It’s a struggle, elbows, arms and wrists as weak as if they’ve been de-boned, but she works herself into an upright position and in the next moment her feet are finding their way into the sandals, though the Velcro straps are too much for her and for now at least they’ll have to remain unfastened. She sits there a moment watching the flies gather at the window, their world turned alien on them, the sweet generous air that floated them on its wafting currents to soup pots and trash cans and tender bits of carrion gone as hard and impermeable now as rock, and how could this have happened, what mystery has intervened? They can’t know. They can only fumble and buzz and die, paradise right there before their eyes and unattainable for all that. If she were in Guam still, there’d be a gecko to climb the wall and feast on them, but here the reptiles are more circumspect. But dinner’s ready, definitely, and in the next moment she’s on her feet and moving across the parched floorboards, through the doorway and into the main room, where everybody looks up as one and everybody seems to be grinning.
“Jesus, Alma,” Frazier roars out, his face red and getting redder, “we thought you’d gone and given birth to triplets back there—just toughed it out and bit off the umbilical all on your own.” He mugs for the others, shifting the glass from his right hand to his left as he crosses the room to her, spreads his fingers wide across the swell of her abdomen and crows, “Nope, they’re still in there, folks. And I don’t blame them—what baby in his right mind would want to come out and face this bloody bunch of drunks and bush crazies?”
“Speak for yourself,” somebody says, and the laughter is general.
Annabelle floats in to intercede, playfully pushing Frazier away from her and holding up a bottle for Alma’s inspection. “Sparkling cider, non-alcoholic. Thought you might want a glass—do you?”
“Yes, that would be nice,” she says, her voice soft and delicate, a flutter in her own ears. “If anybody left me a clean glass, that is.”
A hoot from A.P., who makes a show of throwing back his wine in a gulp, then getting up to wash the glass at the tap and elaborately dry it with the one semi-clean corner of the dishtowel before handing it to her with a flourish. Annabelle is right there on cue, moving in with the bottle to fill the glass and call for a toast. “To Alma,” she says. “And the baby!”
“Or babies,” Frazier puts in.
“Easy for you to say”—Annabelle bends to refill her own glass from the nearest bottle of pinot grigio—“but you’re not the one who has to carry all that weight around.” She pauses, reconsidering, and reaches out to pat his midsection. “Though on second thought . . .”
“Not me, I swear I’m not pregnant.”
“Sextuplets!” A.P. shouts. “Anything less is, is”—he’s weaving, grinning, trying to drink from the neck of the bottle and make sense at the same time—“insupportable. Or unsustainable. Or, or—whatever.”
She’s due in two and a half weeks. Everyone’s aware of that, even Freeman Lorber, who tried his best to assert his authority over her and for the first few weeks after she began showing kept insisting he’d be best man at the wedding till she let him know that there wasn’t going to be a wedding and it was none of his business in any case. All you need to worry about, she told him, and she’d let her voice harden till there was no coming back, is who’s going to look after things when I’m on maternity leave—which is only going to be a week, five working days, so don’t get that look on your face. If there are any surprises—if she should go into early labor and she happens to be here on the island—there’ll be plenty of time to get back to the mainland, if not by boat, then helicopter. But that’s not going to happen because she’ll be back at home for the last week and her mother will be there with her. And Ed. Ed, with the car gassed and tires inflated, already primed to floor it all the way to the hospital.
After dinner, she takes a chair outside to sit and watch the light change over the rise behind the bunkhouse. Her book is back on her bed, but she doesn’t need a book, not here, not tonight. Everything is still, the swallows back in their nests, the grasshoppers that the foxes so love to crush between their teeth settling down in the high yellow grass, the colors of the buildings and the fields and the chaparral shifting and melding in exactly the way of the Diebenkorn paintings hanging in the main house—and Diebenkorn stayed here, right here, walked this very ground, a friend and guest of Carey Stanton in the time before all this became public land, or at least held in trust for the public. She’s thinking about that, about capturing this scene, the sweep and solace of it, in oils or even pencil, how very nearly impossible that must be, and of her last attempts at figurative art, in the seventh or eighth grade, which wound up looking more like abstract expressionism, when one of the fox girls, Allison, comes out to join her.
