When the Killing's Done (17 page)

Tim chatters. The boat hydroplanes. Her stomach flutters around the fragments of trail mix and the coffee she’s washed it down with, but she doesn’t get seasick—she never does. It’s a question of mind over matter—or rather, mind over peristalsis. And reflux. Some people can control it and some can’t. Tim, for instance. Tim’s a rock. He could eat a seven-course dinner and ride the roller coaster at Magic Mountain all day long and it wouldn’t affect him in the slightest—in fact, if it weren’t for the centrifugal forces involved he could probably tuck in his napkin and chow down
while
on the coaster. A number of the passengers are a bit more delicate, though, including at least one of the journalists this little jaunt is meant to win over, and Alma can’t help feeling a prick of anxiety. Toni Walsh, of the Santa Barbara paper, which to this point has been less than enthusiastic over the rat issue and the ensuing question of pig control on Santa Cruz, came aboard looking as if she’d had a rough night, and as soon as they left the harbor she settled in at a table by the window and put her head down, feigning sleep. Now, when they’re no more than a mile out, she rises abruptly and staggers outdoors to the stern, where the wind can carry off whatever she’s had for breakfast. Not a good start. And of course, just to needle her, Tim lifts his eyebrows and whispers, “There’s a shitty write-up in the making.”

As the boat slows and they cruise into the dock, the sun cutting through what’s left of the mist in great rectilinear columns, the cliffs rearing, birds squawking, everyone seems to come alive. People who’ve been silent the whole way across are suddenly gabbling in high excited voices, the sixth graders are uncontainable—What are
they
getting out of this, she wonders, besides sugar and sunburns?—and the faces of her office mates have that rare look of release she sees only on Friday afternoons. She’s right there in the middle of it, helping people up the ladder, making small talk, bantering, even drawing a smile from Alicia, the pale shy secretary who seems locked up like a box without a key, and then she’s shaking hands with Fausto Carrillo, the mayor of Oxnard—he’s all smiles—and guiding a shaky Toni Walsh to the levitating rungs of the ladder.

There’s a brief conference with Wade, then out come the coolers, lifted from the hold and propelled across the sun-blasted planks of the dock with a whoosh of molded plastic, all the details settled, the picnic in its nascent stages and nothing left to do but distract everybody with what she hopes will prove to be the highlight of the day, the nature walk. While Wade and some of the others go on ahead to light the charcoal and set up the portable picnic tables in the courtyard of the visitor center—a spot calculated to move even the palest driest desk-bound cynic with its views across the channel—she and Tim, as planned, begin working their way up to the bluff to lead the group hike along the loop trail. She reminds herself to go slowly, especially up the steps, pausing at each landing to flag one plant or another and give the less fit a chance to catch their breath. Once they get to the top, where the walking is easy, she’ll have ample opportunity to score points for the principles and rationale of island restoration, indicating the nests of the western gull and other recovering birds while subtly but unfailingly bringing home the point that all this has been made possible by the rat-control project, which, incidentally, was funded by a court judgment against one of the gross polluters of the ecosystem—Montrose Chemical Corporation, responsible for pumping over a hundred tons of DDT-contaminated waste into Santa Monica Bay between 1947 and 1982—and so cost taxpayers virtually nothing.

In her detail-oriented way, she’s reminded each of the guests through repeated e-mails to dress appropriately for what should be a moderate two-mile hike in changeable weather conditions, and most seem to have gotten the message. She sees hiking boots and windbreakers, daypacks, water bottles and the like, but Toni Walsh, bringing up the rear in a pair of blood-red espadrilles, cropped crepe pants in a jungle print and a spandex tube top—sans jacket or sweater—is already hugging her arms to herself and looking as if she’s in need of a cigarette. Or no, Alma corrects herself, that’s cruel and judgmental—she doesn’t even know if the woman smokes. But then all writers smoke, don’t they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy? Tim has the floor at the moment, telling those gathered round him something of the nesting habits of the gulls, how they pair for life and defend the same patch of ground year after year and will attack and even kill any chick from a neighboring nest that might blunder onto their turf, so she gives him a truncated wave of her hand and makes her way back down the trail, thinking she’ll offer Toni Walsh the extra windbreaker she’s brought along for just such a contingency as this.

