When the Killing's Done (15 page)

The ledge, this projection of volcanic rock bristling with the spikes of xerophytic plants that has broken his fall—saved him—is one of many, a series of jagged battlements projecting from the cliffs as if to impede an invasion. He sees this, can trace the pattern that is no pattern at all up and down the rock face in both directions, as he very gingerly shifts his weight. It takes him a moment, forty-two years old and with high blood pressure and a knifing pain in his right side, before he’s able to work his feet beneath him and rise, inch by staggered inch, hugging the rock. When he’s fully erect and can see above him to the place where the ground gave way, he becomes aware of the shag of plants to the near side of him,
Dudleya
mostly, succulents that would snap in two, pull right out, send him
plummeting
, but something with a woody stem too,
Ceanothus
or scrub oak maybe, right there, just inside the limit of his reach. He takes hold of it. Tries it. And then, pressing himself so close to the rock that he will later find pebbles, sand, bits of leaf and twig worked under his belt and into the seams of his underwear, he lifts himself, snatching at the next handhold while the toes of his hiking boots dig for traction. Twenty seconds later he’s on top, his legs churning at the loose dirt, the pack binding, his blood howling in his ears, and then he’s safe, scrambling fifty feet into the brush before he collapses.

The next thing he remembers is looking at his watch. And this is the astonishing thing—only five minutes have elapsed. Five minutes. Not an hour, just five minutes, three hundred seconds, from what seemed certain death to resurrection. He is sweating, though the wind is cold, the T-shirt beneath the hoodie wet through. There’s a deep blue bruise on the back of his right hand. His ribs ache. But he gets to his feet, digs out his plastic water bottle for a long hissing squeeze of the filtered water from the reverse-osmosis tank he installed in the kitchen at home,
aqua vita
, then tucks it away and starts back up the trail, mechanically scattering pellets. The decision has already been made: he will tell no one, not Anise or Wilson or Dr. Reiser, about what has just happened. Or almost happened. Why should he? He feels like enough of an idiot as it is, and as he settles back into his rhythm—clutch, lift, release—he can’t help wondering how much more an idiot he would have felt if he’d had to have been rescued. Or worse: a posthumous idiot, splayed on the rocks with a crushed skull and his hips reverted, forever a totem of the Park Service, just like the pygmy mammoth.
Remember that clown? What was his name? The one that splattered himself all over the rocks trying to spread vitamin K?

Despite the sweatshirt, he’s begun to shiver by the time he spots Wilson coming along the trail toward him. The sky is uniformly dark now, the wind stronger, colder, the brush whipping, bits of chaff and seed beating past him on gusts that seem to come from every direction at once. He keeps pitching handfuls of the vitamin mix into the air, though he’s beginning to understand that there will be no drop today, no helicopters hovering overhead, no rats bloodied, no authorities to dodge or confront. He’s thinking he should have paid more attention to the weather report, should have been more flexible—but then he’s the kind of person who makes a plan and sticks to it, which is why he’s been so successful in business, never crap out, never say die, never, above all, admit you’re wrong. Wilson, loping along, his right arm shooting out rhythmically to toss one handful after another of the mix over his shoulder, gives him a grin as he closes on him. “How’s it?” he calls when they’re still twenty feet apart. “You got any stuff left? Because I’m just about out.”

They stand there together a moment, backs to the wind, and Wilson digs a pack of cigarettes out of his inside pocket. “Freakin’ cold, eh?” Wilson says. “They say the weather’s changeable out here, but this is”—he tucks a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, cups a hand and puts the lighter to it—“this is brutal. You know it was going to be like this? I mean, could you even guess?”

He’s not complaining, just commiserating in the way of a comradeat-arms. “Yeah, colder than shit,” is all Dave can manage in response, though he appreciates the sentiment. The shock of the fall is fading, and no, he’s not going to mention it, not now, not ever. It’s like when he used to play football in high school—somebody blindsides you, you just get up and walk it off. The coach’s face comes to him then, a joyless ego-glutted overworked sinkhole of a face above a gray sweatshirt and a shining silver whistle on a red lanyard.
Walk it off
. That’s what the coach would say, even if you’d separated your shoulder or dislocated your knee.

Wilson looks to the sky from beneath the pulled-down brim of the baseball cap. “I don’t know, man—feels like rain to me.”

“Yeah. Me too. But at least it’s going to keep the bastards out of the sky. At least for today.”