The light has begun to fade, bats careering across the open spaces, a cool current of sea air creeping up the pass from the ocean. Allison—a smoker—settles in on the ground beside her, resting her back up against the rough stucco wall. “Do you mind?” she asks, waving the unlit cigarette at her.
“No, go ahead,” she says, but she can’t help feeling the slightest tick of annoyance. Couldn’t she smoke out back? Up on top of the ridge? On one of the buoys in the channel? Anywhere but here?
“I mean, I’m downwind of you, I’m pretty sure.” There’s the flare of the match, the pursed lips, the sharp assaultive odor of charred weed, and then it’s gone, drifting along the base of the house like a spirit summoned and dismissed.
For a moment they’re silent, Alma staring off across the expanse of the yard to where the compost bin rises up like a building itself, Allison absorbed in her cigarette. The bats ricochet off nothing, the shadows go one degree denser. Then, just to say something, to be gracious and welcoming instead of merely old, pregnant and bearish, Alma says, “Dinner was great. You guys really outdid yourselves.”
“You like it?”
“I think I ate too much.”
“Yeah, I mean, when Marg and I saw the rockfish A.P. caught we figured bread it, flash-fry it and then set it aside so it won’t get soggy, then the rest was easy, your standard stir-fry with brown rice. And wine.” She lets out a laugh. “Enough wine and anything tastes good.” Allison’s a blonde, what Alma’s mother would call a dirty blonde, thin-faced and pretty and no older than the girl Dave LaJoy brought out here to die.
“Well, whatever,” Alma says, “you were inspired tonight. Really, you guys should open your own restaurant.”
But Allison doesn’t respond. She’s looking off in the direction of the compost bin. “What’s that,” she says in a whisper, “a fox? Or no, that can’t be a fox, can it?”
The foxes, used to a free handout when they were caged, are common around the ranch now, even in daylight. Alma has identified six different individuals making the rounds of the compost every night, delicately gourmandizing on the leftovers, which tonight would feature a certain irresistible quantity of rockfish skin, guts and bone. But Allison—she’s a fox girl, after all—is right. Even without her glasses, Alma can see that. This is no fox. The movement is all wrong, too humped and discontinuous, not nearly fluid enough. “Skunk,” Alma says, rising from the chair in the same moment Allison unfolds herself from the ground to stand there beside her. “What else could it be?”
And that’s when things become interesting, the two of them advancing cautiously across the drive and up the slight rise where the seasonal grasses have been scythed to yellow stumps and the occasional eruption of hacked fennel shows itself like a clenched green fist, the going unsteady, the fading light playing tricks with their eyes. Both are trying to minimize their movements as in some children’s game, red light-green light, keeping their arms at their sides and freezing in place after each step. The bin is no more than fifty feet away now. They’re squinting their eyes to focus against the descending screen of the night, but even in the diminished light it becomes apparent to both of them that this creature, working its paws like a peasant woman bent ove
r her wash on the banks of a nighttime river, is neither fox nor skunk. For one thing, it’s too big. And the movement is all wrong. The fur. The way it sits back on its haunches while it eats. For an instant, puzzlement giving way to outrage, Alma sees a dog there before her, a ragged stinking disease-spreading mongrel some idiot boater set loose without a thought to the consequences, to the disaster canine distemper or parvovirus could wreak on the fox population, but then she sees that this is no dog either. Amazingly, bewilderingly, it seems to be something else altogether. Something with a mask and articulated fingers and a long striped bushed-out tail.
