T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

They had a late lunch — supper, really — outdoors at a little café in the studiously quaint town of Santa Ynez, then drove back up 154 and through the San Marcos Pass in the decanted sunshine of the dying afternoon and wound their way down to Santa Barbara with the islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel laid out before them as if on a tray, the perspective shifting and shifting again as they wound their way through the switchbacks and watched the night begin to gather in a gray tumble of thickening gloom up ahead of them while the islands rode off to the west in red streamers of illumination. Rita remarked on how pretty it was and Anise chimed in to agree. “Maybe I ought to write a song about it,” Anise murmured, her voice gone whispery in collusion. “Call it ‘Floating Islands,’” her mother said, and though he was calm, floating himself, on an even keel, he couldn’t help working up a little venom: “How about ‘Killing Floor’? Or no. That one’s already taken, right?”

At home, still half-looped, he parked the Beemer in the garage beside the Yukon—“Let’s go to your place, and then maybe walk down to one of the restaurants in the village,” Anise had said — and he’d said that that sounded just fine, and he was feeling no pain at all. Then he remembered the cages and he led the women out onto the lawn in the fading light to examine the depredations of the raccoons and it became a sort of game to position the cages, set the triggers and smear peanut butter all over the bait trays. At one point Anise had gone into the house for a bottle of wine and he shouted to her to see if there were any sardines in the pantry — there were — and when she returned they laid three sardines atop the smears of peanut butter in each cage, then stood back, satisfied with their work, sipping wine while the night deepened around them.

And now, at dawn, he awakens with a lurch, because something’s wrong, something’s definitely wrong, but what is it? He’s been dreaming. . what? Of pursuit, terror, faces out of the past diachronically summoned to cluck over his failures and inadequacies. A height. A drop. Laughter as ragged as hate. He sits up. Shoves the dreads up out of his face. His scalp itches. His stomach curdles. He has a mild headache, a fact of which he’s just becoming aware in a stealthy crepitating way. While he’s at the bathroom sink, staring numbly at his reflection in the mirror and mechanically filling and draining two glasses of tap water, he remembers the traps.

Filled with purpose, he ducks back into the bedroom to pull on a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt and slip into his sandals — made of synthetic materials, not leather, because leather just allows the killers to profit all the more — and then he’s out the door and into the cool of the morning, shutting the dogs in behind him so they won’t run on ahead and mess with the traps. He doesn’t really expect to have caught anything, not yet, not the first night, but he finds himself quickening his pace nonetheless. Yesterday, when he picked up the traps, the Animal Control officer — he of the blowhard’s voice, hoarse, too-loud and far too pleased with itself — had answered the question he’d posed over the phone. “What do you do with them?” the man had thrown back at him. He was skinny as a bread-stick, his eyes close-set and his hair slicked down over his scalp like the pelt of a sea otter. “That’s your decision. But we can’t take them here. And it’s illegal to possess wildlife.”

“So what do I do — release them somewhere? Up in the hills?” He pointed in back of him, to where the Santa Ynez Mountains rose up abruptly beyond the window to crowd out the sky.

“That’s what people always think,” the man said, “but when you displace animals like that it’s very hard on them. They don’t know the environment and they’re disoriented. Plus, it’s ninety-nine percent sure that the available range is already occupied.”

“What are you saying?”

The man shook his head slowly, side to side. “I’m not saying anything. But these are problem animals, right?” A sardonic smile took hold of the lower part of his face. His irises pinched inward as if the pressure of focusing were too much to bear. “You reported them. They’re damaging your property — your lawn, you said. Right?” He paused to hold up his palms by way of disclaimer and then lifted his shoulders and dropped them in a baroque shrug. “Our feeling is it’s up to you to dispose of them.”

So here he is, stalking across the grass, which is still wet with dew. There’s fog this morning, drifting insubstantial shreds of it snarled in the lower branches of the trees and rising up overhead to pull down the sky. He’s chosen to go with two traps rather than one, reasoning that since there were two raccoons they’d be more likely to prefer their own cages, but then he’s no animal behaviorist — or trapper, for that matter — and all he can do is hope for the best.

The near trap, the one he’s set right in the middle of the lawn, is as gray and empty as the fog itself, or so it seems until he gets right up on it and sees the patch of fur shoved up against the steel mesh there. But the color is all wrong — it’s white, not brown or golden or tawny even. He’s thinking of the danger suddenly, of puncture wounds, festering cuts, rabies, and he’s on his guard even as he bends forward to peer inside and recognizes the bloated overfed Angora from two doors down, the one he’s forever chasing off the property for the cardinal sin of stalking birds. Its eyes are soft pleading puddles. It begins to purr.

For a moment he thinks of taking the thing, trap and all, back to its owners, an elderly couple who seem always to be unloading groceries from the trunk of their car as if they’re expecting a siege, but then he thinks better of it, feels along the outside of the trap and lifts the door back up on its hinges. Instantly the cat bursts out as if ejected on a blast of air, but then it stops, preening, and gives him a long steady look before mincing off across the lawn, tail held high. The peanut butter, he sees, is still intact, but the sardines are gone. He’s thinking he’ll have to re-bait the thing — and wondering how he’s going to avoid catching the same cat night after night — when he glances up at the second trap, which he tucked in against the far wall in just the place where he saw the raccoons rise up and flow over it. He can’t be sure at this distance, but there seems to be something in the depths of the trap, a dark concentration of shadow, and he can see already that this is no cat.

Approaching warily — he doesn’t want to spook it, whatever it is — he comes up on the cage from the rear, where the dropped metal door screens him from view. He becomes aware of the chatter of the birds then, as if an unseen hand has just switched on the soundtrack of the morning. There’s a cool clean smell off the ocean. Everything is still. When he’s just there, just behind it, he slides to his right so he can see down the length of the cage, and the shadows separate — there are two of them — before bunching again. Two raccoons, the very ones, their eyes fixed on him, hands clutching the wire like prisoners in a penitentiary. It takes a moment to understand that the larger, sitting up now so he can see her gray nearly hairless underbelly, is the mother, and the smaller the pup or kit or whatever you call them. But then he goes down to one knee for a better look and the animals bunch again and the larger one, the mother, shows her teeth.

What does he feel? Wonder, certainly — here are the mysterious shapes of the night made concrete, captured, under his control, their existence as tangible and traceable as his own. Satisfaction. Vindication. And a strange sort of power, of species superiority — they’d assaulted him, however unconsciously, however naturally — and now he has them and it’s up to him to dispose of them as he chooses. For a long moment, poised on one knee, he simply watches them — and they watch him in return, as aware as he is that they’re his now, that they’ve been caught by a larger, more gifted predator, that any hope they might have had of escape or even survival is nil. After a while his knee begins to stiffen and he eases down on the verge of the grass and folds up his legs under him in the lotus position, a posture he adopts wherever he might be — in one of the stores, on the rug in front of the big-screen TV, outdoors on the patio or the lawn — when he needs to take a moment to shut himself down, to go deeper, to focus and see, really see.