“I told you, Mom, he’s trapping the goldens. Which has to be done because we discovered that it’s the golden eagles killing the foxes. You see, what most people don’t realize—”
And she went off into her tutorial mode, unraveling a parable of cause and effect that might have seemed like a sick cosmic joke if it weren’t so catastrophic. The whole thing started with Montrose Chemical dumping DDT during the war, the DDT working its way up the food chain and preventing the eggs of the native bald eagles from forming properly. The balds—aggressive, highly territorial and primarily piscivorous—died back, and the goldens, which prey on land animals, cruised in from the coast to colonize the islands, attracted by the bountiful food resource presented by the wild hogs, Sus scrofa, that should never have been there in the first place. But then—and here’s where she paused to let the lesson play itself out—you can never foresee how a closed ecosystem is going to react not only to introduced elements but to their elimination as well. The sheep had overgrazed and that kept the invasive fennel down, but once the sheep were removed the fennel sprang up in all but impenetrable thickets ten feet high, which provided ideal cover for the pigs. “So,” she’d said, her mother’s gaze bright but fading, “you’ve got no balds to keep the goldens away and the goldens are nesting and hungry but with fewer and fewer pigs available. In that case, what do you think they’re going to eat?”
Ed, who by this time had shifted to the couch, where he seemed to be monitoring two baseball games simultaneously with the sound muted, looked up and said, “Foxes. Cute little dwarf foxes.”
It wasn’t till one of the biologists began to notice a falloff in the population that they began to trap and radio-collar the foxes. In the mid-eighties the island-wide population was robust, in the range of three thousand individuals. By the late nineties it was a tenth of that and no one could determine the cause of the decline.
“We were in danger of seeing the fox go extinct. On our watch,” she said. “Look”—she carried her laptop over and set it on the kitchen table, canting the screen so that Ed could see it too, and brought up the image of a single golden eagle chick perched proudly on its nest with the remains of twenty foxes scattered beneath it, some still wearing their radio collars. “That was our proof. We followed the radio signals and this is what we found.”
So the eagles had to be trapped and removed, no easy task. First they tried netting them on the wing out of the door of a helicopter, but it was like trying to catch butterflies on a roller coaster, and even if they’d been successful, there was the problem of the eagles surviving the fall. It was Tim who came up with the idea of baiting the birds to a carcass rigged with a spring trap that when activated would shoot out a net to ensnare them, and that worked, to a degree. In the interim the biologists trapped as many foxes as they could and caged them for a captive-breeding program, which to date had produced eighty-five kits to be released once the goldens were gone and balds could be brought in from Alaska to reestablish a viable breeding colony. The thinking was that the balds would keep the goldens at bay and that the goldens would have no incentive in nesting on the island once the pigs were removed.
The question everyone asked at this juncture—the question Dave LaJoy asked endlessly, vociferously, in the press and on the pavement—and the question her mother asked then, was: “Why can’t you just trap the pigs alive? And bring them back for, I don’t know, for farmers or something? Or food? Think of all the starving people in the world.”
“Believe me,” she’d said, “we would if we could. But there isn’t a federal agency that would allow it. The risk is just too great.”
The fact was that these hogs—Santa Cruz Island hogs—were a discrete population that had had no interaction with outside populations in a hundred and fifty years, and thus could carry leptospirosis, foot and mouth disease, mutations of common bacteria and viruses that could burn through the American hog industry and leave it twitching in the mud. So there was no choice but to euthanize them. With bullets, two each, the first to the heart, the second to the head, according to the American Veterinary Association guidelines. Clean kills. As swift and final as fate. And the carcasses? All that wild-bred pork? The carcasses were to be left where they lay for the entertainment of the ravens and the benefit of the soil.
“The thing is,” Frazier is saying, now dabbing at a bright smear of egg and hollandaise at the corner of his mouth, “with pigs you get ninety percent of them right off, but it’s that remaining ten percent that gives you hell. And you can’t run the risk of missing a single individual because that could be a pregnant sow for all you know and then the whole business just starts in over again.”
