T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

She saw that register on his face. His eyes went wide, his jaw locked. He was in pain — just standing up was a trial — and this was like climbing up on his shoulders and kicking the crutches out from under him. She felt bad then — he hadn’t known, or hadn’t known the extent of it. “What are you talking about?” he said, his face lit freakishly by the flames, sick flames, chemical flames, the beer cans bursting with a long liquid hiss that was the sound of capitulation and defeat.

“Upstairs. In the bedroom. His bedroom. He’s got an ad in Field and Stream , for Christ’s sake. ‘Eldon Thatch’s Island Hunt Club.’ Prices and everything.”

It was then that the noise she’d been hearing off on the periphery grew in intensity, grew closer, and it wasn’t the clatter of the helicopter that had appeared overhead like a big ratcheting bug and vanished over the rise in the direction of Scorpion, but the angry mechanical buzzing of the ATVs come home to roost. She looked up to see the three of them, in single file, working their way down the road from the mesa. Bax had seen them too. He was already in motion, moving faster than she could have imagined, and when they came roaring into the yard he was at the truck, propped up against it, and he had the.22 in his hands.

She didn’t know guns, didn’t want to know guns. She was in a transcendent state, the hate and fear burning in her in equal portions, and where were the peace and love she’d shaped her voice around through all those years when music was the means and brotherhood the end? She’d started the fire. She’d provoked this. Her throat clenched. Somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was going to die.

She watched the three of them shut down their engines and dismount, their motions fussy and exaggerated, as if to show how purely cool and unconcerned they were, nothing out of the ordinary, just a bonfire burning in the yard and a.22 rifle leveled on them. Thatch removed the khaki cap he was wearing, shook out his hair — he had one of those layered cuts the hair bands favored to distract you from the fact that they couldn’t play their instruments, and that said all she needed to know — then ambled across the yard, the other two trailing in his wake. “Hello there,” he called, trying on a smile that was like the smile of a man stepping onto a used car lot for the first time, hopeful but expecting the worst. He wanted to know what was going on, what they were doing there, what the fire was all about. “For a minute,” he said, trying to be friendly, trying to smooth things out, as if trespassing and sheep killing and cutting their living out from under them was just a little gaffe, nothing really, “I thought the house was on fire.” But then he had a look at the piled-up mess of the fire and saw what it was and his face went hard.

“You’re killing our animals,” Bax said. “Livestock. You and these two clowns”—he had the rifle laid out across the hood of the truck and the truck was between them and him, and he indicated the two hunters, fat-faced types in their thirties or forties, with a jerk of his head—“are shooting up our sheep. That we paid for out of our own pockets. And that’s got to stop.”

She’d moved in beside him when the men had climbed down from their vehicles blinking against the light of the spreading sky. The mud sucked at her boots. A cold shiver ran through her. “And the lambs,” she heard herself say. “What about the dead lambs? Seventy-three of them.”

The big man — Thatch, and he must have been some sort of bodybuilder or something — just shrugged. “Talk to the Gherinis,” he said. “I don’t owe you shit. You owe me. You’ve got no right to destroy people’s personal property, and I tell you you’re going to pay every penny it’s going to cost to replace it, or—”

“Or what?” Bax lifted the gun now, though it was puny, ridiculous, a child’s toy compared to what the two fat-faced men had slung over their shoulders.

Thatch hadn’t moved. He was twenty feet away. The bow loomed over the back of his head as if it were attached to him, a supererogatory limb sprung up out of the jointure of his shoulder blades. “I’ll sue you. I’ll have you evicted, that’s what I’ll do. You just try me. And I’m about a heartbeat away from coming over there and kicking your crippled ass, crutches or no.” He shifted his gaze to her. “You too, you bitch.”

The violence of the curse, the hate, the explosive freight-train rush of the moment— Life and death , that was what she was thinking, life and death —stunned her. Scared her. What had she done?

No one moved. No one said a word. Movie images flickered through her head, shootouts and quick draw, Technicolor irreality, playacting, and who were those people lying there in the dirt with the fake blood spurting? Extras, stuntmen, bad guys. Not Bax, not her. But where was the reality, exactly, where the restraint? The law? Normalcy, even?

Ultimately — and it happened before she could draw her next breath — there was only a single shot fired, and it was Bax who squeezed it off, a sudden sharp snap like the crack of a whip that kicked up a puff of dirt all the way on the far side of the house, and Bax wasn’t aiming, maybe didn’t even mean to pull the trigger, but it had its effect. The two fat-faces staggered back as if their knees had buckled and she watched the color drain out of Thatch’s face.

Bax — she couldn’t read him, couldn’t tell if his own stone-cold look was the result of the pain of his ribs or a flare of anger or even surprise at what he’d done, what it had all come to — dropped his voice down to its fiercest pitch and said, “You cocky son of a bitch — who the hell do you think you are?”

And Thatch, white still, white as Gold Medal flour, his blood drained as neatly as if somebody had pulled out the stopper, fought to master his voice. “You think you can intimidate me?”

And Bax, check and checkmate: “You’re damn right.”

She could see it was going to be difficult getting back into the truck, Bax fumbling and exposed for the fatal space of one long moment while she twisted the key in the ignition and Thatch and his sheep killers did whatever it was they meant to do to get their own back, and so she started round the truck to the driver’s side, saying loud enough for all to hear, “The hell with it. Let’s just leave. Let’s just get out of here.”

Thatch made no move to stop them, though the look he gave her was death delivered. She had the truck up and running and blasting its exhaust, and the noise and her motions, the briskness with which she sprang into the seat, squared herself and jerked at the gear shift, gave Bax cover enough to juggle gun and crutches and heave himself into the truck, and she never gave Thatch a second glance as she pinned the accelerator to the floor and slashed away up the road until the ranch and the bonfire with the three puny figures in front of it was just a speck in the rearview mirror.

She’d never been so torn up in her life. Her hands were trembling, her feet were like dead things, and she could feel her stomach, the very bottom of it, as if it had been pinned to her with a tack. Bax roared out his rage all the way up the snaking muddy road to the mesa and she roared it right back at him. They made all sorts of resolutions, what they were going to do, what Bax was going to say to the owners and to the police and the Coast Guard and anybody else who would listen, but none of it did the least bit of good, because when they wound down the other side of the mesa and Scorpion Ranch appeared beneath them and grew larger and larger till the view out the windshield was filled to surfeit with it, they saw the helicopter there, inert in the yard, and the pilot and a man in suit and tie — the Gherinis’ agent or lawyer or whoever he was — standing beside it and Anise and Francisco with them, looking grim.