When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle Page B

was heaped in a towering pyre and the sweat stung at her eyes and soaked her hair till the ends hung limp, she went barefoot down the path to the beach and scoured the sand for anything that would burn and she hauled that up too. There was newspaper, rat-shredded, in a cardboard box just inside the door of the second shack. The matches she found in a jar atop the woodstove.
    She waited till it was full dark, hunched over her knees in the too-tight shirt and the blue sweater with the red piping that smelled of a strange man’s sweat, eating pork and beans from the can and savoring each morsel, before she lit her signal fire. And when she lit it and fed it and kept on feeding it, the flames rose thirty feet in the air, visible all the way to the mainland she could just make out through the gauze of fog as a series of drifting unsteady lights, as if the stars had fallen into the sea. The fire raged, sparked, tore open the night. Someone would see it, she told herself, someone was sure to see it. That first night she even called out at intervals, a hollow shrill gargle of sound that was meant to pierce the fog, ride out over the sea and strike the hull of whatever boat might be passing in the night to see her fire and hear her call. The second night, she saved her breath. By the third night she’d used up nearly all the wood she could scavenge and thought of setting the shacks afire—or the chaparral. At the end of the first week, she was resigned. She scattered rats, ate from the cans, drank from the barrel. When she wasn’t gathering wood she lay in bed, dozing, thumbing through the yellowed newspapers to weigh the news of events that had been decided years ago, politics, economics, war stories, and would the Allies take Monte Cassino and push through to Rome, would the Marines land at Guadalcanal, would Tojo triumph or turn his sword on his own yellow belly?
    The rats persisted, gnawing, thieving, slipping in and out of their cracks, thumping in the night, and she persisted too—her fires, of necessity, smaller, but beacons nonetheless, urgent smoldering pleas for help, for release. She saw boats suspended in the distance with their tiny quavering sails and she waved her arms like a cheerleader, fashioned flags from sticks and the tatters of an old faded-to-pink towel and waved them too, but the boats never grew larger or drifted out of frame, as static as figures on a canvas tacked to the very farthest wall in the most enormous room in the world. No one came. No one landed. No one existed. And where was Till? Where was he? He would have come for her by now, if he was alive, and how could he possibly have died in America, aboard his own boat off the lobster-rich Channel Islands, when the Japs hadn’t been able to sink him in the whole wide blinding expanse of the Pacific?
    The answer was too hard to hold on to so she let it go. She let it all go. Even the rats. And then, on the first day of what would have been the third week of her imprisonment in a place she’d come to loathe in its changeless, ceaseless, ongoing and never-ending placidity and indifference and sheer brainless endurance, a Coast Guard cutter, free as a cloud, rounded the point and motored into the cove.
    And what did the Coast Guard find? A sunburned woman unused to the sound of her own voice, her hair stringy and flat and her eyes focused on nothing. She was the wife of a drowned man, a widow, that was all. She climbed into the rowboat and the sea shifted beneath her and kept on shifting until the big boat, the cutter, sliced across the channel under the downpouring sun, until the shore, with its sharply etched houses, swaying palms and glinting automobiles, rose up to take her in and hold her as firmly and securely as she could ever hope to be held again.

The Wreck of the Winfield Scott

    T hough Alma is trying her hardest to suppress it, the noise of the freeway is getting to her. She can’t think to slice the cherry tomatoes and dice the baby