T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

“Uh-oh, am I in trouble here?”

Anise gave her a bitter smile, and yet her eyes lit with something like pleasure over the exchange. She needed to talk, to respond to someone in the flesh about what she was feeling, thinking, reading, and not the faceless instructor who graded her papers in a tight rigid hand and in lettering so minuscule he might have been copying out the warning label on a bottle of prescription pills.

Keep it light, she told herself. Go easy.

“Because if I ask you if you want to sit out here in the rain by yourself for a few more minutes while I go back in to take the bread out of the oven, you’re going to say — what was it?”

“ ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”

She wanted to help ease the burden — and she tried as best she could, tried to anticipate, cajole, keep things moving forward — but she was stretched to the limit through every minute of every day and right now the lambs needed her more than her daughter did. And there was bread in the oven and stew on the stove and Bax up in bed with his foul mouth and a temper like a nest of hornets somebody’s just whacked with a stick. She didn’t want to argue. She didn’t want to nag. But she couldn’t help herself. “How about eating that egg sandwich before it goes cold?”

“I would prefer. . oh, shit. To go to the mall, to see somebody, anybody, except you and Bax and a bunch of stupid sheep. Like all my life. Like every day. I might as well be in prison.”

And here came the guilt. The weight of it that was like a physical thing because she was guilty, guilty of everything Anise could throw at her and more. She shut her eyes to drive it away, but it did no good. She saw Anise as a little girl, the look on her face when she told her she was pulling her out of class three weeks before the close of the school year and taking her out to an island nobody had ever heard of. Fifth grade. Three weeks from the end. What about all my friends? What about summer vacation? We’ll have our vacation on the island, she’d told her. You’ll love it. Beaches — there’s a beach right there, your own private beach right in front of Scorpion Ranch. I’m not going . And then she’d repeated herself— You’ll love it —chanting it so many times it became a litany, and Anise, stubborn, unconvinced, adamant, throwing it back at her: I will not love it, I’ll hate it. And I don’t want to go to any scorpion place, I hate scorpions. Don’t you? She’d wondered about that herself, but as it turned out there were no scorpions, or only the smallest little dull brown things you sometimes saw clinging to the underside of one of the logs in the woodpile, and she’d promised her — promised her and believed it herself — that it would only be for the summer. Yes, sure, and now Anise wouldn’t know the inside of her old school — of any school — if it opened up right here in the pasture in front of her.

“You see any problems out there this morning?” she said, keeping her voice flat. She was staring off across the meadow now, and there were lambs everywhere, bright as cotton wool, and the ewes licking, licking.

“Uh-uh.” And then, reluctantly, because they were both on the same page again: “Twins right over there, see — like right by that red rock. There? See?”

“Did she—?”

“Yes, she licked them both.”

“And did you—?” With twins, it was a good idea to bind them together so the stronger, dominant one, would pull the other along to the teat.

“I’m reading, okay? I have an assignment due. Not that you would care.”

“Okay, babe, okay,” she said. “There’s plenty of time. We just don’t want them to get separated, is all.”

As if on cue, a raven began to croak from the screen of trees behind them, and then another joined in. A dark scribble of them marred the clouds overhead and there was a black patch on the ground a hundred yards away where two of them were trying to lure a ewe away from her lamb, but the ewe was having no part of it. “Keep your eye on that, hon,” she said, pushing herself up. “And keep Bumper with you — we don’t want him out there herding anybody, not this morning. I’ll be back”—she twisted her wrist for a look at her watch—“in like twenty minutes. And then I’m going to walk the perimeter here all day, right till dark, and you can go back to your room and your books, anything you want. Okay?”

Her daughter’s eyes, illuminated by the sheen of the rain, were as changeable as well water, the palest finest transparent gray shading to blue, not Toby’s eyes and not hers either. She was trying to picture her own mother, her mother’s eyes, but as hard as she tried to superimpose that vision on Anise, she couldn’t quite manage it. Folding her arms round her knees and leaning forward, she watched as her daughter unwrapped a corner of the sandwich and lifted it to her mouth for an exploratory sniff. “Okay?” she repeated.

“Yes, already , yes!! I mean, what do you want me to say? What do you think, I’m like three years old? I’m here, okay? And if any of those frickin’ birds even thinks about it I’m going to be on him like glue.”

Frickin’. On him like glue . She heard Bax in the mix and maybe Arturo, the youngest of the hands, thirty-one and retired from rodeoing with a right leg that looked as if it had come out of a laundry wringer. She heard it and felt the guilt all over again, as if someone had switched on a circuit inside her — Anise needed to be with kids her own age, her peer group, kids she could go to the movies with and window-shopping in the mall and all the rest of it. Girlfriends. Maybe even a boyfriend. Or somebody to moon over anyway. She pushed herself up and ducked back out into the rain, which seemed to be slackening a bit. Or was it her imagination?

“You do that, honey,” she said, thinking, even as she said it, of the kind of ache that would open up inside her if Anise ever did go back to shore, to Toby and Toby’s mother in New York, where she spent a couple of weeks in the summer, at least when Toby remembered to send tickets for the plane. She’d already shifted toward the house when she swung round again, the dog looking up at her in expectation, Anise chewing her egg sandwich and regarding her warily. “And when you get ’em all glued down,” she added, the rain drooling from the big bowl of the sombrero, “pluck out all their feathers for me, will you?”

Francisco was just coming out the door, wearing a heavy leather poncho over his workshirt and a faded red baseball cap that carried the legend Trojans in once-yellow letters across the crown, a legend that always made her think of the condoms she and Toby were so careful to use even when they both felt they were about to burst wide open with the fierceness of their need but which hadn’t stopped her from getting pregnant at just exactly the wrong time. Twice. Once when the band (Tobrita, her inspiration, their names intertwined in the way of forever, as if forever meant anything) was just taking off and then again when the record company sent them out on tour. The first time he made her get an abortion. The second time she refused. That was Anise. And could she even imagine life without her? “I go to watch now,” Francisco said. “ ¿Todo bien? ”

She was standing there braced against the doorframe, trying to kick off her muddy boots, the rain scent at her back, the dense complex odor of cooking coming at her through the open door. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice harsh in her own ears. “Jesus God, sometimes I just want to give up, throw it all over and go live in a motel someplace and collect welfare like everybody else, you know what I mean?” He didn’t know. Sheep were what he knew, sheep and nothing else. One boot sucked free, then the other, and she reached out to steady herself against the wall. “But maybe you want to make a circuit and see what you can see — especially across from where Anise’s set up.” She gave him a softening smile. “You know me, always worried.”