When the Killing's Done (24 page)

“Sounds like a nightmare,” she said, smiling now. “But what are you paying?”

“Does it really matter?”

“Yes,” she said, “it does.”

Another wave of the hand. “Minimum wage. But that’s for eight hours and no overtime. Room and board. A chance to live in the most beautiful spot on the face of the planet and see the stars the way nobody sees them anymore, all the way to the deep white creamy heart of the Milky Way.” He turned up the smile. “And all the lamb you can eat.”

“I have a daughter,” she said.

“I know.”

“Valerie told you?”

“Valerie told me, yeah. But you can homeschool her—in an atmosphere which, let’s face it, is going to be a whole lot healthier than where you are now, what with the gangs, drugs, teen sex and all that. Mexicans. Crime. You don’t want her exposed to that kind of thing if you can help it, believe me—”

“You have kids?”

“Two girls, Marty and Fredda. They’re all grown up now.” He set down the glass. His hands were battered, the skin rough, the nails like horn. “I’m divorced. I used to have a drinking problem. Now I don’t.” In the next moment he was leaning back to dig something out of his pocket—a wallet—and she thought he was going to show her pictures of his daughters, but that wasn’t it at all. He patiently extracted three bills and laid them on the table. Hundreds. Three one-hundred-dollar bills, as pristine as if they’d just come off the press at the mint back in Philadelphia. “Here,” he said, his voice touching bottom, “you take this . . . Wait”—he groped in his pocket again until he came up with a set of car keys and slapped them down on the table—“you can drive a stick, can’t you?”

She nodded, the bills splayed out between them like an insanely generous tip for the waitress who hadn’t even brought their sandwiches yet.

“You know the Safeway up the street there?”—he was pointing down the length of the restaurant, beyond the counter, the dust-flecked windows and the macadam road glistening with moisture, his eyebrows lifted interrogatively. “Yeah? Well, take this and go buy us groceries.”

“Groceries? What do you mean?”

“You’re going to drop me down at the harbor is what I mean. I got about six thousand things to remember before the boat leaves . . . I mean, enough for a week or maybe a week and a half, and after that we’ll take you back to shore and think about the long-term stuff, fifty-pound sacks of rice, beans, that sort of thing. You know the marina, right?”

“Well, I . . . I’ve been there, but—”

And now the waitress appeared with their sandwiches and they were both momentarily distracted as she set down the plates, extracted a bottle of ketchup from the pocket of her apron and asked if she could get them anything else. “A refill?” he said, rattling the ice in his glass. “What about you, Reet? Ready for another di-u-retic?”

There was a moment of silence as they both bent to their sandwiches and she felt as if she were already on the boat, out at sea, lurching with the waves, so hungry suddenly she could barely think. What was happening to her? Had she agreed to some sort of pact? And if so, when had that happened? She became aware of the music playing then—the jukebox, a tune she’d always loved, Neil Young’s “Helpless,” which she’d covered with Toby in a radically slowed-down version, their two voices enfolded on the chorus and Toby pounding down those chunky chords on the piano as if it were made of concrete, bliss, pure bliss—and she took it as an omen.

“So listen,” he was saying, “eat up and then you can drop me at the marina—the boat’s a friend of mine’s, the
Side Pocket
. Just ask. Everybody knows it.” He was wiping his lips, chewing. “Damn good sandwich.”

She closed her eyes a moment, trying to picture things, the way they would evolve, because her mother was going to have to watch Anise, that was for sure, at least temporarily, at least till school was out, and she’d have to call in sick at work, maybe permanently sick—

“Oh,” he said, waving the sandwich, which ran with its juices, his right hand slick with thin runnels of Thousand Island dressing and the liquefied fat of the Swiss cheese, “I just wanted to remind you—”

“But listen, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to buy, and I can’t, I mean, I have to—”

“Vegetables,” he said, dabbing at his beard with the wet-through and stained remnants of his paper napkin. “Jug wine. Couple cases of beer—make that five cases, and the brand doesn’t matter, whatever’s on special. Condiments. You know,” and he paused, deadpan, “whatever goes with lamb.” And now the other hand came into play, held palm up so that the calluses shone with grease and the deep gouges of his lifeline leapt out at her like a map of her future. “But what I wanted to say, to remind you, that is, is that the boat leaves at five.” He leaned into the table, leaned in close, and gave her a wink. “Don’t you be late now.”

