“Is this Dave I’m talking to?”
He doesn’t recognize the voice, a man’s voice, low and whispery, jangling with some sort of unreconstructed redneck accent. “That’s right,” he says. “Who’s this?”
The name means nothing to him. It flies right out of his head. He needs coffee, eggs, toast, something substantial on his stomach. It takes him a moment to register what the man on the phone, a friend of an associate of a friend of Wilson’s, is trying to communicate. “I can git you what you want,” the man says. “As many as you want. Only question is price. Thirty apiece? That sound okay to you?”
What he’s talking about, and it comes to Dave in a flash, is rattlesnakes—the western rattlesnake, Crotalus viridis, to be exact. He’s too surprised—or no, overwhelmed by the timing—to respond.
“You there? Can you hear me? I say this is Everson Stiles, from Wellspring? In Texas?”
“Yeah,” he says, recovering himself. “Yeah, okay. Yeah, I hear you. I’m interested. Very interested.”
It was months ago, around the time he’d gone out to the island with the raccoons, that he’d asked Wilson to put out some feelers for him, and this was the contact he’d come up with. Everson Stiles, formerly pastor of an evangelical Christian church that believed in bringing the serpent right into the house of worship. Every year there would be a rattlesnake roundup and the parishioners would show up with burlap sacks of them and roll around on the floor in their midst, speaking in tongues and prevailing upon the Lord to keep them from harm. But the Lord, apparently, let them down, and people were bitten—one, a ten-year-old girl, fatally. There was a lawsuit and it went against the church and that was the end of the practice and the church too.
“Plus expenses. Travel, I mean. Gas money.”
“What, all the way from Texas?”
There’s a brief snort of laughter on the other end of the line. “No, all that’s done with. Now I’m in Ojai. Right up the street from you. And I tell you, this is the time to get ’em, when they’re denned up for the winter? Big balls of ’em, all wound up together. You wait till they emerge in spring and it’s basically one snake at a time, and then the price’s going to go up.”
He’s trying to envision it, snakes in a bag, flexing and roiling, three bags, four, laid out on the concrete floor in the garage, and he’s going to want other things too—more raccoons, rabbits maybe, gophers, what about gophers? “Sounds fine,” he says, feeling himself expand with the exactitude of that vision, rabbits in cages twitching their noses, thumping their feet, giving him a wide anxious walleyed look. And not the white ones you get as a kid at Easter, but jackrabbits, big rangy wild-hearted things honed for survival. “No, the price is fine, and I want them, I do. Definitely. But listen, this isn’t a good time—can I get back to you?”
The instant he hangs up the phone rings, startling him out of his reverie. It’s Anise, asking if he slept well, and his mood comes crashing down all over again.
“You know I didn’t. And no thanks to you.”
“Look, why don’t you pick me up for lunch and fill me in on the details, then we can go up to the gig together, all right?”
He says nothing, hating her.
“I can make an announcement,” she offers, and he can picture her in her kitchen, chewing on the end of a pencil or a breadstick, everything in its place, gleaming and safe. “About the girl and what happened, what we’re up against. Or flyers, we can do flyers, if you want.”
“You don’t know what I’ve been through,” he says finally, sounding soft and self-pitying in his own ears, giving in. “You can’t begin to imagine.”
The Wreck of the Anubis
When she gets off the phone with Maria Campos, the lawyer Freeman Lorber recommended, she’s so wrought up she has to go directly into the kitchen and pour herself a glass of sake just to keep from collapsing like a vacant suit of clothes. She takes a long steady drink, staring out into the sodden pit of the yard, the ferns bowed by the recent storm, the lawn a swamp, the eucalyptus shedding bark in long tattered strips. The sun is shining, at least there’s that, but the condo feels alien and sterile and everything in it, from the woodblock prints her grandmother Takesue left her to the forest-green leather couch with the cherry frame that cost her a month and a half’s salary to the stereo and the potted Dracena and even the Micah Stroud CDs stacked on the bookshelf, seems as if it belongs to someone else. Tim is gone. And without Tim, the place is empty, abandoned, useless. For a moment she feels as if she’s going to cry, and she doesn’t want to cry, not over Tim or Dave LaJoy or anybody else, and she has to press the cold glass to her forehead, hold it there right between her eyebrows like a compress, till the moment passes.
