When the Killing's Done

by Boyle, T. C.

  “Come on, honey,” she said, struggling to control her voice. “Let’s go back to the house and get into some dry clothes. I’ll make you some tea. Or hot chocolate. How about some hot chocolate?”

  Anise didn’t respond. She sat hunched over her knees, rocking back and forth, the line of her clenched jaw as bloodless and jumpy as a diviner’s rod. She didn’t even lift her eyes.

  Rita stood there in the rain, trying for her daughter’s sake to be gentle, reasonable, calming, motherly, but she felt none of these things. The fact was that in that moment Anise looked exactly like Toby, Toby when he was down, when they played and nobody showed, when the A&R man at the record company told them he had reservations about some of the songs on their second album, that they were weak, worse than weak, that they were shit, pure and unadulterated, and Toby was the last thing she wanted to think about now. Toby with his tantrums, his cheating, his coke. Cocaína, he always called it. As in, Let’s do some cocaína. Cute. Real cute. When they couldn’t even pay the rent.

  She made an effort. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said, the smell of the rain enlivening the odor of death that hung over the field till she felt as if she wanted to sink down in the mud—right here, right in front of her daughter—and cry herself dry. What was the use of it all? The worry, the deprivation, every penny put back into the flock and no satisfaction but in increase? “The damage is already done and all we can do now is let the mothers come back to their babies. Look,” she said, pointing across the field to where Francisco and Bumper were working to bring them in, “they’re already coming back. They’re as worried as we are.”

  Anise’s voice was small and bitter. “What about the ones that don’t have anything to worry about? What are they going to do?”

  “I know,” she said. “I know, it hurts.”

  She was remembering the previous year when one of the ewes that had lost a lamb to a withered leg kept nosing at the remains of the carcass—the hooves, the head, the coat—long after the flesh had gone. That was a kind of heartbreak that jumped species, from Ovis aries to Homo sapiens, and here it was again, seventy-three ewes come back to bleat for the lambs that couldn’t answer, and the ravens laughing from the trees.

  “We have to get the police,” Anise said in a steady low voice, and now she looked up, her eyes hard and fixed. “Make them pay, those jerks, those hunters. For every one.”

  “We will, honey, believe me.” And here she felt the anger and hate and despair come up in her all over again. “I’m going to go straight in there to the radio and call the sheriff, because this is criminal trespass, and, I don’t know, vandalism—”

  “And murder.”

  There was a countervailing breeze coming up off the ocean—she could smell the sharpness of it, the iodine, the salty sting of scales and feathers and fins—and it loosened the grip of the rain till it began to fall off in random spatters. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s what it amounts to.” She held out her hand, impatient now. “Come on, get up, move. Let’s get to the radio while there’s still a chance of catching them.”

  Anise rose from the grass and smoothed down her wet jeans. The lambs she’d gathered just lay there looking into the wind, but already the ewes were trotting up to them, each instantly identifiable to the other by smell and a distinctive note of voice. “What good’s the sheriff going to do? Even if he came, which he won’t, it might be days from now and those guys are going to be long gone.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, already turning toward the house, “maybe we can get the Coast Guard on them.” One of them, the one in front, was a big square-jawed blond who looked as if he could have been one of those phony TV wrestlers her father had liked so much when she was a girl back in New York. He hadn’t even given her so much as a glance. And he wasn’t carrying a gun, unlike the other two—they roared past, as oblivious as he was, rifles slung over their shoulders as they worked the handlebars of their machines and looked out ahead for ruts, obstructions, the retreating flanks of a black tusker boar. He must have thought he was the real deal, because he had a bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Big man. Big hero. “Because they’ve got to have a boat somewhere, you know that—”

  Anise, rangy, tall, her back slumped under the weight of everything that was wrong, and her book, in its plastic sleeve, pressed to her chest, fell into step with her, and there was the house ahead of them, smoke rising from the chimney, Bax’s light still on, and it was as if nothing had happened, as if all the clocks were frozen and the sun locked in place. “Where do you think they are—Smugglers’? Because we put signs there and they—they can’t just say they didn’t know . . .”

