T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Wilson sets down the magazine so he can cradle his head and stretch, his legs kicking out and the muscles bunching in his shoulders. “Thirteen bucks for a hundred, that was the come-on, but I found a site where if you buy quantity it winds up costing like three bucks off the low end of that. So an even thousand.”

“You used your Visa?”

“No. A friend’s. And I had it shipped to her house, in Goleta.”

That sounds all right, not that anybody’s going to trace it and even if they do, even if the whole thing blows up in their faces, they’ll get it in the newspapers — and maybe save the rats too, because that’s the bottom line here and no matter how loose-jointed he might get, that’s what he has to remember: save the animals. He tilts the kettle over the brown-paper filter, fishes the half-and-half from the refrigerator. Back goes the kettle, then he’s handing Wilson his cup and settling into the chair opposite him while the boat ticks and sways, making its minute readjustments beneath them. In that moment he’s as calm as he’s been since he walked into that lecture— Alma’s lecture, and he hasn’t forgotten her and what went down in the past between them even if she acts like she has, Dr. Alma, with all her tics and airs — and he realizes how much just being on the boat does for him. It’s another world here, shut away from all the fights and hassles and the way people close in on you if you stop to take a breath. “I’ll write you a check,” he says.

“Whatever.” Wilson shrugs, stifles a yawn.

And then he’s leaning back, sipping coffee — real coffee — and thinking about the day he bought the boat ten months back — forget the cliché because it was a happy day then and it’s happy now too. He got a deal, a real deal, because the people were desperate to get rid of it, the guy some sort of executive with PacifiCare, bloodless as a corpse, took it out exactly three times in the three years he’d owned it and very nearly ran it aground each time, or so the story went, the wife (once maybe, but no longer anything to look at) pursing her feather-veined lips over the details. Fatuous people. Jerks. They’d named the boat, talk of clichés, the Easy Life . But as he sat right here in this cabin listening to the wife go on in what was meant to be ironic fashion about the husband’s seamanship, or lack of it, he knew what he would name her, as soon as the check was signed and the papers transferred, and he was thinking even then of today, of course he was, because how else was he going to make his intentions known, how else was he going to strike a blow for the animals when the animals were all the way out there across the channel where nobody could see them? And Anise — she’d been to college, but sometimes he wondered about the gaps, the yawning chasms, in her knowledge — asking, “Paladin? What’s a Paladin?”

Next morning breaks clear over the water, the fog confined to a white ruff at the shoulders of the islands, the sea calm, the winds light, though the weather service is warning of another storm system moving in from the north sometime later in the day. Which might or might not affect them, depending on how long this is going to take. Or if anyone tries to stop them, which is always a possibility. Anise is asleep in the bow berth, the rhythm of her breathing punctuated by a light rasping gargle deep in the throat — a snore that periodically rises up over the throb of the engine and settles back down again. Wilson, the man who can nod off anywhere, anytime, is stretched out facedown on the couch, a blanket pulled up over his head. There’s fresh coffee, for when they want it, and Anise-made sandwiches in the reefer. On the table, the three black plastic bags and the three backpacks that will receive and transport them. He hasn’t got the radio on, preferring the silence. He sips coffee, watches the sea. The boat holds steady, barely a ripple on the surface.

Wilson’s friend — her name is Alicia Penner and she makes the trip from Goleta all the way down the coast to Ventura five days a week to work as a secretary in the offices of the National Park Service on Harbor Way in the marina, where the sun sits in the windows and the NPS drones shuffle papers all day and think about what to kill next — has, in her humble role as a friend of the animals, pinpointed the day of the drop for them. It’s not general knowledge. For all their lectures and Q&A sessions, these people aren’t really interested in hearing what the public has to say — and they certainly don’t want any interference, not at the museum, not in the parking lot, and especially not at the kill site, all the way out there across the belly of the gray lapping waves.

