The man behind the seafood counter is older; he wears a name tag that says BILL in white letters debossed in a red field pinned to his white smock, and he makes charming small talk with you while wrapping your oysters. “This one spit in my eye when we dropped him onto the ice!” he says, holding one up; you picture the scene and smile.
“Can you blame him?” you say.
Bill cocks his head and wrinkles his lips, which causes his already bushy greying mustache to bunch up; it looks like an animal with its back turned to you, nestled just beneath his nose. “Guess I’d do the same, in his shoes!” he says, breaking into a wide smile. He must have been at this job for years: without drawing any attention to his hands, he’s wrapped everything up in butcher paper, tied it with twine, and written a price on the outside.
“Fresh is best!” he says when you thank him. “If you don’t eat them all tonight, just put a damp cloth on ’em in the fridge, they’ll keep!”
“A damp cloth, right,” you say, smiling and nodding as you turn toward the dairy aisle: the recipe calls for buttermilk. Maybe you’ll make biscuits or pancakes tomorrow. Maybe you’ll just drink a glass of buttermilk with breakfast, like your grandmother used to do. Does anyone still do that: drink buttermilk? At the checkout counter, again your eyes catch those little booklets. Secrets of the Chinese Zodiac. Modern Needlepoint. Hollywood by Night. They call to you—bright colorful designs on their covers, whole worlds of unknown possibility for forty-nine cents apiece. They’d look lurid on your coffee table: red lines drawn between stars to trace the shape of a monkey against the night sky. Quaint bright patterns. A cloak-and-dagger motif. But you leave them where they are, because everything’s already in order. You have a date with a tablecloth on the beach.
* * *
WHO KNOWS HOW the children who will tell your story in the future retain the detail of the radio on the counter? It sounds like something made-up, an embellishment from one of the older kids on the playground whose sense of detail demands a still focal point. But it’s true. The radio spends most of its time in a drawer: it’s a simple handheld transistor, the kind your father might take to a baseball game to listen to the play-by-play. When you come home from the supermarket, you wash your hands at the sink, take the shucking knife down from the knife rack, and, riding the inspiration that’s been with you since your morning cup of coffee, take the radio out and set it on the counter.
It’s clearly visible in photographs from the scene, a palm-sized silver faceplate with a round bubble in the upper right corner like a porthole where the dial is. The housing is shot through with perfectly round circles, die-cut and looking for all the world like the work of a very attentive child with a hole-punch. The top four holes are decorative rather than functional, framing a colorful pattern: red, yellow, yellow, blue. Why two yellows instead of a four-color spread? Who can say?
When Jesse and Gene let themselves in through your unlocked front door, the radio is playing “Hold Your Head Up” by Argent, a hard rock band. You remember this because it’s not your sort of thing; it’s a type of music you sometimes hear coming through the open windows of cars in the school parking lot. That it feels somehow aggressive seems, to you, a sign that you’re getting old; pointless to resist, it seems. The chorus is beginning to grate on your nerves as you work away at the oysters, prying their shells open and pulling the soft flesh loose, but this work requires focus, so you’re waiting the song out, hoping they play something mellower next. But at trial, later, you can’t remember what came after. Whatever it was, it has not been able to rise above the memory of the panic, and the chaos.
Neither of them announce themselves when they enter: they aren’t seasoned thieves, but they know that a doorknob turned gently enough makes hardly any sound at all if there’s ambient noise to mask it: a stove fan, a countertop radio. Everyone was a child once; everyone’s moved stealthily sometimes, either at play or from sheer animal need. Your awareness of their movement in your peripheral vision is sharp and sudden, the momentary flash you get just before an especially large bug hits your windshield: thwap. Just like that, the huge abstract splatter of guts and carapace across your field of vision. The wind widening its spread, rippling in the splotch.
When Gene covers your mouth with his right hand and pulls your body tightly against his, your fist reflexively tightens around the handle of the shucking knife, and your eyes go wide. You can’t stop your mouth from trying to open, to scream, to call for help: it’s pure instinct. “Easy, easy,” he says in a hot whisper, just next to your ear; you feel his arm against your right breast as he moves his hand to your wrist, intending to squeeze hard enough to make you drop the knife. Jesse, per his instructions, is already heading for the bedroom, since Gene has told him several times that the valuables are always in the bedroom.