When the Killing's Done (48 page)

“Oh, I don’t know—ten?”

“More like noon,” Alma puts in.

“Noon? How about one? Or two, do I hear two?”

And this is funny, very funny, at quarter past seven on a forty-ninedegree February morning with the refrigerated scent of the sea riding in off the water and the prospect of three days on the island unscrolling before them, three days free of condo, supermarket, office and car, and as they descend the ramp to the boat, they’re laughing. Or no: giggling. Like schoolgirls on a field trip.

The Park Service boat is substantial, no question about it, but it’s a whole lot smaller than the
Islander
and doesn’t have anywhere near its stability. At first, Alma sits at the table in the main cabin with Annabelle and the three college girls on their way out to relieve the three college girls who’ve been tending the caged foxes for minimum wage and course credit for the past two weeks, but everything seems closed-in and overheated and she has to go out on the stern and stand in the wind till the nausea passes. It’s cold. The sky, which seemed so promising earlier, is beginning to cloud over. Dolphins ride the wake, surfing the swell and leaping up to surf it again. A pair of humpbacks—or are they great blues?—spout off in the distance, wild things in a wild place, the mainland rapidly falling away and the waves gloomily slapping at the hull as if the boat has been hauled out here in the middle of the channel for the sole purpose of intercepting them. After a while she has to choose between nausea and freezing to death, and so she makes her way back into the cabin and sits there rigid at the table, staring off at the horizon and willing herself to think of anything but decks and boats and the sea until she hears the engines decelerate and the long dun pier at Prisoners’ comes gradually into view.

Frazier is there to meet them in the battered Toyota Land Cruiser some kind soul donated to the Conservancy and they all cram in for the three-mile run up to the main ranch, where they drop off Annabelle. They sit there in the middle of the dirt drive, engine idling, while she hoists her pack to one shoulder and then leans into the driver’s side window to bring her pale pretty face into the sun-blistered orbit of Frazier’s as if they’re about to compare hat sizes. But no: they’re kissing. And this is no mere ritual of greeting between two well-meaning colleagues, no glancing peck to the cheek or coolly affectionate salutation, but something very like the hungry soul kiss of separating lovers. As if that isn’t awkward enough, they all have to sit there for an extra sixty seconds so Frazier can watch her sway over her hips all the way across the expanse of the lot and in under the shade of the oaks to where she’ll be staying in one of the airy, clean, well-appointed rooms in what was once, before its makeover as a kind of early California ranch-style B and B for the Conservancy’s big donors, the bunkhouse of a working ranch. Then he puts the car in gear and they continue another quarter mile on up the rutted dirt road to the field station, where the rooms are not airy, clean and well-appointed, and where they’ll all unfurl their sleeping bags and try to stake out a little space for themselves amidst the working chaos of the place.

There’s a flurry of hugs, snatches of gossip, truncated hellos and breathless goodbyes as the girls exchange places and Alma ducks into the back room—a single, with a worn but serviceable mattress laid out on a makeshift bedframe—to lay claim to it before anybody else does. She’s bent over the bed, smoothing out her sleeping bag and replacing the suspect pillow (who knows how long it’s been there and what use it’s been put to?) with the one she’s brought from home, when she becomes aware that she’s not alone. She turns round to see Frazier standing there in the doorway. He’s dressed in his bush clothes: khaki cargo shorts and matching shirt, the felt hunting hat with the teardrop crown and a yellowed pair of boar’s tusks worked up under the leather hatband, thick-grid hiking boots and Gore-Tex gaiters to keep the foxheads out of his socks. Gaiters, especially, are a necessity out here and she’s brought along her own pair, having learned from experience that you can’t really cover much ground with half a dozen needle-like seedpods working their way through your socks and into your flesh, and if the foxhead isn’t a perfect example of dispersal adaptation, then she can’t imagine what else is. Aside from deer ticks, maybe. But there are no deer ticks out here because there are no deer to entertain them. “Well,” Frazier says, his smile heating up like kindling set to the match till it’s not a smile at all but a kind of maniacal ear-to-ear Kiwi grin, “are you going to take all day or do you want see some pig action?”