And that was how she found herself hunched over the stained dried-out planks of the long sheepman’s table in the mud-tracked kitchen of an adobe ranch house so far out from the coast and life and the morning paper she might as well have been marooned, propped up on her elbows and blowing the steam off a cup of coffee at the first turning of dawn some four and a half years later. Where those years had gone, she couldn’t have said any more than she could have said where the wind went once it tired of raking the canyon behind the house. Her hands were tough as wire cutters, her hair hung limp for lack of shampoo and she hadn’t seen the inside of a restaurant of any kind in as long as she could remember. Not that she was complaining. She had Bax and Anise, half a dozen ranch hands and upward of four thousand sheep to keep her company, and she was so absorbed in the workings of the ranch—in the details, everything inhering in the details—that all the rest of the world seemed to dwindle down to nothing, as if she’d dreamed it, as if the whole town of Oxnard had been thrown up like a movie set or hardened in place out of a shower of fairy dust. And the news—what was the news anyway but a long continuous trumped-up shriek of impending doom and current disaster that just made everybody sour and distrustful and hateful of their fellow man? She didn’t need it. Didn’t miss it. The news for her, the news that mattered, was written on the wind and it dripped out of the fog and bleated from the throats of the sixteen hundred ewes about to drop their lambs in the rain-fed grass of the lower meadow that she could hear and smell and taste even as she got up to feed more wood into the stove.

The room was cold—warmer than it had been when she’d got up two hours earlier to make breakfast, but still below her comfort zone—and the heat of the stove felt good on her face. She poked the coals and laid a few sticks of driftwood over them and then topped that with splits of eucalyptus from the grove the owner’s father or maybe grandfather had planted God knew when and which was forever shedding branches and bark, especially in winter when the rains came and the soft porous wood absorbed the weight of the water till it gave with a crack and a dull hurtling thump you could feel two hundred yards away through the soles of your boots. It was winter now—January—and there was a light rain ticking at the windowpanes, an installment on the twenty inches per annum they got if the currents, winds and barometer cooperated. The last two years had been more than they’d bargained for, El Niño years, and the dry wash out front had become a riverbed overflowing its banks with a roiling brown tide sweeping the wrong way, into the ocean rather than out, and they’d lost the privy, the chicken coop, the corral and everything movable besides, including the ten or twelve cords of wood she’d patiently gathered, sawed, split and stacked through the long dusty unremittent season that stretched from April to the end of November. And then there was the mud, scrawled two feet high along the inside walls of the house, the mark there still like the rime on a dirty cup. Mud she didn’t need, not this year. Let the rains come gentling down and the wash keep hold of the runoff.

It was just light enough to distinguish the colors of things outside the window—a pair of khaki gumboots hanging from a hook under the eaves, a once-red wheelbarrow overturned atop the heaped-up mound of the kitchen compost pile, the scored white hood of Bax’s wrecked and wheel-sprung Jeep—when Francisco came in the back door to help her clean up the breakfast dishes and attack the mess on the pocked concrete floor. Francisco was a Basque with Mexican blood or a Mexican with Basque blood, depending on the company and his mood, and he’d been attached to the place through the last failed sheep operation and then as caretaker during the lonely years when the ranch house deteriorated from lack of care and money and the sheep forgot all about shearers, dogs and fences and scattered across the crags and ravines of El Montañon, the transverse ridge that separated this, the eastern ten percent of the island, from the western portion. Now he was with Bax. He was anywhere between fifty and eighty (no one could say and he wasn’t forthcoming on the subject, preferring to speak in terms of eras rather than years,
el otoño de los vientos
, the epoch of the bone collectors from the university, the earthquake time or the drought time when he was a boy working cattle in the San Joaquin Valley and the
patrón
had hired a
chisera
to bring rain and she charged him a calf for her efforts, and then, after it had rained like Noah’s deluge for two weeks running, demanded two calves to make it stop). He dressed in a faded blue workshirt, tattered bandanna, freshly oiled boots and jeans so saturated in blood, lanolin and dirt they could have been used to brace up the joists of the house in an emergency, and he wore the traditional sheepman’s knife in a sheaf strapped to his thigh. How he’d ever translated his knowledge to Bax remained a mystery since he was about as communicative as a stone (unless he was drunk, when you practically had to gag him to shut him up), but he was as complete and efficient as one of the robots the future kept promising. What he said now was, “I take the Mister
su café
, Missus?”

