When the Killing's Done (23 page)

But now the bailiff’s calling his name and Sterling’s on his feet. He feels the muscles working in his legs as he rises, his chest swelling, and he’s moving forward to stand there before the bench while all the reporters—is that what’s her name, Toni, from the
Press Citizen
?—snatch at their pads and pencils and laptops. The room goes silent. Sunlight sits in the tall windows. There’s a distant sound of traffic.

The judge—and there’s another shithead he’d like to have five minutes alone with—squints at him over his glasses. He does something with his lips, a kind of preliminary licking or flexing, and then, glancing down at the paper before him, he begins to read aloud: “While there is a strong probability that the defendant did in fact commit the crimes with which he is charged, the evidence submitted and admitted does not serve to eliminate the doubt that remains. Further, since the Park Service eradication project was ultimately successful, the issue becomes moot.”

And what’s this? He can feel the mood shifting, the room coming to life as if a long collective breath has been expelled. He looks to Sterling, who’s staring straight ahead at the judge, trying to keep his expression sober despite the first intimations of triumph compressing the crow’s-feet rimming his eyes and radiating down to tug at the corners of his mouth. Everybody’s watching. Everybody can see him. His T-shirt. His message. His meaning. He feels a hard hot surge of joy coming up in him and it’s as intense as an orgasm: he’s going to walk!

“Therefore,” the judge pronounces over the steady retrograde tug of his accent, and yes, he could go right up there and kiss him, right now, “I pronounce the defendant not guilty.”

In the aftermath, out in the corridor with Toni Walsh and the woman from the local TV affiliate, the fingers of his right hand entwined in Anise’s and the camera trained on him, he makes a little speech, the lines of which he’s been rehearsing in his head all week. “It’s a sad state of affairs when our own federal government considers feeding wildlife to be a crime, while at the same time raining down poison indiscriminately from the sky is okay—legitimate, I mean.” And what’s even sweeter is that he’s able to raise his voice and project it all the way down the long gleaming tiled hall at the very moment that Alma Boyd Takesue and Tim Sickafoose emerge slumped and tragic from the courtroom so that he gets to watch her turn her head to him and then turn away again as he winds it up with an inspired flash of rhetoric: “And if these people think they’re going to get away with slaughtering some five thousand native pigs on Santa Cruz Island, well they’ve got another think coming.”

He pulls back then, dropping Anise’s hand to raise his own, two fingers spread in the victory sign. “Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head so that the dreads stir and rise in bristling affirmation, “not while the FPA’s on the watch.”

PART II

Santa Cruz

Scorpion Ranch

R
ita was newly separated from a man who’d hurt her in so many ways she’d lost track of just how and why she’d ever gone with him in the first place, her car was in the shop with some sort of systemic failure she couldn’t begin to fathom let alone pay for, her job was inadequate to her training and expectations, and she had a ten-year-old daughter to feed, clothe and educate. It was May of 1979, and all the good feelings—the vibrations, the groove—of the shimmering bright era that had sustained her through every failure and disappointment had dwindled and winnowed and faded till she was angry all the time, angry at Toby for leaving her, angry at her daughter, angry at her boss and the landlord who wanted two hundred fifty bucks a month for a dreary clamshell-gray walkup over a take-out pizza shop on Route 1 in downtown Oxnard, where the fog hung like death over everything and the trucks never stopped spewing diesel fumes outside the window, which might as well have been nailed shut for all the air it gave her. So when Valerie Bruns, her best friend from work, told her she knew of an opening—of a chance to get out, get away, change the scene as if this were Act II of one of the plays she’d been in in high school—she came back to life. Instantly.

“It’s on an island,” Valerie said.

“An island?” she echoed. “What do you mean, an island?”

“Santa Cruz.”

She’d called Valerie because it was Friday night, thinking they could go someplace for a drink, listen to music, hang out, but Valerie was going to her mother’s for dinner and didn’t know if she could. Then they’d got to talking about work—they were both aides at Point Hueneme Junior High—and what an uptight bitch the assistant principal was, and Mrs. Paris, the special ed teacher, and how they’d both like to quit, when Valerie mentioned the job.

“I thought Santa Cruz was a city—we played there once, I think. They’ve got a college there, right?”

“No, Santa Cruz
Island
.”

“Where’s that?”

