Stiles reaches in and slides one of the bags out, hefting it by the knot on top. His arm strains. The shape shifts inside the bag, going heavy at the bottom. “Might. But they like the bag, like the dark. They don’t want to bite what they can’t see—or fix on with their radar.”
“Radar?”
“That’s what I call it. Heat sensors. For detecting warm-blooded prey when they come out slinkin’ at night. Mice and such. Rabbits.” He holds out the bag. “Here, you want to hold it? No?” A smile now, ungenerous, pinched down at the corners. “You want a look at least, see you’re gettin’ your money’s worth?”
“No,” he hears himself say, waving the flat of one hand. “That’s okay.”
A silence. Stiles is watching him, that uncharitable look on his face still. “All right then, have it your way. That’ll be three hundred. Cash. And forget the gas money. You want me to put ’em in the back of your vehicle for you?”
“Yeah, sure,” Dave says, trying to extract his wallet from his pocket and flip open the rear hatch of the Yukon at the same time. “Am I going to need plastic like you have?”
A shrug. “They might shit, I guess. It’s a wicked smell once it’s in the carpet. But you can have this sheet here if you want. I got no use for it.”
And that’s it. Stiles flips back the plastic sheet like a waiter changing tablecloths and spreads it across the floor of Dave’s car, smoothing out the wrinkles with a brusque stroke of one hand. Then he hoists the burlap sacks, two at a time, laying them in gently on top. When he’s done, Dave hands him the money, three hundred-dollar bills. Stiles takes a moment, fanning them out in his hand before folding them once and stuffing them in his right front pocket. Then he tips an imaginary hat and climbs into the cab of his truck. The door slams. The engine turns over, smooth as a vacuum cleaner. One final thing, his head craning out the window, his smile so tight it’s almost a grimace: “Nice vehicle you got there.” There’s a soft mechanical thump as he eases the transmission into drive. “I do like your style.”
Dave is aboard the boat nearly an hour before he told the others to show up, stowing things (the snakes he intends as a surprise, sort of like the capper to the day, and he lays them gingerly below, one at a time, careful to keep the sacks away from contact with his body) and generally making ready to go to sea. There’s a stop at the fueling dock, then back to his berth to prepare the sandwiches and marinate the tofu and veggies for kebabs. The wine is in the cooler, beer too—Wilson’s a real beer hound—and the rabbits are in their cage under the table, with plenty of newspaper spread underneath to catch their droppings. To this point he never realized just how much food rabbits process, as if they evolved on the earth for the sole purpose of producing little balls of crap, infinite crap, and having them in the garage for the past two weeks was a real trial. It was Guadalupe’s husband who got them for him—cottontails, not the big lean jackrabbits he’d been hoping for—but it was the only avenue open to him. Salvador had trapped a pair of wild rabbits that had been raiding his garden three years back and he’d kept them in a pen and bred them for food, quite a thriving business, according to Guadalupe. Well, these five would be spared anyway, and cheap at five dollars apiece. The girls—both Anise and Alicia—cooed over them and fed them slivers of carrot, lettuce and whatnot for the first week, till they lost interest and left the custodial duties to him. But they’re hot to release them, that’s for sure. “We’ll have a little ceremony on the beach,” Anise said, squeezing his biceps. “A coming out party, Rabbits in Bunnyland. Won’t that be cool?”
As for raccoons, he struck out there. The traps yielded nothing but the same cat three nights in a row and then nothing at all. Ditto opossums, though he spotted two of them on the street out front of the house late one night a couple weeks back and he’s keeping the traps set and baited just in case. Gophers he’s given up on. They moved in within weeks of the raccoons’ departure, fanning up great conical mounds of dirt like miniature calderas all over the new lawn, and he consulted with his gardener over the problem. “Can you catch them—alive, I mean? Unhurt.” The gardener looked at him for a long while. Then, very slowly, measuring out his words, he said, “Poison or Macabee trap. Either way, they’re dead. You want pets, go to PETCO.”
