When the Killing's Done (16 page)

Alma is reminded of all this by the printout—“The Use of Acetaminophen in Controlling
Boiga irregularis
Among Insular Populations”—spread open beside her laptop on one of the gently rocking Formica tables in the main cabin of the
Islander
, bound for Anacapa. Sipping coffee from a paper cup and staring into the computer screen as the neatly marshaled lines of type hypnotically rise and descend along with the tabletop and the deck and hull beneath it, she’s not yet aware she has a headache coming on, but every sixty seconds or so she looks reflexively away from the screen and out over the water so as to refocus her eyes. Then she comes back to the text, hits the backspace key and inserts a new phrase or extends a line, her lips silently forming the words. She’s frowning but unaware of it.

The boat’s carrying capacity, both in the cabin and on the upper and stern decks, is a hundred-fifty or so, and today, eighty-five of the spots have been reserved for NPS employees and assorted biologists, including Tim, who are part of the Anacapa Recovery Program, as well as a collection of journalists from the AP, the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Santa Barbara Press Citizen
, a dozen local politicians and tastemakers and a television crew from the local NBC affiliate. In the ship’s hold are three big coolers chock-full of marinated chicken, turkey sausage and tofu burgers for the barbecue grill, various salads, whole-grain breads, a pot of chili and rice, a fourth cooler of bottled water, soft drinks and dessert, and a fifth reserved exclusively for champagne. Two cases. On ice. Medium-priced California stuff, as befits the Park Service budget, but champagne—or, more properly, sparkling wine—all the same.

The sea is flat, the fog already lifting. The captain has just slowed for a pod of dolphins, and most of the passengers—NPS people, tourists, backpackers, a sugar-and-hormone-fueled group of sixth graders under the rapidly eroding control of two harried teachers—have gone out on deck to watch the glistening cetaceans slash through the water like shadows come to life. When she glances up she can see Tim out there amongst them, a paper cup of coffee in one hand, binoculars in the other.

It’s early June, ten in the morning, just over one and a half years since the initial drop of the control agent, and the purpose of this little jaunt is purely celebratory—while the journalists tap at their keyboards and the photographers manipulate their digital cameras and the TV crew homes in, Alma will lift a glass of champagne in faultless synchronization with Freeman Lorber, the park’s superintendent, and declare all three islets that compose Anacapa one hundred percent rat free. At the moment, she’s busy polishing her press release, while the article, by Robert Ford Smith, the herpetologist she’d worked under on Guam, awaits a free minute. It came to her via e-mail from the field station at Ritidian Point on the northernmost tip of the island, where the beaches are soap-powder white and the vegetation gnarled and snake-haunted, before she left her office at seven-fifteen this morning, and she’s as eager to get to it as a child with a new video game, but duty calls, always calls, and always takes precedence.

The press release, which she’s been tinkering with for the past two days, will inform the assembled journalists, and through them the public, that the rat-eradication project has been an unqualified success. No rat sign has been detected anywhere on Anacapa since the release of the control agent, neither nests nor scat or tracks or any evidence whatever of predation, and the dummy eggs the consulting ornithologist has slipped into the nests of various birds have not been disturbed, whereas formerly they would have been scrimshawed with tooth marks. Careful monitoring over this period has led her to be able to declare with absolute confidence that all the target animals have been eliminated. And the result has been swift and dramatic. The seabirds have rebounded, not to mention the Channel Islands salamander and side-blotched lizard—whose numbers have doubled—as well as the native deer mouse, the population of which is estimated at 8,000, the highest count on record. And more: Tim Sickafoose, consulting ornithologist, resident humorist and all-around prince of a man, has discovered the first pair of Cassin’s auklets nesting on Rat Rock in living memory, a place which, she imagines—and yes, this will be the sly and triumphal joke to insert in an otherwise by-the-numbers text—will soon have to undergo a name change. How about Auklet Rock? she’s thinking. Do I hear any takers? Or what about Sickafoose Point? Will that fly?

