“You want another?” she asks. “And maybe a sandwich? I’ve got some of that Gruyère you like—on a ciabatta roll. How does that sound?”
He’s put up the canopy to keep the sun off the deck because she’s worried about her skin, milk-white, white as the flesh of the calves they deprive of light and iron so they can serve them up as veal for all the butchers and carnivores out there, and when she comes back from the galley with two sandwiches and the shaker of margaritas—and here’s the first mechanical sound, the faintest click of the ice cubes dropping down out of the ice maker in the depths of the boat—he sees that she’s removed the top of her bikini, and why not? It’s not as if anybody’s coming to lunch.
The sight of her—all that incandescent skin, the heavy ever-so-slightly asymmetrical load of her breasts—stirs him, and why wouldn’t it? He’d have to be comatose not to respond to something like this, like Anise, all but naked. And that’s the beauty of it—they’ve got all day, all night, all day tomorrow and tomorrow night too. No need to rush. “Nice,” he says, the adjective of the day, as she hands him the plate and leans over him to pour the glass full, and he’s thinking of the women’s magazines she leaves lying around, a model all rigged out on the cover and the various come-ons, in neon letters, radiating out from her as if she were Kali of the supernumerary arms. Love Secrets of the Stars, How to Please Your Man in Bed (Guy-Tested!), 63 Ways to Turn On Your Mate. As if it was that hard. All you have to do is take off your clothes, baby, and if he’s not dead he’ll jump your bones.
So there’s a nice little frisson going as he eats his sandwich with a hard-on, sips his second margarita, contemplates the waves and allows the sweet purr of her voice to envelop him as if she were singing, and maybe she is. Soon, when the mood takes him, he’ll get up and slip the bikini bottom down her thighs and take her by the ankles, lift her legs and slide it off her. But right now he’s savoring the moment. Like all women she can sulk and brood for days on end over some imagined slight or a thing so inconsequential—what somebody said to her at work, the color of the dress she knew she shouldn’t have bought—as to make him question her sanity, but he’s never seen her in a better mood than this, so pleased to be here on this deck anchored off her own special island at half-past twelve when everybody else in the world’s at work, three-quarters naked and savoring the moment as much as he is. He hasn’t touched her yet but she’s wet, he knows she is, and he’s thinking maybe they’ll do it right here, right on the deck . . .
“You know what this reminds me of?” she asks, stretching her legs all the way out to flex her toes against the rail, the base of the cocktail glass balanced on her sternum, between her breasts. “I mean, out here all alone like this and nothing but open water all the way down to what, L.A.? Mexico?”
“What?” he says. “What does it remind you of?”
“The Island of the Blue Dolphins. You ever read that book?”
“I don’t know. Sounds familiar.”
“It’s a children’s book, I guess, or what they call young adult now. My mother read it to me when I was a kid, over and over—it was my number one favorite for a year probably.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know. Eleven, twelve maybe.”
He holds on to that a moment, trying to picture her at that age, pubescent Anise, with her honey-colored hair and rounded limbs, breasts just starting to break through as if they’d sprouted from seed, which in a way they had, everything programmed in the genes, her smile, her voice, this gentle graceful irresistible flow of limbs and hair and lips and eyes holding him transfixed in this instant on this deck off the back side of this rocky volcanic island with its skirt of white foam and the cliffs that soak in the sun as if they were molten still. Natalie, his first love, was fourteen when she magically appeared at the desk across from his in Mr. During’s third-period history class at Santa Barbara Junior High, a transfer from Plainfield, New Jersey, where she’d gone to Catholic school and learned to smoke Larks and the odd joint when the nuns were busy doing whatever nuns do. She didn’t look anything like Anise—she was short, even as a newly minted adult of eighteen, which was when he married her, with her mother’s Sicilian complexion that made her look as if she’d just stepped out of the tanning salon no matter the season. To him she was a real exotic, with her black hair and copper eyes and the way she pronounced things like fall and dog (“If it’s dawg,” he’d say, “then why isn’t it lawg and fawg and bawg?”). Exotic can only take you so far, though, and when you marry that young—he was only nineteen himself—you’re asking for disaster. Which was what he got. They lasted two years, during which he was working part-time and getting his associate’s degree at the community college, and then he started up the business with help from his father and she was gone out of his life. “I’ll bet you were sexy,” he says.