  “Don’t you worry, darlin’,” she said, striding along as briskly as her legs would carry her, and was she quoting some song, was that it? Lyrics clouded her head, all the songs she’d heard and sung and would sing in the years to come when all this was over with, and she was already envisioning a new song, with a blues progression and a theme of final and uncompromising revenge. “Don’t you worry,” she repeated, the words like cold little stones in her mouth, “those sons of bitches are going to regret this, and you can take my word for it.”

  But they didn’t. And they wouldn’t. Because wheels were turning that she knew nothing about, and when she mounted the stairs to the bedroom she was surprised to see Bax out of bed, dressed in his faded flannel shirts—he wore as many as three or four of them, depending on the temperature—and his blue jeans with the one leg cut away for the cast. He was perched on the edge of the chair, attempting to pull on his socks, but when he tried to reach down to his good foot the ribs tugged him back as if his arm was attached to a bungee cord. He winced. Let out a curse. “Goddamn it,” he rumbled when she came through the door, “will you help me with this? And my boots. Where the shitfuck are my boots?”

  She slid his socks on over his cold white feet with their horny yellowed nails and splayed toes before she said a word and when she did she was already at the door. “You mean your boot, don’t you? Because there’s no way a boot’s going to go over that cast, even if I slit it with a knife. And I don’t know that you should even be up on it.”

  “I heard two shots,” he said, swiveling toward her, the left leg swinging like a pendulum in its chrysalis of dirty white plaster. “What was it—day-trippers? Hunters?”

  It was day-trippers who punched holes in their illusion of serenity anytime they chose to show up, day and night, from the diver who drowned within sight of the beach while taking abalone out of season so that Anise had to find him there at low tide with his facial features all eaten away and one rigid arm hooked up like an invitation to dance, to the bonfire builders and stranded fishermen and the six teenagers in their daddy’s cabin cruiser out of Santa Barbara shooting up a pod of gray whales in the shallows off Scorpion Rock. You never knew, especially in summer, when somebody you’d never seen before would waltz right into the kitchen, as if the whole ranch was nothing more than a curiosity out of a museum. But this wasn’t day-trippers. This was worse, far worse. “Hunters,” she said.

  He’d stopped just short of her, weaving on the pinions of the crutches, huge, big-headed, his hair gone white in the past year and his white-flecked beard fanning out across his collar and up into his sideburns as if a wind were spitting in his face. “Where? Not on ranch property?”

  She tried to keep her voice level. “Right in Scorpion meadow. Right in the middle of it.”

  “Shit. The dumb fucks. We lose any?”

  She just nodded. “Anise’s downstairs trying to get the Coast Guard on the marine radio. This time we’re going to make them pay.”

  “What’d they look like?”

  And now she had to see them all over again. The way they’d come on, heedless, clueless, the sheep starting up. “I don’t know. Like the average jerk. The one of them had a bow and arrow and he was all in camouflage like this was Vietnam or something.”

  Bax wedged himself through the doorw
ay and she followed him to the head of the stairs, the kitchen opening up beneath them, the long table, the boar’s head Bax had had stuffed presiding over the room with its meshed tusks and lopsided grin, as if death were a rare joke. “He didn’t”—handing her the crutches so he could take hold of the rail and begin easing himself down the stairs, one step at a time—“have blond hair by any chance?”

  “He did, yeah,” she said, stepping down to him and forcing her shoulder up under his arm for support.

  “Big guy? Forties?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Why, you know him?”

  “Shit, yes. That’s Thatch.” Another step down and then another, the room looming beneath them, opening up like a chasm, the stove, the oven, the dull glow of the battered pots and pans, a pit of domesticity and daily strife. She could hear Anise’s voice at the radio—“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”—and the screech of static on the other end. Who’s Thatch? was what she was about to say, but he was already spinning out the answer. “Doesn’t he know the rules? They told me he was strictly to stay off the ranch and just hunt the hills.”

  “Who told you?”

  He was breathing hard, sweating, though it couldn’t have been more than fifty-five degrees in the house, and when they reached the bottom of the stairs he winced as she ducked out from under his arm and handed him the crutches. His eyes pulled away from hers. “The owners,” he said.

