When the Killing's Done (29 page)

He dragged himself across the room to the door before he responded, and when he did, he was already reaching behind it for the .22 rifle, as if that would do any good against a band of pig killers with high-powered rifles and a longbow with a fifty-five-pound pull. “They gave them the hunting concession, all right? And I didn’t want to get you all pissed off and raving because it’s the owners’ decision and there’s nothing we can do about it except the deal was they’d stay off the property and up in the hills and now the deal’s off.” He swung his head round angrily and shouted down the length of the room to where Anise sat at the big Steelcase desk where they did their paperwork, crying “Mayday!” into the radio microphone. “Shut that goddamn thing off, will you? Anise! Shut it!”

Rita had a hand on his arm. He was grimacing, tottering, trying with his two hands, two armpits and two shellacked and shining crutches to maneuver the rifle so he could hold on to it and throw open the door at the same time. “What are you going to do? Shoot them? You can hardly stand up.”

He was outside, on the landing, and then he eased down the front step and into the wet, the rubber-tipped struts of the crutches sucking at the mud and already blackened. In the absence of the Jeep, their only vehicle was the geriatric Ford pickup one of their unnamed predecessors had left behind. He and Francisco had resurrected it, but it was balky in the extreme, and they spent as much time fooling with it as racecar mechanics. Shoulders hunched to the level of the crutches, his head dipping and rising with each labored step and the cast swinging wildly, he made straight for it. She was right behind him, outraged, as furious over this exclusionary secret he’d been harboring as she was over the slaughter of the lambs. He fumbled with the passenger door of the pickup, unequal to the task, then slammed the flat of his hand against the rusted sheet metal and jerked his head round, savage suddenly. “Open the goddamn door, will you. And then get in behind the wheel.”

She pulled back the door and he clattered and groped his way in, cursing under his breath, the leg in its cast like a timber he was trying to fit in place, the rifle careening across the floorboards and the crutches tangled and banging, wood to metal. When she tried to help, he shrugged her off, jerking at the crutches as if he were trying to break them in two, and so she gave it up, ducked round the hood and slid into the driver’s seat. She watched him strain and heave and jerk at the unyielding wooden struts, wanting to say something but fighting down the urge because he was going to do what he was going to do and no amount of advice or sympathy or sense was going to change that, then shifted into neutral, put one foot on the clutch and the other on the accelerator, turned the key and listened to the engine crank and then catch with a mufflerless farting blast of exhaust. He was in now, the crutches flung into the truckbed, the door slammed shut. She goosed the accelerator, dropped the stick into low and the truck lurched forward, shimmying over the ruts. “Where to?” she said, her tone low and nasty, and she was ready to lay into him, she was, but he forestalled her.

“Smugglers’,” he said.

She pictured the ranch house there, run-down, uninhabitable, a kind of spook house she sometimes sat in to get out of the rain or just to listen to the phantom tread of the sheepmen who’d tromped the floorboards in a day gone by. That was where they’d be, she’d known that much herself—even Anise had known it. But what she hadn’t known—what he hadn’t told her—was that they had the owners’ blessings. That the owners were branching out because the sheep operation was bringing in practically nothing and they wanted a return on their investment like anybody else. They lived on the coast, in nice warm houses, they ate out in restaurants and went to the movies and the yacht club or the symphony or whatever it was, and they had no idea of the kind of work and dedication she and Bax had put into the place. No idea. Not an inkling.

Suddenly she felt scared. Just three hours ago she was secure, serene, her every thought focused on the lambing, on life and giving and
increase
, and now she was trapped in a burning house and all the windows were nailed shut. She jerked the wheel, hammered the brake, pounded the accelerator. There was a moment of weightlessness succeeded by a grinding thump and a cascade of piss-colored water as they plunged into the Scorpion River and ricocheted up the far bank. The gear shift throbbed in her hand, the engine wheezed and ratcheted. Dropping down to first, she hit the ridge road at speed and they began to climb. Up they went, past the spot where Bax had flipped the Jeep, the road winding back on itself, higher and higher, till Scorpion Bay opened up beneath them and the ranch caught hold of the web of dirt roads that radiated out from it as if it were the center of all the world and the trees wove their fringe around it and the ewes, in the distance, were specks of non-color, licking their lambs. The rifle lay on the floorboards at their feet, sliding first to her, then to him, as she took the turns and beat in and out of the potholes. “So what are you going to do?” she asked him through her gritted teeth, her shoulders jerking, the seat bucking under her and Bax holding on to the door handle for his life.