Anise is the first to show. She’s wearing clogs and a crotch-high jumper kind of thing, in yellow, like the playsuits little girls used to wear when he was a kid, with the exception that she’s no little girl and her playsuit is cut deeply in front to show off what she has. Her bag is slung over one shoulder and she’s got a bottle of wine in each hand, one red, one white. “Cambria, honey. Martha’s Vineyard. My favorite.” She tips back her straw hat to peck him a kiss and then wrinkles up her nose. “What’s that smell?”
“The rabbits. Don’t you remember? This is their big day.”
Then she’s down on hands and knees, making kissing noises at the cage under the table and talking baby talk to the brainless nose-twitching things backed up against the wire mesh as if wire was all there was in the world. “Oh, the poor little bunnies, all stuck in that awful cage. Little bunnies, look at you. Nobody’s going to eat you now, don’t you worry. Uh-uh, not with Mommy here.”
He watches with real interest, the fringe of her skirt thrust up in back and her breasts gone heavy with gravity—Doggie-style, that’s the term that comes into his head—and how long has it been since they’ve had sex? Was it last weekend? Seven whole days? Three steps and he’s hovering over her, bending from the waist to peer into the cage, one hand seeking out the heat of her, right there where the flap of skirt rucks up and the tight silken material of the crotch takes over. “Mmm,” she murmurs, pushing back against his hand with a revolution of her hips, “that feels nice.”
They’re in a deep clinch, mouth to mouth, groin to groin, Anise pressed up against the bulkhead and everything in him strung tight as a bow, when Wilson’s face appears in the doorway. “Hey, hey, now, none of that,” Wilson crows in the voice of the class clown, which is exactly what he was and is, “or we’ll never get out of port.” And then, to Alicia, whose face slides in place next to his as if they’re looking down a well, “You see what’s going on down there? They’re doing a porn movie only they forgot the camera.”
Alicia has wine too, a wicker basket crowded with the necks of bottles, and she’s all legs coming down the steps in a pair of tight white shorts. Wilson has a case of Dos Equis propped up on one shoulder, a grocery sack of avocados and tortilla chips in his free hand. “Got to have chips and guac,” he announces, setting his burden down on the table, “or it’s not a party. And this is definitely a party, am I right, Alicia?”
Before she can respond, before she has a chance to hand the basket to Anise or even say hello, Wilson has her in a simulated clinch, thrusting his hips in parody. “Can’t let nobody show us up, huh, baby?”
Dave is feeling loose, or as loose as he’s able to feel because relaxation is not his long suit, and instead of shutting Wilson down he just lets him go. Smiling, one arm around Anise’s waist, he says, “We’ll see about that—knowing you, you’ll be snoring about ten minutes after we pass the breakwater.”
Wilson’s in motion suddenly, swinging away from Alicia to take the basket, set it down on the table and then spread his arms wide in an elaborate palms-out shrug. “Maybe so, Captain, but when the time comes”—a wink for Alicia—“I’ll be ready to report for duty.”
And everything’s fine, sparkling, beautiful even. They’re all smiling, all the way around, and he’s thinking how great it is to be able to do this, to get away, kick back, slow down, let life come to you instead of chasing after it all the time. Ever since he was a kid he’s been going out on trips like this, and for his money there’s nothing that can compare with the excitement of coming aboard with your arms laden and taking your sweet time to stow your gear and provisions in the ingenious motion-proof lockers designed specifically for that purpose—“Making everything shipshape,” as his mother used to say—
and then starting the engine, casting off the lines in a solid pillar of sun or even a cold dripping mist or a rain that taps on the roof of the cabin like a thousand separate fingers and motoring out of the harbor with nothing but anticipation ahead. When he was in school and the tedium of routine and term papers and pop quizzes got him to the point where he felt as if he were buried in layers of mud like one of the hibernating frogs in the tricolor illustration of the winter pond in their biology text, his parents would take him and a friend of his choosing—Barry Butler, Joe Castle, Jimmy Mastafiak—out to the islands for the weekend.
