When the Killing's Done (25 page)

It was lamb at the chopping block though, one of last year’s wethers fresh-slaughtered the night before, and if someone had tapped her on the shoulder and asked her if she saw any irony in that, she would have said no, just practicality—they were in the business of shipping wool and lamb on the hoof to the coast and sustaining themselves on what they could, and that was lamb and more lamb, just as Bax had warned her that gray socked-in day they’d sat in the diner in Oxnard and become acquainted for the first time. Sheepmen ate lamb and mutton because it was there and because they couldn’t run out to Carl’s Jr. for a burger when they felt like it or cruise up the avenue for a beer and a hot dog. If the diet was a crime of sameness, she’d learned to supplement it with the occasional hog one of the hands shot or the lobster and abalone she and Anise would dive for with mask and snorkel and two pairs of cracked blue rubber flippers, just for the change. The lobsters were a treat, as many as twenty or more of them set to boil in water she’d laced with salt, peppercorns, apple cider vinegar and bay leaves, but the hands—Mexicans, mostly in their forties and fifties—were suspicious of anything new. They ignored the drawn butter and lemon wedges she’d husbanded since her last grocery run, preferring to fold up the supple white tails in their tortillas, with a scoop of beans and rice and hot sauce out of the bottle.

She used her cleaver and the butcher knife to cut chops from the loin and separate the saddle to set aside for roasting, then to strip the meat from the bone and chunk down the rest, marveling at how far she’d come in her mastery of the details. When she was living in Oxnard after Toby weaseled out on her, she could barely slice an onion her knives were so dull—and before that, when they were on the road, waitresses brought them knives, the serrated kind, to cut their steaks or chops or prime rib, and where the knives came from and who put the edge to them was no concern of hers. But not now. Now she was an intimate of knives, her knives, and she had a knife for every purpose, sticking, skinning, boning, breaking, keeping them as sharp as when they’d come out of the box at the hardware store in a time when high-quality carbon steel was manufactured right here in this country.

She dredged the meat in flour, then browned it in lamb fat while she roasted green peppers and serranos in the oven and diced tomatoes, rutabagas, celery and onions with quick brisk efficient strokes, barely noticing Francisco creep back into the room to clear the breakfast dishes from the table and slide them into the washtub. Next, she dropped the vegetables in atop the meat, setting the roasted peppers and serranos aside to cool. Then it was half a gallon of Carlo Rossi red and enough water from the tap to fill the pot (yes, they had running water now, though they’d gone without for the first year and more, a gas pump bringing it up out of the well and into a reservoir on the rise behind the house, where gravity fed it through the pipes Bax had installed at her insistence, along with a water heater so they could experience the civilizing influence of a hot shower). She gave the whole business a few brisk turns with the stirring spoon, rapped it hard against the lip of the pot and set it down on the stove, and the silence she’d come to love and expect seeped back into the room.

She’d kept the radio off purposely because she wanted to be attuned to what was going on out there in the meadow, where since first light Anise had been sitting beneath a tarp propped up on the bifurcated ends of four bent eucalyptus sticks driven into the mud, with Bumper, the little black-and-white sheepdog, at her feet and her literature book spread open in her lap, and when the stew was going full boil, Rita was going to damp the stove, pull on another sweater and her rain slicker and go out there and join her. So the kitchen was quiet, the only sounds the hiss of the stove and the banked roar of the oven played against the murmur of Francisco’s dishrag, the intermittent tap of the rain and the distant watery bleating of the lambs.

The hands liked their food hot, as in spicy, a taste she’d come to acquire herself, especially if there was plenty of red wine for lubrication and bread or tortillas to sop it up with, and she cranked the handle of the pepper grinder over the pot for a good slow count of fifty before turning to the cutting board and the mound of roasted peppers. She split each of the serranos in two, swept them off the scarred plank and into the mouth of the pot, then shucked the skins from the roasted peppers, cut them in strips and added them to the mix. Then it was sage from the herb garden, paprika, parsley, a handful of bay leaves, and finally, five fennel bulbs—the stuff grew everywhere the sheep couldn’t get at it, as persistent as weeds—sliced and stirred into the simmering liquid to impart a faint hint of licorice at the very top of the palate. When she was done, she took the dented aluminum bowl full of scraps and cuttings and whatever had been left on the breakfast plates out into the rain-washed morning to toss it in the compost.

