T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

“Yeah, sure,” he hears himself say for the benefit of the group, though in his mind he’s already leapt ashore and started up the canyon. “Good idea. Don’t want to overload the thing, not in this weather.”

This is all for show, because he and Wilson worked out the details as they humped round the headland and into Willows Cove. Somebody’s got to stay with the boat in weather like this, and that’s going to be Wilson because he’s the only reliable hand in this group of amateurs. Which means that Wilson will have to ferry them in, three in one group, three in the next, and then haul the dinghy back aboard just in case anybody comes nosing around.

“I’ll just tell them I’m sightseeing,” Wilson joked while the others were fumbling with their gear below. “Or no, I’m looking for a nice quiet place to commit suicide. What do you think? Think that’ll grab them?”

He was too keyed up to play games. “Just keep it straight, all right? And watch for us — I mean, the minute we come back out on the beach you drop that dinghy and hammer it like it’s a drill, like every second counts.”

“What am I supposed to say, ‘Aye-aye, sir’?”

“Don’t fuck with me. Not here. Not now.”

“You know I wouldn’t fuck with you, Dave,” Wilson said, doing exactly that. “But no worries, man, everything’s cool. I want this to happen as much as you do — or did you forget that?”

“All right,” he says now, one eye on the beach, where the surf isn’t all that bad because the storm’s pushing the waves lengthwise down the flank of the island, “Toni, it’s going to be you and Cammy and me on the first run, then Josh, Kelly and Suzanne. And when the dinghy hits the beach you jump out and run for those willows over there, see where I’m pointing? Don’t worry about getting your feet wet or anything else, just duck out of sight as quick as you can so Wilson can get the dinghy out of there and back on board. I don’t have to tell you, if they see us on the water, we’re screwed.”

Then they’re in the inflatable and beating across the waves, the shore coming to them as if pulled on a string, the engine growling, spray spitting in their faces. Wilson brings them in just fine, tipping back the engine and riding in on the surge, but Toni Walsh is a little shaky on the concept of springing lightly from boat to shore and she’s already wet to the knees and in danger of getting creamed by the next wave when Dave catches her by the arm and jerks her up the crest of the beach. By contrast, Cammy hits the sand like a Marine and makes for the bushes without breaking stride, her hair wet and streaming beneath the black cap, the transparent rain gear molded to her thighs. She’s gone before he can blink.

In the next moment — two minutes, a hundred twenty seconds — he and Toni Walsh are in the willows with her, not even breathing hard. Or at least he’s not breathing hard — for her part, Toni seems to be hyperventilating. He listens to her suck air in a choppy smoker’s wheeze, water running noisily over the stones, tree frogs shrilling, the rain hissing in the leaves. There’s an intense odor of greenery, of muck and rot. Everything seems to be drooping. The sky, flexing overhead, is more black than gray, his socks are sodden and he can feel the cold pelt of the rain leaching through the cap to sponge his hair and slip down his collar, drip by drip.

He’s watching the boat through a scrim of rain, Wilson maneuvering the dinghy in against the stern of the Paladin while Josh leans forward to take hold of the line. Without thinking, he hoists himself up atop a cluster of water-run boulders for a better view while Toni Walsh, wet through, heaving for breath and fumbling in her big wet pink purse for a cigarette, levels a look of irritation on him. The boulders are slick and ovoid, like the eggs of dinosaurs, and Cammy, long-legged and gaunt and looking satisfied with herself, suddenly appears on the one beside him, but not Toni Walsh. Toni Walsh is standing down there below them, in water up to her calves — flowing water, brown and braided and quick — and he comes to himself long enough to reach down a hand and haul her up like so much baggage, which is what she is. Which is why Anise refused to come, though he blustered and threatened and pulled every guilt trip he could think of on her.

This is when he begins to realize there may be a problem here, a situation he hasn’t taken into account — namely, that Willows Creek, normally a gurgling little rill you can jump across, isn’t so much a creek as a river right now. Roiled and hissing, bristling with debris and loud with the sucking clamor of dislodged rock, it fans out across the mouth of the canyon in a muddy sheet, carving its way through the sand to send snaking brown tentacles out into the sea. The plan is to take the easy foot trail along the sandbars that wind through the reeds and willows, following it up along the streambed to higher ground where they’ll eventually intercept the fence line and cut as much wire as they can while Toni Walsh, with his help, collects photographic evidence of the slaughter, carcasses piled up like dead leaves, like charnel — just follow the ravens and that’s where they’ll be. That’s the plan. But the foot trail is gone and so are the sandbars. And the reeds and willows are neck-deep in a rush of swirling dark water.

No matter. Even as Wilson swings the dinghy in against the beach and the others struggle out into the surf, he’s improvising — too late to turn back now, because from the look of Toni Walsh they’ll never get her out here again, and if they don’t do something soon, the pigs will have gone the way of Anacapa’s rats. He swings round to study the canyon walls, thinking they’ll have to make their way up at an angle, above the level of the creek, hard going but manageable, not a problem, not a problem at all, because he’s up for it, and the kids would jump off the edge of a cliff if he told them to, and Toni Walsh — Toni Walsh is just going to have to tough it out. If she wants her story. And she does, she must, or she wouldn’t be here. When he turns round again, the boat is right there and two of the slickered figures — the girls — are leaping out and sprinting across the beach, but Josh, flailing for balance, goes down in the surf, not once, but twice, before he rights himself and starts off after them.

“Here they come,” Cammy says, barely able to suppress the excitement in her voice. “And Josh”—she lets out a strangled little gasp of laughter—“look at Josh! Jesus.” She’s grinning, giddy as a child, and what do they think this is, a reality show? Summer camp? She springs to the rock in front of him, agile as a flea, her eyes lit with the pure joy of the moment. “Guess he decided to take a swim, huh? Hey, Josh,” she calls out, “how’s the water?”

He’s not about to offer explanations or admit he’s miscalculated the volume of water washing down out of the canyon this time of year because explanations are for losers and all that matters is getting this done. So when Kelly and Suzanne — short and soft, both of them, pear-shaped and nearly indistinguishable in their matching olive-green slickers — splash up to him, grinning, he just reaches down a hand and hoists first one, then the other, up onto the rock with the rest of the group. And here comes Josh, already shivering, and the only solution to that short of building a fire and drying him out, which is no solution at all, is movement, strenuous movement, as in getting him up out of the canyon to a place where he can manipulate the wire cutters till he works up a sweat.

“All right,” he says, lowering his voice conspiratorially though there’s no one within miles to overhear him, “the storm’s dumping water in the canyon so it’s going to be a little bit more of a climb than what it should have been, but everything’s going to be fine. . it just might take us a little longer to get up there, that’s all.” He snatches a glance down at his wet boots, at the boulders they’re perched on, the water sluicing round them — if anything, it seems to have risen in the five minutes they’ve been here, but that’s not possible, is it?