The oatmeal goes down like a brick, the wrong thing to order, definitely the wrong thing. Her stomach is on fire suddenly—too much coffee, too much tension, dealing with her mother, hitting the squirrel, fighting traffic to get here—and she has to square herself in the chair and sit rigid a moment till the burning passes. Is she developing an ulcer, is that it?
“Aerial starts when—next week? That’s what you’re projecting?” Freeman asks, leaning into the table, the rind of his grapefruit at one elbow, coffee cup at the other. The pen in his breast pocket has left a dark blue Rorschach blot on his pale blue shirt and the silver points of his bolo tie are tarnished—or maybe they’re smudged with ink. But his eyes are bright. He’s attached to the notion of the park superintendent as a man of action, like the legendary Bill Ehorn, who flew into San Miguel to personally pull the trigger on the last pregnant jenny, thus ending the occupation of the island by introduced mules, and Alma knows he’s angling for an invitation.
Frazier nods genially. “As best we can figure. Because we’re already having good success on the ground, but we need to get up on the ridges and work our way down. And I tell you, you only do a kill if you can get the whole group. If there’s a chance even one’ll get away, you draw back. Because, you understand, these are very clever animals—they say they’re smarter than dogs, smart as a three-year-old child for that matter, but for my money even the dopiest dog beats that . . . anyway, they’ll communicate to the others and go into hiding. And that’s a nightmare.”
Alma catches the waitress’s eye from across the room, thinking to expedite things and get the check now, but the waitress misinterprets her meaning and brings the coffeepot back round. Frazier, gesturing broadly now, holds out his cup to be refilled, giving the girl a quick wink and then going on about how while aerial is indispensable the real hunt takes place on the ground, now that the dogs—his own dogs, from New Zealand—are out of quarantine. And then, Freeman and Annabelle edging their cups forward for refills while Alma lays a palm over hers and mouths, “Check, please,” he brings up his Judas pigs, a concept so devious it gives her a thrill every time he mentions it.
Annabelle, who to this point hasn’t been as closely involved with the details of the hunt as she herself has, gives him a bemused smile and drops her voice. “Judas pigs?” she echoes. Her look says, Amuse me.
And Frazier stops right there to take in that look and sweep his eyes over the restaurant, the retreating waitress, the view out the window, before he comes back to her. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Very effective in an operation like this. You see”—leaning in over his plate to pin her with his gaze—“we use their own sex drive against them, and if that seems unfair, well, dearie, I guess it is. But this isn’t a game. This is war. All-out war. And wave goodbye to the little piggies.”
“Okay,” Annabelle says, flashing a smile, “we can all agree with that—but what do you mean?”
“What we do is trap as many as we can and hope to find a couple females in estrus—these things’ll breed all year round in this climate, so it’s not so hard as you might think, especially if you cage a boar with them for a day or two. Then we radio-collar the females and let them go.” He’s leaning so far over the table he’s practically in her lap at this point and Alma has to remind herself, while sitting rigid and fighting down the
gas pains, that it doesn’t really matter to her one way or the other if he finds a little solace wherever he can. “And you’d be surprised,” he says, “or maybe not, maybe it’s just what you’d figure. But each of those females will wind up with a whole parade of boars around her, rooting and fighting and sniffing her up—even the wiliest old scarred-up paranoid razorback’ll come charging up out of his hole for a chance at that—and it can bring in a whole bloody contingent of sows and juveniles too, whether they’re in heat or not, just to be close to the action. Like a pig disco.”
“And then?”
“Then we track them and move in.”
He pauses to take a sip of coffee, all three of them playing that scenario over in their heads, the abrasive hides, the mobile snouts, pig sex. “And believe me,” he says, “nobody gets out alive.”