Strangely, it seemed warmer outside than in, the clouds rolling up out of the ridge to the south, bruised and fist-like, dense with tropical moisture. At her feet, new growth, shining with wet, the ground that had been barren so long exhaling low dense colorless clouds of vapor, as if it had been holding its breath till now. She felt the rain as cold pinpricks on her face, her scalp, the rigid plane of her extended right hand where it emerged from the turned-back sleeve of the wool sweater to clasp the rim of the bowl, and if the hand looked strange to her, like somebody else’s hand, rough, work-beaten, too little acquainted with the bridge of a guitar, then that was how it was and how it was going to be because she was a sheepwoman now and proud of it.

There was a time when she slept till two or three in the afternoon, when she stayed up all night jamming and carried her hands around as if they were wrapped in cellophane. Then their first album came out and everybody thought the world was going to open up to them like a foil-wrapped present under the Christmas tree, and then Anise was there and they made the second album before things crashed and burned and she and Toby and Anise came out to the West Coast, where it was happening, really happening, or so Toby claimed, but then it wasn’t happening and she’d had to start getting up early with all the rest of the wage slaves out there just to get to one shit job after another.

That was a long time ago and what she had then of ambition, of pushing out from herself to the world beyond, had settled deep inside her, gone inward, where it glowed like the last unquenchable ember in the stove. What did she love? Her people: Anise, Bax, Francisco. This place, where nature came at you in the raw, unmediated, untenanted, and you lived life in the moment. The flock. Bumper. And music. Music still. Music always. But when she played now it was for her daughter and her lover and the scored and weather-wrecked ranch hands, with their ruined teeth and wine-sweetened breath.

Behind her, the walls of the house were streaked with rain, dark veins of it pulsing against the pale skin of the stucco, the light from the kitchen window cutting a neat rectangle out of the wall below the smaller rectangle where Bax’s reading light glowed in the second-story window. He was up there under his blankets and the big down comforter and she was out here. In the rain. With a full day of watching and worrying ahead of her. Not that it mattered, she told herself, not so long as he got better. And, in a way, as terrible as it sounded, his misfortune was her boon delivered up on a platter, an opportunity to prove herself, to take charge of the lambing while the others were out in the hills, mending fences and keeping the roads open with an eye to the roundup at the end of February, when the lambs would be docked and castrated along with any of the strays they’d missed the previous year. No need for them to hang around here when there was so much to be done up above. And really, there wasn’t much to the lambing—the ewes did all the work. You just needed to keep watch during those first critical hours against some disturbance of the flock, a jolt of panic that would set them running and leave the newborns alone even for the space of a minute, because that was all it took for the ravens to come on.

This year she and Anise had posted
Keep Out
signs on the beach at Scorpion and at Smugglers’ Cove over the ridge to the southeast, closing off the ranch to all visitors while the lambing was under way so there’d be no chance of any interference, intentional or not—unlike last year, when two jerks in a speedboat had buzzed the cove, taking potshots at anything that moved, the crack of their rifles repeating up the canyon in rolling crescendo till the flock scattered every which way. That had been a disaster. They must have lost fifty newborn lambs in the space of an hour, fifty lambs that wouldn’t grow and thrive and be sent to market, and that took a real bite out of their profits. For weeks after, all she could think of was revenge, of standing those grinning idiots up against the wall of the house and shooting them with their own guns, see how they liked it. That was her fantasy, like something out of a John Ford movie, but even in her rage, even at her hardest, she knew it was just that. The only gun she’d ever touched in her life was the .22 Bax kept behind the front door to discourage ravens and the big golden eagles that carried the lambs off to their nests and dropped the empty sacks of hide to the ground when they were done, and she’d never fired it, wasn’t even sure if she could figure out how.