The Separation Zone
So it’s June finally and the channel’s full of boats and all the pigs are dead and nobody knows and nobody cares. His approach is he’s not going to be bitter, not get himself worked up where it’s not going to do any good. FPA is defunct, just a sad joke now, every last nickel in donations evaporated in the face of Toni Walsh’s assault and the way the national papers picked up on it. Not to mention the blogs. Where what they’d been doing once seemed heroic in the eyes of a certain demographic, now they’ve become a symbol of willfulness and excess—and worse, of a kind of clownish incompetence that makes him ashamed to hold up his head in public. Even Marta, fat-assed pathetic Marta, who’s in the kitchen right now making damn sure his eggs are over easy and his toast is at least malleable, referenced the situation one bleak early morning when the café was full to bursting and everybody—right down to the greasy-pantsed apprentice bum who shuffled in each morning for his take-out coffee—was listening. “Looks like you got yourself some trouble, that right, Dave?” she said, making sure her voice was pitched loud enough for them all to hear, though she was careful to let the pouchy folds of her face droop in a simulacrum of sympathy. Burning with rage and humiliation, he’d looked past her to sweep the room with his eyes—just let anybody crack a smile—and then, in a controlled voice said, “Nothing I can’t handle.”
He’s sitting in a window seat brooding over that little scene, over all the unfortunate scenes of his shit life in the course of the past four months, watching the traffic ease past on the slick streets, the fog so dense it seems to create each successive car out of nothing. What he wants is a second cup of coffee and his eggs and toast, but Marta has been moving as if the floor’s made out of flypaper and it’s been at least five minutes since she disappeared into the kitchen, probably for a smoke or maybe a blood transfusion or better yet, a new brain. Does he hate her? No. He tolerates her, that’s all, the way he tolerates all the other half-wits and incompetents of the world. Does he want to find another café, one with better food and better service? No. Because he’s a creature of habit, for better or worse, and he’ll be the first to admit it—even to Anise, who wouldn’t set foot in a place like this. Especially to Anise.
At least the court business is behind him, or mostly. The civil suit’s a joke—Kelly was an adult and went along willingly, in service of her own needs and beliefs—and it’ll never get past summary judgment. And Sterling has got the criminal charges reduced to a single misdemeanor count of trespass, to which Dave will plead guilty—proudly, and puff it up in his blog on the FPA website for whoever’s still out there—and pay the fine and move on. Which is what today is all about. When he’s done with breakfast, if Marta can ever drag herself through the swinging door and actually deliver it, which, if he’s not mistaken, is what she’s paid to do, he’s going to go to the supermarket, stock up on some sandwich things, tofu, cherry tomatoes, red peppers, mushrooms and sweet onions for kebabs, a couple bottles of nice local wine, and then he’s taking Anise, Wilson and Alicia out to Coches for the weekend. To relax. Do some snorkeling. Catch some sun. And the radio did promise sun by noon, all appearances to the contrary.
He shoots a savage look at the motionless slab of the kitchen door, with its greased-over wire-glass window and the smudged push plate, then turns back to the fog and the reborn cars. Is it his imagination or does it seem a degree thinner? Because a minute ago he couldn’t see that fire hydrant across the street, could he?
This is the moment at which a woman appears out of the fog, sidesteps the hydrant, gives a quick glance in both directions and crosses the street as if she’s coming directly to him. She’s thirty-five, forty maybe, wearing a skirt, dark hose, slick black vinyl boots that rise to her knees, her face round and sweet and generous, big soulful eyes, all made up at six-thirty on a Saturday morning and with a white beret cutting a sharp mysterious line just above her eyebrows. A quick little hop and she’s up on the curb, the walk, coming right up to the window, and she’s nobody he knows, is she? Her pupils are dilated, hugely, dark planetoids rimmed with a corona of cola brown, making her appear vulnerable, soft, receptive—isn’t that the look of love? Or is it just myopia? She’s right there, inches away, but she’s not looking at him, hasn’t come for him at all. She’s peering past him, scanning the interior, the counter, the booths, looking for somebody, until all of a sudden she realizes he’s there and flashes him a wide teetering smile of surrender.
Normally, at this hour in the morning, interrupted in his own booth—caught out—he might have scowled. But not today. Today’s different. Today’s the start of something, of relaxation into the world, of acceptance, joy and forgiveness, and so he smiles right back at her, and that smile, though he has Anise and she has somebody too, somebody who’ll show up at any minute and breeze into the place with her on his arm, says that he is willing and able and ready for anything.
