T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

In any case, as Alma is prepared to inform her audience, the black rats— Rattus rattus , properly — that survived the wreck of the Winfield Scott made their way, over the generations, from that naked rock to middle Anacapa and from there to the eastern islet, and finally, afloat on a stick of driftwood or propelled by their own industrious paws, to the westernmost. Only luck and the six miles of open water of the Anacapa Passage, with its boiling spume and savage currents, has kept them from expanding their range to Santa Cruz. And no one, not even the most inveterate rodent lover, would want that.

The Prius is aglow with the soft amber light of the dashboard as it slips almost silently along the streaming freeway, Tim relaxed behind the wheel and offering a running commentary on the news leaking out of the radio, his way of calming her, of pretending that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this little jaunt to the museum. As if they were going to stroll arm-in-arm through the exhibits, examining the Chumash tomol and the skeleton of the Santa Rosa Island dwarf mammoth for the twentieth time, drawing down their voices to laugh and joke and feel at home amidst the dry stifled odor of preservation. Alma would have driven herself, except that she likes to free her mind before speaking in public and has learned from experience that the focus required of driving — however minimal and however short the distance — distracts her. There always seems to be some sort of problem on the road, an accident, a lane closure for repaving or reshouldering or whatever it is they do along the freeway at night — or mayhem, simple mayhem, bad manners, cell phone abuse, people with their heads screwed on backward — and the delay upsets her equilibrium. When you see brake lights ahead you never know if you’ll be stopped for five minutes or an hour. Or your life. The rest of your life.

Sure enough, half a mile from their exit, they run into a wash of brake lights and in the next moment they’re stalled behind a pickup truck elevated up off the roadway on a gleaming web of struts higher than the dwarf mammoth could ever have hoped to reach. “Shit,” she hisses, and she’s biting her lip, a bad habit, she knows it, but she can’t help herself. “I knew we should’ve gone the back way.”

Tim shrugs, reaches out a hand to switch channels, the reporter’s intimate placatory tones dissolving in the thump and rattle of timbales, congas and cowbells and the keening almost-human voice of a guitar rising up out of the deluge of percussion. “It’s probably nothing,” he says. “We’ve got twenty minutes yet. And Mission’s the next exit. See it? Right there — under this moron’s rear end?”

She doesn’t respond. Just turns her head and gazes out the window on the auto mall in the near distance — more cars — and lets the air run out of her lungs in a long withering sigh. It’s not Tim’s fault and she doesn’t mean to take it out on him. He’s doing the best he can, and the quickest way, no question about it, is the freeway. How could he know this was going to happen? (Though she did argue for the back way the minute he flicked on the signal light for the freeway. Isn’t it rush hour still? she’d said. Or the tail end of it? Nah, he assured her. Not now. We’ll be all right .) So it was his call. And she went along with it. And here they are. Stopped dead.

After a while he says, “Must be an accident.”

She’s dressed all in black — pressed cotton slacks, patent-leather heels and V-necked top accented by a modest silver bracelet and necklace, nothing showy, nothing anybody could object to — and her notes are tucked inside the manila folder atop the laptop balanced on her knees. It took her a long while that afternoon to decide on what to wear, trying to strike a balance between the formal and the casual, the ecologist dragged in from the field and turned out with just the right degree of chic to be persuasive and sympathetic rather than intimidating, and she spent the better part of an hour combing out her hair and applying her makeup. Too much eyeliner and she’d look like a slut. Too little and they wouldn’t be able to see the shape of her eyes and the way the light gathered in them and made people stop to stare at her on the street, because looking good, or at least stylish and interesting, was part of the job description. Who wanted to sit there in a stiff-backed chair and have some dowdy forest-service type rattle off statistics about the decline of this species or that? She was there to be looked at, as well as listened to, and she had no problem with that. If she could use her looks to advance her cause, then so much the better.

But damn them, damn them for making this so hard on her. And she should never have had that tea — the caffeine has her heart pounding in her ears and her nerves stripped raw, just as if she’d opened up her skin and taken a vegetable peeler to them. “I wish I was out on the islands,” she says, turning abruptly to him. “Recruiting invertebrates. Banding birds. Anything. I’m fed up with this crap.”

He’s looking straight ahead, his face dense with the reflection of the pickup’s brake lights. “You are the spokesperson, after all.”

“Director of information services.”

“Same difference. But what I mean is, spokespeople have to speak. It’s what you do, it’s what you’re good at.” He pauses, fingers tapping at the wheel, working through his variations. “And why is it ‘spokespeople’—shouldn’t it be speaks people? Or speakpeople. There they go, the president’s speakpeople, all ready to start speaking.” He turns to her, serious suddenly. “They’d be lost without you and you know it.”

“Dave LaJoy,” she pronounces carefully. “Anise Reed.”

He waves a hand in dismissal. “Okay, okay — there are crazies everywhere. Especially when you—”

“When I what?”

“I don’t know — do something controversial. Or defend it, I mean. Explain it. Explanations always leave you open to attack, as if you’re apologizing after the fact. Or before the fact, I mean.”

She can feel a flare of anger coming up in her. “I’m not apologizing. We’ve got nothing to apologize for. We’re scientists. We do the studies. Not like these PETA nuts that come out to shout you down because they’ve got nothing better to do — and they’re ignorant, baseline stupid, that’s all. They don’t have the faintest idea of what they’re talking about. Not a clue. If they would only—”

“So educate them.”

She throws it back at him, bitter now, bitter and outraged. “ Educate them. Good luck. These people don’t want facts, they don’t want to know about island biogeography or the impact of invasive species or ecosystem collapse or anything else. All they want is to stick their noses in. And shout. They love to shout.”

“I know,” he says, “I know,” and they’re moving now, the string of brake lights easing off all down the line, the tires gripping the road, rolling forward, the exit rushing at them. “I’m on your side, remember? Just keep your cool, that’s all. Be nice. But firm. And professional. That’s what you are, right — professional?”

The freeway releases them onto city streets, cars parked along the curb, storefronts giving back the glare of the headlights, trees broadcasting their shadows. People are coming out of restaurants, flicking remotes at their cars, standing in groups on the sidewalk for no discernible reason, going to meetings. A bus lurches out ahead of them and settles into its lane, shuddering like a ship at sea. They pass a storefront offering kung fu lessons and she has a fleeting glimpse of robes, faces, synchronized gestures. It’s quarter to seven. They will be there, barring further surprises, with five minutes to spare, and in a way that’s better than arriving half an hour early and having to sit in the back room staring at the ten-foot mounted grizzly and fret and pace and watch the clock portion off the seconds. She raises her hands to push the hair away from her face, then drops them to the folder in her lap. The rain, which has been threatening all through the afternoon, chooses that moment to dash at the windshield and sizzle on the dark tongue of pavement before them. “Yeah,” she says finally, long after it matters, “that’s what I am. Professional.”