“If I was, I didn’t know it.”
“Yeah, sure—tell me another one.”
“I didn’t. Really.” She rotates the base of the glass, a pink circle of condensation left beneath it like a wet kiss against her skin, her hand balanced on the swell of one breast. “Too isolated. Way too isolated.”
He doesn’t have anything to say to this, but he’s feeling the slow seep of the tequila settling in him, taking him out of himself, and he’s going to get up, any minute now, and run his hand down her leg.
“Anyway, it’s fiction, but it’s basically a true story. About the last woman left out on San Nicolas Island? Indian, that is. Chumash. The Spanish padres took everybody off the island in the eighteen-thirties or forties or whenever, and she was left behind. And it’s great, a great story, like Robinson Crusoe. How she survived.”
“What’d she do, hide when they came to get them?” He holds up his glass, examining it a moment in the light, then snakes out the tip of his tongue to get at the salt crystals caked on the inside of the rim. “That’s what I would have done.”
“No, she wasn’t hiding—she wanted to go.”
“Or was it like in those fables where she disobeyed her parents or snuck off to have a smoke or something? Maybe she was playing with herself. That must have been verboten, right? Or did the Indians encourage that sort of thing?”
“No, nothing like that. It was her little brother. They were all on the ship, just setting sail, when she discovered he wasn’t there. He was only like three or four or something and he got lost in the shuffle. Or maybe he was hiding—I don’t remember. I don’t think the story gets into that. The point is, when she saw he wasn’t there she jumped overboard and swam back to the island to rescue him. And since the wind was up, the boat couldn’t come back for her.” She pauses, takes a sip, levels her eyes on him. “Sad story, though—he died like a month later. The wild dogs got him.”
“Wild dogs? On San Miguel?”
“Feral dogs, left there by the Indians years before. They’re gone now, of course—”
“Yeah, of course. Probably picked off one by one by Alma Boyd Takesue.”
“But anyway, she tamed two of them and she had a pair of pet ravens too. And that was it for company till she was rescued eighteen years later—they took her to Santa Barbara where she got sick and died within six weeks because she had no immunity, of course, being away from people for so long. You didn’t get this in school?”
He shrugs. “Maybe. Yeah. I guess.”
“I remember her dress,” she murmurs, her eyes gone distant over the rim of the glass. He’s watching her throat as she swallows, watching her breasts. “It was made of cormorant feathers so it shimmered in the light.”
“Really,” he says. “Feathers?”
She nods. “The pope has it now. In the Vatican. They took it to the Vatican—”
“Really,” he says.
“Yeah, really.” She’s looking at him now, a soft slow unambiguous smile playing across her lips.
“I wonder,” he says, rising from the grip of the deck chair, “what she did about sex?”
Two days and
two nights, and then back to the coast, to real life and all the hassles that come with it, to the piss-poor numbers for the month of May at the Camarillo store for reasons no one can fathom, least of all Harley Meachum, and to the trial he’s entitled to as a citizen of the United States of America who’s been arrested on federal property on charges no sane law enforcement agent would have brought in the first place. He’d been hoping for a jury trial, a chance to speak to the underlying issues and maximize the press coverage, to explain himself, look people in the eye and let them know who the real criminals are, no mistake about it, until his lawyer, Steve Sterling—whom he’s retained on the recommendation of Phil Schwartz, the wizard who handles whatever might happen to come up vis-à-vis LaJoy’s Home Entertainment Centers, contracts, rental agreements, the odd lawsuit thrown at him by one litigious moron or another—disabused him of the notion. There will be no jury. No convocation of his fellow citizens from all walks of life and a grab bag of educational levels to weigh the evidence and sit in deliberation, because the counts against him don’t carry a stringent-enough penalty to warrant it—that would require a felony, and he can only imagine what he’d have to do to wind up with a felony charge. Save something, he supposes. Pick up a rat, dust it off and set it back on its feet again.
