When the Killing's Done

by Boyle, T. C.

  The light faded to gray. Shadows fell away from the walls. She made out an irregular shape on the floor of the entryway, something that didn’t belong, and it took a moment for it to cohere out of the dimness: a blue backpack, its flap flung back on a box of dehydrated meals in silver pouches. Beyond it, there was a jumble of clothes and equipment, manufactured things, shucked wrappers, crumpled cans, three twelve-packs of Tecate stacked haphazardly one atop the other in their flame-red jackets. The smell she remembered—mild and botanical, the odor of dry rot, mold, the dehisced seeds of the plants that drifted through the broken panes and settled in the cracks of the floorboards—was different now, coppery and hard, with an overlay of the mechanical, of oil, gun oil, and here were the rifles, two, three, four of them, propped against the back wall like an exhibit in a gallery.

  The sleeping bags she found laid out on the floor of the main room, a pair of Coleman lanterns propped up beside them in a scatter of hunting magazines—Oregon’s Mule Deer Paradise, Ozarks Bear and More!—and a yard-long ice chest, orange and white plastic, set like a bench beneath the lintel of the shattered window. She heard Bax call out her name, but didn’t answer. Inside the ice chest, amidst a slurry of melting ice, were two plastic-wrapped slabs of meat, what looked to be a liver in one and four or five crudely cut steaks in the other. Behind her, at the door, there was the sound of a heavy footfall and then the thump and grate of the crutches. Bax’s voice echoed through the emptiness: “Rita, where in hell are you?”

  Still she didn’t answer. She was too angry, each crumpled cigarette pack and balled-up wad of underwear or grease-stained rags infuriating her anew, and what did they think this was, a hotel? A flophouse? She took the stairs two at a time, cursing under her breath. At the top of the stairs was a door, and that was strange, because she hadn’t remembered a door there at all. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if it had new hinges, or at least they’d been newly oiled and scraped of rust. She lifted the latch and pushed the door open, and here she was surprised—or no, shocked and outraged—all over again.

  The room had been transformed. The floorboards gleamed as if they’d been varnished, or if not varnished at least scrupulously swept and mopped. And the windows—there were two of them, set in the side and back walls—were covered in plastic sheeting, which had been carefully affixed to the window frame with duct tape. A camp bed stood against the far wall, complete with blankets, pillow, sheets and pillowcase. There were jackets and shirts suspended from nails driven into the wall above it, another backpack—this one in plain unvarnished khaki, as if it were military issue—set atop a slab of driftwood beside the bed, a crude desk and chair fashioned from produce crates squared off against the wall opposite. And worst of all, a fleece, a tanned fleece splayed out on the floor in front of the bed so the sheep killer wouldn’t have to get his feet cold when he shucked off his boots, strung his bow, sharpened his steel-tipped arrows.

  “Rita?”

  She was frozen with hate. “Up here,” she called. “I’m upstairs.” She could hear Bax scraping around below, muttering to himself. And then, as if she needed anything more to provoke her, vinegar to rub in her wounds, a jab with a sharp stick, she saw what was on the table. There, beside a Coleman lantern and half a dozen paperbacks, was a hunting magazine turned back to a full-page ad. From a distance, it looked as if a huge pair of binoculars was staring out from the page, but when she snatched up the magazine, she saw that she’d been looking at two circular photographs, one of a boar flashing its tusks and the other of a ram, a Rambouillet ram, perched on a crag. The legend at the top read: Eldon Thatch’s Island Hunt Club. There was a phone number and a Ventura address, followed by a price list: $750 for a razorback boar, $1,000 for a trophy ram and two meat sheep. Meat sheep. What went through her mind in that moment wasn’t so much a thought process as it was an escalating flood of images, each more bitter and ironic than the last. Their sheep, their rams, the animals they’d paid for themselves and broken their backs over, nurtured, docked, dipped, were going to be hunted down—were being hunted down—at prices that were twenty times what they could get for them. And by strangers. Interlopers. Jerks.