The trail is half an inch deep in dust the consistency of waffle mix. The sun has burned off the mist by now but there’s a wind out of the north that brings the chill factor down into the low fifties, she guesses, and as she eases past people (“What’s with you, Alma,” the mayor jokes out of a flushed moon face, his eyes exophthalmic and his tongue licking for air, “giving up so soon?”) and down a gentle incline to where Toni Walsh seems to be struggling to put one foot in front of the other, she’s already got the windbreaker out of her pack and bunched in her hand. Though her intention is obvious, the reporter—what is she, forty, forty-five?—just stares numbly at her. “You okay?” she asks.

“Me?” Toni Walsh hasn’t bothered with makeup, not even lipstick. Her shoes are coated in dust. Her hair, dyed an unnatural shade of red, hangs limp at her shoulders, over-processed and dry as the bunch grass at their feet. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Just not used to boat rides, I guess. In the morning anyway.”

“You look cold.” Holding out the windbreaker now. “I’ve got this if you want it. It’s extra, so—”

There’s something in the woman’s face that warns her off and she feels embarrassed suddenly, as if she’s been attempting in some unconscious way to bribe her, or at least curry favor, but that’s not the case. She’s just being accommodating, that’s all, because everyone here is in a sense her guest, and a good host . . . or just common courtesy . . .

“No, no, thanks,” Toni Walsh says, and she’s fishing in her purse for—yes—a cigarette. Which she puts to her lips and lights in a windblown puff of smoke. There’s gooseflesh on her upper arms. Her eyes are red-veined. The ends of her hair, split and eroded, flail round her throat.

Alma drops her arm awkwardly, the rejected garment catching the wind till it flaps like a pillowcase on a clothesline. “If you want, you can just go back to the visitor center and have a cup of hot coffee—Wade’ll have the fire going by now—or wine, if you want a glass of wine. We won’t be long.”

Toni Walsh looks over her shoulder to where the white monolith of the lighthouse rises up out of the scrub against the broad bright pan of the ocean, the light spanked and coppery, the thin distant sail of a yacht like a scrap of cloth blown on the wind. The rest of the group has begun to move off now, Tim, his shoulders slumped, loping on ahead of them, talking all the while. “Yeah,” Toni Walsh says finally, puckering her lips to exhale a lungful of smoke and watch the breeze snatch it away, “that sounds cool. Think I’ll just do that.”

Later, after she’s caught up to the group to add her comments and exhortations to Tim’s running monologue and the hikers have had an opportunity to absorb something of the island’s rare solace and beauty on their own, she begins to forget herself, trying to imagine the experience through their eyes, as if she were seeing the place for the first time. It’s not all that different geologically from what they’d find along the coast opposite, where Highway 1 bends away from Port Hueneme and the cliffs stagger back from the breakers under a mantle of coreopsis and coyote brush, except that there is no highway, there are no roads or buildings or trash. And it’s quiet, as quiet as the world must have been before the invention of the internal combustion engine, the sea and the wind providing the backdrop to the barking of the seals and the mewling of the birds. Sometimes, when she’s out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.

Today, of course, she’s too wound up to get to that point or anywhere even close. Yet still everything looks fresh and eternal at once, wildflowers in bloom, the views unencumbered, the gulls cooperative, lizards exploding underfoot as if to underscore the point that the rats are gone and all is well. The hikers are enjoying themselves, she can see that, the hands-on experience of the place worth a thousand press releases. And isn’t this what she took the job for to begin with—to familiarize the public with the specialness of these islands and by extension all the dwindling retreats of the world made so much more precious by their rarity? To turn them on? Make them advocates? Engage them in the fight against the land-grabbers and developers and people like Dave LaJoy, who might mean well, or think they do, but act solely out of ignorance and vindictiveness?