Casting off was like settling into your seat on the jet to Hawaii or strapping your longboard to the top of the car to drive down to Baja, only better, far better, because the trip was part of the adventure and when you got there it was like you had your own house with you and not just a suitcase or a gym bag. And yes, he’s seen the mile-long motor homes out on the freeway with the reanimated corpses propped up behind the wheel, spewing out the fumes while they drag their earthly belongings with them from Toledo to Butte and back again, but sitting on a concrete strip in a pall of smoke with ten thousand other idiots can’t compare with being at sea, where every day, every hour, every minute, there’s something new to get your mind around and you can just flick the wheel with one little finger and go anywhere you want.
Wilson, quick on his feet and with the makings of a sailor in him if he ever wanted to go there, casts off and then joins him at the helm. The girls are down in the cabin, glasses of cold clear viognier balanced delicately in their hands while the bottle beads in the antique ice bucket Anise found in a junk shop somewhere. They motor down the long double row of berths, the Chez When, the Mikado and the Isosceles II showing them their sterns, the fog so dense they can barely make out the letters of their names. “It’s supposed to be clear around noon,” he says over the sound of the engine, “and, I don’t know, it should be nice out there the rest of the weekend. That’s what they’re saying on the radio anyway.”
“You joking or what?” Wilson has a beer cradled between his legs. He’s dressed in an oversized T-shirt, baggy shorts, sandals. On his head, canted back, a baseball cap—not black, not this time—but the tomato red of the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles. “I picked up Alicia down at her apartment on Bath? I couldn’t even fucking see the house.” The beer comes to his lips, his throat works, it sinks again. “Noon? If it clears by six we’ll be lucky. Shit, if it clears at all.”
The long looming multi-pillared structure of Stearns Wharf, with its restaurants and trinket shops and tramping lines of tourists, suddenly breaks through the mist like a giant centipede humping across the water, and then it vanishes again and they’re through the mouth of the harbor and out onto a sea as flat and scoured as a stainless-steel pan. “At least it’s calm,” he says, thinking of how the channel can look so placid when you get up in an airplane or you’re coming down San Marcos Pass on a sunny day, as if it’s nothing, as if you could paddle across it in twenty minutes.
“At least. But I’d trade calm for some sun any day.”
That’s the last thing Wilson has to say because within minutes, given the gentle rocking of the boat and the somnolent thrum of the engine, he’s gone. The beer, still clutched between his thighs, is in no danger of spilling, and at this point it’s mainly suds and backwash anyway. His head tips forward till his chin is resting on his chest. Very lightly, he begins to snore. For the next hour, Dave lets him be, content to focus on the task before him, keeping an eye on his instruments, staring out into the fog till the fog is all there is, heaven and earth and sea swallowed up and spat out again and still no sign of clearing. He’s thinking his thoughts, but those thoughts are greatly reduced, until eventually he’s thinking nothing, his mind gone free of his body the way it always does at sea. He’s just alive, that’s all. His heart’s beating. He’s breathing. And the fog props him up on a smooth cool sheet of nothing as if he’s floating—or no, flying.
They’ve just passed midpoint when Wilson wakes with a start. “Oh, shit,” he murmurs. “What’d I do, doze off?”
“More like deep R.E.M. time. You’ve been out almost an hour.”
From below, the tremolo of the girls’ voices, giggling, a snatch of music fading in the background. Wilson, adjusting himself to his surroundings, discovers the bottle clamped between his legs, raises it experimentally and lowers it again. “You want a beer? I think I need another one at this point.”
“Not till we get there.”
“Right. Steady on, Dave.” There’s a silence, nothing but the soft wash of the bow, the engine, chatter from below. “At least the girls are having a good time, sounds like. But shit, this stuff is thick. How in Christ’s name are you navigating through it—I mean, I wouldn’t know the middle of the channel from the back end of the island. Or the rocks. Or the cold briny bottom, full fathom five and all that. You going to keep us off the bottom, Dave?”
“That’s my intention. Here, just look at the chart on the screen—here, yeah, this one.”
