But here’s the coffee and here’s her mother pouring it and asking if she’s got time for a bite and she’s saying, “No, Mom, got to run,” even as Ed—jaunty and athletic still, despite the hips—saunters across the room with his morning Bloody Mary to ease into the table where a plate of redolent bacon and a mound of scrambled eggs, Mexican style, awaits him. “Morning,” he says.
“Morning, Ed.” She tries for a smile and so does he.
But has she got everything? She sets down the mug and pats her pockets, then slips into the front room for her laptop, sunglasses and three-ring binder, and in the next moment she’s making her getaway amid a flurry of regrets. “Wish I could stay and spend the morning with you,” she says, easing out the door, “but I’ll see you tonight. And, Mom, don’t bother to cook because I wanted to take you to this seafood place, okay?”
She’s belted in, her laptop and notebook on the passenger’s seat, mug in the cup holder, the car fuming silently beneath her. Then it’s out the drive to meld with the traffic coming off the freeway ramp, which is already backed up from the stop sign at the end of the block. To connect going south she needs to make a left at the intersection, go two blocks north past banks of condos on both sides, then across the freeway overpass to turn right on the southbound ramp. Just as she swings out onto the surface street ahead of a little yellow convertible going too fast, something darts across the road in front of her—a blur, a shadow—and she hits the brakes to the blare of the convertible’s horn at the instant she feels the thump of mortality under the left rear wheel. In the next moment, heart pounding, she pulls to the side as the convertible slashes by, peering anxiously in the rearview to identify this thing she’s hit, the creature, the animal—a squirrel, is it a squirrel?—writhing at the curb behind her.
There are other cars, three, four of them, easing past as she fumbles for the emergency blinkers and steps out of the car. Across the street, incongruous in this neighborhood of condos, is a white colonial with dark trim, a generous lawn and a stand of junk trees screening it from the freeway beyond and below it. Oaks, she’s thinking, there must be some oaks back in there or why else the squirrel? Squirrels are rare here, the native vegetation displaced by ornamentals and citrus trees, their niche taken by the roof rats that thrive on the avocado, orange and loquat the developers have planted for their delectation. But—she’s moving toward it now, watching its eyes, bark brown and luminous with shock—this is definitely a squirrel, a western gray, Sciurus grisens, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The weight of the car has crushed its rear legs and tail, pinning them to the pavement in a glutinous mélange of fur, gristle, bone and blood. Its head and neck are rigid and the front legs—the miniature paws with their shining claws black as pencil lead—scrape spasmodically at the unyielding blacktop as if to dig their way free. She tries to be dispassionate about it—she’s at risk of being late for a meeting that will help determine the fate of any number of species interlocked in a unique ecosystem while this animal before her, this unfortunate individual, is superabundant in its range. But when she’s standing over it and the eyes, trembling, liquid, unplumbable, are fixed on her and she examines the fine arrangement of the black-tipped hairs and the perfect cream white arc of the chest, she feels the emotion come up in her. This perfect thing and she’s killed it. Or crippled it. Crippled it beyond hope. But what should she do? Nudge it to the gutter with the toe of her shoe? Wrap it in something—newspaper, the old pair of shorts Tim keeps in the trunk to wear under his wetsuit—and take it to the vet? Or animal rescue? Or just—put it out of its misery?
As it happens, the decision is taken out of her hands, because in that moment a kid she vaguely recognizes—a boy of twelve or thirteen, from the pricey condos that give onto the oceanfront across from the hotel—rattles up to her on his skateboard and lets out a low whistle. “Oh, man,” he says, looking from her to the writhing squirrel, “gross. Did you hit it?”
“Yes,” she says, and why is her voice reduced to a whisper? Why is she suddenly on the verge of tears?
Before she can say anything further, before she can think, the boy steps forward on his own initiative and grinds his heel into the animal’s head till the gray and pink strands of the neural matter sluice free, like spaghetti.