No, this will be a bench trial. That is, a roving federal magistrate will come to the Santa Barbara courthouse to set up shop for the week and hear his case and whatever else they’ve got on the docket. According to Sterling, this is a real break—otherwise they’d have to trot all the way down to L.A.—and that’s what he’s been telling anybody who’ll listen. A break. A real break. He does nothing more than go for a hike on property everybody in America owns in common, and he has to shout hosannas and kiss the sky for the great and all-sustaining break they’re giving him: no L.A. “Isn’t that something?” he tells Marta as she sets his two eggs over easy down in front of him, and Justin, the bartender at the Coast Village Grill, as he knocks back an anticipatory vodka cranberry. “Aren’t I the lucky one?”
Sardonic comments aside, he’s in a mood as he comes up the steps of the courthouse at seven forty-five a.m., Anise on one side of him, Sterling on the other. He was up two hours before the alarm rang, his stomach churning and his head cavernous and windy. He skipped breakfast—too tense to eat—downed two quick gulps of sulfurous coffee on his way to the car before upending the cup in the bushes, then got into it with Anise because he had to sit outside her apartment and lay on the horn for fifteen minutes before she hauled her sorry ass out the door. When she finally did appear, no hurry, no worry, she paused to frame her face in the passenger’s side window and give him a look that didn’t have a particle of contrition or even consideration in it, and for a second he thought she was just going to turn and walk away.
“Sorry,” she said, sliding into the seat beside him with a cardboard Kinko’s box wedged under one arm and a purse the size of a suitcase draped over the other. “I had to get the flyers together.”
“I don’t give a shit what you had to do!” He was already shouting, instantly shouting, slamming the car in gear and lurching out into traffic. “And why for shit’s sake didn’t you put the fucking things together last night like I told you? Huh? Tell me that!”
She didn’t have anything to say to this. The flyers were his idea. He’d chosen a heavy stock the color of pumpkin rind, for its visibility—you don’t just crumple up and toss paper like that, at least not before you give it a glance and absorb the message, which was the whole idea—and downloaded a very clean close-up of a pure white hog he could have sworn was grinning, its skin as smooth and supple as a human’s, its ears cocked inquisitively and its eyes lifted to the lens, which he’d enclosed within a red circle with a prohibitory slash through it and the legend Stop the Slaughter stamped across the top of the page. The rats were gone, the rats were history, but the pigs were next on the agenda.
“Because I’m the one facing jail time here, not you. And I hope you got your beauty sleep, because I was up all night. Shit. I mean, can’t you think about me for a change? Even for one fucking minute? Even when everything’s on the line—I could go to jail, you know that?”
She was sitting erect beside him, her posture flawless, her eyes secreted behind a pair of oversized sunglasses with lime-green frames. Her diction was very precise. “You’re not going to jail.”
And then, absurdly, and he knew he was making a fool of himself even as he turned to her, he was roaring, “The fuck I’m not!”
Now, his stomach in freefall, he stamps across the wide tiled entrance hall of the courthouse—wide enough to drive a truck through—and up the elaborate staircase, with its hand-painted tiles shipped all the way over from Tunisia, as if that’s going to impress him, then around a turning to the right where the hall opens out to the grassy courtyard below, and finally down another enclosed hallway to Department 2. The door is immense, a great dark oiled slab laid to its hinges when they built the place back in 1929, and it opens on a courtroom out of another era, vaulted ceilings, wood paneling, high-crowned benches arranged front to back like pews in a church, the church of the law. He makes note of the court recorder perched at her desk off to one side of the room, of the dais in the center where, he presumes, the judge will appear in his own good time, of the bailiff, with his paunch and his swagger and his look of utter indifference, nobody innocent, nobody at all.