Afterward, after she’s put the bill on her card and said her goodbyes all around, she finds herself in the deserted ladies’ room, the light of ten o’clock in the morning suffusing the high glass-block windows. She should be at work. And she will be, she promises herself, in just a minute—she’ll leave the car where it is and walk so she can get a little sun on her face and steal a march on the protestors, blending with the tourists and slipping in the service entrance before they even know she’s there—but for the moment she just needs to clear her head. And breathe, breathe as deeply as she can. The pain in her abdomen hasn’t gone away—in fact, it seems worse, as if she’s swallowed some sort of corrosive, Drano, Emma Bovary’s strychnine, brodifacoum. The image of a rat flits through her head, its feet churning, eyes fixed. It’s the coffee, it has to be. And the oatmeal. Whatever possessed her to order oatmeal? She should have stuck to toast, dry toast, but then the thought of it—brittle, abrasive, crushed and wadded and stuck in her throat—sends her banging into the stall and suddenly everything’s coming up, the coffee, the oatmeal, the dregs of her mother’s pasta and the thinnest disembodied hint of Onikoroshi sake, too much sake, formerly on the rocks.
Immediately she feels better. She flushes twice, watching the water swirl in the bowl, but the smell lingers even as the outer door wheezes open and footsteps approach in a sharp high-heeled tattoo. Her first thought is of Annabelle, but that can’t be because she watched her go down the steps in animated conversation with Frazier ten minutes ago. At least. The heels tap closer and she freezes while the handle of the stall briefly rattles and whoever it is pulls back the door of the adjoining stall and settles in with a sigh, followed by a fierce hissing rush of urine. Then she’s out of the stall and at the sink, cupping her hands for a sip of water to rinse her mouth, wishing she had a toothbrush—or breath mints; she makes a note to stop in the place downstairs to pick some up—and though she’d like to take a minute with her lipstick and hair, she doesn’t dare because the occupant of the other stall is noisily unraveling toilet paper and she doesn’t want to be seen. Not now. Not after being sick. So she’s out the door and down the stairs, thinking to freshen up in the restroom at the office, thinking she’ll get herself a Coke and maybe a package of crackers to settle her stomach. And the breath mints, definitely the breath mints.
Just below the restaurant, on the promenade that wraps around the marina, there’s a shop that caters to tourists and carries the usual cornucopia of things, from Dramamine, sunblock and cheap straw hats for the whale-watching crowd, to postcards, T-shirts and bobble-head dolls for the landlubbers, to the soft drinks, hot coffee, prepackaged sandwiches, crackers and cheese in the shrink-wrapped single-serving portion, breath mints, candy and tabloid magazines everybody needs all the time. She’s about to duck in the door—a drift of metallic balloons in a stand there, artificial poppies sprouting from a styrene ball in a papery blaze of red, T-shirts clothespinned to a wire like wash—when she catches herself. There’s a young woman, a girl, seated at one of the white plastic tables out front, her back to Alma, and her hair—dyed a uniform copper red—trailing down her back in a spill of trained curls. But isn’t it Alicia? Alicia doing what, taking her lunch break? She checks her watch. At ten-thirty in the morning?
Before she can think what to do—Is it Alicia? Is she really prepared to question her, discipline her, wonder why she’s not at her desk in the absence of her boss, opening the mail, answering the phone, for God’s sake?—the light shifts as if someone’s put a hand over the shutter of a lens and a man comes backing out the door, a cardboard tray with two cups of coffee and a package of powdered doughnuts held out gingerly before him. But she knows him, doesn’t she? The earring, the goatee, the incongruous shock of the blue eyes in a Latino’s face, or part Latino, Chicano, mestizo, whatever you call it, and who—?
And it comes clear. Because he recognizes her in that instant and in that instant she knows him, knows him in a flash of recollection, even as Alicia turns her head to look over her shoulder to see what’s keeping him. Alicia, her features gone slack and her eyes retreating. Alicia, shrinking. Alicia revealed. But he—Wilson, that’s his name, Wilson— he’s unfazed. He saunters up to the table, sets the tray down, and looks back to where Alma stands arrested at the door to the shop in which her Coca-Cola Regular, cheese and cracker combination and breath mints await. Then, so casually he might have been posing for a snapshot, he flashes her a smile—a beautiful, full-lipped, effervescent smile, as if they’re the best friends in the world—and slowly pulls up the chair beside Alicia, puts an arm around her shoulders, and draws her to him.
