When the Killing's Done (10 page)

Alma murmurs something in response, and then they’re striding across the courtyard, past the entrance to the auditorium and up to the door of the room where the unlucky grizzly (
Ursus arctos californicus
, declared extinct 1924) stands guard. “But all these cars—this isn’t all for me, is it?”

“I don’t know who else,” Frieda throws over her shoulder, bending from the waist to manipulate a clutch of keys and let her into the cold too-bright room, brisk now, hugging her arms to her and revolving around the floor on the spongy soles of her running shoes as if she’s about to dash off into the night. She’s anxious, Alma can see that, anxious because of the size of the crowd and the subject matter and what happened in Ventura last week. “But you have everything you need, right? There’s water out there on the podium—and we’ll start a little late, I think, maybe ten minutes or so, just to let everyone get settled, what with the rain—”

“Yes,” Alma murmurs, “that’s fine. “I’ll just need to plug my laptop into the projector. And the microphone—”

“I did the sound check myself. You’ll take questions afterward?”

The grizzly, formerly on display but exiled to this back room for crimes unspecified, looms over them with its plasticized eyes and arrested teeth, snarling mutely down the ages. There are other artifacts here too—a great stiff comb of baleen propped up in the corner, cast-off mammoth bones aligned neatly on an oak desk and looking unsettlingly like the refuse at the bottom of a Colonel Sanders bucket enlarged to implausibility, Chumash arrowheads and shards of pottery in a dusty glass display case skewed away from the far wall at a forty-five-degree angle, museum clutter awaiting the donors’ dollars to rescue it from eternal storage. “Yes. I mean, that’s what they’re here for. Most of them, I guess.”

Frieda gives her a look. “If any of them get, well—I don’t know,
contentious
—don’t be afraid to cut them off, and I do have Bill Braithwaite at the door, just in case . . .”

This is the point at which she’s supposed to say,
Don’t worry, I can handle it—I’ve done it a thousand times
. But she says nothing.

Erect, her glasses shining and her pigeon-colored eyes in retreat, Frieda claps her hands together and spins halfway round with a faint squeak of rubber or plastic or whatever it is they’re making running shoes from these days. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to your thoughts then. I’ll come get you in”—she raises her wrist to squint at a flat gold watch on a band no wider than a shoelace—“say, seven and a half minutes?”

It’s warm in the auditorium, very warm, all those people—standing room only, which means three hundred at least—bundled tightly together, post-prandial, variously digesting their dinners, processing proteins and starches and sugars, generating heat. And it’s humid, the rain beating remorselessly at the roof and percolating through the downspouts with a peristaltic tick and gurgle. And, of course, since it’s November, the museum’s central air has been long shut down for the season. Sitting there in the middle of the front row while Frieda reads through a list of announcements—upcoming events, classes, fund-raisers, opportunities to get in on museum-sponsored field trips, films and slide shows—she can feel the sweat rising from her pores, collecting at the nape of her neck beneath the thermal blanket of her hair, trailing down her spine to where the blouse has begun to stick to the small of her back. When she slipped in stage left and took her seat, she caught a glimpse of the crowd, surprised all over again by the turnout, especially on a rainy night, but she didn’t look closely enough to individuate anyone, not even Tim, who must have been part of the contingent, mostly male, milling around in the rear without hope of finding seats. If she was nervous a few moments ago, in the green room with Frieda—and the grizzly—she’s over it now. In fact, all she can think of—hope for—is that Frieda’s introduction will be short and to the point so she can get up there and get this over with.

But Frieda is not short and to the point. After a shaky start, Frieda is coming into her own, riding high on the heady business of insinuating a single human voice through the wires of a foam-jacketed microphone and the distant speakers they feed in order to hold the attention of three hundred people without lapsing or slipping up or making a fool of yourself. The introduction—Alma Boyd Takesue, B.S. in biology from the University of Hawaii, M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental studies from UC Berkeley, three years in the field studying the brown tree snake on Guam and all the rest, right on down to a recitation of the titles of her papers in scientific journals, all of them, all the journals and all the titles—manages to be both uninspired and interminable, and by the time Frieda finally announces her and stands back to shield her eyes against the spotlight and extend a blind hand of welcome, the audience is restless. The applause patters dutifully as Alma rises from her seat and then cuts off abruptly, even before she finds herself up there under the glare of the spotlight, struggling to adjust the microphone the taller woman has left poised well above the crown of her head.

