“So what you think?” Clive asks in a kind of yodel that startles them all. “Should we call it a day? Not much sense in mucking about in this shit. You won’t see another pig today, I guarantee you that.”
A.P. looks first to her, then Frazier, to see how the proposition is going over, before rubbing his hands together, ducking his head and concurring. “No,” he says, “no way.”
Frazier, his legs tented before him, his grin in place, leaves it to her. “What do you say, Alma—seen enough?”
Before she has a chance to answer—and she can already see the fire going in the big paneled room of the field station, already feel the dry sustaining warmth of her own showered and talcumed body wrapped tightly in her sleeping bag—two things happen. The first involves the transient appearance, at the far edge of the rough table of dirt and rock on which they’re sitting, of a pair of labile snouts and four startled eyes, and the second, the eruption of the dogs in a moil of slashing limbs and frenzied outraged yelps. In an eyeblink, they’re gone, the whole business, transient pigs (there were two of them, weren’t there? Medium-sized: shoats?) and all four dogs. Frazier leaps to his feet, cursing.
“Aw, shit,” A.P. spits, but he never moves. Nor does Clive. “I told you”—to Clive—“we should’ve kept the dogs chained.”
“But who would’ve thought—I mean, the fucking pigs coming right up to us like we had a bucket of slops and it’s feeding time?”
“Aw, shit,” A.P. reiterates.
The barking—baying—is already fading away downslope when Frazier, who’s made no move to shoulder his pack or pluck up the rifle propped against it, begins to break down the fire, separating out the burning brands and kicking dirt over the coals. “Well,” he says, glaring first at Clive, then A.P., “aren’t you going to get up off your sorry asses and trail those dogs?”
Reluctantly, with exaggerated stiffness, they get to their feet. They look put-upon, angry, stung by the reproach—they don’t want to be out in this weather, nobody does, and they were only waiting for her to throw in and say Yeah, I’ve had enough, let’s go back. But that isn’t going to be possible now. Now they have to follow the dogs because the dogs are on the scent and they can’t just leave them out there on their own.
“Alma?” Frazier, who’s still poking at the remains of the fire in a shifting robe of smoke that clings to his legs, falls open and wraps itself round again, is watching her. “You up for this? I can take you back, if you want—”
And what’s she going to say? Is she going to say Take me back like some secretly pregnant pencil pusher, like a woman, or pull the damp sweatshirt over her head, wriggle into her clear plastic poncho and heft her pack like the others? “I’m fine,” she says, and then the tarp is rolled up and packed away and the fire stamped out and they’re following Clive and A.P. down into the throat of the canyon, rain overhead, mud underfoot.
She’s not really keeping track of the time—she’s too exhausted for that, too wiped even to lift her wrist and peel back the wet sleeve of her sweatshirt to glance at her watch—but it seems as if they’ve been walking for hours. Trudging down one slope and up the next, the world as wet as it must have been when the continents first emerged from the rolling waters and nothing in sight but more hills, more chaparral, more streams, runlets, rills and cascades, it becomes apparent to her that they won’t be finding the pigs, not today. They might not even find the dogs. Or the road. Or the truck, for that matter. The hunters are out there somewhere, Clive and A.P., moving like machines, like pistons, up and down, up and down. And she’s stuck here behind Frazier, who—and she’s acutely conscious of this—is hanging back for her sake, picking his way carefully across the landscape, silent now, grinless, thinking his own thoughts. They’re working along the ridge, lower down, much lower—so low she can see the looping brown upper reaches of Willows Creek and hear the deflected roar of it as it blasts its way to the sea, water piling atop water—when she spots something below. Movement. A flash of color. It can’t be A.P. or Clive. It can’t be the dogs. Or the pigs. Or any pig. Because the color—it’s moving, definitely moving—is all wrong. The color, and here she calls ahead to Frazier to stop while she drops her backpack at her feet to retrieve her binoculars from the side flap, is pink.
