T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Because of the cliffs, the only place to land is at the dock, where they’ll be plainly visible, but the dock is deserted and the sky is closing in, and he wonders if the Park Service will risk flying their helicopters in weather like this. Maybe not. Maybe he and Wilson can get out in advance of the poisoners, give the rats a head start. Save them. Rescue them. Champion them. Nobody else is going to do it, that’s for sure, nobody but him and Wilson and Anise, FPA, For the Protection of Animals. All animals, big and small. No exceptions. The wind’s in his face, flapping the hood of the sweatshirt round his throat, the dock coming up fast — action, he’s taking action while all the rest of them just sit around and whine — and he can feel the giddiness rising in him, the surge of power and triumph that rides up out of nowhere to replace the bafflement and rage and depression Dr. Reiser and his pharmaceuticals can’t begin to touch. This is who he is. This .

There are something like a hundred and fifty steps up the cliff and onto the plateau above, and his hours on the StairMaster hold him in good stead here, he and Wilson climbing stride for stride and flinging out handfuls of kibble and rat vitamins as they go, taking pains to hit even the most inaccessible spots, and so what if the tabs tend to dribble down the rock faces? No place is off-limits to a rat. When they get to the top — humped and treeless, nothing in sight but the lighthouse and a couple of whitewashed outbuildings, one of which features a plaque that says Ranger Residence —they decide to split up, Wilson taking the loop trail to the right and he to the left. “Okay,” he says, the wind beating at him and the blood surging through him till he feels as if he could take right off and hover overhead with the gulls, “remember to hit the cliffs all along the way, not just the trail—”

Wilson is watching him from beneath the pulled-down brim of his cap, looking as if he’s just heard a good joke. Or told one. “Yeah, you already said that. About six hundred times.”

“And we’ll meet in the middle”—the trail was an easy hike, mainly flat, two miles or less—“and cut across on a diagonal, just to make sure we cover as much territory as we can.”

Wilson holds his grin, brings one fist up for a knuckle-to-knuckle rap of solidarity, and then they’re going their separate ways. The sun is in retreat now, the clouds twined across the horizon to the north like weathered rope, the wind coming in gusts strong enough to rake the pellets out of his hand, and before long he’s tossing the stuff as high as he can and letting the wind do the work. It’s exhilarating. Like being a kid at play. The vitamin tabs are a pale yellow, the kibble rust-colored, blood-colored, and he doesn’t want to know what it’s composed of, doesn’t want to think of offal, bone, the leavings of the slaughterhouse floor — it’s enough to watch the stuff fly from his hand to loop and twist away from him like confetti.

Up the path, head down against the wind. And what if it rains? Will they postpone the drop? Will the vitamins dissolve, the kibble rot, stink, fester? He doesn’t know enough about the properties of either compound to make that determination — besides which, it’s too late to go back now. And even if the mix does break down, the most likely scenario has the rats eating it anyway — they’re rats, after all, born to scrounge and hoard and eat till their stomachs swell like balloons — and it’ll stay with them, fat-soluble, buried deep in their tissues. Who knows, maybe they’ll find it so satisfying they’ll ignore the cascade of blue pellets the Park Service plans to unleash on them. That’s what he’s thinking as he makes his way along the ridge, detouring when necessary to heave the mixture right out to the edge of the cliffs, lost in the rhythm of it — clutch, lift, release — and he begins to feel better, begins to think everything will work out after all. He’s in the moment, breathing deep, working his legs, the scent of coastal sage in his nostrils, birds hovering, lizards licking along ahead of him. Before long, he finds he’s actually enjoying himself, twenty million people strung along the coast across from him and the island as deserted as it was when it rose up out of the sea. Except for Wilson, of course. And whatever Park Service types came out on that boat. And — lest he forget — the resident ranger, who’s no doubt sitting on his ass in his little white house with a view to die for, reading crime novels, boiling spaghetti, blinding himself with gin.

He’s off the path now — clutch, lift, release — thinking of the almost unimaginable degree of evil it must take to be a scientist in some big chemical company lab, Monsanto, Dow, Amvac, devoting all your talent and energy, your whole life, to coming up with a compound as deadly as brodifacoum and finding just the right mix of ingredients to make it irresistible, a kind of rat candy, rat cocaine, when his feet get tangled in the brush and the air goes suddenly still. It happens so fast he can’t get a grasp on it, the cracked and veined earth vanishing beneath the thrust of his elbows as he pitches forward, dust in his eyes and the stones sifting away from him, flying stones, stones raking down the length of the chasm that opens up before him like a movie gone to wide-screen. Warning: The cliffs are unstable. Stay on the path . And then what’s beneath him, beneath his torso and flailing legs, is going too, dropping away, and he with it. There’s a brief moment of weightlessness and the panic that seizes him with an electric jolt, and then the blow he catches from the ledge ten feet down.

He lands on his right side, on his rib cage, the air punched out of him and the backpack wrenched askew. At first he knows nothing, and then what does he know? That he has fallen from the cliff, the unstable cliff, the friable, loosely compacted and stony cliff, and that he has not plummeted — that’s the word that comes to him, a word he wouldn’t use in any other context — to his death. On the rocks below. Where the sea, riding in on the swell of the storm, thrashes and foams and pulverizes. For a long moment, he’s unable to move. And then, like a cat waking from sleep, he flexes each of his muscles in turn, reacquainting himself with the mode of their functioning, thinking, Anise isn’t going to believe this , thinking, What if I have to be rescued? What if the helicopter, the Park Service helicopter, the poisoners’ helicopter—?

The ledge, this projection of volcanic rock bristling with the spikes of xerophytic plants that has broken his fall — saved him — is one of many, a series of jagged battlements projecting from the cliffs as if to impede an invasion. He sees this, can trace the pattern that is no pattern at all up and down the rock face in both directions, as he very gingerly shifts his weight. It takes him a moment, forty-two years old and with high blood pressure and a knifing pain in his right side, before he’s able to work his feet beneath him and rise, inch by staggered inch, hugging the rock. When he’s fully erect and can see above him to the place where the ground gave way, he becomes aware of the shag of plants to the near side of him, Dudleya mostly, succulents that would snap in two, pull right out, send him plummeting , but something with a woody stem too, Ceanothus or scrub oak maybe, right there, just inside the limit of his reach. He takes hold of it. Tries it. And then, pressing himself so close to the rock that he will later find pebbles, sand, bits of leaf and twig worked under his belt and into the seams of his underwear, he lifts himself, snatching at the next handhold while the toes of his hiking boots dig for traction. Twenty seconds later he’s on top, his legs churning at the loose dirt, the pack binding, his blood howling in his ears, and then he’s safe, scrambling fifty feet into the brush before he collapses.