The Mister—Bax, that is, the man whose late-life challenge it was to oversee these 6,800 acres on an inequitable profit-sharing basis with the owners and in whose bed she’d been sleeping since two weeks after her installation as cook, hence her status as Missus—was laid up. He’d been clearing debris out of the cratered road that angled precipitously up out of the valley on the far side of the wash, trying to preserve access to their makeshift airstrip, when the Jeep, which wasn’t much more than animated debris to begin with, flipped on him. He was thrown clear. The Jeep rolled and kept on rolling, the windshield flattened, the steering wheel sheared off and the front wheels, fenders and hood permanently rearranged, till a boulder stopped it halfway down the side of the cliff. No one had any idea what had happened till the dark began to come down and Anise, looking up from her history homework, asked, “Where’s Bax?”

He’d been lucky, or so he told it. The concussion was mild enough so he was able to keep the ravens off him, waving an arm when they got too close; it was his bad leg—the left one—that was broken; and he’d only cracked three of the twelve ribs a human being is graced with. “Forget all that Adam’s rib nonsense,” he’d told Anise that first night at the hospital in Ventura when she sat over his bed with her long worrying face on, “because men and women have exactly the same number. And that’s a common misconception, that men have one less. You know what a common misconception is? Like a prejudice. An old wives’ tale.”

But he was laid up now, feeling his hurt, frustrated, angry, sixty years old a week ago and showing it. And he was a bear in the morning anyway. So she took the pot from the stove, poured a cup heavy with sugar and cream, and handed it to Francisco. “Yeah,” she said, “that’d be great. You take it up to him. And don’t tell him anything. Or no: you tell him I’m going to be out there with those ewes till every one of them has dropped. All day, all week, and next week too, if that’s what it takes.”

Francisco—his face was remarkably smooth for a man who’d spent his whole life under the sun, which was one reason why it was so hard to estimate his age, that and the fact that he carried himself like a far younger man, back straight, his stride long and his step vigorous—gave her a nod of accord. He said one word only—“
Suerte
”—and then he took the cup and ambled out the door and up the stairs to the room above where Bax lay flat out on his back reading through the pile of old
Life
magazines she’d picked up at a yard sale last time they were on the coast. There’d be a chamber pot to empty. And within the hour, after he’d had his first two cups of coffee, he’d want breakfast. Before that, though, there was a stew to prepare and set on the stove to slow-cook through the day, lunch and dinner both. That and the bread rising in the six pans arrayed on the counter behind her, which would go into the brick oven once the fire she’d banked there had burned down to coals.

She went to the drawer and took out her whetstone and put an edge on the butcher knife, all the while listening to the sounds of the house, the distant bleating of the ewes and the harsh avian cursing of the ravens that had gathered in their legions for the feast she meant to deny them. Where they came from, she couldn’t say—it was a mystery. There was always a resident population hanging round the slaughtering shed or the midden out back, but as soon as lambing season began they must have quintupled their numbers, flying in from the other islands or maybe even the coast. Francisco said they were the souls of the Indians,
las almas de los indios
, come back from the dead to plague the white men who’d displaced them, and maybe he was right. Certainly they were as smart as any Indian or anybody else for that matter. Step outside with a rifle and they’d vanish, only to reappear just out of range. Try it with a stick, even one you’d painted black for just that purpose, and they’d ignore you. She’d seen them work in pairs, one distracting the ewe while the other went for the lamb. And while scientists might make the claim that apes are the only tool-using animals aside from
Homo sapiens
, she’d seen ravens drop mussels on the rocks to crack them open or pick up a stone and hold it between their claws for ballast in a heavy wind. Souls of the Indians, devils, whatever they were: they weren’t going to get at her lambs, not this year.