When the Killing's Done

by Boyle, T. C.

  It can’t be more than fifty degrees out on the water, the wind chill dropping the temperature a whole lot lower than that, but Anise’s mother insists on sitting out on the deck the whole way across. He tried to tell her it was going to be chilly before they’d even climbed out of the car, but she dismissed him. “You think I don’t know these islands?” she said, her eyebrows lifting till they floated on the furrows that ran up into her hairline. Her face was a template of Anise’s, uncanny, exact in every detail, as if her daughter had been cloned instead of generated in the usual way—the same broad forehead, the round face and strong chin, eyes that jumped out at you from ten feet away, the perfect shells of her ears and the sexy slight eversion of the upper lip, the whole of it framed by a whipping hurricane of dirty-blond hair that was going to gray in long electric streaks. She was tall, square-shouldered, leaner than Anise, but built, still built, though she must have been in her mid-fifties. At least. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, a short-sleeved blouse and a bandanna at her throat. The blistered leather jacket, fleece-lined, her concession to the weather, was knotted round her waist. She wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry.

  When she’d put her rhetorical question to him, she wrapped an arm round Anise and said, “Now that Bax is dead and probably Francisco too, I don’t think there’s anybody alive knows them—or at least the one we’re heading for—better.” She broke into a smile and turned her face to Anise’s as if she were going to kiss her—and she did, on the tip of her nose, a quick compression and release of the lips that made him uneasy in a way he couldn’t quite pin down. “Right, honey?”

  But that’s all right. Everything’s all right. The water’s a cloud and he’s floating on it now, living in the moment, getting away, and he feels his mood lightening by the minute. There’s not much chop. The sun’s unencumbered by even the hint of a cloud or the slightest tatter of fog. The dolphins come gamboling. The engine never misses a beat. And if he hammers it all the way out it’s because he’s eager to get there if only to reconnoiter, but he’s hoping—they’re all hoping—to be able to land at Scorpion, or if not Scorpion, then Smugglers’, so Rita can see for the first time in all these years what’s left of the place. So she can reminisce, spin stories, talk about sheep and ravens and the way it was sitting round a bonfire on summer nights strumming a guitar and blending her voice with her rangy tall pubescent daughter’s while the moon rose up full-bellied out of the channel and all the dwarf foxes and skunks pinned back their ears and howled. Or barked. Or whatever it was they were capable of. For the most part, Anise stays out on deck with her mother, the two of them chattering away, Rita’s mood so airy she might have swallowed his entire bottle of Xanax, and he doesn’t mind. It’s his pleasure—his privilege—to escort her and if that involves hearing the old stories over and over, that’s fine with him. If it makes Rita happy—and here he steals a look over his shoulder to see the two of them seated in deck chairs, their heads together and the wind at their hair—it makes Anise happy. And what makes Anise happy absorbs him totally. Or so he tells himself as he pushes the throttle forward and the cove at Scorpion heaves into sight.

  He knows better than to anchor before he can sweep his binoculars over the pier and the beach and the beaten dirt trail that curves around behind the rock face on the right, because that’s where the house is and that’s where the rangers will be, if the rangers are here at all. Rita, windblown, flushed, is leaning way out over the rail as the boat swings round in the chop. She’s got her own binoculars, a little 8 × 22 birdwatchers’ pair she pulled out of her purse. “There,” she cries, her voice pitched high with excitement, “isn’t that the Jeep? Bax’s Jeep?”

  And now Anise is in on the act, a hand shielding her eyes till her mother passes her the binoculars. She takes a moment to focus, steadying herself over the flexion of her legs. “I don’t know,” she says, “is that a patch of yellow or just my imagination?”