“I was wondering,” Wilson says, kicking the toe of one boot into the dirt at his feet, the smoke of the cigarette torn from his fingers, his eyes squinted against the blow, “if, you know, it does rain, like what is that going to do to this stuff? What if it really rains. I mean, like buckets, like the monsoon, because it’s that time of year, you know. Are we wasting our time here? Is this all just going to wash away?”

If it is, he’s not about to admit it. “Nah, I don’t think so. And the fact that they’re obviously not going to do the drop is okay too. It gives the animals a chance to store up, and even if the stuff gets wet, they’re not going to care. You don’t think a rat’s that particular, do you?”

Wilson just shrugs. He’s looking out across the water to where the horizon dissolves in a cauldron of cloud. “Shit, I don’t know—that’s your department. You’re in charge, you tell me.” A drag on the cigarette, the butt end glowing. “You’re the one that wanted to come out here, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, well here we are, so let’s stop gassing like a pair of old grannies in their rocking chairs and get this over with so I can sit by that heater you got and crack the champagne. Long live the rats, right?”

It takes another half hour to cover the plateau, he and Wilson branching out at a forty-five-degree angle, the wind, if anything, getting worse. When he’s done, when the backpack is empty and his fingers numb and his ribs throbbing as if he’s being kicked with each step he takes, he makes his way back to the trailhead to find Wilson there waiting for him, hunkered down on the steps with a paperback and another smoke. “We out of here?” Wilson asks, glancing up at him. “Yeah,” he says, and then they’re both bouncing down the steps, the cove expanding beneath them to reveal the Park Service boat still tied up to the buoy, and the
Paladin
—not that he was worried—still at anchor, nose to the wind and the waves streaming round it like creases on a sheet.

It isn’t till they get halfway down to the landing dock that they spot the figure there, a man in a teal shirt with his back to them, busy going up and down the ladder to secure his gear in a white Zodiac inflatable tied up next to the dinghy. Since there’s only one other boat in the cove and only somebody escaped from the asylum would take that thing across the channel in weather like this, he has to conclude that the man is attached to the Park Service boat. “Don’t look now,” Wilson says, but he’s already shushing him. “No worries,” he says, striding across the dock as if the man on the ladder doesn’t exist.

Up close—and the guy turns around on them now, as if he can sense their presence, or, more likely, feel the reverberations of their tread radiating along the boards of the dock—he’s startled by the certainty that he’s seen him somewhere before. The guy hoists himself up onto the dock, no smile, and he’s tall, six-three or -four, giving them an expectant look, as if he’s been waiting there for them.

If it was up to him he’d just brush right by without a word, not
What’s happening
or
Looks like rain
or
Fuck you
, but Wilson takes it upon himself to be their ambassador of goodwill. “Nice day,” Wilson says, rolling his shoulders side to side and showing off his grin, all lips, no teeth, as if that much pure white enamel would blind anybody with its radiant power.

Still no reaction from the man in the teal shirt. Who just stands there, arms folded, as if he’s waiting for something, still waiting. His shoulders are narrow, his back slightly stooped. He looks to be in his mid-thirties, his face unlined and with something of the college frat boy in it, the tight cartoon slash of a mouth sketched in under the exaggerated nose that cants ever so slightly to the left, as if it’s been reshaped. Green eyes. Mud-colored hair, whipping round his head with the wind. And one more thing: a plastic nameplate, like cops wear, on the breast of his teal shirt.
Sickafoose
, it says.

So there’s the wind, the dinghy jerking back on its painter, waves slapping at the pilings of the landing dock, the smell of rain on the air, the
Paladin
sitting right offshore and this jerk standing in their way. “The island’s closed to the public,” he says finally. “Will be closed for the next three weeks. Maybe you didn’t see the sign?”

“No,” he hears himself say, and he’s not going to get worked up here, he’s not. “No, we didn’t see any sign.”

Sickafoose measures out one of his long big-knuckled fingers and directs their attention to a white enameled sign the size of a regulation backboard, the squared-off admonitory letters stamped there in take-no-prisoners red. How had he missed it? Not that it would have mattered. This is public land, reserved for the public, owned by the public.

“So what are you,” Dave says, “some kind of cop?”

“I’m a biologist.”

“Congratulations.”

Sickafoose ignores him. He’s got something in his hand, in the palm of his hand, which opens in a kind of slow phalangeal striptease on a spatter of rust-red cat kibble and pale yellow vitamin tabs, even as Wilson tugs at the brim of his cap and says, “Well, we got to be going, see you later, man,” and starts for the ladder.