“Hello,” she hears herself say, the amplification hurling her voice out into the void and then bringing it back to inhabit every crevice in a throbbing overwrought vibrato. “I want to thank you all for coming, especially on such a”—and here she pauses, searching for the right word, the one that will soften things, lighten them up, and what kind of night is it anyway?—“dismal night.” Yes, dismal. There is a collective rustling, as if the entire audience were balanced on a taut continuous sheet of paper, and then she’s bending to her computer, and the first image—of Anacapa at twilight, Arch Rock glowing iconically and the sea so multifaceted and calm it might have been painted in oils around it—infuses the big screen behind her. “This is Anacapa,” she says redundantly, “one of the islands that comprise the Channel Islands National Park, the islands often referred to as the Galápagos of North America.”

The Galápagos of North America
. It’s a tired phrase, but one she conscientiously works into all her press releases and talks, whether formal or informal, because it never fails to have its effect, people drifting off on a fugue of
National Geographic
specials, of blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, vampire finches and marine iguanas presented in loving close-up while azure waves beat at crinkled shores, only to awaken to the connection she’s trying to make—that these islands,
our
islands, are equally unique. And equally worthy of preservation. And not simply preservation, but restoration.

She lifts her head to gaze out on the audience, sweeping left to right as if she’s speaking personally to each and every one of them, though with the spotlight in her eyes and her glasses on the podium beside her and the auditorium lights turned low, she can barely make out anyone beyond the second row. “Anacapa,” she pronounces, giving each of its aspirated syllables a long lingering beat, “is, as I’m sure you all know, a unique and irreplaceable ecosystem that is home to endemic species of both plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, from the island wallflower and an autochthonous
Malacothrix
, of the chicory genus, to the shield-backed cricket and the native deer mouse,
Peromyscus maniculatus anacapae
, just as the other islands harbor unique species of birds, as well as the spotted skunk and”—here a click of the mechanical mouse to display the next picture, one that never fails to arouse a tongue-clucking murmur of approval—“the island fox. Which, through some sixteen thousand years of separation from the mainland, has evolved into a separate subspecies, featuring the dwarfism often common to insular populations. On average”—she looks to the screen behind her, the fox blooming in the darkness, ears erect, paws neatly aligned and gazing out into the audience with all the ferocity of a stuffed toy—“these little guys weigh four to six pounds, the size of a house cat . . . one that gets regular exercise, that is.” This last, her icebreaker, always generates the first laugh of the evening, or rueful chuckle, at least, as the cat owners reflect on the overfed, kibbleized giants curled up asleep on the sofa at home.

She has them now, and never mind that privately she’d like to see all free-ranging cats exterminated in fact and by law, because she’s ascending into her rhythm, the Latin nomenclature rolling off her tongue as if she were a priest in training, every fact and figure at her command, no need at all to glance down at the notes she’s printed in 22-point type so she can dispense with her glasses and give them the full effect of her eyes. As the images click behind her, she presents a quick overview of island biogeography, of how isolated species evolve to fill niches in the ecosystem and of how that balance, unique to each island throughout the world, can be upset by the introduction of mainland species. She talks about the dodo, perhaps the poster animal for island extinctions, a pigeon-like bird that found its way to an isle in the Indian ocean and subsequently evolved, in the absence of predators, into the waddling big-bottomed flightless bird made infamous by its very helplessness.

“The dodo was naive,” she says, giving them a hard, no-nonsense look, because this is the reality, this is what it comes down to—the permanent loss of an irreplaceable species—and there’s nothing funny or even remotely ironic about that. “That is, it had had fear and suspicion bred out of it, and so waddled right up to the first seaman to land on the island of Mauritius, who plucked and roasted it, then introduced pigs and rats, which fed avidly on the eggs of this ground-nester. Flight is expensive,” she goes on, “in light of caloric resources expended, and so too is tree-nesting. Why fly, why nest in a tree, if you’ve evolved in a place where there are no predators? The answer for the dodo—the result, that is—as every schoolchild knows, was extinction.”