  In the next moment she was sweeping everything—bedding, paperbacks, the lantern, even the plastic sheeting she ripped from the windows as if she were ripping the skin from their backs—into one of the wooden crates, and in the moment after that, her breath coming so fast she might have been hyperventilating the way she had over the lines of coke Toby would chop and lay out for her any time of day or night whether she wanted it or not, and she did want it, she always wanted it, she was bumping the thing down the steps and yelling out to Bax, who was standing there at the base of the staircase gaping up at her, to get out of her way. “What in Christ’s name?” Bax said. “You can’t touch this stuff, this is private property, this is—”

  She said nothing. There was no time for debate—she was in the grip of something here and it was going to play out whether or not he liked it or Eldon Thatch liked it or Pier and Francis Gherini or the commander of the Coast Guard himself. Down the stairs, across the floor and out the door to the yard, Bax clumping behind her. She overturned the box and dumped everything in the mud. Then she snaked past Bax, who was rumbling away at her in a language that was English, insistent and harsh, but might as well have been Mandarin Chinese for all the effect it had on her, propelling herself back into the house, to the main room now, stuffing the sleeping bags in the box, the backpack full of just-add-water meals, the magazines, the beer, even their rolls of toilet paper. She dragged it all outside and dumped it there, and if she heard the scream of the three-wheelers on the hill above or the harsh machine-gun clatter of the helicopter blades that could only mean that the owners were on their way to deliver their poisonous news in person, it didn’t matter a whit. Because she squared her shoulders and went straight to the truck and the spare can of gasoline Bax kept behind the passenger’s seat and in the next moment the sweet smell of benzene rose to her as she sloshed it over the whole mess and then reached deep in the pocket of her jeans for a match.

  So it went up, all of it, before Bax or anybody else could stop her. And Bax did try to stop her because he was the peacemaker, the coward, the dog who would roll over on his back so the owners could scratch his belly and then sell the concession out from under him. She watched the flames rise, roiling and bright, the lanterns bursting with the violent release of their kerosene, the food pouches popping like firecrackers, cotton and leather and Gore-Tex shriveling away to nothing while the foam pads beneath the sleeping bags sent up an evil oily black smoke that forked into the sky and hung there overhead like a tattered umbrella. When Bax did get to her—scrape, clump, scrape—she swung round on him, furious. “Do you know what they’re doing? Do you have any idea?”

  “I don’t care what they’re doing, you don’t come into somebody’s house—”

  “Somebody’s house? This is nobody’s house. This is our house. Part of our ranch, part of what we’re paying through the nose to lease.”

  “—and destroy private property. It’s not right. It’s crazy. You’re fucking crazy, you know that?”

  “Yeah? And so what are you then? They’re selling our sheep, Bax, our rams that we . . . for any jerk with a gun to just . . .” She felt herself giving way, all the jolts and frustrations of the day tearing loose inside her, and her eyes were wet suddenly. “A thousand dollars, Bax, they’re killing our stock for a thousand dollars for one ram and two meat sheep. Meat sheep, for God’s sake!”

  She saw that register on his face. His eyes went wide, his jaw locked. He was in pain—just standing up was a trial—and this was like climbing up on his shoulders and kicking the crutches out from under him. She felt bad then—he hadn’t known, or hadn’t known the extent of it. “What are you talking about?” he said, his face lit freakishly by the flames, sick flames, chemical flames, the beer cans bursting with a long liquid hiss that was the sound of capitulation and defeat.

/>   “Upstairs. In the bedroom. His bedroom. He’s got an ad in Field and Stream, for Christ’s sake. ‘Eldon Thatch’s Island Hunt Club.’ Prices and everything.”