Crotalus Viridis
There is no boat because Wilson has been scared off by the Coast Guard, who motored up alongside the Paladin and by means of a bullhorn ordered him to hoist anchor and quit the premises as the island and its waters were closed indefinitely to all visitors, so that Wilson had no choice in the matter, thinking to head contritely toward Ventura and then circle back after dark, but Dave doesn’t know that. All he knows is that things have gone to shit and that he’s got a dead girl, three hypothermic would-be saboteurs and one shivering, silent and thoroughly pissed-off reporter on his hands. Beyond that, wet through and with the temperature in the forties and rain still falling intermittently, they could die out here, all of them, if they don’t find shelter and build a fire, but a fire’s risky—what they need is Wilson and the boat with the heater in the cabin turned up high and dry clothes and a hot Cup O’ Noodles or coffee, anything to take the chill off.
“Dave, Dave.” Someone’s calling him in the dark, a suspended face given definition in the thinnest illumination leaching in under the clouds from the distant coast, and he backs out of the water, the foam hissing at his ankles, and sees that it’s Josh. “Listen, Dave”—Josh can hardly get the words out he’s shivering so hard—“we need to build a fire, all of us, we’re freezing—”
“No,” he says, freezing himself. “Too risky.”
“Yeah, well, risky or not the girls are gathering driftwood and Suzanne’s got matches, the strike-anywhere kind, like in a plastic pill container so they’re dry? And we’re going to light a fire, a bonfire—it can be a signal. For Wilson.” He breaks off to sneeze, raising a vaporous hand to his face. “Because where is he anyway?”
“Just wait. Give it a few more minutes. He’ll be here.”
“And then what?”
“Then we go aboard, get dry, get warm.”
“What about Kelly?”
“We bring her.”
Josh’s voice comes back at him, hard, furious, on the verge of cracking: “She’s not going to get warm. Not ever.”
It’s all he can do to hold himself back, trying to fight down his emotions, keep control, because he’s the one who’s in deep here, he’s the one they’re going to come after, and he’s been trying to think what to do for the past hour now. They could say she fell off the boat, but then he’s seen CSI—that’d be fresh water in her lungs, not salt. Maybe they were on West Anacapa, hiking, and she slipped and fell down a hill into a rain puddle, a big puddle, deep, a pond really, and by the time they got to her . . . but what about Toni Walsh? Toni Walsh isn’t going to stick her neck out. Toni Walsh has her story and the story’s going to put it to him and no doubt about that. Irresponsible behavior. Lawless. Reckless. A young girl dead, and for what? Finally, he says, “We can’t help that. It was”—and he knows how false he sounds—“just one of those things.”
“Just one of those things? We’re talking about Kelly here. Kelly’s dead, don’t you get it?” Somewhere in the darkness beyond them he can hear the others gathering driftwood, voices tuned low, feet swishing in the sand. The waves beat and recede. The air smells of rot. “We need the police,” Josh is saying, his voice pinched and uneven, as if he’s being strangled. “We have to report it to the police. They’ll come—they’ll take care of, of the body. I mean, radio from the boat.”
He doesn’t answer. And he doesn’t protest when Suzanne, with the scraps of newspaper she’s kept dry in a plastic bag, her strike-anywhere matches and a fierce gale of concentrated fanning and blowing, manages to turn a thin searching finger of flame into a blaze and then a bonfire that consumes anything they can throw into it, wet or dry. He stands there with them, as close as he can get to the fire, hugging his arms to his c
hest, rotating to dry himself, heat the only thing that matters. And when Wilson does come, when the soft sustained hum of the motor rides in over the plangent suck and roar of the waves and the running lights coalesce in the void, he’s not even the first to notice. It’s Cammy. Cammy shouting out, “He’s here! Wilson! He’s here!”
As one, they break away from the fire to rush the water’s edge and watch the lights maneuver into place, listening to the thin metallic screech of the anchor chain unspooling, the discreet plunk of the anchor itself, and then, a moment later, to the muted slap of the inflatable hitting the water. They’re picturing Wilson—oblivious Wilson, happy Wilson—lowering himself into the dinghy preparatory to pulling the engine cord and casting off to come and get them out of this, wrap them in blankets, take them home, when there’s a shout from down the beach. A man’s voice, brutal, roaring, the voice of authority and retribution: “Who’s there? Who is it now?” And then, four figures separating themselves from the night, dogs there too, shorts, slickers, bush hats, guns, “Don’t anybody move.”
