His awakening came almost twenty years ago now, not as an epiphany per se but more a lifting of the veil, an infusion of light and clarity, and it transformed his life. He was twenty-six, putting in sixteen-hour workdays in the first of his stores, the flagship in downtown Santa Barbara, located back then in a transitional area three blocks off State, the building an anonymous cinder-block structure that could have housed anything from a muffler shop to a dental clinic. Three blocks away was life—tourists, bars, restaurants, retail—but there was nothing on his block but a taquería and a postage-stamp park populated exclusively by bums and the odd drugged-out high school kid and his pasty girlfriend. The sidewalk was pocked with dark blotches, there were empty bottles in the blighted shrubs along the street, stains of urine and worse in the alcove that gave onto the front door, tight black scrawls of graffiti scarring the pale stucco walls.
It was a sad state of affairs, as far as he was concerned, and it drove him crazy. His every thought was linked to the business, to attracting customers and upgrading his product line and, of course, it was all about perception as far as the customers were concerned—who, he asked himself, even the most diehard audio freak, really wanted to lay out his hard-earned money in a components store, however hip, that was located across from bum central? He worried over it, got into shouting matches with various burnouts and gimps, wrote letters to the mayor, the city council, the newspaper—Can’t we clean this city up?—without any appreciable difference. But he was luckier than most. He worked hard. Offered a top product at a reasonable price. And because he knew what he was doing, an electronics freak himself, and his customers appreciated it, they came to him and came back again, and very gradually the business began to grow. Still, he wasn’t exactly paying attention to the larger issues. He was absorbed. He was busy.
Then one afternoon a girl he’d hired to work the front counter while he was out doing installations handed him a slim pamphlet with an earth-green cover adorned with the old hippie sign for peace. He’d just come in the back door after fielding a complaint from a middle-aged woman with seriously sun-damaged skin who’d berated him because the remote wouldn’t switch on the amplifier in the new system he’d installed for her just the week before (she was pointing it backward, he discovered, after wasting a good forty-five minutes checking out every possible glitch he could imagine) and he looked down at the pamphlet in disgust. “What is this?” he asked the girl, turning it over in his hand. He gave her a sharp glance. “I hope you’re not handing this shit out in the store, because if you are—”
“It’s not shit,” she said, her voice so soft it was almost a whisper. “And I’m not passing it out to customers, don’t worry.” Her name was Melody Appelbaum—it comes to him in a flash while he sits there in the netherworld of the courtroom, Sterling droning on about something and the judge looking as if he’s on the verge of passing out—and she was a student at UCSB. She shrugged. “I just thought you might find it significant, that’s all.”
Significant. He might find it significant. Not useful or eye-opening or revolutionary, just significant. Without thinking, he stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans, and it wasn’t until he was getting ready for bed that night that he discovered it there. Idly, he flipped it open. The title—Animal Rights—appeared at the top of the first page, the letters faintly blurred in the way of cheap reproduction. Beneath it was a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer: “The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee to morality.” There was no author listed, and aside from a copyright symbol at the bottom of the page, no publication data at all.
He turned the page on a collage of photos that radiated out from the center like the petals of a black-and-white flower. It took him a moment before he saw what they were. And when he saw and understood, he experienced a jolt of revulsion and morbid fascination that was no different from what he’d felt when he was in junior high and came across the photographs of the victims of the Nazi camps in a claustrophobic carrel in the back room of the library. But the victims in these photographs weren’t human—they wore the mute unrevealing faces of cattle, hogs, veal calves, of chickens, their wings flapping futilely against the clamp of the conveyor and the blade to decapitate them. He looked closer. One of the animals, a hog that had been strung up by its feet in the slaughterhouse amidst myriad others, stared back at him, fully conscious and headed for the eviscerator looming in the foreground.