  “What do you mean? They didn’t—?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice gone to the very bottom of the register, more a snort or growl than a human vocalization, “and I’ve been meaning to tell you about it for a couple of weeks now, but with the accident and all I just—”

  She was furious, burning. “Just what? Lied to me? Kept me in the dark? Treated me like a hired hand, like a cook, instead of what I am, or what I thought I was anyway. You son of a bitch. You’re worse than they are.”

  He dragged himself across the room to the door before he responded, and when he did, he was already reaching behind it for the .22 rifle, as if that would do any good against a band of pig killers with high-powered rifles and a longbow with a fifty-five-pound pull. “They gave them the hunting concession, all right? And I didn’t want to get you all pissed off and raving because it’s the owners’ decision and there’s nothing we can do about it except the deal was they’d stay off the property and up in the hills and now the deal’s off.” He swung his head round angrily and shouted down the length of the room to where Anise sat at the big Steelcase desk where they did their paperwork, crying “Mayday!” into the radio microphone. “Shut that goddamn thing off, will you? Anise! Shut it!”

  Rita had a hand on his arm. He was grimacing, tottering, trying with his two hands, two armpits and two shellacked and shining crutches to maneuver the rifle so he could hold on to it and throw open the door at the same time. “What are you going to do? Shoot them? You can hardly stand up.”

  He was outside, on the landing, and then he eased down the front step and into the wet, the rubber-tipped struts of the crutches sucking at the mud and already blackened. In the absence of the Jeep, their only vehicle was the geriatric Ford pickup one of their unnamed predecessors had left behind. He and Francisco had resurrected it, but it was balky in the extreme, and they spent as much time fooling with it as racecar mechanics. Shoulders hunched to the level of the crutches, his head dipping and rising with each labored step and the cast swinging wildly, he made straight for it. She was right behind him, outraged, as furious over this exclusionary secret he’d been harboring as she was over the slaughter of the lambs. He fumbled with the passenger door of the pickup, unequal to the task, then slammed the flat of his hand against the rusted sheet metal and jerked his head round, savage suddenly. “Open the goddamn door, will you. And then get in behind the wheel.”

  She pulled back the door and he clattered and groped his way in, cursing under his breath, the leg in its cast like a timber he was trying to fit in place, the rifle careening across the floorboards and the crutches tangled and banging, wood to metal. When she tried to help, he shrugged her off, jerking at the crutches as if he were trying to break them in two, and so she gave it up, ducked round the hood and slid into the driver’s seat. She watched him strain and heave and jerk at the unyielding wooden struts, wanting to say something but fighting down the urge because he was going to do what he was going to do and no amount of advice or sympathy or sense was going to change that, then shifted into neutral, put one foot on the clutch and the other on the accelerator, turned the key and listened to the engine crank and then catch with a mufflerless farting blast of exhaust. He was in now, the crutches flung into the truckbed, the door slammed shut. She goosed the accelerator, dropped the stick into low and the truck lurched forward, shimmying over the ruts. “Where to?” she said, her tone low and nasty, and she was ready to lay into him, she was, but he forestalled her.

  “Smugglers’,” he said.

  She pictured the ranch house there, run-down, uninhabitable, a kind of spook house she sometimes sat in to get out of the rain or just to listen to the phantom tread of the sheepmen who’d tromped the floorboards in a day gone by. That was where they’d be, she’d known that much herself—even Anise had known it. But what she hadn’t known—what he hadn’t told her—was that they had the owners’ blessings. That the owners were branching out because the sheep operation was bringing in practically nothing and they wanted a return on their investment like anybody else. They lived on the coast, in nice warm houses, they ate out in restaurants and went to the movies and the yacht club or the symphony or whatever it was, and they had no idea of the kind of work and dedication she and Bax had put into the place. No idea. Not an inkling.