The rest is confusion, the dogs nosing up to them, the men with the guns fanning out as if this were some sort of military maneuver, Cammy and Suzanne writhing and flapping their hands and crying out, “Help! We need help here!” like the underage victims in a slasher flick, the fire roaring, the sea pounding, the closing whine of the dinghy’s motor cutting through it all like a thin honed blade, and, staggeringly—How could she have known?—Alma Boyd Takesue emerging from the shadows to the light, the fiercest hateful unforgiving sneer of triumph sealed into her little sliver of a Gook face. It takes him a moment to sort it out. These are the hunters, the pig killers imported from New Zealand, as if there weren’t enough native-born killers to go around. And these are their dogs. And this—the black-haired undersized sneering woman in the mud-spattered gaiters and drooping sweatshirt—this is their boss, the Haupt-executioner herself, here to make sure the blood is being spilled with all due haste and efficiency. Alma. Alma Boyd Takesue.
“Just what do you people think you’re doing here?” the man in the middle, the beefy one with the cocked hat, the rifle strapped to one shoulder and his hand hovering over the pistol at his belt, the one who’d bellowed at them from fifty feet away like some sort of storm trooper—and why not extend the metaphor if it fits?—wants to know. Demands to know.
Josh looks sheepish, Cammy is fighting back tears, Suzanne holding out her palms and rushing plaintively at the jerk, as if he’s some sort of authority here, reiterating in a childish singsong what she’s just communicated—“We need help”—while Toni Walsh plants herself in the sand, slumps her shoulders and tries to light a cigarette. That leaves it to him. And what does he say? He says, “Who the fuck are you to order us around?”
The man takes a step forward till there’s no more than ten feet separating them. His eyes are a cold feral glitter in the firelight. “I’m the man with the gun,” he says. And pauses to let that sink in, the belligerence of it, the implied threat, the stone-cold arrogance, gazing slowly from face to face, taking his time, before his eyes come back to settle on Dave. “And you’re the trespassers. Worse—you’re vandals. Here to interfere with—”
“Bullshit. You’ve got no authority here.” Swinging round savagely to point a shaking finger at Alma. “And you either, Dr. Takesue. This isn’t even Park Service property.”
The inflatable is on the strand now and Wilson, blinking, running a bewildered hand through his hair, steps into the firelight. “Jesus,” he groans, as if to himself, “what the shit is going on here?” And then, to the big killer, the one with the mouth and the boar’s tusks shoved up under his hatband as if he were some sort of aborigine (and why not stick them through his nose, Dave’s thinking, wouldn’t that be more appropriate?): “Who are you people?”
Alma, ignoring them, turns to the big man. “Call the Coast Guard,” she says. “And the ranger station.”
“What,” Dave breaks in, “Ranger Rick to the rescue? Again?” He can’t believe what he’s hearing. “I told you—you’ve got no authority here. None. Zero. Zilch. And you”—raking the loudmouth with his eyes—“you want to start giving orders, let’s see your badge. Where is it, huh? You’re not even an American citizen. You’re just some hired gun, some shithead with about as much respect for life as, as—”
“Shut it,” the man says, and now the gun, the pistol, is in his hand.
“I’m making a citizen’s arrest”—Alma glances round the circle of faces, her mouth set, eyes hard. “Until the proper authorities get here and we can—”
It’s Suzanne who cuts her off. She throws back her head and shrieks, all the misery and frustration and horror of the day pouring out of her in a long shattering fusillade of helplessness and rage. “Don’t you understand? There’s been an accident!” she cries, her shoulders heavy with the burden of it, all her facial muscles pulled tight till she could be wearing a latex mold of her own face. “Somebody got hurt, a girl, she, she—”
“She’s dead.” Toni Walsh, the cigarette at her lips, finally adds her voice to the mix. She’s come up silently to stand beside Dave, her shoulders hunched, strands of salmon hair laminated to the side of her throat just above the seasickness patch. She shoots him a look of impatience—worse: of hate, of doom—then addresses Alma. “You’re going to need to call the coroner.”
