When the Killing's Done

by Boyle, T. C.

  Anise and her mother are deep in conversation, every last bump and spike and guano-spattered tumble of rock bringing on a flood of recollection, and they haven’t noticed the change of course—or at least they haven’t mentioned it. But now, when his intention is unmistakable, Rita looks up and says, “Where you heading? Back around again?”

  He nods, conscious of Anise’s eyes on him. “I thought we’d just go over and check out Prisoners’ for a bit, on the TNC property. They can’t be everywhere, can they?”

  Prisoners’ Harbor, the main port of entry on Santa Cruz, lies on the north shore, just past the narrow eastern neck that gives the island a fanciful look from the air, as if it were a big dun plesiosaur stretching out its blocky head in pursuit of some swift-finned creature of the deep. There’s a long stretch of beach opening out from a tumble of hills and the valley that runs back three miles to the main ranch, where the defunct winery still stands, and where the ranch house, with its pool and gardens and outbuildings, gives the Conservancy a base of operations that feels like a remnant of paradise. He’s been there, twice, in happier times, before the killing started anyway, and the way the ranch house is situated to take in the views of its own private valley in a spot erased from the memory of the world moved something in him. He felt a desperate stab of covetousness, as if after ranging all over the globe he’d found his one true home, only to discover it belonged to somebody else. He wanted it. Wanted to sell the house he’d bought, mortgage his life and buy the place so he could pull all the doors shut behind him and say screw you to the world. Sure. Close it down. Live like Adam. Or the wild man who rowed out from the coast at the turn of the last century with nothing but a box of apples, a slingshot and a couple of fishhooks and took up residence on the barren shit-strewn lump of Gull Rock, gobbling up gull’s eggs and whatever he could bring down with a sling-propelled stone. He wore nothing but a ragged loincloth, winter and summer. Grew out his hair and beard. Watched the sky.

  Of course, that’s all just a dream, an adolescent fantasy. Everything, every square foot of everyplace, belongs to somebody, and any contemporary wild man—or entertainment center magnate with the flicker of an idea of even thinking about going wild—would be hunted down and hustled off to the bughouse in padded restraints. He’s reflecting on that, on wildness, on peace and eternity and the natural state of man, as they round Coche Point and motor close in along the coruscating arc of China Beach, using the headland behind them as a screen in the event that the Coast Guard cutter does in fact get word and come looking for them, and between bites of his sandwich he turns to Rita to see what she has to say about it. “Did you ever hear any stories about the wild man that used to live out here?” He chews, swallows, picturing himself in a loincloth and shaking a spear over his head. “Years ago, I mean. Turn of the century?”

  She considers a moment, her eyes drifting off to some other destination before sharpening with the recollection. “Francisco used to talk about him,” she says, hunched forward over her knees, beer can in one hand, half-eaten sandwich in the other, her head gently swaying with the movement of the boat. “It was like a legend or something, only real. This was in the early days, by the way, back before Prohibition when they had the winery going and all that. His father—Francisco’s father—told him the guy was a poacher, stealing sheep to eat what he could of and leave the rest for the ravens.”

  “He wasn’t right in the head, was that it? I mean, sucking gull’s eggs and sleeping out in the open and all the rest of it, the loincloth—”

  “He was a Dane, but the shortest Dane on record—only five feet tall. Or that’s what they say. And not only was he poaching sheep, he killed foxes, skunks, the island blue jay, whatever he could get hold of, and, I guess, just cooked it over a driftwood fire and dug in.”

  “Roast pork,” he says automatically, and he means to be funny, or at least ironic, but he can’t bring himself to grin or even smile because the thought sets him off all over again. They’re out there now, he thinks, blowing away animals. And we’re laughing about it. In the distance he can make out the pier at Prisoners’, a strip of nothing out there in the sun glaze, but no boats at least. And no helicopters.

  “So he was a carnivore,” Anise puts in, and she’s wearing a sour grin, needling her mother. “Just like you, Mom.”

  Rita grins back at her, then digs in her breast pocket for a pair of opaque iridescent blue sunglasses and claps them over her eyes as if she’s going into hiding. “That’s right,” she says, “because that’s the way we were made.” She pauses to take a sip of her beer. “And I just love the taste of lamb.”