“This way,” Sterling murmurs, guiding him by the arm, Anise half a step behind him, and he throws back his shoulders and strides down the center aisle to the front of the room as if he’s walking the red carpet at the premiere of his own movie, and let them look, all of them, what does he care? The first person he lays eyes on is Alma, Alma Boyd Takesue, right there in the middle of the second row, wearing her executioner’s face. She lifts her head to shoot him an abbreviated glare before turning to Sickafoose, who’s propped up beside her like a stick man, and how he’d like to lay into him, just once, just sixty seconds behind a closed door or out in the alley, Jesus, yes, but then Sterling’s leading him to the bench right in front where he’ll have his back to the whole mob of them and he pulls away for just an instant before thinking better of it and sliding his butt resignedly across the slick burnished wood of the bench, Anise folding under the back of her dress to slide in beside him. And she’s looking good, at least, her eyes done up, a blush of lipstick—not too much, because she doesn’t need it—dressed all in white, the color of innocence, of exoneration and respect, the dress falling to the tops of her cherry-red vinyl boots and her hair raging round her like a jungle sprung to life. He feels a surge of pride in her. Anise Reed. The beauty, the lover of animals, the singer—he has her and they don’t, not the puffed-up bailiff or Tim Sickafoose or Ranger Rick or the judge who sweeps out of a door in the back looking like the dictator of a third-world country nobody’s ever heard of, and what is he, Mexican? Armenian?
There are preliminaries, of course, just like in a boxing match. Other cases, other people. Up and down, yes and no. And then they call the United States v. David Francis LaJoy and he feels his heart seize, despite himself. Never show weakness, he knows that, and he checks off his muscles, one after another, fighting to keep his eyes locked and his expression frozen. The prosecutor, smirking, whip-thin, a preppie type with a preppie haircut in a checked suit half a size too small who could have been Tim Sickafoose’s double, calls Ranger Rick to the stand and the court has to hear Ranger Rick go through a blow-by-blow account of how his suspicions were aroused by the consulting ornithologist and how ultimately he boarded the suspect’s boat and made the arrest. Then it’s Sterling’s turn and Sterling rises from his chair to lay into Ranger Rick, going over the same ground what seems like a hundred times till the man creeps back into himself and admits that he couldn’t specify what kind of shoes the suspect had been wearing on the day of the alleged incident, nor could he distinguish them from the shoes Wilson Robert Gutierrez had been wearing, and then it’s Tim Sickafoose’s tur
n to throw the dagger and on and on they go.
He has plenty of time for reflection (for one thing he never realized what a bore Sterling is, his voice like a TV announcer’s—late, late-night TV, when they trot out the popcorn makers and Ginsu knives—his face as heavy as sleep and his posture so weak his bones might have been melting, his suit boring, his tie, but maybe that was a facet of his genius, maybe he meant to bore the judge comatose and how could a comatose man pronounce anything but a verdict of innocent?). Time drags. Every once in a while Anise reaches out to give his hand a squeeze, a gesture for which he should be grateful, but he only wants to lean over and throttle her because he doesn’t need pity here or empathy or affection or whatever it is. Empathy’s for the weak, for the guilty. Before long, even before Sickafoose has had his say and Sterling, boringly, tries to undermine the testimony, he’s begun to feel sorry for himself. Begun to worry. He studies the judge’s face as if it’s a timetable at the railway station, complex, unrevealing, routed in a thousand different directions to a thousand different destinations. He’s going down, he’s sure of it.
And why? Because he believes in something, the simplest clearest primary moral principle: thou shalt not kill. There was a time when he was just like anyone else, feeding burgers into his mouth, hot dogs, roast beef, pastrami, the chops and steaks and chicken wings his father seared on the grill and his mother served up with salad and corn and fresh-baked rolls, and like everyone else he was oblivious to the deeper implications. He went through school eating the spaghetti with meat sauce, the burritos and tacos and carne asada the cafeteria ladies served up in neat tinfoil packets. In the commons at the community college he sat amidst the disarray of his books and sipped his Coke and chewed his ham and avocado on rye, and if the ham, stripped and cured and sliced, had once been the tissue of a living sentient being, he never knew or cared. On weekends, he pushed his cart through the supermarket with all the rest of them, humming along to the jingles and reprocessed Beatles’ melodies tumbling through the speakers, the sanitized meat in its plastic wrapping as innocuous as if it had fallen off a tree, the lobsters in their murky sweating tank no more an object of concern or even curiosity than if they were carved of wood. Somewhere someone raised a cow and somewhere else the cow was killed and processed while another anonymous someone checked his lobster traps for the slow-witted crustaceans gathered there. And took them to market. And dropped them in the tank. And there they stayed, their claws pegged and their fate sealed, until someone else put down his money, took them home and boiled them alive. That was how it was. And he never thought twice about it.