  Suddenly she felt scared. Just three hours ago she was secure, serene, her every thought focused on the lambing, on life and giving and increase, and now she was trapped in a burning house and all the windows were nailed shut. She jerked the wheel, hammered the brake, pounded the accelerator. There was a moment of weightlessness succeeded by a grinding thump and a cascade of piss-colored water as they plunged into the Scorpion River and ricocheted up the far bank. The gear shift throbbed in her hand, the engine wheezed and ratcheted. Dropping down to first, she hit the ridge road at speed and they began to climb. Up they went, past the spot where Bax had flipped the Jeep, the road winding back on itself, higher and higher, till Scorpion Bay opened up beneath them and the ranch caught hold of the web of dirt roads that radiated out from it as if it were the center of all the world and the trees wove their fringe around it and the ewes, in the distance, were specks of non-color, licking their lambs. The rifle lay on the floorboards at their feet, sliding first to her, then to him, as she took the turns and beat in and out of the potholes. “So what are you going to do?” she asked him through her gritted teeth, her shoulders jerking, the seat bucking under her and Bax holding on to the door handle for his life.

  He gave her a strained look. The ribs were killing him, she could see that, but at the moment she had no sympathy for him, not the smallest, fractured particle of it. “I don’t know,” he said, and the rifle slid all the way across the cab, barrel first, till she had to nudge it away from the accelerator with her foot. “I’m just going to go have a little talk with them, is all.”

  By the time they got to the top of the ridge the sky had begun to clear, the black clouds rolling off to obscure the coast to the north and a continuous thread of silver running along in their wake. The going was easier here, the terrain ironed flat across the mesa that separated the two ranches, but the road was soupy and there were displaced rocks and mudslides of one degree or another round every turning. Half a dozen times she had to climb down and roll stones out of the way or ply the shovel they kept in back for just such a happy occasion and all the while Bax sat there fuming. Even in the best of times the road wasn’t much—every spring, after the rains, Bax and Francisco would take turns coaxing the old John Deere bulldozer to life and scrape it smooth of ruts, rocks and brush—but it see
med especially bad now that the Jeep, with its four-wheel traction, was out of commission and she had to negotiate it in the pickup. All the while, fishtailing across the mesa, she dreaded the prospect of winding her way down through the stacked-up switchbacks on the other side. That would be a trial, the sodden earth giving way, the wheels skewing toward the shoulder that wasn’t a shoulder anymore but an edge, a precipice, a drop.

  When they got to the top and the road began to dip down again, she and Bax had a view of Smugglers’ Ranch and the grove of olive trees, gone wild now, that somebody had put in the ground when the place was a going operation and they planted hayfields for the cattle, picked grapes and pressed olives for their oil. Nothing looked amiss, at least not from a bird’s-eye view, and she didn’t dare take her eyes off the road for more than a hurried glance as she humped in and out of the gullies and kept so close to the inside she scraped whatever paint might have been left off the long run of the fenders and the battered door that was all there was between Bax and the gouged-out hillside. “Jesus,” he said—twice—but that was all he said.

  The wheel jumped like a fistful of snakes, the tires slipped and grabbed and slipped again. She snatched a quick glance out the window, and as far as she could see, there were no boats in the bay or drawn up on the beach, but when finally the road stopped pitching and she could lift her eyes from the hood for a better look, she saw the tracks the three-wheelers had left in the yard out front of the abandoned house. They ran in tight graceful arcs, looping in on themselves, weaving and interweaving, their message all too plain.

  She pulled up in the yard, killed the ignition and set the brake with a jerk of her arm. The house was a two-story adobe, like the ranch house at Scorpion, but here the glass of the windows was gone, long since shattered by day-trippers practicing their marksmanship with stones and bullets alike, and the three parallel doors—one on each end and one set in the middle as if the place had been designed by kindergartners on a stiff sheet of construction paper—stood perpetually open on their ruptured hinges. It looked the way it always had: unoccupied, deserted, bereft. Heart leaping, she slammed out of the truck and went straight for the middle door, the one that gave onto the main room. If she saw Bax tugging at the dead weight of the cast and fumbling for his crutches, it didn’t register because this wasn’t about being polite or compassionate or even loving, and it was cold fury that propelled her. He shouted something at her back, but she was already inside.