  “Yeah,” Anise says, the grin gone now, “and meat is murder.”

  “I think I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “You didn’t seem to feel that way when we were living at the ranch.”

  “Come on, I was just a child. I didn’t know any better.” She’s fixed on her mother now, twin creases of irritation emerging between her eyes. “But you should. After what we saw out there, I mean just that one day with the ravens and those hunters? You might not have known it, but that was the biggest trauma of my life—”

  “That and Oxnard Junior High.”

  “I’m not joking. I’m telling you: animals are conscious. They feel pain. They have the same right to life you have.”

  “I remember one time”—Rita says, ignoring the appeal and lifting one dripping boot to brace an ankle on her knee before settling back in her seat with a sigh—“during shearing, when those vaqueros came out and raised a little hell after all the wool was in and they roasted a kid—the head, remember that? They put the head right on the coals and then split it open for the brains—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “—and that good rich creamy pale fat you used to spread on a slice of oven-hot bread like it was butter. Did you know that, Dave? Anise used to be a regular little mutton glutton.”

  “Yeah, well, me too,” he says, trying to play peacemaker. “Until I saw the light. But anyway, you know we’ve got to stop this pig hunt—I mean, it’s crazy. Nobody, not even the guy that runs the slaughterhouse, would want to see animals hunted down for nothing. Or you either, right?”

  What he’s trying to ask is whether she’s on their side or not, but Anise jumps in to answer for her: “No, no way. She’s as opposed to it as we are. Anybody would be.”

  They’re both looking to her, the harbor running up on them, waves creaming along the shore and the chaparral above it patchy and parched and waiting for the rains, when she sets down the beer in the cup holder in front of her and raises her head to level a savage uncompromising glare first on him and then her daughter. “Of course I am,” she says, spitting out the words. “It’s a waste of good meat.”

  That night, after taking them both out for a very pricey dress-up dinner at a new French restaurant Anise seemed to have heard about somewhere, during which he got into an unfortunate debate with the waiter over the way his sole meunière had been prepared, which he’d had to send back twice, Anise clucking over the fate of the fish—“If you’re going to commit to vegetarianism you can’t go halfway, Dave, because that’s just cowardly”—and Rita giving him a sour smile while lifting dainty slices of all-but-raw filet mignon to her lips, he drops them off at Anise’s apartment without comment and drives home to inspect the new lawn. And if he drives too fast and if a cop he vaguely recognizes pulls him over and asks him how much he’s had to drink and does he know the speed limit on city streets is thirty-five miles an hour and lets him off with a warning, it’s all because the day has been, well, complicated. He’s tracing the chain of events that blasted his mood to fragments—the frustration at Prisoners’ Harbor when the helicopter appeared out of nowhere to buzz the boat till he swung round and nosed it out to sea, the blaring circumambient voice warning him that “THE ISLAND IS CLOSED TO ALL VISITORS, REPEAT, THE ISLAND IS CLOSED,” Anise taking so long to get dressed they missed thei
r reservation by forty-five minutes and had to prostrate themselves before a little frog bastard of a snooty maître d’ before they got seated, and then the waiter, and the fish and the way Rita sucked at her filet mignon as if she were draining it of blood drop by drop—when the gate pulls back and he glides into the driveway to the streaming welcome of the motion-sensor light mounted over the garage door.

  It’s past midnight. He’s tired. He’s aggravated. He’s not thinking deeply. The car door eases open, the radio dies on a jam from some anonymous band he must have heard ten thousand times, and why, in Christ’s name, can’t the programmers come up with something different, something obscure and new and unfamiliar, the B sides, nothing but B sides, just to give everybody a break before they go out and shoot themselves? He steps out on the firm hardscape of the cobbled brick drive, feeling the familiar boater’s illusion that the ground is moving beneath him. For a moment he just stands there, taking in the night chill, the stars, listening to the silence and the muffled drone of the freeway. And then, just as he’s about to dig a flashlight out of the trunk and stroll out onto the lush new yielding carpet of the turf, to admire it and congratulate himself on his decision to go with sod instead of scattering grass seed and worrying over birds and weeds and bald patches till it comes in, he becomes aware of movement there, out along the perimeter of the yard.