  From where he sits at the bridge he can see nothing but a rusting heap of old ranch equipment the Park Service dragged down away from the house and left there in the tall weeds above tide line. They’d probably meant to haul it all away, wipe the place clean, but then they would have had to bring a crane out to lift the wreckage onto a barge and transport it back to the coast, so some Park Service genius decided they ought to just leave it there as a curiosity, a historical artifact, a reminder of the times when people like Anise’s mother were out here running sheep. Maybe he can make out something in the pile that might once have been a Jeep, but he’d have to use his imagination to force the lines to coalesce and he’s too busy jumping the binoculars from one point to another, looking for authority figures, for hunters, guns, hounds, helicopters, to pay it more than passing attention.

  So he decides to drop anchor and lower the dinghy. What are they going to do—shoot him? He sees nobody, nothing, not a flicker of movement but for the shorebirds doing their thing in quick-footed runnels of color. The outboard fires up right away, a long smooth swell rocking beneath them, and in the next moment they’re planing toward the pier, Anise and her mother riveted ahead, their faces tight with anticipation, and for a moment he sees them both as children, Girl Scouts maybe, and here’s their field trip, their wienie roast and the return of the native all rolled in one. Of course, there’s a sign there, posted on the face of the pier, right where the tourist boat bumps up against the crossbeams to offload, and it tells them what they already know: ISLAND CLOSED TO ALL ACTIVITIES/NO LANDING UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. BY AUTHORITY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

  But they’re right there now, thirty feet away, Anise demurring—“Maybe we shouldn’t . . .”—and her mother, Rita, in a soft coaxing voice, saying, “What’s the harm? I mean, do you hear any gunshots? Do you see anybody? If we could just—I just want to feel the dirt under my feet, that’s all. For five minutes. That’s all I ask.”

  And he’s thinking: The sons of bitches. And shoving the tiller to swing the bow abruptly and chase along the beach. Shouting to make himself heard over the noise of the motor, he says, “Maybe if we pull up on the beach we can always say we didn’t see the sign.” Spray shoots up. He eases off on the throttle and then they’re riding the gentle crest of a wave up onto the beach as he tips back the motor and there’s a long shudder and groan of the sand beneath them, everything glinting in the wet, shells, stones, the tiny scrambling things that make their living in the wash.

  Rita’s already out of the boat, quick-limbed and agile, tugging at the braided yellow nylon line to pull them up and away from the sea. Anise springs out behind her and now he’s on the beach too, all three of them scooting the inflatable across the sand.

  “Wow,” Rita says, hands on her hips, not even winded, “just look at it!” What she’s seeing goes back twenty years and more, but what he’s seeing is the six-foot sign pounded into the sand, a duplicate of the one on the pier, made out of the same sheet metal as a road sign, and before he can register the next one down the beach and the one beyond that he’s wondering if the convicts up at Soledad or wherever had to pound it out in metal shop. Strange twist if they did, forming those proscriptive letters behind bars to keep people out of a place with no bars on it at all.

  It is then—Rita exclaiming, Anise following her up the slope toward the house, which is just visible from this angle, some five hundred yards off, adobe, white walls, green tiles anchoring the roof, the sun throwing javelins at everything—that the two jerks in Park Service regalia come hustling out the door. He’s startled, despite himself, because this is just what he expected, isn’t it? His voice is a bark, harsh, snapping like a dog’s. “Anise! Hey, get your ass back in the boat!”

  She’s fifty feet ahead of him and her mother’s fifty feet beyond that.

  “Rita!” he shouts, and when she turns he stabs a finger in the direction of the men in the distance and then sweeps his arm over his head like a third-base coach waving the runners home. There’s a moment of inaction, Anise’s wide wondering fa
ce, her mother’s stacked in duplicate behind hers, and then they’re both running and he’s running too, for the boat, for the line, to haul the thing back in the water and get off before he has to listen to yet another lecture—or worse, go through the whole sick charade of another arrest.