This is the day before Thanksgiving, a day when everybody’s mind is on turkey and chestnut stuffing and football and champagne, and the islands, if they register at all, are nothing more than a distant blur in the mist. The Park Service plan is to hit East Anacapa first, while people are standing in line at Vons and Ralphs and Lazy Acres Market, ditching work to clink glasses at the downtown bars, nipping out to the airport to pick up Grandma and Aunt Leona, basting turkeys, geese, ducks, and then, two weeks later, when the very same people are busy Christmas shopping and planning their office parties, they’ll bombard the middle and western islets. Secrecy. Privacy. Out of sight, out of mind. But what the pencil-necks in their swivel chairs haven’t taken into account is that some people don’t eat turkeys or geese or ducks, don’t eat meat of any kind, because meat is murder and every living thing has an animating spirit and the same right to life as the humans who take it from them, butcher them, feed them into their gaping greedy jaws and toss the bones into the trash as if the thing that bore them never existed at all. And those people tend to pay attention. Real close attention.

When the island begins to climb up out of the haze and spread itself across the horizon to the south, fifteen minutes out and counting, he cuts the engine and ducks down into the cabin to nudge Anise awake. She’s a heavy sleeper, a sprawler, as comatose as if she’s been conked with a ball-peen hammer, and he bends to her gently, brushes the hair away from her face and leans in to kiss the corner of her mouth. Her lips are slightly parted, her lids closed on a faint stripe of eyeliner. In that instant he’s involved in the heat of her, a rising radiant aura of flesh and fluids, the faint lingering scent of her perfume and the jojoba shampoo she uses, her breath sweet and moist and lush with sleep. “Hey,” he whispers, “hey, Ankhesenamen, wake up. Imhotep’s here.”

It takes her a moment, coming back from very far off, and then her eyes ease open without a hint of surprise, as if she knew he was there all along. Her lips are warm, puffy, lipstickless. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt, pale blue to match her eyes, with her own name done up in freehand across the front and the dates and venues — Lompoc, Santa Maria, Nipomo, Buellton, Santa Ynez — of her last modest self-financed tour in support of her last modest self-financed CD scrolling down the back. “I want my mummy,” she says, reaching out for him, and this is a routine that goes back to their first date, a trip to Paseo Nuevo to see the remake of the old Boris Karloff flick.

He holds the embrace just long enough, a morning hug, that’s all, and then pulls away from her and straightens up. He can feel the caffeine working in him, the boat rocking like a cradle, sea air leaching in from above. What he’s remembering is the first time he ever laid eyes on her, a Sunday afternoon in February or maybe it was March and she was playing at the Cold Spring Tavern high up in the San Marcos pass, opening for a grind-it-out blues band. She mounted the little five-foot-square stage with her head down, the guitar slung under one arm. He was at the bar with one of his buddies — Wilson maybe, or maybe not. Folk wasn’t really his thing, but she was the whole package, a big wide-faced beauty with skin the sun had never touched and hair the color of honey hardened in the jar that reached all the way down to her knees, and — this really got him, as if all the rest weren’t enough — bare feet. Those feet fascinated him, perfect, sleek, unadorned, the flexing toes and rising arch, the beat invested in the flesh. Her feet grabbed the stage and let it go, her lids fluttered shut and her head rolled back till her tongue found the words to ride out over the rhythm. She was like some kind of hippie princess resurrected from another time, out of sync, wrong, definitely wrong, but big-shouldered and confident and shining all the same. He began to listen, to tune out Wilson or whoever it was, and hear what she was projecting, a handful of covers and a skein of originals that went beyond cheating hearts and poisoned love to speak to the issues, to the way the sons of bitches were paving over the world, factory-farming animals, inserting their toxic genes into everything we drank and ate till they were inescapable. The songs weren’t half-bad, he was thinking, and when she walked off the stage and disappeared out back he found himself having another cocktail and then another, and he might have forgotten all about her in the rush of conversation and the fumes of his Absolut rocks, but then the members of the blues band took the stage and halfway through the first set she appeared there in the middle of them as if she were a revenant made flesh and let her voice go on “Stormy Monday” till it made something ache high up inside him.