  His first thought—and here he steels himself, ready to call out a warning or better yet a threat—is for intruders, burglars, thieves, but then he sees the shadows there, two of them, humped close to the ground, and thinks of the dogs, but the dogs are in the house where he left them. It takes him a moment before he understands that these are nature’s animals, wildlife, come to enjoy what he’s provided for them. Very slowly, with exaggerated caution, he slides along the length of the car, and with both hands, one to turn the key and the other to keep the lid from springing all the way up, he quietly slips open the trunk. There’s a wince of escaping light, and then he has the flashlight in hand, thinking, Coyote? Or just a neighbor’s dog? as he eases it shut again, stifling the click of the lock with the pressure of his hand.

  He forces himself to stand stock-still, listening, until the smallest sounds begin to drift to him out of the shadows. What does he hear? A soft wet swishing, the faintest tick of breathing or mastication, then a rustle, a soughing, then nothing. He’s almost afraid to lift his feet and so he shuffles forward, an inch at a time, the darkened cylinder of the flashlight held out before him like a homing device—he wants to get closer before switching it on, wants to be as close as he can before the light explodes and the animals scatter. He can feel the excitement building in him, the lure of the strange, the recondite, the hidden world that prowls through the dead hours of the night. A step closer, then another. And then, at the edge of the lawn, shadows enfolding shadows as if there were infinite depth to the night, as if the night were an ocean, as if he were underwater, in a cave, feeling for signs of the blind cave fish, he flicks on the light.

  Two raccoons, their eyes flaming as if they were the source of the light and not he, stare up at him, the gray gloves of their paws arrested and revealed for the fraction of a moment, and then they turn away from him as if he weren’t there at all, and go on with their business. Which, he sees now, is digging. They bend forward, paw at the turf, then rock back on their haunches, feeding something into the dark absence of their mouths. He runs the light over the belly of the lawn, each individual blade of grass clutching its shadow, and sees, in fact, that the new lawn is already pocked with holes, moonscaped, as if it were the apron of a driving range. It takes him a moment—this is nature, these are wild creatures, he is the interloper here and they the inheritors of the hills that have run continuous up the coast all the way to Alaska from the time the glaciers lost their traction—before he shouts out. “Get out of that! Get!” he cries, trying to pin them with the beam and clap his hands at the same time, running now and watching the two shifting golden forms pull back reluctantly and scoot over the ruined turf to the wall, which is no impediment at all.

  In the morning, after a closer inspection of the damage, he dials the number of Bruce Diaz, the friend of Wilson’s whose crew installed the lawn. He lets the phone ring eight times before hanging up—patience is not one of his virtues—and dialing again. On the fifth ring a woman answers in Spanish—“¿Bueno?”—and his mind goes momentarily numb until he can think to say, “¿Quiero hablar con Bruce? ¿Por favor?”

  There’s a shuffling and wheeze, voices mingling and separating, the muffled bark of a dog. Then Bruce’s voice, too loud, comes hurtling at him: “Yeah?”

  “Bruce?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Dave LaJoy.”

  There’s a silence.

  “You installed a new turf lawn for me yesterday?”

  “Yeah, sure. Dave. Okay. Sure.”

  “Well, it’s all full of holes. I mean, I get home at midnight, I haven’t even had a chance to see the job yet, and I turn on the flashlight and all I see is holes and bunches of dirt and dead grass piled up.”

  Another silence.

  “Bruce, you there?”

  “Raccoons,” he says finally, as if reluctant to pronounce the name of the guilty party. “They’re after the worms—nightcrawlers, you know? Worms are part of the product, necessary, you understand? For aeration, fertilizer. You get rid of the raccoons, the holes’ll grow over in a week, you won’t even know they were there.”

  But here it comes, rising in him, and he just can’t stop it. “You mean you’re not even going to get your ass over here and take a look? This a new lawn, new. I didn’t pay for any raggedy torn-up piece of second-rate shit.” There’s an unfortunate emphasis on the last epithet, because the pressure is ticking in him now, scraping away at the core of him like a thousand gray-gloved little claws. “I’ll cancel that check quicker than you can spit.”

