

Her stepfather—white-haired, bad-hipped, six years older than her mother but looking twice that—wound a skein of red-stained pasta around his fork, then set it down and asked, “How’s all that going? Good?”

She answered automatically, conscious of her mother’s eyes on her. “Yes, sure, of course. Never better.”

“Did you get the article I sent you? From the
Sun
?” Her mother leaned in confidentially, her food untouched still, and this was her pattern, talk, drink, talk some more, and let the food go cold. The sausage she’d arranged to conform to the inner rim of the plate had been cut neatly in six or seven slices, but none of the slices had made the journey from plate to fork to mouth.

All at once, her mind went blank. Article? What article?

“The one about the protests? The picture showed your building—and you could see the window of your office there on the second floor—with, I don’t know, picketers out there with their signs?” Her mother shot a look at Ed, then came back to her. “You were mentioned I think three times, or four—was it four, Ed?”

Ed gave a vague nod. He was somewhere else altogether, his question—
How’s all that going?
—nothing more than an attempt to be sociable. He’d been the P.E. teacher at her mother’s school and they hadn’t married till Alma was a grad student. He barely knew her and knew Tim even more peripherally—he’d met him once, on one of his rare trips to the coast in the company of her mother, or maybe twice. He liked sports. Liked to talk about this team or the other, so-and-so’s batting average, the Diamondbacks’ need of pitching. Of birds, ecology, the ruination of the islands, the islands themselves, he knew next to nothing and what he knew was as vague and untroubling to him as what was going on in the former Yugoslavia or among the Dayaks of Borneo. She didn’t blame him. He was like anybody else, living in the world of society, commerce, TV, oblivion.

Her mother’s tone was defensive. “I circled your name. In blue. The blue pencil I use for my crosswords, I remember it distinctly. And don’t tell me I didn’t mail it—I’m not that far gone yet.”

“You did, Mom, thanks. I’m sure it’s around somewhere, probably at the office—I try to keep a file on each project, public response and whatnot, just for future reference. Not that anybody’d be interested.”

A familiar sense of dread had come over her then, a feeling that things were out of control, that there was some specific task that wanted completing, the task that would make it all come out right, but she couldn’t pin it down or remember exactly what it was. The fact was that the AP had picked up the story of the protests out front of the Park Service offices and every animal rights group in the country had jumped on that bus. Dave LaJoy—it was two years now since his public exoneration, and he still wore the triumph of it like a chest full of medals—had led the protest, marching out front of the looping circle of thirty or forty chanting protestors, most of them students from City College and UCSB. It had gone on for a month now and she’d taken to parking the car at the other end of the marina, where the restaurants and tourist shops were, just so as to avoid the rush they made at her when she wheeled Tim’s Prius into the lot at the office.

In the morning, at breakfast, she’d be meeting in one of those very restaurants—the Docksider—with Frazier Carter, of Island Healers, Annabelle Yuell, her counterpart from the Nature Conservancy, and Freeman—expressly to avoid the protestors and discuss the continuing implementation of Phase III of the pig eradication project in peace. Over omelets. Lattes. Super-sweetened Thai spiced tea. And a view that carried beyond the masts of the ships to where the channel opened out and rolled all the way to the feet of Santa Cruz Island, where Tim wasn’t banding murrelets or doing counts or checking nests, but trapping eagles, golden eagles, for removal to the coast.

Her mother was saying something, and it was as if she’d just come awake. “I’m sorry, Mom. Thank you, I mean it. Thanks for thinking of me. It’s just that this whole thing—this project—is complicated, that’s all. And if I don’t—I know I should call more, but . . .”

Now the fork bent to the plate and her mother dropped her eyes, rolling the long strands of pasta neatly round the tines with the aid of a soup spoon, then setting the whole business down again on the side of the plate. “I’m not saying that,” she said. “I just want you to know I’m thinking about you, is all.” She looked to Ed. “We’ve got a lot on our plates ourselves, you know—in a lot of ways, retirement’s more hectic than teaching was. Committees, bridge parties, parties all the time. And golf. Did I tell you Ed’s been teaching me golf?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ed put in, coming fully to life for the first time since they’d sat down, “we’ll have her on the women’s PGA tour before long. Your mother’s a real natural, did you know that?”

Her mother was smiling, her eyes warm, dimples showing. The vodka was silvery in the glass, like some rare reduced metal. She gave her husband a long buttery gaze, and they were complicit.

“No,” Alma said, shaking her head side-to-side in an exaggerated gesture, smiling herself now, the burden gone, or at least lightened, at least for the time being, “I had no idea.”

In the bathroom, in the present moment, she’s wiping the mirror clear of condensation preparatory to putting her makeup on, the sound of her mother’s voice—a sweet quavering contralto, honed through all the years of singing along with her third graders to “Lean on Me,” “The Man in the Mirror” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”—oddly comforting. She even finds herself humming along as she dresses. This meeting, like all the meetings she arranges, is informal, and so she dresses as she would for any workday: tan Patagonia fleece vest over a Micah Stroud T-shirt, fawn-colored corduroy shorts and suede hiking boots. It’s the end of October, the sun up now, no fog, but it’s always chilly along the coast, and she wears the vest—or vests: she’s got three of them, in tan, cranberry and rust—year-round, with a tee in summer, and in winter with a long-sleeved shirt or sweater. They’re handy and practical both. Though she won’t be going out to the island this morning or any day this week for that matter, she can be ready to take off at a moment’s notice, the various flaps and pockets of the vest ideal for secreting sunblock, lip balm, her Leatherman, compass, maps, water bottle and the like. Finally, she unwraps the towel, combs out her hair and trips down the steps to the scent of bacon and the sight of her mother and Ed and a kitchen in disarray.