On the next page, there was more of the same—turkeys, lambs, dogs in a pen at the animal shelter awaiting the burn of the needle. And then the text, which put numbers to the slaughter, eight billion chickens butchered each year in this country alone, a hundred million hogs, forty million cows (twenty-five percent of which had been carelessly or inadequately stunned and thus effectively skinned alive, their writhings as the skin is torn from their faces a regular feature of the assembly line). And the line never slows, not even when the hogs come to and break loose of the shackles to careen in a panic into the pit below or when the shrieks of the ones crowding behind cause them to freeze in the chute till they’re beaten and electroshocked into moving. He read of the conditions in the farm factories, of pigs raised in pens so small they can’t even turn around, not once in their whole lives, of chickens debeaked and caged in warehouses with a hundred thousand others, knowing nothing but concrete and wire and the reek of death. Then there were the animal experiments—kittens having their eyes sewed shut to study the effect of sightlessness on development; rabbits subjected to the Draize test, in which a chemical irritant is dripped into their eyes by way of evaluating products in the cosmetics industry; dogs injected with plutonium; monkeys deprived in every conceivable way, tortured, mutilated; rats uncountable bred only to suffer and die, transgenic rats, oncogenic rats, rats upon rats.
He read the pamphlet through twice that night and in the morning he brought it with him to the store and laid it down on the counter without a word, right next to the cash register. Melody Appelbaum, nineteen, pouty, fat-cheeked, expecting trouble, gave it a glance, then looked away. “Where’d you get this?” he demanded.
She shrugged as if to say it was nothing, no more consequential than an advertising flyer, that she hadn’t meant any harm, that she’d take it back and never mention it again. “At school,” she said finally. “From a PETA person? Actually, my boyfriend.”
And he’d been so far out of the loop he had to ask what PETA was.
“It’s a group, you know? Activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?”
He mulled that over a moment, watching her eyes, animal’s eyes, no different essentially from the eyes of that hog or of dogs, cats, even fish and insects, organs of seeing and apprehension, windows to the soul. “Can you get any more of them?”
Another shrug. “I guess.”
“A hundred? Five hundred?”
“I guess.”
“Good,” he’d said. “I’m going to want them right here, right by the register. And you hand them to anybody who walks in the door.”
That was the day he gave up meat, cold turkey, and where did that expression come from? Of course, he still needed protein, especially since he was lifting at the gym, which was all about results, and so he continued to incorporate eggs and dairy in his diet, though he knew all about the battery hens in the egg-laying factories, how they’re fed the remains of the male chicks, which are otherwise useless to the industry, how they’re subjected to forced molting (that is, they’re periodically denied food for six to ten days and then brought back on diet as a way of forcing ovulation), and how after a year they’re played out and sent to slaughter. Anise is on him all the time about it—not to mention his cardiologist—but eggs are his one concession to the system, to cruelty. He means to change. He will change. Anise is a vegan and he’s moving that way, he is, but it’s hard, because through all
his bachelor days from his divorce on up to the present, it’s been eggs that sustained him. Omelets, especially. In fact, the first time he had Anise over for dinner, he made a green salad and a veggie omelet—his specialty—thinking it would be just the thing, till she sipped at her wine, picked at the salad, gave him the full chill of her glacial gaze and said, “Meat is murder. And so are eggs.”
Now, sitting in the courtroom with her four years later, he comes out of his reverie to hear Sterling laying into Sickafoose, the tedious dead dry-as-dust voice come to life suddenly: “So you can’t be sure then which of the two men you saw—at a distance of what, a thousand yards?—making throwing motions?”
And Sickafoose, shifting in his seat, knotting and unknotting his bony legs, drawn down to nothing finally, and finally, in a whisper, saying: “No.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
“No. I can’t be sure.”
Anise turns to him suddenly and she’s huge, rippling, her face floating to his like an untethered balloon, the kiss, the squeeze. Is this it? Have they finally conceded, the sons of bitches, the killers, the—And then suddenly, unaccountably, he’s back on the boat, the paradisiacal island rising up out of the sea before him. “Do you know why they call it Coches Prietos?” she’s asking him, the post-coital margarita rocking gently on the rail.
