T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

“It must have something to do with cars, right. Coches? I don’t know: dark cars?”

“There were no cars here back then.” She’s wearing a playful smile. A superior smile. This is her island, after all. “There are no cars here now.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Beats me. I give.”

“Coches is slang for pigs. Get it? Dark Pigs Canyon. La Cañada de los Coches Prietos . The dark ones, those are the ones that went feral back in the eighteen hundreds. They get big and mean and they’re fast. The boars anyway.”

“Right,” he says. “That’s why they have to kill them off. All of them.”

“Yeah,” she says, reaching for the frosted glass. She hasn’t bothered with her clothes and he hasn’t bothered with his either. “But we’re not going to let them, are we?”

A week later, he’s back in court, stomach churning all over again, in a mood, but he’s forgone the tie and jacket. In their place, he’s wearing a black T-shirt with the new FPA symbol — the pig in the circle — emblazoned on the front in aniline orange with the Stop the Slaughter legend, in the same loud shout of a color, done up in biker’s script across the back. And why not? He’s here to absorb the judge’s verdict, and whether he’s going down or walking out the door, he’s going to do it in his own way.

What’s happened in the interim is purely serendipitous and a whole lot better than he could have hoped for — the press has picked it up, his story, from his point of view, because the papers find this sort of thing irresistible. “Rat Activist on Trial,” “Rat Lover Says He Acted to Save Animals,” “Local Man Defies Park Service,” “Stop the Killing LaJoy Says.” And it’s not just the local paper — the interest has blossomed beyond that to pull in any number of big-city dailies, the AP, even USA Today . He’d like to think people are on his side, that they see the value in every life, however small, but as Anise has been reminding him all week, there’s the freak factor too. Rat lover . It’s almost an oxymoron, for most people anyway. He’s heard that two of the morning disc jockeys on the local oldies station have been making jokes about it — jokes, that is, at his expense, and yet still the word is getting out in a bigger way than he could have imagined. And that means money. Since the trial started, donations to FPA have gone through the roof — at last count nearly three thousand dollars came in in the last week alone.

Sterling — fifty, bald, with doughnut residue on his lapels and a steely smile imprinted on his face — swells beside him as the judge enters the courtroom and all stand. In the next moment they’re sitting again, benches creaking, people coughing into their fists, blowing their noses, scuffing their feet. There’s a delay of fifteen minutes at least as the judge shuffles papers, fools with his reading glasses and entertains one lawyer or another in private conference, the discreet murmur of their voices like background noise, the buzzing of insects or the whisper of a fan. While the judge — Karagouzian, definitely Armenian, with an accent and a moustache and a house in Glendale — is otherwise occupied, Sterling turns to him and gives him a sotto voce pep talk meant to impart serenity but which actually winds up scaring him more than anything that’s gone down so far.

“There’s no way the judge is going to convict,” Sterling tells him, shaking his head back and forth like a metronome. “Not with how Sickafoose compromised himself on the stand—”

“Good,” he hears himself say. “Great. But you said it was no sweat anyway, trumped-up charges, no evidence, right?”

“Yes, sure, but you have to understand Karagouzian’s a ramrod for law and order and he has a reputation for ruling on the side of the authorities.”

“But not in this case.”

And here’s where the scare comes in, and it hits him, as usual, in the stomach, in the stomach lining where the digestive juices, inflamed with caffeine, chew away at him, because Sterling wags his head even harder and says, “I’m ninety-nine percent sure, but then Karagouzian hates any kind of protest or press involvement, which isn’t your fault, God knows, and it’s legitimate, absolutely, but I just thought I ought to warn you in case we — well, as I say, I’m ninety-nine percent sure here.”

He glances at Anise. She’s chosen to sit on his left this time, so he and Sterling won’t have to step over her when the judge gives his verdict. She looks great, a real presence, huge really, with her broad bleached face and big shoulders and her hair combed out and frizzed up so it spills over everything, her purse, her lap, the back of the pew and all up and down the left side of his body as if to hold him there beside her. Maddeningly, though, she’s dressed all in black — a skirt that goes right to the floor and a leotard with a little embroidered vest over it, black on black. “Why black?” he’d demanded, stupefied, when she came down the steps of her apartment and dropped into the passenger’s side of the Beemer. She took off her sunglasses to look him square in the eye. “I want to be ready for anything,” she said, and though he tried to contain himself, his voice was as bitter as the sediment at the bottom of his coffee cup. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Now she gives him a tight smile. “I’ll bake you cookies,” she whispers.

“Very funny.”

There’s a rustling behind him, to his right, and he glances past Sterling to see Alma and Sickafoose squeezing into the far end of the bench. Neither of them will meet his eye, but they’re wearing smug looks, as if no matter what happens they’ve got him where they want him, here in federal court, with a hanging judge up there squinting at his papers preparatory to coming down on the side of the law that protects the guilty and burns the innocent. But what a cunt, that night at the restaurant, the way she’d bailed on him — as if she was better than he was, as if he didn’t know his wines — and wasn’t she sworn by law to protect and nurture the resources of the national park instead of killing things off at random? Jesus. And she’s looking Asian, real Asian, with that hair and the set of her jaw and the way she’s holding herself like some little geisha, like the touch of the wood slab behind her would cripple her. .

But now the bailiff’s calling his name and Sterling’s on his feet. He feels the muscles working in his legs as he rises, his chest swelling, and he’s moving forward to stand there before the bench while all the reporters — is that what’s her name, Toni, from the Press Citizen ? — snatch at their pads and pencils and laptops. The room goes silent. Sunlight sits in the tall windows. There’s a distant sound of traffic.

The judge — and there’s another shithead he’d like to have five minutes alone with — squints at him over his glasses. He does something with his lips, a kind of preliminary licking or flexing, and then, glancing down at the paper before him, he begins to read aloud: “While there is a strong probability that the defendant did in fact commit the crimes with which he is charged, the evidence submitted and admitted does not serve to eliminate the doubt that remains. Further, since the Park Service eradication project was ultimately successful, the issue becomes moot.”

And what’s this? He can feel the mood shifting, the room coming to life as if a long collective breath has been expelled. He looks to Sterling, who’s staring straight ahead at the judge, trying to keep his expression sober despite the first intimations of triumph compressing the crow’s-feet rimming his eyes and radiating down to tug at the corners of his mouth. Everybody’s watching. Everybody can see him. His T-shirt. His message. His meaning. He feels a hard hot surge of joy coming up in him and it’s as intense as an orgasm: he’s going to walk!