El Tigre Ridge lies approximately three miles south of the field station, rising in elevation to 1,484 feet above sea level amidst a tapering wall of eroded peaks that falls away precipitously into the cleft of Willows Canyon to the west. It’s a thousand feet lower than the island’s highest mountain, Diablo Peak, across the central valley to the northwest, and more than three hundred feet below the top of El Montañon, ten miles to the east, which represents the high point of the barrier ridge between the Park Service and TNC properties. Still, it’s a climb, and though there’s a bucking lurching potholed semblance of a dirt road winding up and away from the ranch, the Island Healers vehicle—a miniature pickup with a cramped two-person cabin and the steering wheel on the wrong side—can only take them so far. Especially now, in winter, when a succession of storms has rolled in off the Pacific to wash away everything but the rocks so that the road looks as if it’s been bombed. Repeatedly. After one especially jarring plunge into a spewing crater and a fishtailing climb up and out the other side, Frazier jerks the wheel hard to the left, pulls just off the road and kills the ignition. “From here, we walk,” he announces, flinging open the door to swing his legs out and plant his boots in the mud. If anything, he’s grinning wider now, as if all this were a grand joke at her expense, and as she slides out the other side she can’t help wondering if he’s been hitting the flask already. She steals a glance at her watch: it isn’t even noon yet.

The air is burdened with humidity, the breeze cold. What sun there was is gone for good now and though she’s never been a betting woman, she’d put everything she has on the prospect—no, the certainty—of rain. “That’s what I’m here for,” she tells him, shouldering her pack and grinning right back at him. “To get a little exercise.” (Unlike Annabelle, who begged off with a wide hypocritical smile, claiming she had too much going on at the main ranch to muddy her boots up in the hills, paperwork, accounts, maintenance issues—
You know, dreary stuff. The worst
.) And then, because of Tim, because Tim’s in her mind and she can’t get him out, she adds, “I’m not just a desk jockey, you know.”

Frazier doesn’t answer. He’s on the two-way radio he keeps snapped to his belt, chattering away in Kiwi with one of his hunters, part of a two-man team somewhere up ahead of them, apparently closing in on a target. “Royt,” he says, “royt,” already moving up the road, surprisingly quick for a man who always seems so sprawling and laid back, and how has she missed the rifle he’s somehow managed to sling over one shoulder? Her eyes jump to it, to the gleaming stock, the dark rubbed eye of the trigger, the lethal tube of the barrel. The realization comes to her then that this is the tool of his trade, that he’s as familiar with it as he is with his cell phone, the gearshift of the Toyota, the corkscrew he carries on his key chain. Why should this surprise her? Electrify her? Rivet her attention? Because she’s never fired a gun in her life, never even touched one, and here’s the rifle Frazier so casually and routinely employs, riding his back as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if it weren’t for firing high-velocity copper-jacketed rounds into things, as if it weren’t for hunting, for killing.

“No,” he’s shouting, “just go after them if you think you’re going to have a shot. We’re right behind you.” A glance over his shoulder for her, and she’s scrambling now to keep up—“I don’t think Alma’s going to want to shoot them herself anyway.” Feet churning, mud kicking up at his heels, he depresses the button for the crackled response, a thin all but incomprehensible Kiwi affirmative snatched from the ether. She can hear him breathing, the air sucked down in quick bronchial gasps. They’re moving more rapidly now, leaping puddles, dodging rocks, what’s left of the road veering sharply around its hairpin turns and up, always up. “Right, Alma?”

She has neither time nor breath to answer. She grins to demonstrate how good a sport she is, concentrating on moving her legs, matching him stride for stride, though it’s an unequal contest because his legs are so much longer. Watching the gun, watching his hat and shoulders and the way his calf muscles ball and release beneath the ties of his gaiters, she follows him at a lively jog up the road to a point where a trail only he can see cuts sharply down through the chaparral to the right. She follows his lead, pitching headlong into the bush, snatching branches to keep her balance, all the while studying her feet so she doesn’t step in a hole or turn an ankle. They’re angling down—a hundred yards, two—before he cuts again to the right, bearing along the downside of the slope, and all at once she feels the weight lift from her, feeling good and alive and whole for the first time in weeks, taking in the views, the smells, the wet glorious creeping rejuvenation of the flora springing up underfoot and rising around her in a continuous weave of gray-green and bright flowering yellow that reaches to her waist and higher.