She’s left her hair loose and the wind takes hold of it, flinging it across her face, and when she shakes her head to settle it, any thought of Dave LaJoy and the rest of the self-appointed saviors is gone. She shuts her eyes, lifts her face to the sun. This is perfect. A perfect day. She feels like a conqueror, like a queen, like the first Chumash woman come ashore ten thousand years ago. She’s soaring. High on the moment. And the feeling sustains her for a whole thirty seconds—until she thinks to glance at her watch, that is. How did it get so late? They’re ten minutes behind schedule, ten minutes at least.

She feels a familiar stab of unease, swings round and maneuvers herself to the front of the group, beside Tim. He’s made a platform of a rock the size of an ottoman and he’s standing atop it, arms akimbo, sunglasses dangling from one hand. The frayed baseball cap he hung on the bedpost last night so as not to forget it is pulled down tightly over his brow, leaving the lower half of his face to incandesce in the sun. At the moment, he’s delivering a synopsis of the burrowing owl’s habits and predilections, and the hikers have gathered round him to reflect on the cored-out habitation of the creature itself, which proves to be absent. She clears her throat to get their attention. “Anybody getting hungry?” she asks. “Because I sure am.”

Well, they are. Of course they are. There is an unspoken quid pro quo here. Whenever she leads a group hike for PR purposes, there’s always the promise of a good and bountiful free lunch and the chilled wine to go with it. One of the hikers, a stout woman in an unfortunate straw hat that whips round her face in the wind till it’s like one of those plastic hoods the veterinarians use on dogs—and is she the mayor’s wife or his special friend?—looks particularly ready, so Alma focuses her smile on her. “All right then. Follow me.”

Then she’s leading them down the trail and back to where Wade and his helpers, Alicia among them, have set out the meats, salads and other dishes on a long table made festive with a crisp white cloth and a vase of wildflowers. Beyond the table, in the near distance, the lighthouse stands burnished and welcoming under the sun, the sea fanning out in a dazzle of color beneath it, everything companionable and inviting. Like a party. Exactly like. The hikers break ranks as they approach, what had been single file giving way to drift, people talking in low voices, chugging from water bottles, joking in the spirit of camaraderie a shared experience of nature always seems to bring out. Alma’s eyes flit critically over the scene, not keeping score exactly, but noting who’s elected to stay behind and trying to get a quick take on their various moods and postures—do they look hungry, bored, pleased? That sort of thing. It’s almost a reflex with her.

She spots Toni Walsh standing on the far side of the fire pit, a glass of wine in one hand, cigarette in the other, chatting up Alicia. Alicia? But then Alma can’t control everything and whatever Alicia—dark-eyed, stylish, twenty-something, about as talkative as a stone—can tell Toni Walsh probably won’t amount to much and certainly can’t hurt the cause. Alicia’s a secretary, that’s all, and she’s stolidly efficient, if bloodless, but she’s had no training in restoration ecology except what she’s picked up by osmosis, and Alma doesn’t doubt for a minute it’d be all the same to her if she worked in industry or service or for the polluters themselves.

In fact, she’s remembering a time when she and Alicia were alone in the office, working late on a paper the superintendent was going to deliver before a gathering presided over by the secretary of the interior, Alma reading proof aloud and Alicia checking it against her own copy. It was fairly dull going—Freeman was no Rachel Carson—and at some point they took a break and went out on the deck to watch the fog tangle itself in the shrubs. Alma found herself doing the talking, trivial things mostly, nothing to do with work, and if Alicia didn’t want to open up, even then, when things were more relaxed than during regular working hours and the boss-employee dynamic might have constrained her, Alma could understand that. But to get the girl to say anything, about her boyfriend, her parents, a movie she’d seen—the weather even—was all but impossible. With her it was always yes or no or uh-huh—if she had any opinions, she kept them to herself. And yet on this occasion—just this once—she did speak up, apropos of nothing. Or, as Alma later realized, of a minor point Freeman was making with regard to biological control in closed ecosystems.

“I don’t know why we have to kill everything,” she said, studying her nails, which had been done in two colors, aquamarine and raspberry, and speaking in a voice so soft it was barely audible. No eye contact. Eye contact would be confrontational, assertive, and Alicia, if anything, was non-assertive, more the vessel than the substance that fills it. “What if we just left everything alone like the world was before us—like God made it. Wouldn’t that be easier?”