T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

“Don’t sell her short — the way she’s going now she could be the first baby to sail solo around the world. What do you think? Asleep at the wheel?”

Beverly stirs. The green eyes flash open and don’t particularly like what they see. Two or three heaves for breath and then the encapsulated wail breaking free to startle the cabin, everybody looking her way now, some in annoyance, some in the fondness of reminiscence, and then they look away and there’s the maneuver with the blouse and the nursing bra and the baby’s at the nipple, the flow of milk commencing and conversation starting up again.

“I don’t know about you,” Frazier says, looking to Annabelle, “but I’m ready for a beer. Anybody want one? Alma?”

“She’s nursing, dummy.” Annabelle gives him a look, her eyebrows knitting, her lips clenched in mock exasperation.

“So? A little beer in the system just makes the buggers stronger. I mean, look at me. My mother put away four or five pints a day her whole life — and nobody can tell me she was about to take a holiday just because she had a baby hanging off her teat.”

Annabelle cuffs him lightly on the meat of his arm. “Oh, come on, Frazier — be civilized, will you? Pretend you’re an American.”

“You expect me to dignify that with a response?” he says, pushing himself up. “Beer — that’s the universal language.” He’s hovering over the table, Annabelle sliding out to make way for him. “Annabelle?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Why not? We’re celebrating, aren’t we?”

“Alma? You sure?”

She shakes her head. “I’m okay. Really.”

They both watch him make his way up the aisle between the tables to the concession stand-galley, where, Alma sees, any number of people seem to have the same idea, beers universal, though it’s just past ten in the morning. “It’s going to be one heck of a party,” Alma says.

Annabelle nods, grinning. “And that one”—indicating Frazier with a nod of her head—“is going to make sure it never stops, not till we’re back in Ventura and they kick us off the boat anyway.”

The celebration — and it’s not premature, not at all, because miracles do happen and they need to be consecrated when they do — is in recognition that no pig sign has been found anywhere on the island since the last pig was shot in the spring. They might have waited a year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having an old sow with six piglets show up somewhere in time for the six o’clock news, but pigs make a real mess of their environment, rooting things up in great wide swaths you can see from the air, and everybody’s about ninety-nine percent sure they’re gone — though of course they’ll go on monitoring the fences for two more years yet before removing them permanently. Besides which, Frazier and his crew won’t be here in a year — or maybe Frazier will, judging from the way she’s seen him gaze at Annabelle when he thinks no one’s watching.

No, for her money — for all intents and purposes — the pigs are gone. And this day — mid-September, sun high, seventy-three degrees out on the water and maybe eighty at Scorpion — has been created in PR heaven for just such an occasion as this, and because Freeman Lorber has a conflict, she herself will stand before the gathered partygoers and the news camera from KNBC and deliver her speech with Beverly in her arms, declaring Santa Cruz Island free of invasive fauna.

Except for a single inconvenient specimen of Procyon lotor , that is, observed feeding at the compost bin at the main ranch three and a half months back. Or perhaps there were two — the ground was too hard to give up much in the way of prints — but certainly the animal was there. She saw it and so did Allison, unmistakably. And that — the appearance of the raccoon as dusk fell on that June night — is either one of the greatest coincident finds in the history of island biogeography or a disaster in the making. Or both.

No one believed them at first, and of course by the time everybody rushed out there in confusion the animal was gone. It must have been a fox , everybody said, or a skunk; maybe a crippled fox, with a broken leg or something (which would account for the odd movement), but she wouldn’t be swayed. They were all out there the next night, and they saw the evanescent figures of foxes and skunks going about their rounds, but no raccoon. People began to look at her as if she were suffering from some sort of ramped-up hormonal delusion — and they dismissed Allison because Allison was very young. And she’d had a lot to drink that night.

On the third night she and Allison hauled out one of the fox traps and baited it with a healthy smear of peanut butter and half a can of questionable tuna somebody dug out of the back of the refrigerator, while the others — Frazier and Annabelle included — drank wine in an atmosphere of elevated sarcasm. Raccoons, yeah, right, and what have you two been smoking? Though she felt as if she weighed at least as much as Konishiki, the celebrated sumo wrestler — Konishiki and his brother too — Alma was up at first light and making her way across the blistered lot to where the cage stood hidden behind the compost bin. It was very still, the birds not yet fully roused, the western sky wrapped in darkness and a spatter of penetrant stars. When she got within fifteen feet of the trap she saw that there was movement inside, an animal there, a mammal, its features cloaked in fur. And when she was right there, right on top of it, the animal’s head and shoulders swung round and the hard brown unblinking eyes fixed on her from deep in the black robber’s mask.

Frazier wanted to exterminate it. “I tell you,” he said, enormous in the boxers and T-shirt he wore to bed, all that skin, the plump bare feet and toes clutching at the dirt, “you let these things go and they’ll take over. I’ve seen it with innumerable species on too many islands to count. And this is an omnivore. It’s got to impact negatively on the foxes you just spent — and don’t look at me — seven million dollars to preserve.”

“What if it rafted here?” Alma said, staring down into the cage while everybody crowded in, sleep in their eyes, hair mussed, sinking into the grab bag of their clothes. “During the winter storms maybe. There was a lot of debris washing down out of those canyons on the mainland — we could be looking at something like a minor miracle here. The first colonist.”

“So bring it back. Take blood. Test it,” Annabelle said.

“It couldn’t have been here all along, right?” Frazier put in, a look of impatience pressed into his features, as if he had a bus to catch. “There’s no way, what with the documentation of this island and the way we combed it for those hogs—”

“They’re nocturnal,” Alma countered, “holing up all day in burrows or downed logs, so they might have escaped notice. But do we know how long they’ve been here? No. Certainly it’s got to be recent. Again, I’m telling you, we’re looking — probably, I mean, possibly — at the first natural transplant in what, sixteen thousand years?”

“What if somebody brought it here?”

“Who?”

“As a joke.”

She just glared at him. “Who’s going to trap a raccoon and bring it all the way out here for a joke? What kind of joke is that? It doesn’t even make sense. No, this animal got here the way the skunks and the foxes and the mice and the fence lizards and all the rest did and we have a clear duty not to interfere with it. Tag it maybe. Collar it. But nature’s got to take its course.” She looked round at them all, her eyes sweeping from face to face, all but pleading. “Isn’t that what we’re doing here in the first place?”