  So what is it—a matter of seconds? The rangers, one of them with a mustache, the other without, won’t deign to break into a run because that would somehow impeach their dignity, or that’s how he figures it anyway, but they’re doing double-time nonetheless. For her part, Anise flies. She keeps herself in shape at the club because being fit and looking good are part of who she is and what she does, and here she is beside him, the foam of the surf climbing up their ankles, the dinghy afloat now, the rangers gaining and the sun still throwing spears. The surprise in all this—and how can he examine it so calmly?—is Rita. For the space of a heartbeat he thought she was going to stand there and confront them, lay into them, let them know in the most exacting detail just who she is and what her rights are and how this is her island, not theirs, and if they so much as lay a finger on her the sky will open up and the seas erupt, but he’s managed to trigger the flight response in her and she whips round and bolts for the beach.

  The engine catches with an accelerating growl and a quick angry puff of exhaust. Anise is waving her arm like a search and rescue victim. The Park Service types are coming on, stiff-kneed—oh, they won’t run, it’s not in them, because they’re the authority here, the stuff, the man—but Rita never lets them close on her. She can run. For an old woman, or late middle-aged or whatever she is, she’s moving like a well-oiled machine, the cowboy boots—tooled in the pattern of two snakes entwined over the bridge of each foot, red and blue—pounding across the sand and then sloshing through the low wall of the surf, water to her knees, and here she is in the boat and the boat already a hundred feet from shore. Give it some gas, let it ride. He’s breathing hard, the excitement pounding in him like joy, like the very form and definition of it, but the joy comes with an overload of rage and he pins the tiller wide to bring the dinghy back round in a tight arc just as the rangers reach the shoreline and he can see their faces clearly and see that their mouths are open and that they’re shouting something, some official threat or malediction.

  Let them. Let them shout all they want. Very slowly, with the greatest deliberation, he raises his right hand, the middle finger extended, just to let them know how he feels.

  Dave LaJoy is not the type to give up easily. Or graciously. Or at all. Anise’s mother wants to land, wants to hike around her old property, and that is the issue here. He never stops to think what a shame it is that she didn’t come out on the tourist boat a couple months ago when everybody on God’s green earth was welcome to wander at will and even spend the night in the campground—if they had a tent and a permit, that is—or that she could come out in April or May or anytime but now, because now is when he’s bobbing offshore in the Paladin and now is when he wants access. So what he does, after backing off from Scorpion Beach, hauling the dinghy back aboard and securing it, is head east for San Pedro Point, and the other ranch beyond it, at Smugglers’ Cove.

  Anise and her mother are in the cockpit with him, their hands fluttering and mouths going nonstop—“What a rush!” Rita keeps saying and they both break out in laughter—because they’re riding the high of outmaneuvering the Park Service drones, out-foxing them, and how’s that? He doesn’t look back, though he can picture the two figures receding on the beach, maybe wringing their hands and telling each other how unfair the world is. What are they going to do now with their little summons books and their bright shiny new taxpayer-funded handcuffs? He feels for them, he does. But he’s watching out ahead just the same, watching for other boats—for the Coast Guard cutter specifically—because these people do have marine radios, after all. The engine thrums. The weather remains clear. It’s eleven-thirty in the morning and everything’s fine, the cliffs keeping watch on the right, the ocean opening up ahead of them in all its struck-blue empty rolling immensity. “We’re going to try Smugglers’,” he says, and Anise gives him a look.

  She’s unwrapping a sandwich and handing it to her mother—hummus and roasted pepper, on oatnut bread, no meat, though Rita’s an unregenerate carnivore—and she wonders aloud if that’s a good idea. “Shouldn’t we just quit while we’re ahead?”

  “Shit, no.” He’s not angry, not disappointed or defensive either. He’s just going to do what he has to do and no one can tell him different. “Don’t you at least want to see what they’re up to? I mean, monitor the situation? If we were really thinking, we would’ve brought Toni Walsh with us.” There’s the sweet suck and wheeze of the engine, the shush of the water parting along the hull. “What do you think, Rita?”

  “Me?” She glances up at him, the spark of amusement in her eyes still. “I’m with the program, because this is just, I can’t tell you—amazing. Really amazing.” She shifts her eyes to lean forward and extract a beer from the cooler under the bench. Then she sits up, arches her back as if to relieve the stress of the chase and cracks the beer with a celebratory pop. “I’d love to see the house there,” she says, a seductive note come into her voice. “You know, it was abandoned in our time—until the hunters set up there anyway. Did Anise ever tell you?”

