T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

“Therefore,” the judge pronounces over the steady retrograde tug of his accent, and yes, he could go right up there and kiss him, right now, “I pronounce the defendant not guilty.”

In the aftermath, out in the corridor with Toni Walsh and the woman from the local TV affiliate, the fingers of his right hand entwined in Anise’s and the camera trained on him, he makes a little speech, the lines of which he’s been rehearsing in his head all week. “It’s a sad state of affairs when our own federal government considers feeding wildlife to be a crime, while at the same time raining down poison indiscriminately from the sky is okay — legitimate, I mean.” And what’s even sweeter is that he’s able to raise his voice and project it all the way down the long gleaming tiled hall at the very moment that Alma Boyd Takesue and Tim Sickafoose emerge slumped and tragic from the courtroom so that he gets to watch her turn her head to him and then turn away again as he winds it up with an inspired flash of rhetoric: “And if these people think they’re going to get away with slaughtering some five thousand native pigs on Santa Cruz Island, well they’ve got another think coming.”

He pulls back then, dropping Anise’s hand to raise his own, two fingers spread in the victory sign. “Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head so that the dreads stir and rise in bristling affirmation, “not while the FPA’s on the watch.”

R ita was newly separated from a man who’d hurt her in so many ways she’d lost track of just how and why she’d ever gone with him in the first place, her car was in the shop with some sort of systemic failure she couldn’t begin to fathom let alone pay for, her job was inadequate to her training and expectations, and she had a ten-year-old daughter to feed, clothe and educate. It was May of 1979, and all the good feelings — the vibrations, the groove — of the shimmering bright era that had sustained her through every failure and disappointment had dwindled and winnowed and faded till she was angry all the time, angry at Toby for leaving her, angry at her daughter, angry at her boss and the landlord who wanted two hundred fifty bucks a month for a dreary clamshell-gray walkup over a take-out pizza shop on Route 1 in downtown Oxnard, where the fog hung like death over everything and the trucks never stopped spewing diesel fumes outside the window, which might as well have been nailed shut for all the air it gave her. So when Valerie Bruns, her best friend from work, told her she knew of an opening — of a chance to get out, get away, change the scene as if this were Act II of one of the plays she’d been in in high school — she came back to life. Instantly.

“It’s on an island,” Valerie said.

“An island?” she echoed. “What do you mean, an island?”

“Santa Cruz.”

She’d called Valerie because it was Friday night, thinking they could go someplace for a drink, listen to music, hang out, but Valerie was going to her mother’s for dinner and didn’t know if she could. Then they’d got to talking about work — they were both aides at Point Hueneme Junior High — and what an uptight bitch the assistant principal was, and Mrs. Paris, the special ed teacher, and how they’d both like to quit, when Valerie mentioned the job.

“I thought Santa Cruz was a city — we played there once, I think. They’ve got a college there, right?”

“No, Santa Cruz Island .”

“Where’s that?”

A long exasperated sigh. “You know Henderson’s, in the marina? Where we went for margaritas that one time?”

“Yeah, I guess. Why?”

“Remember we sat out on the deck and we could see Anacapa? Remember I pointed it out to you and you made a big deal out of it?”

“Yeah, sure. Maybe.” She’d been drinking too much lately, drinking out of rage and regret and boredom, and she had only the vaguest rattling recollection of the place — it was on the water, that much she remembered.

“Well, the island next to it, the big one — four times as big as Manhattan — that’s Santa Cruz. It’s like this brown blur most of the time? You’ve seen it. Everybody has. You probably just didn’t notice, is all.”

She was sipping vodka, no ice, from a glass she kept in the freezer beside the bottle, Absolut, her one concession to extravagance — that and smokes. It burned her lips, caressed her tongue. “So what’s the job?”

“It’s this friend of mine, Baxter Russell? He needs a cook out there. He’s got a lease on a place they call Scorpion Ranch — sheep, he’s raising sheep — and he needs somebody to cook for him and I think like six or seven other guys. Cowboys, or whatever you call them. .” Valerie let out a laugh. “Sheepboys, I guess. If that’s even a word.”

And though the first thing she said was, “I’m no cook, I’m a musician,” the idea of it — an island full of cowboys, and out in the middle of the ocean, no less — was already developing pictures in her mind, a whole montage of them, the wisteria-hung ranch house, the salt-sharp tang of the horses after they come in off the range, and How you want your steak done, fellas? Their shoulders, their eyes, bandannas, broad-brimmed hats, tall men, sinewy, lonely. Anyway you like to do ’em, ma’am.

“But I want to talk to him,” she was saying, hasty now, afraid Valerie would shift the subject, drop a see-you-later into the conversation and head out for her mom’s meat loaf and her stepdad’s strawberry margaritas. “Definitely. Tell him I definitely want to talk to him.”

So Valerie gave her his number and she liked his voice over the phone — a baritone with a ragged huskiness scraping the edges of it, a preacher’s voice or a country singer’s — and agreed to meet him the following day for a sandwich at a place on West Fourth Street, which was only five blocks away and didn’t require vehicular transportation, and a good thing too because the car was as dead as the iron ore they’d dug out of the ground to give it shape. The sky was overcast — fog breathing up off the water like steam rising from a teapot, a million teapots, a hundred million, and why couldn’t it ever rain? Or thunder. She’d settle for a good old-fashioned East Coast thunderstorm, anything to break the monotony. She watched herself shift, vanish and reappear again in the storefront windows, the trucks easing past like walls on wheels, pigeons and starlings scrabbling over the remains of a McDonald’s Happy Meal splayed out on the wet pavement and the sad miniature plastic child’s toy — Ronald, with his painted grin — cast away with it. Before she knew she was going to bend to retrieve the toy and slip it in her pocket she’d stopped to flick her hand at the birds and glance round her to see if anyone was looking, thinking of her daughter and the sitter she’d got in for an hour, just an hour, because how long could lunch take?

He was waiting for her in a booth by the window, a newspaper spread out on the table before him, and at first she didn’t recognize him. I’ll be the one with the beard , he’d said, but he’d also told her he was fifty-five (a quick calculation: twenty-four years older than she), which had her expecting a stringy old man with turtle skin and impacted eyes, white hair anyway, overalls, maybe a straw hat. But this man wasn’t like that at all. He wore his hair long and it was streaked with blond where the sun had caught it and when he glanced up at her the look he gave her was anything but the look of an old man. “Mr. Russell?” she tried, still ten feet away, hesitant, uncertain of herself, because this couldn’t be him. . could it?