She paused a moment to lift her face to the sky. The clouds were dark and tight-knit, the rain dancing off her skin: there wouldn’t be any day-trippers coming out from the coast, not with this weather. She upended the bowl of scraps on the mulch pile, then took a minute to turn it with the pitchfork because it needed to be turned and she meant to deny the ravens these scraps too. It was then, the rain sizzling down and the working heat at the center of the pile giving up a plume of condensation and a curdled dank reek of decay, that she detected movement out of the corner of her eye and looked round to see the fox there in the lee of the Jeep, one paw suspended in mid-step.

Now here was an animal she could get behind—too small to annoy the sheep and always on the prowl for the mice that plagued the main house, their droppings ubiquitous, scattered over everything in dark little gift packets of filth and disease. She made a kissing noise and watched the fox’s ears come erect. Then, very slowly, she bent to the pile to unearth the fresh scraps till she found a wet red fragment of bone and gristle and tossed it to him. It landed with a soft thump in the wet earth at his feet and he took it gingerly, as a dog would, but without fear or concern—people were no threat to him. He’d been here longer than they had and he went on eating his mice, insects, the occasional bird, and if people left food around (or variously, Francisco’s briar pipe that went missing from the porch one evening, a half-burned candle, sweated socks hung out on the rail to dry and concentrate the salts of the body), he would oblige them by expanding the range of his diet. She watched him worrying the bone a moment, pinning it with his paws and working it with his teeth, his fur slicked with the rain and his eyes casting her adrift as if she had no significance at all, and then she went back in the house to see to the stew and slide the loaves into the oven.

Francisco had set the dishes aside to dry and was plying the mop on the concrete floor now, shifting the mud from one corner to the other in long yellowish streaks. The floor was always dirty, forever dirty, but that was a matter of degree—until she’d nagged Bax to have the supply barge off-load a hundred sixty-pound bags of concrete and until that concrete was loaded ten bags at a time in the back of the pickup and brought up here to be mixed in the wheelbarrow, poured, tamped and smoothed in place, the floor had been actual dirt, literal dirt, trodden and compacted by how many generations of sheepherders’ boots she couldn’t begin to imagine. The other substantial building on the property—the eight-room bunkhouse—was of wood-frame construction and as far as she knew had always had a pine floor, which was, if anything, even dirtier than the old dirt floor of the main house, but nothing to worry over. The hands took turns sweeping it and every once in a long concatenation of weeks even took a mop to it. They had their own communal room, a few rough chairs, a card table and a potbellied stove, but the main house was where they gathered for their meals and where they felt—at least in her presence—as if they’d come home, the talk at supper of mothers long dead, of haciendas that no longer existed in the mind-clouded valleys of Arizona, New Mexico and Old Mexico too.

She was enveloped in the sweet hot fragrance of the stew as soon as she stepped in the door, the windows steamed over, the big open space that served as kitchen, dining room and gathering place suddenly dense with it, the released molecules of the lamb she’d chunked and the spices she’d crumbled between her palms combining and rising and drifting till even Bax, frowning over his reading glasses in the whitewashed bedroom upstairs, must have been aware of them. Shifting the big pot to the right of the stove, she took out the frying pan, greased it and cracked half a dozen eggs in a bowl. She added a spot of condensed milk and a handful of grated cheese, beat the mixture to a froth and poured out the makings of two thin omelets, spiced only with salt and pepper. Then she laid out four slices of bread, slathered two of them with her own fiery homemade
pico de gallo
, eased the first omelet between them and poured out a fresh mug of coffee. “Francisco, when you have a minute,” she called, and no irony intended here either, because things were easy on the ranch, “would you take this up to Bax?”

He nodded and gave her a grin. “Yes,” he said, “sure,
no hay problema
.” They were both aware of the subtext here: she was making use of Francisco as intermediary for the very good reason that if she’d taken the plate up herself she would have had to listen to Bax’s dammed-up torrent of advice, complaints and animadversions, not to mention the mental list of chores, niggling worries and very pressing matters he was composing even now and had been composing ever since he took to bed.