There are lines at the supermarket, though everybody should be sleeping still, shouldn’t they? He can’t help feeling a stab of the old familiar impatience as the checkout woman calls futilely for a checker at checkstand three—Randy? Randy, checkstand three?—and no one shows up so that he has to wait for the old man moving like an undersea diver who’s forgotten his Vons card and can’t remember his phone number and the three women buying a year’s supply of groceries each, as if they were going straight home to lock themselves in their bunkers, before he can finally get some service, and though the checker is all caffeinated and chattery he responds to every idiotic word out of her mouth in monosyllables until he’s out the door with a You have a nice day now ringing at his back.
At home, he leaves the groceries in the car, taking a moment to shift the perishables into the cooler in the back, then going on into the house to let the dogs out in the yard. He’s arranged with the maid, Guadalupe, to come over in the evening and look after their needs and then again tomorrow morning, so there’s no worry on that score. The dogs—they’ve already been out once, at dawn, when he woke and went to fetch the paper—slink across the lawn to do their business in their hunched skeletal way. They’ve been abused, imprinted with pain, running all their fine-boned lives, from the puppy mill to the track to the kennel and back to the track until they’re too old to run and along comes the man with the needle—from whom he’s saved them, these two at least. Still, they’re timid, skulking beasts, ghosting around the house as if they were ashamed to be seen. He watches them for a moment, then checks the time and whistles them back to the house. It’s eight-thirty and Stiles is due at nine.
At nine precisely there’s a buzz at the gate and then Stiles’s acid-etched tones leaching through the intercom like a message from a distant planet. “It’s me, Stiles,” he says. “I got your goods.”
If Dave was expecting some sort of Southern caricature in overalls and a reversed feedlot hat driving a hard-used pickup with bales of hay and neck-craning goats in back he’s surprised. Stiles is driving a freshly waxed GMC Yukon, same model as his own, only newer, and when he pulls up in front of the house and steps out into the paved drive to take Dave’s hand in his own, he’s dressed no differently from a suburbanite at the mall. And he’s young, much younger than Dave would have guessed from hearing his voice over the phone—Stiles can’t be much older than he is himself.
“Yeah, well, thanks for coming,” Dave says, dropping the man’s hand.
; An awkward pause follows, Stiles just staring at him as if awaiting a speech of praise and deliverance. After a moment he says, “This your place?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty pricey, I’d guess.”
Dave shrugs. “It’s California.”
“Tell me about it.” Another pause, longer this time. “But I’m a man of my word, no matter, and the price we agreed on if I’m not mistaking, is thirty apiece. That right?”
“That’s right. How many did you wind up—?”
“Ten. Each one in their own separate burlap bag,” he says, moving to the back of the SUV now and pulling open the rear hatch.
Dave peers in. There’s the same interior light he’s got on his car, the same gray carpet and hard vinyl storage compartments. Atop the carpet, a sheet of plastic, and atop the plastic, distributed like sacks of onions or potatoes, are the burlap sacks. Look closely and you can see movement there, a flex and release of muscle like a wave rippling and breaking across the dull tan surface of the material.
“You put ’em separate so you don’t get ’em biting each other. They’re not immune to their own poison, you got to know that. I seen it where they get so mad they bite their own self, like suicide. You don’t want that. Not at thirty per.”
Until this moment he hasn’t really considered the lethality of the things—they’re snakes, that’s all, rattlesnakes, and if Santa Catalina has them, why shouldn’t Santa Cruz, and so what if Dr. Alma happens to step on one some blissful sunny morning? That’s nature, isn’t it? But now, looking at the mute brown sacks and the living presence lurking inside them, he can feel a thrill run through him, no different from the thrill of fear and excitement he felt the first time he ever saw a gun, a pistol, an inert black metal object lying casually on a kitchen counter in a neighborhood kid’s house. It was just there, dully gleaming beside the sugar bowl and the cookie jar, but it had the potential to come fatally to life. “How do I handle them? I mean, will they bite through the bag or what?”