T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

The sea is flat, the fog already lifting. The captain has just slowed for a pod of dolphins, and most of the passengers — NPS people, tourists, backpackers, a sugar-and-hormone-fueled group of sixth graders under the rapidly eroding control of two harried teachers — have gone out on deck to watch the glistening cetaceans slash through the water like shadows come to life. When she glances up she can see Tim out there amongst them, a paper cup of coffee in one hand, binoculars in the other.

It’s early June, ten in the morning, just over one and a half years since the initial drop of the control agent, and the purpose of this little jaunt is purely celebratory — while the journalists tap at their keyboards and the photographers manipulate their digital cameras and the TV crew homes in, Alma will lift a glass of champagne in faultless synchronization with Freeman Lorber, the park’s superintendent, and declare all three islets that compose Anacapa one hundred percent rat free. At the moment, she’s busy polishing her press release, while the article, by Robert Ford Smith, the herpetologist she’d worked under on Guam, awaits a free minute. It came to her via e-mail from the field station at Ritidian Point on the northernmost tip of the island, where the beaches are soap-powder white and the vegetation gnarled and snake-haunted, before she left her office at seven-fifteen this morning, and she’s as eager to get to it as a child with a new video game, but duty calls, always calls, and always takes precedence.

The press release, which she’s been tinkering with for the past two days, will inform the assembled journalists, and through them the public, that the rat-eradication project has been an unqualified success. No rat sign has been detected anywhere on Anacapa since the release of the control agent, neither nests nor scat or tracks or any evidence whatever of predation, and the dummy eggs the consulting ornithologist has slipped into the nests of various birds have not been disturbed, whereas formerly they would have been scrimshawed with tooth marks. Careful monitoring over this period has led her to be able to declare with absolute confidence that all the target animals have been eliminated. And the result has been swift and dramatic. The seabirds have rebounded, not to mention the Channel Islands salamander and side-blotched lizard — whose numbers have doubled — as well as the native deer mouse, the population of which is estimated at 8,000, the highest count on record. And more: Tim Sickafoose, consulting ornithologist, resident humorist and all-around prince of a man, has discovered the first pair of Cassin’s auklets nesting on Rat Rock in living memory, a place which, she imagines — and yes, this will be the sly and triumphal joke to insert in an otherwise by-the-numbers text — will soon have to undergo a name change. How about Auklet Rock? she’s thinking. Do I hear any takers? Or what about Sickafoose Point? Will that fly?

Jokes aside, she can’t help worrying over the small details — punctuation, paragraphing, the drum-beating phrases that seem increasingly fatuous every time her eyes fall on them. Or not just fatuous: asinine. Right here, right in the first paragraph, for one. She calls Lorber “a monument of preservation,” which conveys a modicum of truth, but doesn’t it make him sound like something static, like one of the carved heads at Mount Rushmore or a blade dulled by use? Or worse: dead. And here’s his epitaph: Loving husband, loving father, and a monument of preservation.

“Hey,” Tim breathes, sliding into the seat beside her. The boat has begun to move again and the passengers are trooping back into the cabin, all but the sixth graders, who will linger along the rail until they’re soaked through and shivering and in dire need of the hot chocolate, popcorn and microwave burritos the galley dispenses. “You done with that thing yet?” he asks, his voice oily with insinuation. She gives him a sidelong glance. He’s right there, invading her personal space — which is the prerogative of a lover, she has to remind herself — and holding his lopsided grin. “Because there’s a point you reach where you’re just going to tinker it to death, right? And isn’t this supposed to be a party, or am I wrong?”

She’s on the verge of snapping at him, but she catches herself. For a long moment she stares into his eyes, the spray flying beyond the windows, the squeals and shouts of the sixth graders rising round them like the cries of the raptured. “Yes,” she admits finally, and she can smile now too, relax, celebrate, because he’s right — the worst is behind her and this is a day for looking ahead, not back. “Yes, you’re right.”

And it works. The air’s been cleared. Her headache — the incipient headache she’s just begun to become aware of — extends its tendrils and begins to recede all in a single moment. She shifts the mouse, shuts down the laptop and dips forward to reach into her pack and dig out a bag of trail mix, just to keep her energy level up. Party or no, she’ll still have to make a speech after distributing the press release, and she’ll have to oversee her assistant, Wade, who’s in charge of the food, and shine with glowing interest as Freeman gives his own speech replete with awkward pauses, furious lip-tugging and jokes amusing by definition only. But this is a party, or the very beginning of one, and she slips her laptop into its case with a definitive shrug of her shoulders and a business-like chafing of one palm against the other, then cracks the Ziploc bag of trail mix. She sifts a handful into her mouth and works her molars over a cud of sunflower seeds, dates, raisins and M&M’s, the sugar rush almost instantaneous, before offering it to Tim, who takes it absently. He’s giving her a dubious look, as if he’s thinking about something else altogether, as if he’s anticipating her, worrying for her. “You better hope the printer out there’s going to work—”

Her smile is richer now, spreading across her lips till she can feel the tug of it in the muscles at the corners of her mouth, and what are they called? Zygomaticus major. Or minor. Or both. That sounds about right, but it’s been a long time since she took anatomy, and if she remembers correctly something like seventeen different muscles are required to achieve a full smile. But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is she’s smiling because this is Tim smiling back at her and they’re getting a rare day off together, if that’s what you can call this.

“He don’t know me very well, do he?” she says, reaching down to pat the backpack at her feet. “I brought my own along. Just in case.” Before he can respond, she’s holding up a hand to forestall him. “Yes,” she says, “yes, I know. And paper too.”

She’d gone to Guam seven years ago because the opportunity presented itself, because Julie Savidge was one of her enduring heroes and because she’d just broken up with Rayfield Armstrong, who played his guitar in the bars and coffeehouses around Berkeley when he wasn’t working on his dissertation assessing the impact of a species of introduced crab — the European green — on the local invertebrates in San Francisco Bay, and whose chest, shoulders and back were so intricately and finely muscled from all the hours he spent in the water he looked like a living mosaic. She’d moved in with him, and that was a commitment, the first real commitment of her life, but as the months wore on he depleted her patience and her hope and goodwill too. He was never home, always diving, strumming his guitar under the gaze of a spotlight in some bar or coffeehouse somewhere or riding a Greyhound bus to play in towns nobody had ever heard of, and when he was home he was so self-absorbed — crabs and guitar, crabs and guitar — he didn’t seem to have much time for her. And so she moved out. And took a job in the field. In Guam.