What Maria Campos has just told her is so outrageous she can’t process it—a joke, a crazy sick perverted joke made all the worse because it’s no joke at all but the hard truth of what the world is and what she’s facing. Personally. Not as Projects Coordinator and Director of Information Services of the Channel Islands National Park who’s only doing her job and fighting day and night to improve things and give the ecosystem a chance to recover, flourish, bloom, but as an individual before the law. In the morning—tomorrow, Monday morning, her trip to the island cut short because of the incident at Willows so that she got only the single day in the field, as if that isn’t punishment enough—she has to report to the Santa Barbara County courthouse on a warrant stemming from what happened out on the island or have the police come get her. Incredibly. As if she were the criminal and the true criminals the law-abiding citizens. Even worse, arrest warrants have been issued for Frazier, Clive and A.P., meaning that they’ll have to be pulled off the hunt for a day at least, maybe more—and just at the most crucial time.
“You can’t be serious,” she’d said, the phone like a grenade about to explode in her hand.
“I know it’s upsetting,” Maria returned, her voice firm, business-like, as if all this were nothing, the commonest thing in the world, “but you have to appear on this warrant whether the charges are legitimate or not. But believe me”—and her tone hardened—“we’ll get these charges dismissed and see that the bad guys get what’s coming to them. All right? Don’t you even think about it. Just put it out of your head.”
“But I’ve never—I mean, I’ve never even had a speeding ticket.”
“I know, I know. But just let it go. I’ll take care of everything, okay?” She paused, waiting for Alma to protest, then, in a softer tone, she said, “Listen, why don’t you go take a walk on the beach, go to a movie, anything. What about Tim? Have Tim take you out to dinner.”
There was so much wrong here Alma couldn’t begin to put the pieces back in place. All she said, her voice dropping to a murmur, was “Okay.”
“It’s nothing, I’m telling you. Just a desperate maneuver on their part. You’ll see. Trust me.”
And now, the phone back in its cradle, the dry cold rumor of the sake lingering on her palate and her mind drifting out of focus, she lifts the glass to her lips and then abruptly sets it down again. What is she thinking? She can’t drink. Not at all, not a drop. And she had alcohol yesterday, only yesterday, as if she were some out-of-control knocked-up teenager in the ghetto. She upends the glass in the sink, thinking fetal alcohol syndrome, cognitive impairment, mental retardation, and her hand is shaking when she sets it down again. She’s got to get a grip. Got to be strong. In command. The only thing is, she doesn’t feel anything but weak and confused and hurt.
It’s just past ten in the morning. Though she slept in the boat on the way back, it was a hazy intermittent sleep, and every time she opened her eyes Toni Walsh and the two girls were staring at her as if she were their jailer and they were only watching for the chance to make their escape, as if they could fly or walk on water, and now she can feel the tiredness seeping into her, an exhaustion so complete it deadens her legs till they feel as if they’re detached from her, and she has to pull out a chair at the kitchen table and sit heavily
. For a long while she just sits there staring out the window, and then, inevitably, humiliatingly, uselessly, she reaches for the phone and dials Tim’s number.
She’s expecting nothing. He’s on the Farallones, in the field, where there’s no cell service—she knows that as well as anybody. But then maybe he’s gone into San Francisco, for supplies, for R & R, and he’s just arrived, just stepped off the boat, which is why he hasn’t called her yet, and he’ll answer, he’s got to answer, because she wants to hear his voice, has to hear it. . . Her stomach turns over. One knee begins jittering under the table. But she’s expecting nothing and nothing is what she gets. The phone rings twice, there’s a distant faint click, and then the line goes dead.