The audience has settled in, the initial rustling, nose-blowing and fist-suppressed hacking fading away into what she’d like to construe as engaged silence rather than a collective stupor. But no, they
are
engaged: she can feel them, alert and awake and alive to the argument to come (key words:
rats
and
poison
) and the bloodletting of the Q&A that will follow. All right. Time to bring it on. She clicks the mouse and the next image to infest the screen behind her is of those very rats, eyes gleaming demonically in the sudden illumination of the photographer’s flash, as they rifle the nests of gulls and murrelets, their paws and snouts wet with smears of yolk, albumin and chalaza.

“Rats,” she announces, letting the final s sibilate on her lips till it buzzes back to her through the speakers, “are responsible for sixty percent of all island extinctions in the world today.” A pause for effect. “And rats are killing off the ground-nesting birds of Anacapa Island.” Pause the second, this time accompanied by the steeliest squint she can manage, considering that she can barely see the audience. “Which is why I am here tonight to tell you that we must act and act now if we want to save these endemic creatures from the same fate that met the dodo, the Rodrigues solitaire, the Stephens Island wren, the Culebra Island giant anole and dozens—hundreds,
thousands
—of others.”

And now the rustling, the creaking of the chairs and the whisper of voices, excitement flashing through the crowd like an electrical charge: this is what they’ve come for. And it’s what she’s come for too, the moment of truth. She straightens up, squares her shoulders. She has them in her power and now is the time to lean into the microphone, hold them with that squint, and say: “Which is why we have, after long deliberation and with the full backing of the National Park Service’s biologists and the California Department of Fish and Game as well as the scientific community at large, decided to go to the air with the control agent brodifacoum to suppress the invasive rodent population, which, incidentally, is threatening the native deer mice in addition to the murrelet, the pigeon guillemot, the western gull and the cormorant.” She clicks the mouse to display a close-up of a tiny Xantus’s murrelet with its black head and mask over a white throat and underbelly, looking stricken as the snaking dark form of a rat gnaws the egg out from under it. “And let me assure you that this agent is quick-acting and humane, and that if we were presented with any other alternative we would gladly have taken it, but given the urgency of the situation and our confidence in the method of control, we have, have . . .”

The crowd has fallen silent. They’ve become aware of a presence she’s just now perceived at the periphery of her vision, the figure of a man risen from a seat at the far end of the front row, his hair in rusty dreadlocks, his head bowed, muscles rigid, his jaw clamped in fury. She knows him. Of course she does. And of course he’s here and of course he’s interrupting her and behaving like a brownshirt, like a, a—

“Bull,” he pronounces, and his voice echoes from one end of the auditorium to the other. “Propaganda and doublespeak.” He swings round on the audience suddenly, his arms raised like a prophet’s. “Did we come here to listen to the party line like a bunch of drones under some communistic dictatorship, or is this a public meeting? Do we want our questions answered? Our point of view represented? Or is this show for mutes only?”

A groundswell of applause, a scattering of voices, male and female alike, calling out encouragement and then a chant starting like the rumor of a distant wind and blowing stronger with each repetition, “Q and A, Q and A, Q and A!”

And now she’s raising both her hands, palms out, in a gesture for silence, patience, simple common courtesy, and a rumble of voices arises in support. “Sit down,” someone calls from the darkness. “Button it.”

“All right,” she hears herself say, her amplified voice coming at them like the voice of a god, stentorian, omnipotent—she has the microphone and they don’t—“we’ll address all your concerns and take your comments in a minute. As for you, Mr. LaJoy”—he’s still standing there, his arms crossed in defiance—“your opposition to our goals is well documented, and you will have your chance to comment, but I’m going to have to ask you to sit and wait your turn.” And then she adds, superfluously, “All things in time.”