He gave her a strained look. The ribs were killing him, she could see that, but at the moment she had no sympathy for him, not the smallest, fractured particle of it. “I don’t know,” he said, and the rifle slid all the way across the cab, barrel first, till she had to nudge it away from the accelerator with her foot. “I’m just going to go have a little talk with them, is all.”

By the time they got to the top of the ridge the sky had begun to clear, the black clouds rolling off to obscure the coast to the north and a continuous thread of silver running along in their wake. The going was easier here, the terrain ironed flat across the mesa that separated the two ranches, but the road was soupy and there were displaced rocks and mudslides of one degree or another round every turning. Half a dozen times she had to climb down and roll stones out of the way or ply the shovel they kept in back for just such a happy occasion and all the while Bax sat there fuming. Even in the best of times the road wasn’t much—every spring, after the rains, Bax and Francisco would take turns coaxing the old John Deere bulldozer to life and scrape it smooth of ruts, rocks and brush—but it seemed especially bad now that the Jeep, with its four-wheel traction, was out of commission and she had to negotiate it in the pickup. All the while, fishtailing across the mesa, she dreaded the prospect of winding her way down through the stacked-up switchbacks on the other side. That would be a trial, the sodden earth giving way, the wheels skewing toward the shoulder that wasn’t a shoulder anymore but an edge, a precipice, a drop.

When they got to the top and the road began to dip down again, she and Bax had a view of Smugglers’ Ranch and the grove of olive trees, gone wild now, that somebody had put in the ground when the place was a going operation and they planted hayfields for the cattle, picked grapes and pressed olives for their oil. Nothing looked amiss, at least not from a bird’s-eye view, and she didn’t dare take her eyes off the road for more than a hurried glance as she humped in and out of the gullies and kept so close to the inside she scraped whatever paint might have been left off the long run of the fenders and the battered door that was all there was between Bax and the gouged-out hillside. “Jesus,” he said—twice—but that was all he said.

The wheel jumped like a fistful of snakes, the tires slipped and grabbed and slipped again. She snatched a quick glance out the window, and as far as she could see, there were no boats in the bay or drawn up on the beach, but when finally the road stopped pitching and she could lift her eyes from the hood for a better look, she saw the tracks the three-wheelers had left in the yard out front of the abandoned house. They ran in tight graceful arcs, looping in on themselves, weaving and interweaving, their message all too plain.

She pulled up in the yard, killed the ignition and set the brake with a jerk of her arm. The house was a two-story adobe, like the ranch house at Scorpion, but here the glass of the windows was gone, long since shattered by day-trippers practicing their marksmanship with stones and bullets alike, and the three parallel doors—one on each end and one set in the middle as if the place had been designed by kindergartners on a stiff sheet of construction paper—stood perpetually open on their ruptured hinges. It looked the way it always had: unoccupied, deserted, bereft. Heart leaping, she slammed out of the truck and went straight for the middle door, the one that gave onto the main room. If she saw Bax tugging at the dead weight of the cast and fumbling for his crutches, it didn’t register because this wasn’t about being polite or compassionate or even loving, and it was cold fury that propelled her. He shouted something at her back, but she was already inside.

The light faded to gray. Shadows fell away from the walls. She made out an irregular shape on the floor of the entryway, something that didn’t belong, and it took a moment for it to cohere out of the dimness: a blue backpack, its flap flung back on a box of dehydrated meals in silver pouches. Beyond it, there was a jumble of clothes and equipment, manufactured things, shucked wrappers, crumpled cans, three twelve-packs of Tecate stacked haphazardly one atop the other in their flame-red jackets. The smell she remembered—mild and botanical, the odor of dry rot, mold, the dehisced seeds of the plants that drifted through the broken panes and settled in the cracks of the floorboards—was different now, coppery and hard, with an overlay of the mechanical, of oil, gun oil, and here were the rifles, two, three, four of them, propped against the back wall like an exhibit in a gallery.

The sleeping bags she found laid out on the floor of the main room, a pair of Coleman lanterns propped up beside them in a scatter of hunting magazines—
Oregon’s Mule Deer Paradise, Ozarks Bear and More!
—and a yard-long ice chest, orange and white plastic, set like a bench beneath the lintel of the shattered window. She heard Bax call out her name, but didn’t answer. Inside the ice chest, amidst a slurry of melting ice, were two plastic-wrapped slabs of meat, what looked to be a liver in one and four or five crudely cut steaks in the other. Behind her, at the door, there was the sound of a heavy footfall and then the thump and grate of the crutches. Bax’s voice echoed through the emptiness: “Rita, where in hell are you?”