A long exasperated sigh. “You know Henderson’s, in the marina? Where we went for margaritas that one time?”

“Yeah, I guess. Why?”

“Remember we sat out on the deck and we could see Anacapa? Remember I pointed it out to you and you made a big deal out of it?”

“Yeah, sure. Maybe.” She’d been drinking too much lately, drinking out of rage and regret and boredom, and she had only the vaguest rattling recollection of the place—it was on the water, that much she remembered.

“Well, the island next to it, the big one—four times as big as Manhattan—that’s Santa Cruz. It’s like this brown blur most of the time? You’ve seen it. Everybody has. You probably just didn’t notice, is all.”

She was sipping vodka, no ice, from a glass she kept in the freezer beside the bottle, Absolut, her one concession to extravagance—that and smokes. It burned her lips, caressed her tongue. “So what’s the job?”

“It’s this friend of mine, Baxter Russell? He needs a cook out there. He’s got a lease on a place they call Scorpion Ranch—sheep, he’s raising sheep—and he needs somebody to cook for him and I think like six or seven other guys. Cowboys, or whatever you call them . . .” Valerie let out a laugh. “Sheepboys, I guess. If that’s even a word.”

And though the first thing she said was, “I’m no cook, I’m a musician,” the idea of it—an island full of cowboys, and out in the middle of the ocean, no less—was already developing pictures in her mind, a whole montage of them, the wisteria-hung ranch house, the salt-sharp tang of the horses after they come in off the range, and
How you want your steak done, fellas?
Their shoulders, their eyes, bandannas, broad-brimmed hats, tall men, sinewy, lonely.
Anyway you like to do ’em, ma’am.

“But I want to talk to him,” she was saying, hasty now, afraid Valerie would shift the subject, drop a see-you-later into the conversation and head out for her mom’s meat loaf and her stepdad’s strawberry margaritas. “Definitely. Tell him I definitely want to talk to him.”

So Valerie gave her his number and she liked his voice over the phone—a baritone with a ragged huskiness scraping the edges of it, a preacher’s voice or a country singer’s—and agreed to meet him the following day for a sandwich at a place on West Fourth Street, which was only five blocks away and didn’t require vehicular transportation, and a good thing too because the car was as dead as the iron ore they’d dug out of the ground to give it shape. The sky was overcast—fog breathing up off the water like steam rising from a teapot, a million teapots, a hundred million, and why couldn’t it ever rain? Or thunder. She’d settle for a good old-fashioned East Coast thunderstorm, anything to break the monotony. She watched herself shift, vanish and reappear again in the storefront windows, the trucks easing past like walls on wheels, pigeons and starlings scrabbling over the remains of a McDonald’s Happy Meal splayed out on the wet pavement and the sad miniature plastic child’s toy—Ronald, with his painted grin—cast away with it. Before she knew she was going to bend to retrieve the toy and slip it in her pocket she’d stopped to flick her hand at the birds and glance round her to see if anyone was looking, thinking of her daughter and the sitter she’d got in for an hour, just an hour, because how long could lunch take?

He was waiting for her in a booth by the window, a newspaper spread out on the table before him, and at first she didn’t recognize him.
I’ll be the one with the beard
, he’d said, but he’d also told her he was fifty-five (a quick calculation: twenty-four years older than she), which had her expecting a stringy old man with turtle skin and impacted eyes, white hair anyway, overalls, maybe a straw hat. But this man wasn’t like that at all. He wore his hair long and it was streaked with blond where the sun had caught it and when he glanced up at her the look he gave her was anything but the look of an old man. “Mr. Russell?” she tried, still ten feet away, hesitant, uncertain of herself, because this couldn’t be him . . . could it?

But it was. And he had a smile that was like an erasure, no worries, no fears. “Rita?” He pushed aside the paper and lifted his eyes to her (blue shading to gray with flecks of gold fracturing the field) over the lenses of his reading glasses. “Is that you?”

She’d dressed in jeans, flip-flops, a turquoise blouse with short sleeves and a scooped neckline, and she’d done her face and eyes, not knowing what to expect. She wore her hair up, thinking that was how a cook would wear it, and she made a point of getting there at the stroke of noon, rehashing in her mind the few recipes she knew, a handful of curry dishes their drummer had taught her, chicken cordon bleu, scallops in a wine reduction, but she really didn’t think anything would come of it. If he asked her about experience she’d have to be honest with him and say that she’d never done anything professionally, just whipping up things for her daughter and her ex-husband and once in a while a dinner party, but if truth be told they wound up eating out about half the time, fast food, pizza, chicken wings—she was a fool for chicken wings. “Yeah,” she said, giving back his smile, “it’s me.”