  She had, yes. She’d told him about the trauma of all that, the boyfriend—Baxter—half-crippled at the time and powerless to do anything about the slaughter, and the owners exerting pressure on the captains of the hauling barges to ignore Rita’s calls to remove their sheep to market because he wanted them there so the sportsmen could come and put very expensive holes in them, the killing going on even then, but under a different cover. And then the three of them found themselves living in a one-bedroom walkup in Oxnard, right back where they’d started, and instead of six thousand acres to roam they had a backyard the size of a hogpen, and instead of seeing nobody her own age and not knowing the least thing about style or top-forty music or the TV references it took her a year to get, Anise found herself in a classroom. Several classrooms. With a roster of different teachers and a streaming tide of sneering adolescent faces all around her, and if she hadn’t been a born-in-the-flesh beauty and the very incarnation of an adolescent boy’s wet dreams (here he’s extrapolating), she wouldn’t have survived it. Rita got a job as a waitress. The boyfriend—he was an old man by then—mended. Mostly anyway. And he couldn’t find work because there weren’t any sheep ranches to run in Oxnard and his leg bothered him still so it was pitchfork hell to stand up on it for more than ten minutes at a time and he surely wasn’t about to take a minimum-wage job in a hardware store or some such at his age, so he went back to drinking. And so did Rita. They lasted six months, and then he was gone, and Anise, very slowly—watchful, imitative, using her native smarts and the scars of her isolation and her voice and her guitar to her fullest advantage—became Anise.

  “No,” he says. “No, she didn’t tell me.”

  Playfully, reaching out to give his calf a squeeze, Anise says, “You know I did. About six thousand times?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Okay. But I want to hear it from the source.”

  He’s got a sandwich in his hand, and—he checks his watch to see if it’s edged past noon—a beer too. Why not? Why not enjoy himself, have a party if he feels like it? The waters are still free, even if the island’s locked up like a prison cell, only with all the prisoners on the outside.

  Rita’s voice is husky with wear, but she recounts the story with a forced gaiety, as if none of it mattered anymore, as if she were over the pain of eviction and the separation from the boyfriend and ultimately her daughter, as if her life of inaction and bar talk in the backwater of Port Townsend were just what she’d always hoped for. He listens in the way of a historian, one hand on the wheel, the other alternately lifting a sandwich and the beer to his mouth, and then Smugglers’ opens up before them at the very moment the Coast Guard boat, lights flashing, some jerk out on the deck
, makes the far point and slides across the bay. He can’t believe it. But down goes the sandwich, down goes the beer, and he’s swinging the wheel hard to port as if it’s been programmed in his genes and heading back the way they’ve just come, all innocence, as if they were sightseers skirting the island, boating enthusiasts out for a run on one of the last glorious days of the fall.

  Is his heart pounding? You bet. “Talk about high blood pressure,” he says, and tries to laugh. The women are looking back over their shoulders, all the exhilaration blown out of them. “Are they coming after us?” he asks, keeping his voice level.

  He won’t look, in the same way he won’t shift his eyes to the rearview when a cop’s behind him on the freeway, on the theory that if you’re too hyper, they’ll nail you. Be respectful, let them know you’re aware of their presence, and keep the speed pinned at sixty-five, no hurry, no fears.

  “No,” Anise says, “no, I don’t think so.”

  Straight out, easy on the throttle, the blistered back-running slope of San Pedro Point in bright definition out there beyond the bow. He doesn’t say another word. Just watches the point come to them as he changes course ever so slightly, bearing north and east as if he’s heading back to the coast, and that’s just what Anise and her mother are thinking, that they’re done for the day, outmanned, finished, heading home. And then the cove disappears in their wake and the Coast Guard cutter with it—the snitches at Scorpion must not have radioed after all—and when the point is dwindling in their wake he changes course again, bearing west now, retracing the route that brought them here from Scorpion.