“It must have something to do with cars, right. Coches? I don’t know: dark cars?”
“There were no cars here back then.” She’s wearing a playful smile. A superior smile. This is her island, after all. “There are no cars here now.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Beats me. I give.”
“Coches is slang for pigs. Get it? Dark Pigs Canyon. La Cañada de los Coches Prietos. The dark ones, those are the ones that went feral back in the eighteen hundreds. They get big and mean and they’re fast. The boars anyway.”
“Right,” he says. “That’s why they have to kill them off. All of them.”
“Yeah,” she says, reaching for the frosted glass. She hasn’t bothered with her clothes and he hasn’t bothered with his either. “But we’re not going to let them, are we?”
A week later, he’s back in court, stomach churning all over again, in a mood, but he’s forgone the tie and jacket. In their place, he’s wearing a black T-shirt with the new FPA symbol—the pig in the circle—emblazoned on the front in aniline orange with the Stop the Slaughter legend, in the same loud shout of a color, done up in biker’s script across the back. And why not? He’s here to absorb the judge’s verdict, and whether he’s going down or walking out the door, he’s going to do it in his own way.
What’s happened in the interim is purely serendipitous and a whole lot better than he could have hoped for—the press has picked it up, his story, from his point of view, because the papers find this sort of thing irresistible. “Rat Activist on Trial,” “Rat Lover Says He Acted to Save Animals,” “Local Man Defies Park Service,” “Stop the Killing LaJoy Says.” And it’s not just the local paper—the interest has blossomed beyond that to pull in any number of big-city dailies, the AP, even USA Today. He’d like to think people are on his side, that they see the value in every life, however small, but as Anise has been reminding him all week, there’s the freak factor too. Rat lover. It’s almost an oxymoron, for most people anyway. He’s heard that two of the morning disc jockeys on the local oldies station have been making jokes about it—jokes, that is, at his expense, and yet still the word is getting out in a bigger way than he could have imagined. And that means money. Since the trial started, donations to FPA have gone through the roof—at last count nearly three thousand dollars came in in the last week alone.
Sterling—fifty, bald, with doughnut residue on his lapels and a steely smile imprinted on his face—swells beside him as the judge enters the courtroom and all stand. In the next moment they’re sitting again, benches creaking, people coughing into their fists, blowing their noses, scuffing their feet. There’s a delay of fifteen minutes at least as the judge shuffles papers, fools with his reading glasses and entertains one lawyer or another in private conference, the discreet murmur of their voices like background noise, the buzzing of insects or the whisper of a fan. While the judge—Karagouzian, definitely Armenian, with an accent and a moustache and a house in Glendale—is otherwise occupied, Sterling turns to him and gives him a sotto voce pep talk meant to impart serenity but which actually winds up scaring him more than anything that’s gone down so far.
“There’s no way the judge is going to convict,” Sterling tells him, shaking his head back and forth like a metronome. “Not with how Sickafoose compromised himself on the stand—”
“Good,” he hears himself say. “Great. But you said it was no sweat anyway, trumped-up charges, no evidence, right?”
“Yes, sure, but you have to understand Karagouzian’s a ramrod for law and order and he has a reputation for ruling on the side of the authorities.”
“But not in this case.”
And here’s where the scare comes in, and it hits him, as usual, in the stomach, in the stomach lining where the digestive juices, inflamed with caffeine, chew away at him, because Sterling wags his head even harder and says, “I’m ninety-nine percent sure, but then Karagouzian hates any kind of protest or press involvement, which isn’t your fault, God knows, and it’s legitimate, absolutely, but I just thought I ought to warn you in case we—well, as I say, I’m ninety-nine percent sure here.”
