T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

A familiar sense of dread had come over her then, a feeling that things were out of control, that there was some specific task that wanted completing, the task that would make it all come out right, but she couldn’t pin it down or remember exactly what it was. The fact was that the AP had picked up the story of the protests out front of the Park Service offices and every animal rights group in the country had jumped on that bus. Dave LaJoy — it was two years now since his public exoneration, and he still wore the triumph of it like a chest full of medals — had led the protest, marching out front of the looping circle of thirty or forty chanting protestors, most of them students from City College and UCSB. It had gone on for a month now and she’d taken to parking the car at the other end of the marina, where the restaurants and tourist shops were, just so as to avoid the rush they made at her when she wheeled Tim’s Prius into the lot at the office.

In the morning, at breakfast, she’d be meeting in one of those very restaurants — the Docksider — with Frazier Carter, of Island Healers, Annabelle Yuell, her counterpart from the Nature Conservancy, and Freeman — expressly to avoid the protestors and discuss the continuing implementation of Phase III of the pig eradication project in peace. Over omelets. Lattes. Super-sweetened Thai spiced tea. And a view that carried beyond the masts of the ships to where the channel opened out and rolled all the way to the feet of Santa Cruz Island, where Tim wasn’t banding murrelets or doing counts or checking nests, but trapping eagles, golden eagles, for removal to the coast.

Her mother was saying something, and it was as if she’d just come awake. “I’m sorry, Mom. Thank you, I mean it. Thanks for thinking of me. It’s just that this whole thing — this project — is complicated, that’s all. And if I don’t — I know I should call more, but. .”

Now the fork bent to the plate and her mother dropped her eyes, rolling the long strands of pasta neatly round the tines with the aid of a soup spoon, then setting the whole business down again on the side of the plate. “I’m not saying that,” she said. “I just want you to know I’m thinking about you, is all.” She looked to Ed. “We’ve got a lot on our plates ourselves, you know — in a lot of ways, retirement’s more hectic than teaching was. Committees, bridge parties, parties all the time. And golf. Did I tell you Ed’s been teaching me golf?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ed put in, coming fully to life for the first time since they’d sat down, “we’ll have her on the women’s PGA tour before long. Your mother’s a real natural, did you know that?”

Her mother was smiling, her eyes warm, dimples showing. The vodka was silvery in the glass, like some rare reduced metal. She gave her husband a long buttery gaze, and they were complicit.

“No,” Alma said, shaking her head side-to-side in an exaggerated gesture, smiling herself now, the burden gone, or at least lightened, at least for the time being, “I had no idea.”

In the bathroom, in the present moment, she’s wiping the mirror clear of condensation preparatory to putting her makeup on, the sound of her mother’s voice — a sweet quavering contralto, honed through all the years of singing along with her third graders to “Lean on Me,” “The Man in the Mirror” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”—oddly comforting. She even finds herself humming along as she dresses. This meeting, like all the meetings she arranges, is informal, and so she dresses as she would for any workday: tan Patagonia fleece vest over a Micah Stroud T-shirt, fawn-colored corduroy shorts and suede hiking boots. It’s the end of October, the sun up now, no fog, but it’s always chilly along the coast, and she wears the vest — or vests: she’s got three of them, in tan, cranberry and rust — year-round, with a tee in summer, and in winter with a long-sleeved shirt or sweater. They’re handy and practical both. Though she won’t be going out to the island this morning or any day this week for that matter, she can be ready to take off at a moment’s notice, the various flaps and pockets of the vest ideal for secreting sunblock, lip balm, her Leatherman, compass, maps, water bottle and the like. Finally, she unwraps the towel, combs out her hair and trips down the steps to the scent of bacon and the sight of her mother and Ed and a kitchen in disarray.

Her mother, amazingly resilient considering the vast quantity of vodka she put down between dinner and bed the previous night, sings out a cheerful good morning. “Coffee, honey?” she offers, waving the Pyrex pot in invitation.

“Okay, yeah,” Alma hears herself say. “But I’m going to have to take it with me — I’m already running late — so put it in. .” She’s reaching for her special mug, the one with the picture of the gnashing razorback Freeman gave her as a joke, but it’s not there. Her mother, for some unfathomable reason, seems to have rearranged things, not only the cups, but the toaster oven, coffeepot, microwave and radio too. The trash container has vanished. The pictures on the refrigerator are bunched haphazardly. And where’s the calendar?

But here’s the coffee and here’s her mother pouring it and asking if she’s got time for a bite and she’s saying, “No, Mom, got to run,” even as Ed — jaunty and athletic still, despite the hips — saunters across the room with his morning Bloody Mary to ease into the table where a plate of redolent bacon and a mound of scrambled eggs, Mexican style, awaits him. “Morning,” he says.

“Morning, Ed.” She tries for a smile and so does he.

But has she got everything? She sets down the mug and pats her pockets, then slips into the front room for her laptop, sunglasses and three-ring binder, and in the next moment she’s making her getaway amid a flurry of regrets. “Wish I could stay and spend the morning with you,” she says, easing out the door, “but I’ll see you tonight. And, Mom, don’t bother to cook because I wanted to take you to this seafood place, okay?”

She’s belted in, her laptop and notebook on the passenger’s seat, mug in the cup holder, the car fuming silently beneath her. Then it’s out the drive to meld with the traffic coming off the freeway ramp, which is already backed up from the stop sign at the end of the block. To connect going south she needs to make a left at the intersection, go two blocks north past banks of condos on both sides, then across the freeway overpass to turn right on the southbound ramp. Just as she swings out onto the surface street ahead of a little yellow convertible going too fast, something darts across the road in front of her — a blur, a shadow — and she hits the brakes to the blare of the convertible’s horn at the instant she feels the thump of mortality under the left rear wheel. In the next moment, heart pounding, she pulls to the side as the convertible slashes by, peering anxiously in the rearview to identify this thing she’s hit, the creature, the animal — a squirrel, is it a squirrel? — writhing at the curb behind her.

There are other cars, three, four of them, easing past as she fumbles for the emergency blinkers and steps out of the car. Across the street, incongruous in this neighborhood of condos, is a white colonial with dark trim, a generous lawn and a stand of junk trees screening it from the freeway beyond and below it. Oaks, she’s thinking, there must be some oaks back in there or why else the squirrel? Squirrels are rare here, the native vegetation displaced by ornamentals and citrus trees, their niche taken by the roof rats that thrive on the avocado, orange and loquat the developers have planted for their delectation. But — she’s moving toward it now, watching its eyes, bark brown and luminous with shock — this is definitely a squirrel, a western gray, Sciurus grisens , in the wrong place at the wrong time.