She’s moving as fast as she can—bushwhacking, that’s what this is called—when the rain starts in. It begins as a soft rustling in the chaparral, as if the leaves were coming to life one by one across the hillside, and then it quickens till she can hear the insistent tap of it at the bill of her cap and feel its cold touch on her hands, her bare knees, the back of her neck. Everything smells suddenly of sage, a sweet clean release of perfume wrung out of the careening wet hillside by the force of the downpour. Below them, the sight line to the far side of the canyon softens, thickens, blurs. She’s wondering why they call this ridge El Tigre, when certainly there were never any tigers here, not even saber-tooths during the time of the pygmy mammoth, or not that the fossil record shows anyway. There weren’t even bobcats—no cats of any kind. But maybe it’s a question of perception—maybe the rock formation, as seen from below, suggests a sleeping cat lying stretched out on its side. Or there might have been a vaquero from the old ranching days who hailed from deep in the south of Mexico where the jaguars came out at night to seize the village dogs and maybe he acquired the nickname El Tigre because he exacted vengeance on them before he came to Santa Cruz and ran sheep over this hill. Or died here. In an accident, a slide, in mud like this.

There is no sound but the soughing of the rain and the whisper of leaf and branch giving way as they wade through the chaparral, seeking the path of least resistance. Both her thighs are crisscrossed with abrasions and her forearms would be bleeding too if it weren’t for the sweatshirt, which grows heavier and denser by the moment. She’s sweating. Fighting for breath. Out of shape because she’s pregnant, because she’s put on weight, because she’s been tired in the evenings and spending her days at her desk instead of getting out for the hikes she used to take with Tim. She startles when a quail bursts out from underfoot, fans its wings and beats away downwind, and it costs her a step or two on Frazier, who’s already thirty feet ahead of her. She wants to call to him to slow down, but her pride won’t let her.

It is then, just as she’s about to give it up and fall back, that the canyon erupts with the frantic baying of the dogs. The sound, ratcheting up in a series of furious yelps till it planes off in a single full-throated ecstatic howl—seems to be coming from somewhere below them, where the ridge falls off into its turnings and declivities. Frazier snatches a look over his shoulder and then he’s gone, plunging straight down in the direction of the noise, and before she can think she’s following him. Suddenly the vegetation is coming at her in a blind rush, bushes springing up to slam her in the ribs, snatch at her feet, shove her aside, but there’s no stopping her. The frenzy of the dogs strikes fire in her and there’s no question now of keeping up, her balance flawless, her feet hitting the mark over and over again as she fends off one catapulting branch after another and springs from rock to rock like a gymnast, finally overtaking Frazier as he pauses, hands on hips, to gaze over a sheer drop of forty feet or more. The dogs bay, nearer now. Bending low in a hunter’s crouch, he scoots along the crest until he finds what he’s looking for—a debrided chute of rock running with discolored water—and without hesitation he braces himself with both hands, flings his legs out before him and careens down the slope on his buttocks. All at once she’s in the water too—forty feet down and a jump at the end, her palms bruised, calves aching—watching for his signal. “Where are they?” she gasps, tugging at his arm as she scrambles to her feet.

Before he can answer, three shots ring out in succession, a quick thin fretful sound like the snapping of a wet towel. The gunshots silence the dogs for a single suspended moment and then they’re noising again, barking now, snarling, until the final shot, the fourth, snaps suddenly through the din and they fall quiet once more. She looks to Frazier. He’s cocking his head to one side, listening, and his gun, his rifle, is in his hands now and before she can pick up the stealthy patter of advancing hooves the towel is snapping in her ear and the dark hurtling thing coming at them from the cover of the bushes is down and dead as if it’s been there all along, switched with the animate pig in some elaborate magician’s ruse.

She smells the gun, the rain, the blood, and here come the dogs—a pair of Frazier’s prize Australian Bull Arabs, with their straining shoulders and their great wide heads and snouts and the light of the kill shining in their eyes. They break from the bushes in a rush and fall on the hog—a boar, a big boar with meshed white tusks—till Frazier calls them off and strides up to deliver the coup de grâce with the pistol he wears in a holster at his side. One more snap and the dogs sit back on their haunches. There are voices now, Kiwi voices, riding up from somewhere below. “You get him, Fraze?”