She’s chosen the Docksider for breakfast because it’s close to the office, has unmatchable views and an upscale menu. Frazier—he’s a Kiwi, having founded Island Healers back at home in New Zealand where the invasive species practically outnumber the native, a man’s man who prides himself on his ability to handle anything, any terrain, any animal—would no doubt have preferred a coffee shop without the vaguest aroma of pretension, but there’s no harm in elevating the ambience a little. Plus, while he might put on a rough exterior the way a bushman might wrap himself in a hide against a cold night, she’s begun to notice that he’s as conversant with a good wine, nouvelle cuisine and a snifter of Armagnac as anybody she’s met in the committee rooms of Sacramento or the District of Columbia. As for Freeman and Annabelle, they’re just happy to be out of their offices and looking at a tablecloth instead of a scored card table with a pot of coffee and a straw basket of stale bagels set in the middle of it.
Of course, everything’s a bit off kilter from the first, because by the time she’s found a parking spot, darted across the lot and up the outdoor stairway to the restaurant, she’s thirteen minutes late and they’re all sitting there waiting for her, cranked up on their second—third?—cups of coffee and talking nonstop. For a moment, watching their expectant faces as she propels herself across the room, notebook and laptop tucked under one arm and her hair flying out behind her like a deflated parachute, she considers making an excuse—telling them of the contretemps with the squirrel, the congestion on the freeway, the way the lights, every one of them, seemed to have been timed against her by an evil DMV bureaucrat tracking her Prius on a computer screen—but excuses are for children, kids like the boy with his skateboard and gory heel trying to explain the blood spoor on the carpet to his mother, and she opts simply to slide into the seat next to Annabelle and whisper, “Sorry.”
But everything’s relaxed, everybody on the same page, working toward the same goal without animosity or bickering or internecine competition. So what if Annabelle’s constituency has possession of nine times the land the Park Service has? So what if the main ranch, sitting squarely on the Nature Conservancy property, is the jewel of the island and Alma would give her eyeteeth to be able to set up there in the old Stanton house and has to make do instead with Scorpion? So what if Carey Stanton, rubbed raw by some Park Service functionary twenty years ago, ceded the property to the Nature Conservancy instead of her and Freeman and the people of the United States of America? So what if Annabelle had pushed so hard to hire a concern out of Wet Bone, Idaho, over Island Healers that Freeman had twice stormed out of the room? So what? They’re all in this together and they’re all friends—old friends now—and they’re sitting down to breakfast together in a place designed to make everybody feel good so they can hear what each in turn has to report about the progress from Phases I and II to this, the climax of the entire campaign: Phase III, the unleashing of the hunters, not to mention their dogs, ATVs, helicopters and lead-free bullets, which is already now in its fourth month.
Freeman is watching his waistline. He orders grapefruit, cottage cheese and coffee, “Black, no cream.” He’s not overweight, or not at least as far as she can tell, but he’s one of those men who just seems big all over, big in the shoulders, arms, wrists, fingers, big right on down to his fingernails, his head massive, his neck thick as one of the stanchions under the pier. The only incongruous thing is his feet, which are disproportionately small, so that he always seems to be floating above them as if he’s been pumped full of helium.
Frazier—forty-six and big enough in his own right, dressed in his khaki bush shorts and matching short-sleeved, multi-pocketed shirt, his silvering hair in a military buzz cut a
nd his legs stretched out casually in the aisle—orders the Captain’s Breakfast, crab-stuffed crepes, fresh fruit plate, eggs benedict and sourdough toast saturated in butter, with a side of fries and homemade coleslaw. He upends the sugar container over his coffee, then fills the cup to the top with half and half. And smiles round the table. “Hard work chasing pigs up and down those canyons,” he says. “A man’s got to have calories to burn. Not to mention a beer or two and maybe a wee little nip of something at the end of the day.”