“Well, sit down,” he said, folding up the newspaper and handing her the menu. He took a moment, realigning the silverware on the paper placemat that featured the name of the restaurant and a picture of the owner—a fat man, bald—printed on the front and puzzles for kids on the back. “Two things,” he said finally, his voice a rumble, his cracked blue eyes fixed on her as if he was afraid she was going to get up and flit away like a bird. “Call me Bax. And lunch is on me.” Another pause. “And I have to say I didn’t expect anybody so, so—what am I trying to say here?”

That was when she began to feel uneasy all over again: was he hitting on her, was that it? Was this just going be some sleazy proposition? An island? With cowboys? What had she been thinking? “I don’t know,” she heard herself say. And now she was the one toying with the silverware, fork, knife, spoon, shifting the mug and paper napkin like chess pieces. She looked up at him, trying to inject a little brightness into her voice: “What’s good here?”

He seemed to have lost his train of thought, but he was still staring at her, reading her, giving her a look that was hard to mistake. It took him a moment. Finally he said, “I like the Reuben. But you aren’t one of these types that don’t eat this, that or the other, are you? I mean, meat or whatever?”

She shook her head.

“And you can cook?”

She began ticking off recipes—anything she could think of, from macaroni and cheese to lobster thermidor—before he cut her off.

“You don’t understand. It’s lamb we’re talking about. In a stew, fricasseed, roasted, barbecued—with a pot of beans, raw onions, a stack of tortillas. Flapjacks in the morning, eggs, more lamb. There’s seven of us. At shearing you can double that.”

“Cafeteria style,” she said, and he laughed.

Then the waitress was there and they both ordered Reubens and he asked for iced tea and she a diet Coke. They watched the waitress recede, looked up in unison as an elderly couple shuffled in the door as if concrete blocks were attached to their feet and settled into the booth across from them, heaving for breath. There was a counter running the length of the place, half a dozen disconsolate men there, propped up on their elbows and staring into the distance, truckers maybe, rejects from the naval base, the perennially laid off, people with time on their hands. A chalkboard over the soft-serve machine advertised the spaghetti special, with tossed salad and garlic bread. She felt the tug of hopelessness.

“Three meals a day,” he said, his tone business-like now, admonitory even. “Up before dawn, to bed at dark. What I’m hoping is to pick up a generator.” He paused, dropped his eyes. “If not this trip, then the next one.”

She let nothing show on her face. What she wanted was an adventure, what she wanted was out, but she could detect the makings of a long grinding disaster spinning out before her. What did she know about sheep, cowboys, ranches, islands, cooking even? “What about water? You have running water, don’t you?”

He ducked his head, then lifted his chin and ran the fingers of both hands through his hair, which fell forward, thick and thickly greased. “We’re working on it. It’s all part of the plan. And if things might be a bit rough now, I tell you, it’s worth it. I mean, if you like the outdoors—you do, don’t you?” His eyes jumped at hers but he didn’t wait for an answer. “And a cook—a cook is going to really help because it frees up a man so we can put all our energy into getting the place up and running. And improved. Livable, you know? Or more than livable: cozy. Cozy’s what we’re shooting for.”

“O-kay,” she said, very slowly, drawing out the vowels. “But we haven’t talked salary.”

He waved a hand as if to say nothing could be simpler or more amenable. She watched him lift the glass of iced tea and take a long leisurely drink. He was laughing suddenly, his eyes retreating into the hallway of some private joke. “Hell, we got Francisco cooking for us now—he’s a sheepman and he smells like it too, no matter how many bars of soap I bring back for him, not to mention Old Spice. I gave him the biggest bottle I could find, but you couldn’t tell the difference—I wouldn’t put it past him if he drank it. The man burns everything—coffee, beans, meat. And I tell you, you lift your fork to your mouth and it all tastes the same. I swear—and I’ve been meaning to do this, just for the satisfaction of it—you do a blindfold test and you wouldn’t know if you were chewing lamb or a heel of bread or a sawed-off hunk of the cutting board.”