Still she didn’t answer. She was too angry, each crumpled cigarette pack and balled-up wad of underwear or grease-stained rags infuriating her anew, and what did they think this was, a hotel? A flophouse? She took the stairs two at a time, cursing under her breath. At the top of the stairs was a door, and that was strange, because she hadn’t remembered a door there at all. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if it had new hinges, or at least they’d been newly oiled and scraped of rust. She lifted the latch and pushed the door open, and here she was surprised—or no, shocked and outraged—all over again.

The room had been transformed. The floorboards gleamed as if they’d been varnished, or if not varnished at least scrupulously swept and mopped. And the windows—there were two of them, set in the side and back walls—were covered in plastic sheeting, which had been carefully affixed to the window frame with duct tape. A camp bed stood against the far wall, complete with blankets, pillow, sheets and pillowcase. There were jackets and shirts suspended from nails driven into the wall above it, another backpack—this one in plain unvarnished khaki, as if it were military issue—set atop a slab of driftwood beside the bed, a crude desk and chair fashioned from produce crates squared off against the wall opposite. And worst of all, a fleece, a tanned fleece splayed out on the floor in front of the bed so the sheep killer wouldn’t have to get his feet cold when he shucked off his boots, strung his bow, sharpened his steel-tipped arrows.

“Rita?”

She was frozen with hate. “Up here,” she called. “I’m upstairs.” She could hear Bax scraping around below, muttering to himself. And then, as if she needed anything more to provoke her, vinegar to rub in her wounds, a jab with a sharp stick, she saw what was on the table. There, beside a Coleman lantern and half a dozen paperbacks, was a hunting magazine turned back to a full-page ad. From a distance, it looked as if a huge pair of binoculars was staring out from the page, but when she snatched up the magazine, she saw that she’d been looking at two circular photographs, one of a boar flashing its tusks and the other of a ram, a Rambouillet ram, perched on a crag. The legend at the top read:
Eldon Thatch’s Island Hunt Club.
There was a phone number and a Ventura address, followed by a price list: $750 for a razorback boar, $1,000 for a trophy ram and two meat sheep.
Meat sheep
. What went through her mind in that moment wasn’t so much a thought process as it was an escalating flood of images, each more bitter and ironic than the last. Their sheep, their rams, the animals they’d paid for themselves and broken their backs over, nurtured, docked, dipped, were going to be hunted down—
were
being hunted down—at prices that were twenty times what they could get for them. And by strangers. Interlopers. Jerks.

In the next moment she was sweeping everything—bedding, paperbacks, the lantern, even the plastic sheeting she ripped from the windows as if she were ripping the skin from their backs—into one of the wooden crates, and in the moment after that, her breath coming so fast she might have been hyperventilating the way she had over the lines of coke Toby would chop and lay out for her any time of day or night whether she wanted it or not, and she did want it, she always wanted it, she was bumping the thing down the steps and yelling out to Bax, who was standing there at the base of the staircase gaping up at her, to get out of her way. “What in Christ’s name?” Bax said. “You can’t touch this stuff, this is private property, this is—”

She said nothing. There was no time for debate—she was in the grip of something here and it was going to play out whether or not he liked it or Eldon Thatch liked it or Pier and Francis Gherini or the commander of the Coast Guard himself. Down the stairs, across the floor and out the door to the yard, Bax clumping behind her. She overturned the box and dumped everything in the mud. Then she snaked past Bax, who was rumbling away at her in a language that was English, insistent and harsh, but might as well have been Mandarin Chinese for all the effect it had on her, propelling herself back into the house, to the main room now, stuffing the sleeping bags in the box, the backpack full of just-add-water meals, the magazines, the beer, even their rolls of toilet paper. She dragged it all outside and dumped it there, and if she heard the scream of the three-wheelers on the hill above or the harsh machine-gun clatter of the helicopter blades that could only mean that the owners were on their way to deliver their poisonous news in person, it didn’t matter a whit. Because she squared her shoulders and went straight to the truck and the spare can of gasoline Bax kept behind the passenger’s seat and in the next moment the sweet smell of benzene rose to her as she sloshed it over the whole mess and then reached deep in the pocket of her jeans for a match.