T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

“I don’t know,” she said, already turning toward the house, “maybe we can get the Coast Guard on them.” One of them, the one in front, was a big square-jawed blond who looked as if he could have been one of those phony TV wrestlers her father had liked so much when she was a girl back in New York. He hadn’t even given her so much as a glance. And he wasn’t carrying a gun, unlike the other two — they roared past, as oblivious as he was, rifles slung over their shoulders as they worked the handlebars of their machines and looked out ahead for ruts, obstructions, the retreating flanks of a black tusker boar. He must have thought he was the real deal, because he had a bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Big man. Big hero. “Because they’ve got to have a boat somewhere, you know that—”

Anise, rangy, tall, her back slumped under the weight of everything that was wrong, and her book, in its plastic sleeve, pressed to her chest, fell into step with her, and there was the house ahead of them, smoke rising from the chimney, Bax’s light still on, and it was as if nothing had happened, as if all the clocks were frozen and the sun locked in place. “Where do you think they are — Smugglers’? Because we put signs there and they — they can’t just say they didn’t know. .”

“Don’t you worry, darlin’,” she said, striding along as briskly as her legs would carry her, and was she quoting some song, was that it? Lyrics clouded her head, all the songs she’d heard and sung and would sing in the years to come when all this was over with, and she was already envisioning a new song, with a blues progression and a theme of final and uncompromising revenge. “Don’t you worry,” she repeated, the words like cold little stones in her mouth, “those sons of bitches are going to regret this, and you can take my word for it.”

But they didn’t. And they wouldn’t. Because wheels were turning that she knew nothing about, and when she mounted the stairs to the bedroom she was surprised to see Bax out of bed, dressed in his faded flannel shirts — he wore as many as three or four of them, depending on the temperature — and his blue jeans with the one leg cut away for the cast. He was perched on the edge of the chair, attempting to pull on his socks, but when he tried to reach down to his good foot the ribs tugged him back as if his arm was attached to a bungee cord. He winced. Let out a curse. “Goddamn it,” he rumbled when she came through the door, “will you help me with this? And my boots. Where the shitfuck are my boots?”

She slid his socks on over his cold white feet with their horny yellowed nails and splayed toes before she said a word and when she did she was already at the door. “You mean your boot , don’t you? Because there’s no way a boot’s going to go over that cast, even if I slit it with a knife. And I don’t know that you should even be up on it.”

“I heard two shots,” he said, swiveling toward her, the left leg swinging like a pendulum in its chrysalis of dirty white plaster. “What was it — day-trippers? Hunters?”

It was day-trippers who punched holes in their illusion of serenity anytime they chose to show up, day and night, from the diver who drowned within sight of the beach while taking abalone out of season so that Anise had to find him there at low tide with his facial features all eaten away and one rigid arm hooked up like an invitation to dance, to the bonfire builders and stranded fishermen and the six teenagers in their daddy’s cabin cruiser out of Santa Barbara shooting up a pod of gray whales in the shallows off Scorpion Rock. You never knew, especially in summer, when somebody you’d never seen before would waltz right into the kitchen, as if the whole ranch was nothing more than a curiosity out of a museum. But this wasn’t day-trippers. This was worse, far worse. “Hunters,” she said.

He’d stopped just short of her, weaving on the pinions of the crutches, huge, big-headed, his hair gone white in the past year and his white-flecked beard fanning out across his collar and up into his sideburns as if a wind were spitting in his face. “Where? Not on ranch property?”

She tried to keep her voice level. “Right in Scorpion meadow. Right in the middle of it.”

“Shit. The dumb fucks. We lose any?”

She just nodded. “Anise’s downstairs trying to get the Coast Guard on the marine radio. This time we’re going to make them pay.”

“What’d they look like?”

And now she had to see them all over again. The way they’d come on, heedless, clueless, the sheep starting up. “I don’t know. Like the average jerk. The one of them had a bow and arrow and he was all in camouflage like this was Vietnam or something.”

Bax wedged himself through the doorway and she followed him to the head of the stairs, the kitchen opening up beneath them, the long table, the boar’s head Bax had had stuffed presiding over the room with its meshed tusks and lopsided grin, as if death were a rare joke. “He didn’t”—handing her the crutches so he could take hold of the rail and begin easing himself down the stairs, one step at a time—“have blond hair by any chance?”

“He did, yeah,” she said, stepping down to him and forcing her shoulder up under his arm for support.

“Big guy? Forties?”

“Yeah, I guess. Why, you know him?”

“Shit, yes. That’s Thatch.” Another step down and then another, the room looming beneath them, opening up like a chasm, the stove, the oven, the dull glow of the battered pots and pans, a pit of domesticity and daily strife. She could hear Anise’s voice at the radio—“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”—and the screech of static on the other end. Who’s Thatch? was what she was about to say, but he was already spinning out the answer. “Doesn’t he know the rules? They told me he was strictly to stay off the ranch and just hunt the hills.”

“Who told you?”

He was breathing hard, sweating, though it couldn’t have been more than fifty-five degrees in the house, and when they reached the bottom of the stairs he winced as she ducked out from under his arm and handed him the crutches. His eyes pulled away from hers. “The owners,” he said.

“What do you mean? They didn’t—?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice gone to the very bottom of the register, more a snort or growl than a human vocalization, “and I’ve been meaning to tell you about it for a couple of weeks now, but with the accident and all I just—”

She was furious, burning. “Just what? Lied to me? Kept me in the dark? Treated me like a hired hand, like a cook, instead of what I am, or what I thought I was anyway. You son of a bitch. You’re worse than they are.”

He dragged himself across the room to the door before he responded, and when he did, he was already reaching behind it for the.22 rifle, as if that would do any good against a band of pig killers with high-powered rifles and a longbow with a fifty-five-pound pull. “They gave them the hunting concession, all right? And I didn’t want to get you all pissed off and raving because it’s the owners’ decision and there’s nothing we can do about it except the deal was they’d stay off the property and up in the hills and now the deal’s off.” He swung his head round angrily and shouted down the length of the room to where Anise sat at the big Steelcase desk where they did their paperwork, crying “Mayday!” into the radio microphone. “Shut that goddamn thing off, will you? Anise! Shut it!”

Rita had a hand on his arm. He was grimacing, tottering, trying with his two hands, two armpits and two shellacked and shining crutches to maneuver the rifle so he could hold on to it and throw open the door at the same time. “What are you going to do? Shoot them? You can hardly stand up.”