T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

In the end, after keeping the animal confined for three days in the lee of the field station and consulting by radio with Freeman Lorber, Annabelle’s boss at TNC and half a dozen mammalogists, they sedated it, weighed and measured it and drew two vials of blood for comparison with coastal populations. On the third night, somehow — and this is a very bright species, very dexterous — the door of the cage fell open and the animal was gone.

By the time the boat butts up against the dock at Scorpion Bay, Beverly’s asleep again and stays asleep, thankfully, as Alma works her limbs into the Kelty pack and zips it up. Annabelle — she’s never seen her so solicitous — holds the baby up so Alma can slip her own arms through the straps and wriggle the pack into position on her shoulders, and then they’re out on deck in a line of people waiting to climb the ladder to the dock while the Islander ’s captain, with the precision born of long experience, keeps the bow nose into the dock with just the minimal thrust of his engines. When it’s choppy, it can be quite a trick getting hold of the ladder, which, of course is fixed, while the boat is not, but today it’s not a problem. Even for the elderly and slow of foot. Even for people with babies.

On the dock — and it’s so purely beautiful it always takes her breath away, with the tower of rock rising up right there to reduce her and the boat and every human thing to insignificance, the air alive with seabirds, the view to the east along the cliffs so jagged and wild and ancient you could almost picture the great flying reptiles of the Cretaceous crouched there over their cluttered nests — the group divides in two. The Park Service and TNC people head off for the ranch house around the corner, while the campers and day-trippers are held in check by one of the Park Service volunteers, who’s there to recite the rules for them, rules meant for their own protection and which most people tend to observe, though there are always screwups as there always will and must be when you’re dealing with the public. People fall from cliffs, people drown, people get drunk and do violence to one another, bones break, hearts give out, and it’s all in a day’s work for the Park Service. Alma almost resents these people, the public, tramping all over everything and leaving their trash behind, stealing artifacts, chasing birds off their nests, though she knows she shouldn’t — and yet how much better would it be if nobody ever came out here and the islands could exist in the way they always had. Or should have. Before the Aleuts got here and killed off the otters, before the sheepmen and the cattlemen and all the rest.

Just as the captain reverses engines to take the remnants on board up the coast to Prisoners’, the volunteer — an eager middle-aged man in shorts and a tipped-back cap with an elaborately carved walking stick in hand — delivers the all-important injunction: “Be back at the dock by three-thirty for a four o’clock departure.” A pause to search out each face. “Or you’ll be staying overnight whether you’re planning on it or not.” The campers and picnickers and hikers exchange smirks — they’ll never miss the boat, that’s what they’re thinking, but of course half the time somebody does.

It’s then, in the moment when Wade and Jen and the others are offloading the supplies for the festivities and Alma’s just standing there taking it all in — her first trip to the islands since Beverly was born! — that she happens to catch the eye of a woman standing just to the right of the volunteer. The woman — she looks to be her mother’s age — is staring directly at her, and does she know her? She’s pretty enough, for a woman of sixty or so, she supposes, with her great bush of graying hair flaring out from under one of those worked straw hats the Mexicans wear and the overall impression of trimness and fitness she exudes, her youthful clothes — Levi’s jeans and jacket, a black T-shirt with some band’s logo, cowboy boots — and the guitar slung over her back. She’s still staring — and Alma’s staring too, trying to place her — when Wade appears in her line of vision.

Wade is smiling. He’s got a bottom-heavy canvas bag full of provisions hanging off each shoulder and the muscles in his legs are flexed tight under the burden. “Come on, Alma,” he says, “what’re you standing around here for? Don’t you know there’s a party going on?”

And so there is. The day washes over her like a bath. She sits there surrounded by friends in the shade of the old adobe ranch house while the grill sends up its festive aromas and people come up, one after another, as if she’s a dignitary, a potentate, the Queen of the Island seated on her throne, to make small talk and coo over the baby. When the time comes she gets up and delivers her speech, Beverly clutching at the microphone in high baby spirits, and she feels so relaxed and natural she might have been talking to herself in the mirror. She praises Annabelle, praises Freeman and Frazier and all the dedicated men of Island Healers, praises New Zealand, praises the fox girls, and finally, when she’s done thanking everybody she can think of and rattling off every statistic in support of the ongoing recovery she can summon, she raises a glass — of cider, pure sparkling apple cider, still dripping from the cooler — to the foxes, present and future. And the applause? The applause comes down like rain on the parched hills above, where the pines are sprouting in the duff and the oaks hang heavy with acorns.

As for Rita, she knows that something’s going on, some sort of Park Service foolery that’s going to keep her off the grounds and out of the ranch house she came here to see and dwell in if only for the day, but she doesn’t know what the event is all about or what it’s meant to commemorate. She can smell the smoke of the barbecue and it brings her back, though it won’t be lamb they’re roasting, she can bet on that. What, then — pig? Or what’s left of a pig once it’s gone through the mill and been ground up, bone, anus, eyeballs and all, and repackaged as hot dogs. And beef, of course. Beef is safe. None of the conservationists have to see it other than as some sort of bloodless lump of protein in a plastic-wrapped tray in the supermarket, and then probably half of them are vegetarians in any case. So tofu, falafel, eggplant — aubergine, they call it — red bell peppers, summer squash, the sort of thing Anise used to like, used to insist on once she grew up and got out of the house.

There’s the noise of a microphone, a blurred voice swelling and receding on the whim of the electronics, and she skirts the house, the place of memories, keeping her distance from all these people and their wants and needs, and then climbing up into the floodplain of the creek to get a little elevation so she can look down on it and see it the way it was. All the way out on the boat she kept thinking about where the ashes should go, where Anise would have wanted them. She thought maybe the front corner of the house where it looked out on the bay or maybe in back where she’d had her vegetable garden, but now, given the intrusion, given what’s going on there, she’s not so sure. She keeps walking, the ground dry and cracked, the washed-down rubble of stones turning under her boots. She can feel the sweat starting up under her armpits, rimming the brim of her hat. It’s a clear high day, the sky cupped overhead like the lid of a bell jar. Grasshoppers chirr and take to the air. The world jumps at her in a hundred shades of brown and gray and the parched pale seared-out green of the plants that won’t see any rain till the fall runs its course.

It was two fishermen, partners on an urchin boat, who found Anise’s body, not far off Scorpion, as if she’d been trying to get home. She’d been down nearly a week and must have traveled twenty miles in that time, judging from where they thought the wreck occurred. Things had been at her. And to have to look at her, what was left of her, when the coroner pulled the sheet away from her face and shoulders and you could see the stained and twisted weed that was her hair and the flesh that wasn’t flesh anymore was a criminal thing, so hard and so wrong Rita thought she’d never walk out of that place but just die right there on the floor in that cold, cold room. The rest of them — Dave, Wilson, the other girl — they never found. Not a trace. Nothing of the boat either, except the scrap or two that washed ashore. And what did they tell her? They told her there were boats on top of boats down there.