“Wee?” Alma echoes, and she’s grinning at him while the waitress hovers, all in good fun. “Wee” for Frazier translates to half a pint, minimum, which is what his engraved silver flask holds. She’s seen him refer to it time and again as they tramped the fence line, looking for pig sign, and when they sat down to an evening meal at the picnic table out front of the ranch house at Christy Beach on the far end of the island, he was able to put away a six-pack all on his own—and never, not for an instant, had she detected any change in him. Half a pint of Mexican brandy and a six-pack of beer in a system all sweated-out, and no clumsy movements, no slurring of words, just a steady stream of Kiwi talk on every subject under the sun. She looks to the waitress, then nods to Annabelle, to see what she’s having before committing herself to the strawberry crepes and crème fraîche.
Annabelle—she’s Alma’s age exactly—is a white blonde with see-through eyebrows and invisible lashes, dressed today for the office, in a blue silk suit and matching heels in a shade so close to the color of her eyes it’s uncanny. How many shops did she trundle through to find that ensemble, Alma wonders, envisioning whole armies of sales girls paraded across the floor in consultation, the multifarious phases of light parsed against the sheen of the material and the narrowly focused hue of her eyes. Where does she find the time? Not to mention the money? Like Alma, she’s unmarried, but unlike Alma she’s currently unattached—and working for a nonprofit in service of the environment is hardly the way to worldly wealth. She must be a real bargain hound. Either that or she has family money. Alma watches her push the menu away with a languid flick of the wrist and lift her eyes to the waitress. “I think I’ll have the spinach and goat cheese omelet with a side salad—the endive. It comes with a balsamic vinaigrette, right? Nothing creamy?”
The waitress—all of nineteen or twenty, with a ponytail that reaches to her waist and a skirt so short she might have come directly from early cheerleading practice—answers in the affirmative and then turns to Alma. “Have you decided, ma’am?”
“Yes,” she says, handing over the menu and snatching a quick glance round the table, “I’ll just have the organic oatmeal. With skim milk.”
Phase I of the project—Administration, Infrastructure and Acquisition—involved securing the funds from their overlords in Washington and, in Annabelle’s case, the Nature Conservancy, hiring additional staff to oversee the project, acquire equipment and supplies and take bids from the hunting and fencing contractors. Not to mention dealing with an inflamed press ($7 Million Awarded to Foreign Hunters to Slaughter Santa Cruz Island Pigs, read one Press Citizen headline) and an ongoing campaign of harassment from the Dave LaJoy-Anise Reed contingent, both in the courts and in the parking lot out front of their offices in Ventura. Phase II, the division of the island into five zones for the purpose of constructing forty-five miles of pig-proof fencing so that each zone can be sequentially hunted till it’s pig free, was completed in the spring, which means that Phase III is well under way. Afterward, and the nearest estimate is that it will take up to six years to achieve an island-wide extirpation, Phase IV will be implemented, in which the fences will be monitored for an additional two years to ensure that the eradication is complete, after which they will be removed and the island will return to the way it was before humans began altering it. At least that’s the plan. And the hope. The fervent hope of them all.
“Well, yes,” Freeman is saying, his coffee cup held aloft and beating time to some inner rhythm, “we’ve posted signs and sent out the press release stating that the entire island, not just the TNC property, will be closed to the public while the hunt is under way. We’re making it a public safety issue. And the promise is that once Zone One is cleared, we’ll let people back in and open up the campgrounds at Scorpion.”
“As soon as possible,” Alma puts in, looking round the table. “We don’t want to give people any more reason to gripe than they already have.”
“Oh?” Frazier’s giving her a sardonic grin. “Are they griping? I hadn’t heard.”
“You can’t really blame them,” Annabelle says, turning to him.
“I can,” Alma says.
“Because they don’t like to see violence—like me, like us. Life is sacred, I believe that. And yet—”
“And yet no matter how many times you explain it”—Alma’s voice jumps up the register—“they just don’t get it because they don’t want to. Logic means nothing to these people. Long-term goals. Expert opinion.” She can feel the caffeine working in her to the point of coffee jitters, of running at the mouth, of cutting people off—she needs to put something on her stomach, needs her steel-cut oatmeal and her skim milk. “But we’ve been through all this before and we’re just going to have to grin and bear it. For the greater good. For the foxes.”