Jokes aside, she can’t help worrying over the small details—punctuation, paragraphing, the drum-beating phrases that seem increasingly fatuous every time her eyes fall on them. Or not just fatuous: asinine. Right here, right in the first paragraph, for one. She calls Lorber “a monument of preservation,” which conveys a modicum of truth, but doesn’t it make him sound like something static, like one of the carved heads at Mount Rushmore or a blade dulled by use? Or worse: dead. And here’s his epitaph:
Loving husband, loving father, and
a monument of preservation.

“Hey,” Tim breathes, sliding into the seat beside her. The boat has begun to move again and the passengers are trooping back into the cabin, all but the sixth graders, who will linger along the rail until they’re soaked through and shivering and in dire need of the hot chocolate, popcorn and microwave burritos the galley dispenses. “You done with that thing yet?” he asks, his voice oily with insinuation. She gives him a sidelong glance. He’s right there, invading her personal space—which is the prerogative of a lover, she has to remind herself—and holding his lopsided grin. “Because there’s a point you reach where you’re just going to tinker it to death, right? And isn’t this supposed to be a party, or am I wrong?”

She’s on the verge of snapping at him, but she catches herself. For a long moment she stares into his eyes, the spray flying beyond the windows, the squeals and shouts of the sixth graders rising round them like the cries of the raptured. “Yes,” she admits finally, and she can smile now too, relax, celebrate, because he’s right—the worst is behind her and this is a day for looking ahead, not back. “Yes, you’re right.”

And it works. The air’s been cleared. Her headache—the incipient headache she’s just begun to become aware of—extends its tendrils and begins to recede all in a single moment. She shifts the mouse, shuts down the laptop and dips forward to reach into her pack and dig out a bag of trail mix, just to keep her energy level up. Party or no, she’ll still have to make a speech after distributing the press release, and she’ll have to oversee her assistant, Wade, who’s in charge of the food, and shine with glowing interest as Freeman gives his own speech replete with awkward pauses, furious lip-tugging and jokes amusing by definition only. But this
is
a party, or the very beginning of one, and she slips her laptop into its case with a definitive shrug of her shoulders and a business-like chafing of one palm against the other, then cracks the Ziploc bag of trail mix. She sifts a handful into her mouth and works her molars over a cud of sunflower seeds, dates, raisins and M&M’s, the sugar rush almost instantaneous, before offering it to Tim, who takes it absently. He’s giving her a dubious look, as if he’s thinking about something else altogether, as if he’s anticipating her, worrying for her. “You better hope the printer out there’s going to work—”

Her smile is richer now, spreading across her lips till she can feel the tug of it in the muscles at the corners of her mouth, and what are they called? Zygomaticus major. Or minor. Or both. That sounds about right, but it’s been a long time since she took anatomy, and if she remembers correctly something like seventeen different muscles are required to achieve a full smile. But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is she’s smiling because this is Tim smiling back at her and they’re getting a rare day off together, if that’s what you can call this.

“He don’t know me very well, do he?” she says, reaching down to pat the backpack at her feet. “I brought my own along. Just in case.” Before he can respond, she’s holding up a hand to forestall him. “Yes,” she says, “yes, I know. And paper too.”

She’d gone to Guam seven years ago because the opportunity presented itself, because Julie Savidge was one of her enduring heroes and because she’d just broken up with Rayfield Armstrong, who played his guitar in the bars and coffeehouses around Berkeley when he wasn’t working on his dissertation assessing the impact of a species of introduced crab—the European green—on the local invertebrates in San Francisco Bay, and whose chest, shoulders and back were so intricately and finely muscled from all the hours he spent in the water he looked like a living mosaic. She’d moved in with him, and that was a commitment, the first real commitment of her life, but as the months wore on he depleted her patience and her hope and goodwill too. He was never home, always diving, strumming his guitar under the gaze of a spotlight in some bar or coffeehouse somewhere or riding a Greyhound bus to play in towns nobody had ever heard of, and when he was home he was so self-absorbed—crabs and guitar, crabs and guitar—he didn’t seem to have much time for her. And so she moved out. And took a job in the field. In Guam.