  It was then that the noise she’d been hearing off on the periphery grew in intensity, grew closer, and it wasn’t the clatter of the helicopter that had appeared overhead like a big ratcheting bug and vanished over the rise in the direction of Scorpion, but the angry mechanical buzzing of the ATVs come home to roost. She looked up to see the three of them, in single file, working their way down the road from the mesa. Bax had seen them too. He was already in motion, moving faster than she could have imagined, and when they came roaring into the yard he was at the truck, propped up against it, and he had the .22 in his hands.

  She didn’t know guns, didn’t want to know guns. She was in a transcendent state, the hate and fear burning in her in equal portions, and where were the peace and love she’d shaped her voice around through all those years when music was the means and brotherhood the end? She’d started the fire. She’d provoked this. Her throat clenched. Somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was going to die.

  She watched the three of them shut down their engines and dismount, their motions fussy and exaggerated, as if to show how purely cool and unconcerned they were, nothing out of the ordinary, just a bonfire burning in the yard and a .22 rifle leveled on them. Thatch removed the khaki cap he was wearing, shook out his hair—he had one of those layered cuts the hair bands favored to distract you from the fact that they couldn’t play their instruments, and that said all she needed to know—then ambled across the yard, the other two trailing in his wake. “Hello there,” he called, trying on a smile that was like the smile of a man stepping onto a used car lot for the first time, hopeful but expecting the worst. He wanted to know what was going on, what they were doing there, what the fire was all about. “For a minute,” he said, trying to be friendly, trying to smooth things out, as if trespassing and sheep killing and cutting their living out from under them was just a little gaffe, nothing really, “I thought the house was on fire.” But then he had a look at the piled-up mess of the fire and saw what it was and his face went hard.

  “You’re killing our animals,” Bax said. “Livestock. You and these two clowns”—he had the rifle laid out across the hood of the truck and the truck was between them and him, and he indicated the two hunters, fat-faced types in their thirties or forties, with a jerk of his head—“are shooting up our sheep. That we paid for out of our own pockets. And that’s got to stop.”

  She’d moved in beside him when the men had climbed down from their vehicles blinking against the light of the spreading sky. The mud sucked at her boots. A cold shiver ran through her. “And the lambs,” she heard herself say. “What about the dead lambs? Seventy-three of them.”

  The big man—Thatch, and he must have been some sort of bodybuilder or something—just shrugged. “Talk to the Gherinis,” he said. “I don’t owe you shit. You owe me. You’ve got no right to destroy people’s personal property, and I tell you you’re going to pay every penny it’s going to cost to replace it, or—”

  “Or what?” Bax lifted the gun now, though it was puny, ridiculous, a child’s toy compared to what the two fat-faced men had slung over their shoulders.

  Thatch hadn’t moved. He was twenty feet away. The bow loomed over the back of his head as if it were attached to him, a supererogatory limb sprung up out of the jointure of his shoulder blades. “I’ll sue you. I’ll have you evicted, that’s what I’ll do. You just try me. And I’m about a heartbeat away from coming over there and kicking your crippled ass, crutches or no.” He shifted his gaze to her. “You too, you bitch.”

  The violence of the curse, the hate, the explosive freight-train rush of the moment—Life and death, that was what she was thinking, life and death—stunned her. Scared her. What had she done?

  No one moved. No one said a word. Movie images flickered through her head, shootouts and quick draw, Technicolor irreality, playacting, and who were those people lying there in the dirt with the fake blood spurting? Extras, stuntmen, bad guys. Not Bax, not her. But where was the reality, exactly, where the restraint? The law? Normalcy, even?

  Ultimately—and it happened before she could draw her next breath—there was only a single shot fired, and it was Bax who squeezed it off, a sudden sharp snap like the crack of a whip that kicked up a puff of dirt all the way on the far side of the house, and Bax wasn’t aiming, maybe didn’t even mean to pull the trigger, but it had its effect. The two fat-faces staggered back as if their knees had buckled and she watched the color drain out of Thatch’s face.