After a moment, Wilson says, “Yeah, but I still don’t like it if I can’t see where I’m going.”
“You don’t have to.”
“This is what I like, this kind of chart here”—he leans forward to pull one of the laminated sheets out of the rack to his left. “Old school, you know what I mean? Something you can hold on to. But what’s this yellow thing here in the middle?”
“What, you need glasses now?”
Wilson squints, holds the chart out at arm’s length. “Only when I’m on the job,” he says. “But I can make it out: ‘East Santa Barbara Channel Weather Buoy.’ But you already knew that.”
“We just passed it. We’re like halfway to the island, then we’ve another bit to get around the west side and all the way out to Coches.”
“So we’re in the”—quoting—“ ‘Northbound Coastwise Shipping Lane’?”
“No, see here, on the GPS—we just left it. We’re in the zone in between.”
“The Separation Zone.”
“Right. And once we cross the southbound lane, in about five minutes, we’re home free. Until we get to the western tip of the island and head into the Santa Cruz Channel, which is where the rocks are, since you’re asking. So no beer, no cocktails, nothing, not for me. Not till we drop anchor and I can relax, because you know as well as I, you don’t want to fuck around out here. Especially in conditions like this.”
“I hear you. But your copilot, he can drink himself into a coma—in fact, isn’t that required, I mean, by regulation? Unless you have a heart attack. You’re not going to have a heart attack on us, are you, Dave?”
The wash of the waves, the stray giggle from below. No birds, not even shearwaters. The strained half-light of the sun up there somewhere trying to break through. And the calm. The calm you can’t buy. Or maybe you can, because isn’t that what they’re doing?
“You know something I didn’t tell you—or Alicia or Anise even?”
Grinning now, leaning over his knees, the hat pushed up high on his crown with a quick nervous flick of his fingers, Wilson awaits the answer. He likes surprises, likes parties. “What?” he says and the grin expands.
“It’s not just rabbits we’re setting loose today. You know that guy from Texas, the one your friend or uncle or whoever knows? The snake man?”
“Get out of here.”
“Yeah, we’ve got ten primo condition rattlesnakes down there in the hold in burlap sacks. And that’s just the start—guy says he can get as many as we want.”
“Can I see them?”
“Not till we get there.”
“Aw, come on, what are you afraid of? The Sequel: Snakes on a Boat. I can see it now. Come on, man, I used to handle snakes when I was kid. I had like six terrariums, with a rubber boa, a racer, couple of gopher snakes, kings and rattlers, rattlers too. Did you know that the ones in the San Gabriels, down in L.A., are going through a whole weird evolutionary change where the snakes with
the smallest rattles get to mate more because the big ones, the noisy old pissed-off cascabeles, are all getting killed off?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t doubt it. But these ones are going to be just fine.” And this is his vision—he can see it right there before him—coming to fruition, because the snakes he’s bringing out here where nobody’s going to bother them can grow till their rattles drop off, and if that isn’t conservation, he doesn’t know what is.
“Come on. Just one. Just let me see one.” Wilson’s eyes—he’s never noticed this before—palpitate ever so slightly, nerves jumping under the whites like the snakes moving silently in the loose grip of their bags.
“I said no. Can you hear me? Am I talking loud enough for you?”
Wilson’s shoulders go tight and his mouth draws down. He smoothes his goatee a moment, as if thinking things through, then pushes himself up from the bench, jamming the chart back in its rack and swiping up the empty bottle in the same motion. “All right, fuck it. But I’m going down there—to get a beer—and if I happen to take a look then that’s my business, right?” And then he turns, puts both hands on the rails and disappears down the steps.
He’s calm. He’s been calm all day, all week. But this just turns his burners on high because Wilson can be such a jerk sometimes, and what is he anyway but just a carpenter and a wiseass who thinks he can rain on anybody anytime he wants, and before he can stop himself Dave is up from the controls and hammering down the steps shouting, “No, you’re wrong—it’s my fucking boat and it’s my fucking business!”