The night is like the first night the island ever saw, still, enveloping, silent but for the regular thump of the waves, the sky close and breathing out its moisture, life-giving and sustaining. Wild night. Night apart. Night on the island. They’ve all had a look at the motionless form encased in the wrapped-up tube of the poncho like a nymph in its chrysalis, a nymph that will never emerge, death come down to sit amongst them and quiet them. Wilson passes round a thermos of hot coffee overloaded with sugar, the big man’s radio crackles at his lips, people recede into the gloom and emerge again with gnarled lengths of driftwood to toss on the fire. Ten minutes have sifted by. The hunters—almost human—have shared around their energy bars and jerky with Cammy and Suzanne, whose chewing muscles work greedily in the firelight despite their shock and grief, and while Dr. Alma and the big man stand apart with their radio, Dave gathers Wilson and Josh to him on the far side of the fire, out of hearing, because his mind’s been racing the whole time, the fury in him, the rage, held in reserve for just this moment, the moment of decision, of extraction, of getting the fuck out of here before the Coast Guard shows up and damn the consequences.
“I don’t care,” he says, spitting it out, “they can shoot me if they want. I dare them to. I tell you, they’ve got no right to hold us here.” He kicks angrily in the sand at his feet. “It’s kidnapping, you know that? Forcibly detaining somebody. You know what a court of law would do to these clowns?”
Wilson, the faintest shade of the barrio creeping into his voice: “But it looks bad. I mean, who would’ve thought? This girl—Kelly, right? The one with the PETA thing?”
“Yeah, it sucks,” he says, staring into the darkness out beyond them. “No, worse than that. It’s a disaster. A tragedy. And we all feel it, don’t we? But it’s our problem—right, Josh? You with me?—and it’s for us to deal with it. An accident, that’s all. We were hiking and there was an accident.”
Josh says nothing. He’s there, though, compact, gleaming, his face buttery and soft in the glow of the fire, the tough guy reduced. The thing is, can he be counted on?
“You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to take Kelly to Cottage Hospital, that’s what we’re going to do. She died in an accident, it’s nobody’s fault. And what we were doing out here today is nobody’s business but ours, am I right?”
The fire cracks and hisses. Smoke, a dead stinking pall of it, runs at their faces, then sweeps back to chase away on the breeze. After a moment, sotto voce, Wilson says, “I’m with you, man. We don’t have to listen to these pendejos, I mean, who are they?”
“Exactly.”
Then the
y’re moving, he, Wilson and Josh, downwind of the fire and across the short stretch of sand to where the body lies wrapped in its dark winding sheet. They have it—her—in hand, him in front, Josh in the middle, Wilson at her feet, the weight staggering, concentrated, enormous, and they actually make it across the beach to the inflatable before one of the hunters shouts out, “Hey, what’re you doing?” and everybody’s shoving in all over again, even the dogs.
His wet boots are wetter suddenly, socks squelching, surf foaming at his shins. It’s hard to keep hold of her, hard to see what they’re doing, the black rubber bottom of the dinghy like a hole cut out of the earth—like a grave, that’s what he’s thinking—but he never hesitates. “What do you think you’re doing?” the hunter elaborates, but the three of them, wet all over again, ignore him, laying their burden in the bottom of the boat while Wilson takes hold of the line to drag the boat into the water.
This is not a matter of reason, reflection, debate. He’s had it, stacked right up to his ears with it, and when one of them puts a hand on his arm he flings it off so violently he has to stagger to keep his balance. “Get your fucking hands off me,” he says, and his voice is low and even because he’s ready for anything now, beyond threat or calculation or even caring. “What are you going to do, shoot me? Go ahead, you motherfucker. Because this is our problem, this is our”—he hesitates, wanting to say comrade but thinking better of it—“friend here. Kelly. And we’re going to do what we were going to do before you”—he slashes his arm in Alma’s direction—“and your hired goons butted in.”
“You can’t—” she sputters, and she even takes a step toward him, toward the surf, but whatever the prohibition is she can’t seem to find the words to frame it.