  Bax—she couldn’t read him, couldn’t tell if his own stone-cold look was the result of the pain of his ribs or a flare of anger or even surprise at what he’d done, what it had all come to—dropped his voice down to its fiercest pitch and said, “You cocky son of a bitch—who the hell do you think you are?”

  And Thatch, white still, white as Gold Medal flour, his blood drained as neatly as if somebody had pulled out the stopper, fought to master his voice. “You think you can intimidate me?”

  And Bax, check and checkmate: “You’re damn right.”

  She could see it was going to be difficult getting back into the truck, Bax fumbling and exposed for the fatal space of one long moment while she twisted the key in the ignition and Thatch and his sheep killers did whatever it was they meant to do to get their own back, and so she started round the truck to the driver’s side, saying loud enough for all to hear, “The hell with it. Let’s just leave. Let’s just get out of here.”

  Thatch made no move to stop them, though the look he gave her was death delivered. She had the truck up and running and blasting its exhaust, and the noise and her motions, the briskness with which she sprang into the seat, squared herself and jerked at the gear shift, gave Bax cover enough to juggle gun and crutches and heave himself into the truck, and she never gave Thatch a second glance as she pinned the accelerator to the floor and slashed away up the road until the ranch and the bonfire with the three puny figures in front of it was just a speck in the rearview mirror.

  She’d never been so torn up in her life. Her hands were trembling, her feet were like dead things, and she could feel her stomach, the very bottom of it, as if it had been pinned to her with a tack. Bax roared out his rage all the way up the snaking muddy road to the mesa and she roared it right back at him. They made all sorts of resolutions, what they were going to do, what Bax was going to say to the owners and to the police and the Coast Guard and anybody else who would listen, but none of it did the least bit of good, because when they wound down the other side of the mesa and Scorpion Ranch appeared beneath them and grew larger and larger till the view out the windshield was filled to surfeit with it, they saw the helicopter there, inert in the yard, and the pilot and a man in suit and tie—the Gherinis’ agent or lawyer or whoever he was—standing beside it and Anise and Francisco with them, looking grim.

  Yes. That’s right. Pull the plug and let it all wash down the drain, the blisters, the backbreak, the stock and the improvements, the gas-fired water pump and the saddle horses and all the rest, the taste of the dirt between your teeth when the sundowners are clipping over the hills and the deepest requited love of a place that was like the love of the soul of God, let it go. Because Mr. Gherini’s agent, stepping delicately through the mud in his city shoes, said, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Russell, but I have instructions to inform you that you’ve got two weeks to vacate.”

  Bax had thrown it back at him: “What are you talking about?”

  The agent—erect, in command, though he couldn’t have stood more than five feet five and his eyes were mortised with disgust—gave a little speech then, peppered with figures torn from a ledger sheet, forty thousand dollars total profit to the Gherinis in the business year just concluded versus the promise of some hundred and fifty thousand in annual revenues from sport hunting alone, and all that with the Park Serv
ice breathing down their necks and threatening a public taking of the property that had been in his clients’ family from their grandfather’s time for a compensation too mean even to mention. “Let’s face it, Mr. Russell,” he said, lifting one foot from the ooze and then, thinking better of it, setting it down again, “the world’s moving on. Sheeping’s something out of the old west and the old west is dead.”

  Bax, strung tight, trying to gesticulate and hold on to the crutches at the same time, tried to reason with him, but the man kept shaking his head and interrupting him. “Two weeks,” he kept saying. “I’m very sorry. My clients are sorry. Everybody’s sorry.” He moved forward then, very carefully, like a man wading through cake batter, removed an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it over. “Two weeks. You’ve been duly served.”

  It was as if the breath had been knocked out of her. She felt like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a scrap of rock as the seas rose and crashed. She was drowning on dry land. “What about the lambs?” she asked, angling toward him, her palms held out in extenuation. “We can’t just—”