In the morning she puts on her navy blue suit over a white silk blouse fresh from the cleaner’s, slips into her stockings and heels, and appears in court, Maria Campos at her side, and nothing much happens, except that she wastes an entire morning sitting there listening to one case after another until she gets her two minutes in front of the judge, who barely glances at her before releasing her on bond to appear again the following month. When she finally does get to the office, Alicia is nowhere to be seen—an emergency came up and she’s taking one of her personal days, that’s what Suzie Jessup, in the adjoining office, tells her—and there’s a sea of paperwork to get through and a string of e-mails half a mile long. Work. It’s what she needs—it’s what absorbs her—and it isn’t until half-past two, when she’s beginning to feel the urge for a tall iced tea with lemon and maybe a bite to eat, that she leaves her desk and heads down the stairs to the walkway along the marina, thinking to get something at the Docksider. She’s strolling along absently, trying to clear her head, when suddenly she catches herself. There’s something different here, something out of the ordinary, but what is it? She scans the walkway (tourists, strolling), the Park Service building (tourists, milling, passing in and out to gape at the relief map of the islands and the other first-floor exhibits) and finally the broad expanse of the parking lot (sunshine glinting off the glass and chrome of the cars parked in their neatly aligned rows) before it hits her: the protestors are gone.
It’s astonishing. As if she’d awakened in her concrete hut in Guam to step outside and see the jungle vanished overnight. The protestors are gone. No more chants, no more defamatory signs, no more graffiti. Have they given up? Finally? At long last? The thought comes to her—the happy thought, rushing through her in a surge of exhilaration—that they’re gone because their motive force is gone. Because Dave LaJoy is behind bars or out on bail or lurking in an alley someplace pulling the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head like a mafioso or a disgraced senator. He’s made the fatal misstep. He’s done. Finished. And the pig hunt is progressing so far ahead of schedule that by the time he does surface again the project will be over and done with and he’ll have nothing to protest. Won’t that be sweet?
The idea fills her with light. Everything around her seems to glow as if it’s been re-created from dross, new and shining and bright. The mood carries her all the way up the walk to the Docksider, and she finds herself nodding at people she vaguely recognizes and pausing to smile over a young mother and her toddler sharing a floating pink cloud of cotton candy, but then, mounting the stairs, she feels the heaviness creeping over her again, the weight inside her as immovable as a brick—how she’d love to tell Tim the news, radiate her joy, share the sweet taste of victory and vindication. But there is no Tim and the lunch crowd has gone back to work and the place feels vacant and vaguely depressing. She’s just one for lunch, just one, thanks, and when the hostess tries to steer her to an undersized table in the middle of the room, she insists on a booth by the window that’s usually reserved for parties of four or more, and why not? She’s tired of being pushed around. Tired of everything. Just tired.
Staring at the menu, trying to decide whether she’ll have a cup or bowl of the clam chowder with her crab Louie, it takes her a moment to realize that the Korean woman from the variety store downstairs is standing there beside the table. Mrs. Kim. She has a newspaper in her hand, the Press Citizen, and she’s holding it out in offering. “You have seen this yet?” she asks.
Alma hasn’t seen it. She was in such a state this morning, what with the tension of having to get to court and worrying whether she could leave the blouse untucked so as to hide the fact that her jacket would no longer button across her midsection, that she’d forgotten all about it. Half the time she runs right over the paper anyway, remembering it only when she pulls into the driveway at night to see it lying there scuffed and torn. Which doesn’t really matter because it’s a rag in any case, blustering and cocksure and half-competent and on the wrong side of just about everything she believes in. Tim used to call it the Press Critizen.
“No,” Alma says. “No, why?”
Mrs. Kim, an erect tall woman in her mid-seventies who once startled Alma by remarking, after a casual exchange of greetings, You Nihon-jin, eh?, lays the paper on the table and with a smile of complicity gently pushes it to her. “You going to like what they print today. Free copy. You take.”
Before the thank-you is out of her mouth, she fastens on the headline: Death on Santa Cruz. And below it: Questionable Tactics on Part of FPA Lead to Death of City College Sophomore by Toni Walsh.