Prisoners’ Harbor
He’s at home, glancing up from the morning paper in what he likes to call the sunroom to look out the window on the crew he’s hired to lay sod over the desiccated remnant of the lawn. The whole operation has him conflicted—lawns are bad news for the environment, yes, but he’s got to keep up property values, or his property’s value anyway, and he did turn down two contractors who wanted to go the herbicide route in favor of this crew, amigos of Wilson, who dug everything up and then laid down plastic sheeting to stifle the weeds—but the bottom line is that the old lawn, the one he inherited when he bought the place back in 1993, was looking pretty ratty. Now, with the sod—and they’ve already rolled out two long dense sections of it, like carpet—he’ll have a deep blue-green Kentucky-perfect lawn right out of one of those glossy magazines, and he won’t have to wait for it to grow in either. And it’s not a question of vanity or keeping up with the neighbors or anything like that—it’s about protecting your investment, because this house is the best investment he’s ever made, a Spanish mission-style beauty situated on a hill, two stories high with carved wooden beams in the main rooms and intricate wrought-iron grillwork everywhere you look, nearly five thousand square feet of living space set on an acre and a half, and now, twelve years after he bought it, worth four times what he paid. He couldn’t have done any better investing in a gold mine.
The sunroom is on the second floor, facing south, and he can look out beyond the humped backs of the Mexican laborers—three of them, two bareheaded, one in an off-white baseball cap with El Jefe looped across the crown in what looks to be black Magic Marker—to the stucco wall in front and over the roof of the house across the street and out to the ocean, five blocks distant. Today—it’s the end of October, the air clear and sharp—he can see all the way out to Santa Cruz Island, the channel spread out beneath him like a placid little pond and the oil rigs like stepping-stones lined up along the shore. Of course, this time of year the winds can come up and make things hazardous out there in a heartbeat, everybody knows that, and if Anise doesn’t show up soon he’s going to have to call and remind her of that fact. But the forecast is for light to moderate winds and he’s trying to reform his behavior, trying not to be so controlling, so quick to explode—she’ll get here when she gets here, he’s thinking, lifting a spoon of granola to his mouth and watching the faintest little rumor of a breeze finger the leaves of the trees along the road.
Her mother’s in town—Rita, flown in all the way from Port Townsend, Washington—and while he doesn’t ca
re much about that one way or the other, Anise does, Anise certainly does, and when they arrive, if they arrive, if they can ever get their shit together and understand that winds rule the channel and sunset comes early this time of year, he will drive them down to the marina in his Beemer, hop aboard the Paladin and take them out to the island for the day. For pleasure. For a day off from walking the picket line outside the Park Service offices and for the not incidental purpose of testing the limits of the Park Service’s authority: the island is officially closed to all comers because they want to do their killing in private.
But just the thought of it is enough to set him off. Down goes the spoon, the bowl, the newspaper, milk sloshing, the wicker table trembling under the violence of it, and he’s on his feet and across the saltillo floor, pacing now, because he just can’t sit, can’t eat, can’t read. The dogs, conscious of trouble, get up from their beds in the corner and come to him, tails thwapping at their bony haunches, but he takes no comfort in them. It’s as if deep inside him a hammer has dropped, the rush of hate and rage and frustration shooting from his gut right on up to the top of his head to inflame the roots of his hair till they ache, actually ache. Every lawsuit he’s brought has been thrown out of court because the judges work for the system and the system is the National Park Service. And now they’re closing the island in their typical imperious way, no matter what the will of the people says, no matter how many petitions come across their desks or how many protestors stand out there chanting, because they’re confident no one’s going to cross that channel when the water gets rough. With the Civil Rights Movement you could get on a bus and drive down to Mississippi, with Vietnam you could bring people to Washington in cars, buses, trains and jet planes. But not here. And don’t they know it. The sons of bitches.
Just then—the workers out there unrolling the sod, the wind stirring the trees and his mind going up in flames—he sees Anise’s car at the gate and Anise’s pretty white bare arm reaching out to punch in the code that will roll it back on its wheels so she can enter, with her mother, and the day can begin.