T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

The waitress — all of nineteen or twenty, with a ponytail that reaches to her waist and a skirt so short she might have come directly from early cheerleading practice — answers in the affirmative and then turns to Alma. “Have you decided, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she says, handing over the menu and snatching a quick glance round the table, “I’ll just have the organic oatmeal. With skim milk.”

Phase I of the project — Administration, Infrastructure and Acquisition — involved securing the funds from their overlords in Washington and, in Annabelle’s case, the Nature Conservancy, hiring additional staff to oversee the project, acquire equipment and supplies and take bids from the hunting and fencing contractors. Not to mention dealing with an inflamed press ( $7 Million Awarded to Foreign Hunters to Slaughter Santa Cruz Island Pigs, read one Press Citizen headline) and an ongoing campaign of harassment from the Dave LaJoy-Anise Reed contingent, both in the courts and in the parking lot out front of their offices in Ventura. Phase II, the division of the island into five zones for the purpose of constructing forty-five miles of pig-proof fencing so that each zone can be sequentially hunted till it’s pig free, was completed in the spring, which means that Phase III is well under way. Afterward, and the nearest estimate is that it will take up to six years to achieve an island-wide extirpation, Phase IV will be implemented, in which the fences will be monitored for an additional two years to ensure that the eradication is complete, after which they will be removed and the island will return to the way it was before humans began altering it. At least that’s the plan. And the hope. The fervent hope of them all.

“Well, yes,” Freeman is saying, his coffee cup held aloft and beating time to some inner rhythm, “we’ve posted signs and sent out the press release stating that the entire island, not just the TNC property, will be closed to the public while the hunt is under way. We’re making it a public safety issue. And the promise is that once Zone One is cleared, we’ll let people back in and open up the campgrounds at Scorpion.”

“As soon as possible,” Alma puts in, looking round the table. “We don’t want to give people any more reason to gripe than they already have.”

“Oh?” Frazier’s giving her a sardonic grin. “Are they griping? I hadn’t heard.”

“You can’t really blame them,” Annabelle says, turning to him.

“I can,” Alma says.

“Because they don’t like to see violence — like me, like us. Life is sacred, I believe that. And yet—”

“And yet no matter how many times you explain it”—Alma’s voice jumps up the register—“they just don’t get it because they don’t want to. Logic means nothing to these people. Long-term goals. Expert opinion.” She can feel the caffeine working in her to the point of coffee jitters, of running at the mouth, of cutting people off — she needs to put something on her stomach, needs her steel-cut oatmeal and her skim milk. “But we’ve been through all this before and we’re just going to have to grin and bear it. For the greater good. For the foxes.”

“Or bear and grin it,” Freeman says. Lamely.

“At least the courts are on our side.” Alma can feel her smile bloom and then fade. She reaches for her coffee cup, then thinks better of it, pulling both hands down into her lap.

“For now,” Annabelle says. “But you can’t count on that. Every time one of these crazies sues for an injunction I tremble to think what’s going to happen if we wind up with a judge that just doesn’t get it.”

“Amen,” Alma says, “me too. I can hardly sleep nights thinking of what it would be like if they stop us now, when we’ve committed the funds, when weeks, days even, could mean the difference for the foxes. I mean”—looking round the table, caught in the grip of her emotions, so wired she can’t find the off switch—“they’ve got money behind them. Have you seen their website? The ticker there showing how much people are donating? And the local paper. The editorials? They’re just manipulating public opinion. Cynically. Stupidly. But it works. I mean, the pig in the bull’s-eye?”

There’s a silence, as if all this is too much to bear, especially at eight-thirty on a morning made in heaven with the sun riding up off the water and the brown pelicans — brought back from the very edge of extinction because people woke up to the fact that DDT wasn’t exactly a vitamin — gliding low to report on the health of the local anchovy population. This isn’t a morning for fear or doubt, this is a morning for celebration, for eggs benedict and sweet cakes, for resolve and concerted action.

“This LaJoy,” Frazier says after a moment, looking up from the nest of his folded hands, “does he ever go to work or what? The man seems to have a lot of time on his hands. Christ, it seems like every time I come down here he’s out in the parking lot marching around with his bloody sign. And I tell you these bloody chants—‘Nazi’ and ‘Animal killer’ and the like — just put my teeth on edge.” He pauses, patting his breast pocket for his cigarettes, Camels, a pack of which he actually removes before he catches himself. “Almost forgot: no smoking in a public place in this glorious state. But what I want to say is maybe Phase I should have been ‘Eliminate Dave LaJoy.’ ” He raises his left arm and squints an eye to sight down it, squeezing off an imaginary round with the trigger finger of his right hand: “Pow!”

“Can I buy the bullets for you?” Freeman says.

“Not that I’m violent or anything, just that certain species — or individuals within that species — sometimes have to be removed for the salvation of all the rest, right, Alma? Euthanized. There’s a term I like. As long as it’s got a.223-caliber slug attached to it.”

Well, of course. And there’s general laughter, fellow feeling, comradeship, and then there’s food, plates heaped high with it, and the sun picking out each individual mast in the harbor and setting fire to the rigging while the islands float somewhere out there on the horizon. All well and good. But Alma’s the one who has to bear the brunt of everything LaJoy can bring — she’s the one who has to stand up there in the public forums and explain as patiently as she can the rationale for the killing, she’s the one who has to pick up the morning paper and see her own name there like a slap to the face, and it’s wearing her down.

Restoring an ecosystem is never easy — maybe it’s not even possible. She thinks of Guam, where it’s beyond hope. Or Hawaii. Florida. Places where so many species have been introduced it’s hard to say what’s native and what’s not. She’d attempted to boil it down for her mother the night before, because her mother was trying, she really was, and Alma wanted her to appreciate what she was doing — or at least what she was going through. She’d waited for a lull in the conversation — Ed got up to refill the glasses, the ice maker clanking philosophically, the tonic hissing with a rush of released gas — and said, “Take Tim, for instance.”

“Yes,” her mother said, “take Tim. You mean to say he’s not even going to be here for your birthday? Because I don’t know about you, but I intend to bake a cake first thing in the morning — devil’s food, with mocha frosting. And what was that ice cream you like — Vanilla Swiss Almond? Ed’s going to pick up a pint. Or maybe a quart. What do you say to a quart, Ed?”

“I told you, Mom, he’s trapping the goldens. Which has to be done because we discovered that it’s the golden eagles killing the foxes. You see, what most people don’t realize—”