He glances at Anise. She’s chosen to sit on his left this time, so he and Sterling won’t have to step over her when the judge gives his verdict. She looks great, a real presence, huge really, with her broad bleached face and big shoulders and her hair combed out and frizzed up so it spills over everything, her purse, her lap, the back of the pew and all up and down the left side of his body as if to hold him there beside her. Maddeningly, though, she’s dressed all in black—a skirt that goes right to the floor and a leotard with a little embroidered vest over it, black on black. “Why black?” he’d demanded, stupefied, when she came down the steps of her apartment and dropped into the passenger’s side of the Beemer. She took off her sunglasses to look him square in the eye. “I want to be ready for anything,” she said, and though he tried to contain himself, his voice was as bitter as the sediment at the bottom of his coffee cup. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Now she gives him a tight smile. “I’ll bake you cookies,” she whispers.
“Very funny.”
There’s a rustling behind him, to his right, and he glances past Sterling to see Alma and Sickafoose squeezing into the far end of the bench. Neither of them will meet his eye, but they’re wearing smug looks, as if no matter what happens they’ve got him where they want him, here in federal court, with a hanging judge up there squinting at his papers preparatory to coming down on the side of the law that protects the guilty and burns the innocent. But what a cunt, that night at the restaurant, the way she’d bailed on him—as if she was better than he was, as if he didn’t know his wines—and wasn’t she sworn by law to protect and nurture the resources of the national park instead of killing things off at random? Jesus. And she’s looking Asian, real Asian, with that hair and the set of her jaw and the way she’s holding herself like some little geisha, like the touch of the wood slab behind her would cripple her . . .
But now the bailiff’s calling his name and Sterling’s on his feet. He feels the muscles working in his legs as he rises, his chest swelling, and he’s moving forward to stand there before the bench while all the reporters—is that what’s her name, Toni, from the Press Citizen?—snatch at their pads and pencils and laptops. The room goes silent. Sunlight sits in the tall windows. There’s a distant sound of traffic.
The judge—and there’s another shithead he’d like to have five minutes alone with—squints at him over his glasses. He does something with his lips, a kind of preliminary licking or flexing, and then, glancing down at the paper before him, he begins to read aloud:
“While there is a strong probability that the defendant did in fact commit the crimes with which he is charged, the evidence submitted and admitted does not serve to eliminate the doubt that remains. Further, since the Park Service eradication project was ultimately successful, the issue becomes moot.”
And what’s this? He can feel the mood shifting, the room coming to life as if a long collective breath has been expelled. He looks to Sterling, who’s staring straight ahead at the judge, trying to keep his expression sober despite the first intimations of triumph compressing the crow’s-feet rimming his eyes and radiating down to tug at the corners of his mouth. Everybody’s watching. Everybody can see him. His T-shirt. His message. His meaning. He feels a hard hot surge of joy coming up in him and it’s as intense as an orgasm: he’s going to walk!
“Therefore,” the judge pronounces over the steady retrograde tug of his accent, and yes, he could go right up there and kiss him, right now, “I pronounce the defendant not guilty.”
In the aftermath, out in the corridor with Toni Walsh and the woman from the local TV affiliate, the fingers of his right hand entwined in Anise’s and the camera trained on him, he makes a little speech, the lines of which he’s been rehearsing in his head all week. “It’s a sad state of affairs when our own federal government considers feeding wildlife to be a crime, while at the same time raining down poison indiscriminately from the sky is okay—legitimate, I mean.” And what’s even sweeter is that he’s able to raise his voice and project it all the way down the long gleaming tiled hall at the very moment that Alma Boyd Takesue and Tim Sickafoose emerge slumped and tragic from the courtroom so that he gets to watch her turn her head to him and then turn away again as he winds it up with an inspired flash of rhetoric: “And if these people think they’re going to get away with slaughtering some five thousand native pigs on Santa Cruz Island, well they’ve got another think coming.”