T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

He’s wondering what to say to this, coaxing and cajoling not really his strong suits, or being pleasant and making small talk when he’s under the gun, but here’s Wilson loping up the ramp on the other side of the gate, and in the next moment the gate’s pushing open to receive them and they’re inside, click, Boat Owners Only Beyond This Point . Wilson gives him a thumbs-up, as if pink-slickered reporters with nicotine-stained fingers and open-toed sandals are the usual comrades in arms, and then they’re working their way down the ramp to the boat, where the rest of the crew’s already hunkered down in the cabin, sipping coffee, lying low. Waiting.

“You know Wilson,” he says, making the introductions in the cramped cabin while the boat bobs and weaves underfoot, “and this is Josh, Kelly, Cameron — Cammy, I mean — and Suzanne.”

Toni Walsh stands there awkwardly, her shoulders slumped, nodding in turn at each of the crew — the volunteers, as he likes to call them, all of them in their late teens or early twenties, Josh an apprentice tattoo artist and whole-foods advocate, the girls members of the same environmental studies class at City College — before she unbuttons the slicker to reveal a black cashmere sweater, low-cut, with a black bra underneath. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I won’t use any real names.”

Josh — he’s wearing a wife beater to show off his sleeves, some sort of dragon motif that looks like intertwined earthworms running up both arms — scoots up to the table on the overturned bucket he’s been perched on and gives her a long annihilating look. He can’t be more than five-six or — seven, pumped but in the stringy way of the body type that’s too lean to put on real muscle, and you can see at a glance he thinks of himself as a hard case — which just makes him all the easier to manipulate. “Shit,” he says, “I don’t care if you blow my name up right across the headline of the paper, biggest blackest type you got — it’s Joshua Holyrood Miller, with two o’s — because I’m ready to lay it all on the line to stop the slaughter. We all are. Right, Cammy?”

None of the girls is much to look at, not that he’s interested — they’re kids, basically, and he’s got Anise and Anise is more than enough for him, too much really — but Cameron, Cammy, an emaciated brown-eyed blonde with her hair kinked out to her shoulders and the look of somebody who knows a whole lot more than she’s revealing, has her moments. “Right,” she says, darting a glance round the cabin, “right. But don’t use my name.”

And that’s it: the cabin falls silent. When they were coming down the ramp, he could hear voices raised in animation, laughter, the giddiness of those about to go into battle, but Toni Walsh has managed to kill it. No matter. They can make their peace on the run out and whether or not they wind up finding common ground is nothing to him — he’s no social director and this is no cruise ship. He watches dispassionately as Toni Walsh sets her bag on the table and warily eases herself down on the bench beside Cammy.

“So,” he says, “all good, right? Everybody good to go?” And he’s on his way up the steps to the cockpit when he catches himself. “Oh, yeah, before I forget”—and here he extracts the wire cutters from the plastic Home Depot bag and fans them out on the table, one to a person, except for Toni Walsh, that is, who’s along as an observer only—“put these where you can get at them. And, what? Just kick back — it’ll be a two-and-a-half-hour run out there. And if it’s rough, you puke outside, right, and not in the cabin. .”

Of course, given the look of the sky and the way the boats are shifting in their berths, chances are about a hundred percent it will be rough — just how rough becomes apparent as soon as they leave the shelter of the breakwater. The wind’s coming down-channel from the west and it’s kicking up whitecaps out there as far as he can see, the boat rocking pretty aggressively through the full range of its motion, left to right and back again, and then slapping through the creases with a weightless rise and a hard drop down. For Wilson, it’s nothing, because he’s off in dreamland before they’re even out of the harbor, but the others are looking pretty green around the gills (and where did that expression come from, he’s wondering, because people aren’t fish and if they were they wouldn’t be seasick but wriggling and flapping and happy as clams, and really, how happy can clams be when they just lie there in the mud all day waiting for something to come along and pry them open to get at what they are, which is basically just animated slime?). Anyway, he’s got to fight it down himself, the feeling of something alien creeping up his throat while his stomach sinks and sinks lower still, but the good news is that by the time the island heaves into sight the rain has started in, and this is no drizzle but a good gray pelting rain sweeping across the water in rippling sheets that rise up like mythical beings, like gods and angels and devils, to erase everything. Sure. Fine. Anybody want to go pig-hunting today? I don’t think so.

The cabin stirs to life when he cuts the engine and drops anchor. They’ve put in at Willows, on the far side of the island, a place he’s picked because it’s out of the way and because he knows it as well as any other. It was here that he liberated the raccoons in broad daylight three months back, anchoring the Paladin at just this spot and ferrying them across in the inflatable. They’d come to life when he lifted the cage down, thrashing from side to side under the tarp, and thank God it was calm that day or he might have had two drowned raccoons on his hands. They couldn’t know what was happening to them, couldn’t imagine being at sea or even what the sea was, couldn’t know that he meant them no harm and that they were going to virgin territory, mother and son, and maybe they’d breed and start a new genetic line, inbred or not, or maybe, and he had this thought once he’d got the cage ashore and hidden in the willows that lent the canyon its name, maybe he’d trap more. A big male, another female, who knew? That would confound Dr. Alma, wouldn’t it? A whole new race of animals out here on the island, and why not? Her precious foxes and skunks and lizards and the three types of snake had got here at random, washed down out of the canyons on the mainland in a storm like this and riding debris out to sea, and it was nothing more than an accident of fate that raccoons hadn’t been part of the mix.

He’d pulled back the tarp to see them huddled there, their eyes fastened on him, expecting the worst, and then he flipped open the door of the cage and backed off — actually got behind a bush so as to hide himself — and watched as they put their noses to the air, stiffened, and made a break for it. Two patches of fur, gone so fast and so completely it was as if they’d never been there at all. That was random too. But he — Dave LaJoy, citizen, homeowner, activist, defeated in court and ignored on the picket line — was the deliberate agent of release, nothing random about it. He was a life-giver, that was what he was, the rescuer of these creatures Animal Control had all but told him to eliminate while they looked the other way.

“So, two trips?” Wilson wants to know.

Everybody’s out on deck now, the dinghy in the water and jerking at its tether, the rain steady. They’re all watching him because he’s in charge, he’s the captain here, he’s got the map showing the fence lines (courtesy of Alicia) and he’s the one who knows the way up the canyon. He takes a moment, looking past them to where the beach cuts a dark slash out of the foam, and they all turn their heads to follow his gaze. It’s a wild scene: the indented beach cut off at either end by massive pillars of slick wet rock rising up to the ridges beyond, rain riveting the water, the sky fallen in, nothing moving, not even the gulls.