  The voice that comes back over the wire is so reduced he can barely hear it. “Ten-thirty,” Diaz says. “But I tell you, it’s raccoons. I could lay a whole new lawn tomorrow and it won’t make a lick of difference.”

  Diaz—tall, with the build of a heavyweight gone to seed—appears half an hour later and stands with him on the lawn looking down sadly at the cored-out scatters of turf, the whole thing like a big green blanket the moths have got to, tells him he’ll replace the worst two strips at no cost at all, and then lifts his head to look him square in the eye. “But on condition you get rid of the raccoons first.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Call Animal Control,” he says, and then he’s shuffling off to his pickup truck and the gate is opening magically for him and he’s gone.

  Animal Control—amazingly, they answer on the first ring—informs him, through the offices of some overblown sandpaper-voiced clown half a step removed from a rent-a-cop, that they don’t trap raccoons. He’s in no mood. In the interval between the departure of Bruce Diaz and this phone call, Anise called to wonder what he was doing because maybe she was mistaken but hadn’t they agreed on eleven o’clock for him to come by for her and her mother to go wine-tasting over the hill in the Santa Ynez Valley, and he was maybe just a tad abrupt with her. But now, before he can respond—Well, what the fuck are we paying you for then? is on his lips—the person on the other end, the Animal Control officer, says, “But we’ve got the traps here and you’re welcome to come down and pick them up on overnight loan. Or we can do long-term too.”

  This takes him by surprise. “By traps, what do you mean? They don’t, I don’t know, hurt the animal—do they?”

  “No, no, no—these are Havahart traps, same as you use for rats and mice, only bigger.”

  “A lot bigger, I hope.”

  There’s an odd aspirated sound over the line as if the man on the other end were stifling a yawn. Or a laugh. Maybe he finds this funny. Maybe he’s in Animal Control for the sheer hilarity of it, just to get his rocks off. “You’re going to need a pickup or SUV,” the man says finally
.

  It takes him a moment, picturing it. And then, with the phone to his ear, already on his way out the door to back the Yukon out of the garage, he thinks to ask, “What about bait?”

  “Peanut butter. Peanut butter’ll catch anything. They love it, let me tell you. But if you want to get fancy, just open a can of sardines, and you’ll have every raccoon in the neighborhood fighting to get in—and half the cats and opossums too.”

  Again he pauses, the connection breathing static in his ear. One detail remains, and it looms up now like a submerged log riding a contrail of swamp gas. “Okay, yeah, but once I catch them, what do I do with them?”

  Wine-tasting. To his mind it’s just a euphemism for getting shit-faced in the middle of the afternoon, the kind of activity tourists and busloads of retirees get a charge out of, but as it turned out he was glad of it. For a few hours, it took him out of himself, and after their second stop—at a place he loved, the cellars cold and dank, the great oaken casks standing in ranks like monuments to all those corrupted livers of the past—he really loosened up for the first time in what seemed like weeks. Not that he hadn’t felt the tension lift when they’d motored out of the marina the previous morning, but by the time they got to the island he was twisted up inside all over again. So the wine-tasting was a nice break. And he enjoyed Rita—she seemed to like him, respect him even, unlike his ex-wife’s mother, who regarded him out of her black Sicilian eyes as if he were the Antichrist and jumped up from her chair with a little gasp every time he stepped into the room, wailing, Oh, God, does he sit here?

  They had a late lunch—supper, really—outdoors at a little café in the studiously quaint town of Santa Ynez, then drove back up 154 and through the San Marcos Pass in the decanted sunshine of the dying afternoon and wound their way down to Santa Barbara with the islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel laid out before them as if on a tray, the perspective shifting and shifting again as they wound their way through the switchbacks and watched the night begin to gather in a gray tumble of thickening gloom up ahead of them while the islands rode off to the west in red streamers of illumination. Rita remarked on how pretty it was and Anise chimed in to agree. “Maybe I ought to write a song about it,” Anise murmured, her voice gone whispery in collusion. “Call it ‘Floating Islands,’” her mother said, and though he was calm, floating himself, on an even keel, he couldn’t help working up a little venom: “How about ‘Killing Floor’? Or no. That one’s already taken, right?”