Mrs. Kim backs away slowly, giving an abbreviated bow, which Alma, seated, returns as best she can. “No more protestor, eh?” the old woman says, winking. “Bad for business anyway. You business, my business too.”
Alma, heart pounding, smiles up at her. “You can say that again.”
The article isn’t everything she could have hoped for, but clearly, for the first time since all this began, the newspaper of record in Santa Barbara is attempting to distance itself from LaJoy and his gang of crazies. He’s still seen as a crusader and TNC and the Park Service as the enemy, but Toni Walsh—muddied, bloodied and thoroughly provoked—cuts him loose, sounding more like an editorialist than a reporter:
Activist and local businessman David Francis LaJoy, 47, of Montecito, founder and president of the animal rights organization For the Protection of Animals, was arrested late Saturday evening after a bizarre and tragic incident on Santa Cruz Island. Mr. LaJoy led a group of his followers in an alleged attempt to sabotage the Park Service’s campaign to exterminate the island’s feral hogs after the failure of a last-minute injunction to stop the hunt. Members of the party claim that he proceeded recklessly despite the severe weather conditions that struck over the weekend. In attempting a dangerous climb at the direction of Mr. LaJoy in an area of extensive flooding, Kelly Ann Johansson, 19, of Goleta, fell to her death.
Mr. LaJoy was charged with criminal trespass, vandalism and conspiracy. The parents of the deceased, Ronald and Eva Johansson, also of Goleta, contacted by phone, had no comment, but a family friend, who asked to remain anonymous, states that they are planning to file a wrongful death suit against Mr. LaJoy.
She reads the article twice through, feeling better now, much better. When the food comes, she leaves the newspaper spread out before her so she can run her eyes over the headline and the murky file photo of the pier at Prisoners’ Harbor they’ve dug out to accompany it. The chowder is delicious, rich with clams, potatoes, butter, the crab Louis the best she’s ever had. She finds herself wiping the plate clean with chunks of the hot sourdough bread the management prides itself on and she winds up eating too much, or it feels that way anyway. When finally she looks up, it’s well past three, and despite the lift the iced tea gave her, she can barely push herself up from the chair. She’s sleepy, exhausted, but even as the idea of taking off early comes into her head, she dismisses it.
Once she’s outside, she forces herself to pick up the pace, snapping her knees in a martial stride and taking in great lungfuls of sea air, the marina tranquil, the parking lot just a parking lot once again. The breeze is soft and fragrant, wafting up out of the south in a hint of the season to come, and she takes a moment to stand
there on the patch of lawn out back and turn her face to it while the custodian emerges from the rear door to shake out his mop and a half a dozen starlings squabble over a spill of French fries on the walk. Then it’s back to work, her mood darkening again when she sees Alicia’s empty chair, and she settles in at her desk thinking that when Alicia comes up for evaluation, she’s going to have to act on her conscience. That’s all there is to it. And she’s sorry if she’s going to hurt anybody’s feelings.
She winds up working till six, trying to make up for wasting the morning in court, though of course she would have been out on the island still if it weren’t for what happened at Willows, so she can’t be too hard on herself. She’s thinking about that, about the scene on the island, about the dead girl, as she locks the door behind her, makes her way down the steps and crosses the deserted lot to her car. Coming up the beach with the men and the dogs, she’d felt powerful, in charge, and at first, seeing the humped and useless form flung down there in the sand beneath the wet poncho, she’d thought it was a pig, one of the dead pigs they’d pulled out of a ravine and were planning to spirit back to the coast and put on display. Her blood sang in her ears. Removing anything from the island, animal, vegetable or mineral, was a crime, and here they were, caught out at it, and it wasn’t enough that they were trespassing and trying to interfere with a project that had already cost taxpayers millions of dollars, but they were trying to possess wildlife as well, steal it, own it, use it, when as anybody knows all wildlife throughout the country, on public or private land, is the property of the government. She was savage, worked up, thrilling with the joy of nailing them, finally nailing them, when a knot flared in the fire and the form beneath the poncho became something else altogether.