“There’s one in the garage. Right next to all those goddamn vials of shark liver oil.”
And then she started laughing. She knew it was a bad sound—unnatural and spooky, just like Mrs. Agnelli’s—but she couldn’t stop, even when Steinbeck recoiled in confusion. She couldn’t stop when he left her alone at the water’s edge, or when she slunk into the garage like a chastened animal and found it there, just as he had promised: a Kodak 35 Rangefinder, still in its box, a canister of film accompanying it. Laughing, she loaded the film. Laughing, she left the lab and sprinted in the direction of downtown.
She fell silent, however, when she stepped onto Alvarado Street. She remembered it from her earlier explorations: how the streetlights dropped off into an incense-tinged darkness once a certain corner was turned. At the intersection of Tyler and East Franklin, she slowed down. Then, as she proceeded onto Washington Street, it revealed itself: a purple-curtained, two-story building with an anachronistic gas lamp out front. There was a window in the alleyway that would have been inaccessible to most voyeurs but that, on account of her height, gave her a direct view of the brothel’s most well-trafficked chamber. And although she had to endure the proclivities of seven other clients before finding the client she sought, she didn’t lose courage or stamina, she didn’t start to laugh again. Instead, she worked with the calmness of a professional, making sure her father’s face was in the frame whenever possible, the woman beneath him little more than a compositional afterthought: beautiful and foreign, thin with work and want.
18
1998
THROW THE FISH, THROW ’EM GOOD. FISH FOR THE fish. Eat or be eaten. Sardines in the bay? Not anymore, but they’re sure as hell inside the aquarium. She stands above their tank on a catwalk. She throws them their food the way Ricketts used to throw his steaks. “Broadcast feeding,” one of the aquarists named it, as if there’s a message being transmitted and received, and she can’t see the delight of the crowd on the other side of the glass, but she can feel it. She can feel the vacuum of drawn breaths as the sardines tighten their school, as they begin to move as a single undulating tongue, curling around the meal and flashing with satisfaction, a mass of pure instinct shattered and rejoined. The urge to start yelling is nearly uncontrollable. Of course she once saw the horses fight! she wants to yell at him. Of course she did! A clearing in the orchard, a makeshift fence, the snap of torchlight, the waxy leaves of the mango trees catching the breeze like tiny, black sails. A bad, sweet smell in the air, like a pie being baked from rotten fruit. A crowd of men, her father’s long, pale form a crude oddity among the darker, smaller ones. Then the horses, three of them. One: a skinny, nervous mare tied to a stake in the middle of the clearing. Two and three: a pair of stallions, circling the ring, sizing each other up. An involuntary flick of the mare’s tail. A hoof to the chest, a gargle of anguish. Teeth sinking into a throat and pulling away a sheet of bloodied hide. The loser falling to his knees, the winner limping forward to claim his trapped prize. After that, she couldn’t watch anymore, but she could listen and she could smell. And that, of course, was more than enough.
19
1940
FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, WAR.
It started out slowly, somewhat prosaically: the defacing of the exterior walls of Anders’s cannery, the breaking of windows.
Then there was a brief truce, just long enough for Margot’s father to relax, followed by a barrage of vandalism as inventive as it was disturbing. Live squirrels were put inside the pump house, clogging the mechanism with bones and fur. Human excrement—what seemed like tons of it—was piled up in front of the cannery’s main door. She expected him to retaliate, to do whatever he could to inflict an equal degree of suffering upon his rival, but he continued on just as before, utterly immersed in his work, eerily unmoved, the ill will aimed in his direction little more than a distraction that, with the right combination of denial and willpower, he could endure unscathed.