“Or bear and grin it,” Freeman says. Lamely.
“At least the courts are on our side.” Alma can feel her smile bloom and then fade. She reaches for her coffee cup, then thinks better of it, pulling both hands down into her lap.
“For now,” Annabelle says. “But you can’t count on that. Every time one of these crazies sues for an injunction I tremble to think what’s going to happen if we wind up with a judge that just doesn’t get it.”
“Amen,” Alma says, “me too. I can hardly sleep nights thinking of what it would be like if they stop us now, when we’ve committed the funds, when weeks, days even, could mean the difference for the foxes. I mean”—looking round the table, caught in the grip of her emotions, so wired she can’t find the off switch—“they’ve got money behind them. Have you seen their website? The ticker there showing how much people are donating? And the local paper. The editorials? They’re just manipulating public opinion. Cynically. Stupidly. But it works. I mean, the pig in the bull’s-eye?”
There’s a silence, as if all this is too much to bear, especially at eight-thirty on a morning made in heaven with the sun riding up off the water and the brown pelicans—brought back from the very edge of extinction because people woke up to the fact that DDT wasn’t exactly a vitamin—gliding low to report on the health of the local anchovy population. This isn’t a morning for fear or doubt, this is a morning for celebration, for eggs benedict and sweet cakes, for resolve and concerted action.
“This LaJoy,” Frazier says after a moment, looking up from the nest of his folded hands, “does he ever go to work or what? The man seems to have a lot of time on his hands. Christ, it seems like every time I come down here he’s out in the parking lot marching around with his bloody sign. And I tell you these bloody chants—‘Nazi’ and ‘Animal killer’ and the like—just put my teeth on edge.” He pauses, patting his breast pocket for his cigarettes, Camels, a pack of which he actually removes before he catches himself. “Almost forgot: no smoking in a public place in this glorious state. But what I want to say is maybe Phase I should have been ‘Eliminate Dave LaJoy.’ ” He raises his left arm and squints an eye to sight down it, squeezing off an imaginary round with the trigger finger of his right hand: “Pow!”
“Can I buy the bullets for you?” Freeman says.
“Not that I’m violent or anything, just that certain species—or individuals within that species—sometimes have to be removed for the salvation of all the rest, right, Alma? Euthanized. There’s a term I like. As long as it’s got a .223-caliber slug attached to it.”
Well, of course. And there’s general laughter, fellow feeling, comradeship, and then there’s food, plates heaped high with it,
and the sun picking out each individual mast in the harbor and setting fire to the rigging while the islands float somewhere out there on the horizon. All well and good. But Alma’s the one who has to bear the brunt of everything LaJoy can bring—she’s the one who has to stand up there in the public forums and explain as patiently as she can the rationale for the killing, she’s the one who has to pick up the morning paper and see her own name there like a slap to the face, and it’s wearing her down.
Restoring an ecosystem is never easy—maybe it’s not even possible. She thinks of Guam, where it’s beyond hope. Or Hawaii. Florida. Places where so many species have been introduced it’s hard to say what’s native and what’s not. She’d attempted to boil it down for her mother the night before, because her mother was trying, she really was, and Alma wanted her to appreciate what she was doing—or at least what she was going through. She’d waited for a lull in the conversation—Ed got up to refill the glasses, the ice maker clanking philosophically, the tonic hissing with a rush of released gas—and said, “Take Tim, for instance.”
“Yes,” her mother said, “take Tim. You mean to say he’s not even going to be here for your birthday? Because I don’t know about you, but I intend to bake a cake first thing in the morning—devil’s food, with mocha frosting. And what was that ice cream you like—Vanilla Swiss Almond? Ed’s going to pick up a pint. Or maybe a quart. What do you say to a quart, Ed?”