What she expected to find there was something like the environment she’d known in Hawaii, only less developed, more primitive, closer to the edge, and she wasn’t disappointed. The roads, hacked out of the bush, were congested and deadly, the architecture tended toward reinforced concrete block (out of necessity, as a way of surviving the typhoons in this corner of what meteorologists dubbed “Typhoon Alley”) and everything, even the inside of the plastic bleach container she kept under the sink in her bunker cum one-room apartment, smelled of the festering explosive microbial life of the tropics. The jungle was lush, but many of the native trees, destroyed during the war, had been replaced by a South American import, the tangantangan, and it was eerily silent in the absence of the birds. With the birds gone, the insects had bred out, with the attendant result that the spiders—palm-sized, with iridescent yellow stripes on a gleaming black body—had experienced a population explosion, draping understory and canopy alike with the great trembling tents of their webs so that it was impossible to move through the jungle without having the stuff cling to you like a second skin. Not to mention the spider itself, presumably disappointed at being displaced from its web to your sleeve, hair, face.

The local people—Chamorros and Filipinos, mainly—never gave her much more than a vaguely curious glance. They saw her as Asian, or some variant thereof, and so, despite her Big Dogs running shorts and T-shirts touting Micah Stroud and Carmela Sexton-Jones, less an anomaly than someone like Robert Ford Smith or his wife, Veronica, both from Lancashire, with great beaky English noses and skin as blanched and lusterless as potato meal. She felt at home, as she had in Hawaii and at Berkeley, and perhaps she would have felt differently if she’d gone to lily-white Wisconsin to study the effects of cat predation on woodland birds or to Salt Lake City to monitor the grebe population on the Great Salt Lake, but she hadn’t.

Robert—not Bob or Rob or Robbie, just Robert—was in his mid-fifties and had been working to undermine the brown tree snake since the time of Julie Savidge, who’d since moved on. He was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the Brown Snake Research Program and his primary objective was to devise barriers to keep the snake away from the shipping containers at the port and the planes at the airstrip, the fear being that it would hitchhike to one of the neighboring islands—or worse, Hawaii. That was the first step—to limit its spread—but the second, and larger initiative, was to find some biological agent, a bacterium, virus or parasite, that could control its numbers so that the captive-bred native birds could be reintroduced. To that end, he trapped snakes and experimented on them. And her job, both in daylight and at night, with a headlamp and a stick to clear away the spiderwebs, was to check the traps and return to the lab with her clutch of snakes—there were always plenty—so that she could dissect them and determine what they’d been feeding on. It was solitary work—“creepy,” as Tim, no fan of snakes, would describe it—but it got her out of doors, which was the whole point of working in wildlife management to begin with.

There were three hundred sixty-five days in a year, that was incontrovertible, but in the three years she was on the island it seemed as if time had become elastic, stretching like a finely gradated bungee cord till a single day felt like two or even three. She learned to do without culture—American culture anyway—and while she did make several Guamanian friends and attended their various family gatherings and fiestas and came to relish octopus
kelaguen
and breadfruit stewed in coconut milk, she never went native as so many of the others at the field station invariably did. Her time was for the most part solitary and she moved through the bush like a native creature herself—smallish, with abundant pelage, keen observational powers and a reflexive ability to duck branches draped with spiderwebs. She trapped snakes in a wire basket in which a second much smaller wire basket held a white mouse and its ration of chopped potato, stuffed them in a sack and brought them back to the field station, where she removed, euthanized and dissected them or fitted them with miniature radio collars and let them go again to see exactly what they were up to.

The snakes were whips of muscle, powerful enough to raise three-quarters of their length up off the ground and hold it there for minutes at a time, but her muscle, a primate’s muscle, was superior. She killed thousands of them. She was bitten half a dozen times. She became intimate with the peculiar dry pickled odor of the brown snake’s intestines. And she found, contrary to popular opinion or the first law of amateur snake collectors, that this snake did not require live prey or even prey at all. It was so adaptable as to be frightening. When the birds were gone, it ate rats and lizards. And when it couldn’t find a rat or lizard, it came into the yard and the house and snapped up what it could, whether animate or not. Twice, while slitting open the bellies of snakes, she came across pale greasy twists of the plastic raw hamburger is packaged in. And once, in an image worthy of Buñuel, she discovered the stained white tube of a used sanitary napkin, saturated in blood. Even now, when she closes her eyes at night, she can see the snakes in the twilight of her consciousness, erect and weaving their heads, looking for the purchase to climb.