“One minute,” Sickafoose says. The hand thrusts forward. “You know what these are?”

He can feel it now, the quickening pulse of that rage the drugs can only snatch at, and it’s all he can do to stop himself from spitting at the guy’s feet. “Uh-uh,” he says, the voice threshed in his throat. “Never saw them before.”

A beat. Wilson has his hands on the ladder, ready to kick down into the boat, in retreat, and that’s what he should do too—just get out of here and forget it. “You know it’s against the law to feed the wildlife in a national park?” Sickafoose says. “If that’s what you were doing. This is food, right?”

Another beat. Longer. Much longer. He’s thinking of the rat he saw along the road one sorrowful morning, huddled there in the tight binding robe of its agony, a perfect being, perfectly made, every detail of it alive in his memory, the pale exquisitely shaped fingers and toes, whiskers brushed back as if they’d been groomed, the suppleness of the nose, the dark bloodied holes of the nostrils and the pits of the suffering eyes, all of it senseless and wrong, wrong, wrong. All he says is this: “You going to step aside or what?”

Then they’re in the dinghy. Then the boat. Then the rain comes, washing across the surface in a series of sweeps that bring the waves to a boil, and forget the champagne, forget the whole thing, because the engine selects this moment, out of all the myriad others since he’s owned, maintained and piloted the
Paladin
up and down the coast and out to the islands and back in every sort of weather and the most violent of seas, to fail.

Boiga Irregularis

I
n the mid-1950s, when the indigenous birds of Guam began to dwindle in number, and then, in the sixties and seventies, to disappear altogether, no one could trace the cause. Researchers serially suspected DDT, herbicides, habitat loss and disease, but it wasn’t until the early eighties that Julie Savidge, a graduate student doing field work for her Ph.D., focused on a hitherto little-noticed reptile that first appeared on Guam just after World War II. The brown tree snake, native to Australia, Malaysia and New Guinea, was thought to have arrived as a stowaway in a crate of munitions, the engine compartment of a military vehicle or perhaps the wheel well of a Navy transport plane. Its appearance had been duly recorded but very few people came into contact with it. Nonetheless, having eliminated the other possible causes, Savidge decided to plot the snake’s spread from the main port at Apra to the southern, eastern and northern verges of the island, and found that she was able to correlate its expansion with the progressive topographical decline of the island’s avifauna. The mystery had been solved. The problem remained.

In fact, when the brown tree snake reached the island, it found itself in an ophidian paradise. The only other species of snake on Guam, an innocuous thing the size of an earthworm, was no competition at all, and there were no predators to limit its numbers. The food supply, consisting of some eighteen species of birds found nowhere else in the world, was rich and abundant, and the birds, in common with other insular species, suffered the sort of naïveté to predation that had doomed the dodo and its ilk.
Boiga irregularis
lives in equilibrium with the other species in its native environment, and isn’t particularly impressive or dangerous as snakes go. For one thing, its venom, distributed through fangs located at the back of the throat, is relatively mild and only marginally a threat to humans. For another, it is nocturnal and thus rarely seen, and so reedy—no thicker around than a man’s index finger until it reaches a length of three feet or so—as to pale in comparison with some of the snakes of the continental tropics, the cobras, boomslangs, mambas and water moccasins that slither through the herpetophobe’s nightmares.

Still, it has proven to be one of the most insidious and successful invaders on record, reducing those eighteen species of unique birds to eleven, of which two—the Guam rail and the Micronesian kingfisher—exist only in captivity, while six are considered rare and three uncommon. The snake’s density—up to 13,000 per square mile—is among the highest recorded densities of any snake anywhere, and it has proven infinitely adaptable, feeding quite happily on the island’s native frogs and lizards in the absence of the birds, as well as snapping up introduced geckos, skinks, cane toads and just about anything else it can work its jaws around. It grows to some ten feet in length. It appears in toilets, showers, infants’ cradles. Since 1978, 12,000 power failures have been attributed to its climbing electrical poles and shorting out the carrying wires—unintentionally, of course, but knocking out lights, computers and refrigerators all the same. Above all things, it is a climber. A great and undaunted and increasingly voracious climber that has adapted its diet to include pet food as well as pets—in one documented case, a three-week-old golden retriever pup—and anything, alive or dead, that carries the scent of meat. Or blood.