T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

The sunroom is on the second floor, facing south, and he can look out beyond the humped backs of the Mexican laborers — three of them, two bareheaded, one in an off-white baseball cap with El Jefe looped across the crown in what looks to be black Magic Marker — to the stucco wall in front and over the roof of the house across the street and out to the ocean, five blocks distant. Today — it’s the end of October, the air clear and sharp — he can see all the way out to Santa Cruz Island, the channel spread out beneath him like a placid little pond and the oil rigs like stepping-stones lined up along the shore. Of course, this time of year the winds can come up and make things hazardous out there in a heartbeat, everybody knows that, and if Anise doesn’t show up soon he’s going to have to call and remind her of that fact. But the forecast is for light to moderate winds and he’s trying to reform his behavior, trying not to be so controlling, so quick to explode — she’ll get here when she gets here, he’s thinking, lifting a spoon of granola to his mouth and watching the faintest little rumor of a breeze finger the leaves of the trees along the road.

Her mother’s in town — Rita, flown in all the way from Port Townsend, Washington — and while he doesn’t care much about that one way or the other, Anise does, Anise certainly does, and when they arrive, if they arrive, if they can ever get their shit together and understand that winds rule the channel and sunset comes early this time of year, he will drive them down to the marina in his Beemer, hop aboard the Paladin and take them out to the island for the day. For pleasure. For a day off from walking the picket line outside the Park Service offices and for the not incidental purpose of testing the limits of the Park Service’s authority: the island is officially closed to all comers because they want to do their killing in private.

But just the thought of it is enough to set him off. Down goes the spoon, the bowl, the newspaper, milk sloshing, the wicker table trembling under the violence of it, and he’s on his feet and across the saltillo floor, pacing now, because he just can’t sit, can’t eat, can’t read. The dogs, conscious of trouble, get up from their beds in the corner and come to him, tails thwapping at their bony haunches, but he takes no comfort in them. It’s as if deep inside him a hammer has dropped, the rush of hate and rage and frustration shooting from his gut right on up to the top of his head to inflame the roots of his hair till they ache, actually ache. Every lawsuit he’s brought has been thrown out of court because the judges work for the system and the system is the National Park Service. And now they’re closing the island in their typical imperious way, no matter what the will of the people says, no matter how many petitions come across their desks or how many protestors stand out there chanting, because they’re confident no one’s going to cross that channel when the water gets rough. With the Civil Rights Movement you could get on a bus and drive down to Mississippi, with Vietnam you could bring people to Washington in cars, buses, trains and jet planes. But not here. And don’t they know it. The sons of bitches.

Just then — the workers out there unrolling the sod, the wind stirring the trees and his mind going up in flames — he sees Anise’s car at the gate and Anise’s pretty white bare arm reaching out to punch in the code that will roll it back on its wheels so she can enter, with her mother, and the day can begin.

It can’t be more than fifty degrees out on the water, the wind chill dropping the temperature a whole lot lower than that, but Anise’s mother insists on sitting out on the deck the whole way across. He tried to tell her it was going to be chilly before they’d even climbed out of the car, but she dismissed him. “You think I don’t know these islands?” she said, her eyebrows lifting till they floated on the furrows that ran up into her hairline. Her face was a template of Anise’s, uncanny, exact in every detail, as if her daughter had been cloned instead of generated in the usual way — the same broad forehead, the round face and strong chin, eyes that jumped out at you from ten feet away, the perfect shells of her ears and the sexy slight eversion of the upper lip, the whole of it framed by a whipping hurricane of dirty-blond hair that was going to gray in long electric streaks. She was tall, square-shouldered, leaner than Anise, but built, still built, though she must have been in her mid-fifties. At least. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, a short-sleeved blouse and a bandanna at her throat. The blistered leather jacket, fleece-lined, her concession to the weather, was knotted round her waist. She wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry.

When she’d put her rhetorical question to him, she wrapped an arm round Anise and said, “Now that Bax is dead and probably Francisco too, I don’t think there’s anybody alive knows them — or at least the one we’re heading for — better.” She broke into a smile and turned her face to Anise’s as if she were going to kiss her — and she did, on the tip of her nose, a quick compression and release of the lips that made him uneasy in a way he couldn’t quite pin down. “Right, honey?”

But that’s all right. Everything’s all right. The water’s a cloud and he’s floating on it now, living in the moment, getting away, and he feels his mood lightening by the minute. There’s not much chop. The sun’s unencumbered by even the hint of a cloud or the slightest tatter of fog. The dolphins come gamboling. The engine never misses a beat. And if he hammers it all the way out it’s because he’s eager to get there if only to reconnoiter, but he’s hoping — they’re all hoping — to be able to land at Scorpion, or if not Scorpion, then Smugglers’, so Rita can see for the first time in all these years what’s left of the place. So she can reminisce, spin stories, talk about sheep and ravens and the way it was sitting round a bonfire on summer nights strumming a guitar and blending her voice with her rangy tall pubescent daughter’s while the moon rose up full-bellied out of the channel and all the dwarf foxes and skunks pinned back their ears and howled. Or barked. Or whatever it was they were capable of. For the most part, Anise stays out on deck with her mother, the two of them chattering away, Rita’s mood so airy she might have swallowed his entire bottle of Xanax, and he doesn’t mind. It’s his pleasure — his privilege — to escort her and if that involves hearing the old stories over and over, that’s fine with him. If it makes Rita happy — and here he steals a look over his shoulder to see the two of them seated in deck chairs, their heads together and the wind at their hair — it makes Anise happy. And what makes Anise happy absorbs him totally. Or so he tells himself as he pushes the throttle forward and the cove at Scorpion heaves into sight.

He knows better than to anchor before he can sweep his binoculars over the pier and the beach and the beaten dirt trail that curves around behind the rock face on the right, because that’s where the house is and that’s where the rangers will be, if the rangers are here at all. Rita, windblown, flushed, is leaning way out over the rail as the boat swings round in the chop. She’s got her own binoculars, a little 8 × 22 birdwatchers’ pair she pulled out of her purse. “There,” she cries, her voice pitched high with excitement, “isn’t that the Jeep? Bax’s Jeep?”

And now Anise is in on the act, a hand shielding her eyes till her mother passes her the binoculars. She takes a moment to focus, steadying herself over the flexion of her legs. “I don’t know,” she says, “is that a patch of yellow or just my imagination?”