When the Killing's Done (30 page)

So it went up, all of it, before Bax or anybody else could stop her. And Bax did try to stop her because he was the peacemaker, the coward, the dog who would roll over on his back so the owners could scratch his belly and then sell the concession out from under him. She watched the flames rise, roiling and bright, the lanterns bursting with the violent release of their kerosene, the food pouches popping like firecrackers, cotton and leather and Gore-Tex shriveling away to nothing while the foam pads beneath the sleeping bags sent up an evil oily black smoke that forked into the sky and hung there overhead like a tattered umbrella. When Bax did get to her—scrape, clump, scrape—she swung round on him, furious. “Do you know what they’re doing? Do you have any idea?”

“I don’t care what they’re doing, you don’t come into somebody’s house—”

“Somebody’s house? This is nobody’s house. This is
our
house. Part of our ranch, part of what we’re paying through the nose to lease.”

“—and destroy private property. It’s not right. It’s crazy.
You’re
fucking crazy, you know that?”

“Yeah? And so what are you then? They’re selling our sheep, Bax, our rams that we . . . for any jerk with a gun to just . . .” She felt herself giving way, all the jolts and frustrations of the day tearing loose inside her, and her eyes were wet suddenly. “A thousand dollars, Bax, they’re killing our stock for a thousand dollars for one ram and two meat sheep.
Meat
sheep, for God’s sake!”

She saw that register on his face. His eyes went wide, his jaw locked. He was in pain—just standing up was a trial—and this was like climbing up on his shoulders and kicking the crutches out from under him. She felt bad then—he hadn’t known, or hadn’t known the extent of it. “What are you talking about?” he said, his face lit freakishly by the flames, sick flames, chemical flames, the beer cans bursting with a long liquid hiss that was the sound of capitulation and defeat.

“Upstairs. In the bedroom.
His
bedroom. He’s got an ad in
Field and Stream
, for Christ’s sake. ‘Eldon Thatch’s Island Hunt Club.’ Prices and everything.”

It was then that the noise she’d been hearing off on the periphery grew in intensity, grew closer, and it wasn’t the clatter of the helicopter that had appeared overhead like a big ratcheting bug and vanished over the rise in the direction of Scorpion, but the angry mechanical buzzing of the ATVs come home to roost. She looked up to see the three of them, in single file, working their way down the road from the mesa. Bax had seen them too. He was already in motion, moving faster than she could have imagined, and when they came roaring into the yard he was at the truck, propped up against it, and he had the .22 in his hands.

She didn’t know guns, didn’t want to know guns. She was in a transcendent state, the hate and fear burning in her in equal portions, and where were the peace and love she’d shaped her voice around through all those years when music was the means and brotherhood the end? She’d started the fire. She’d provoked this. Her throat clenched. Somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was going to die.

She watched the three of them shut down their engines and dismount, their motions fussy and exaggerated, as if to show how purely cool and unconcerned they were, nothing out of the ordinary, just a bonfire burning in the yard and a .22 rifle leveled on them. Thatch removed the khaki cap he was wearing, shook out his hair—he had one of those layered cuts the hair bands favored to distract you from the fact that they couldn’t play their instruments, and that said all she needed to know—then ambled across the yard, the other two trailing in his wake. “Hello there,” he called, trying on a smile that was like the smile of a man stepping onto a used car lot for the first time, hopeful but expecting the worst. He wanted to know what was going on, what they were doing there, what the fire was all about. “For a minute,” he said, trying to be friendly, trying to smooth things out, as if trespassing and sheep killing and cutting their living out from under them was just a little gaffe, nothing really, “I thought the house was on fire.” But then he had a look at the piled-up mess of the fire and saw what it was and his face went hard.

“You’re killing our animals,” Bax said. “Livestock. You and these two clowns”—he had the rifle laid out across the hood of the truck and the truck was between them and him, and he indicated the two hunters, fat-faced types in their thirties or forties, with a jerk of his head—“are shooting up our sheep. That we paid for out of our own pockets. And that’s got to stop.”

She’d moved in beside him when the men had climbed down from their vehicles blinking against the light of the spreading sky. The mud sucked at her boots. A cold shiver ran through her. “And the lambs,” she heard herself say. “What about the dead lambs? Seventy-three of them.”

The big man—Thatch, and he must have been some sort of bodybuilder or something—just shrugged. “Talk to the Gherinis,” he said. “I don’t owe you shit. You owe me. You’ve got no right to destroy people’s personal property, and I tell you you’re going to pay every penny it’s going to cost to replace it, or—”

“Or what?” Bax lifted the gun now, though it was puny, ridiculous, a child’s toy compared to what the two fat-faced men had slung over their shoulders.

Thatch hadn’t moved. He was twenty feet away. The bow loomed over the back of his head as if it were attached to him, a supererogatory limb sprung up out of the jointure of his shoulder blades. “I’ll sue you. I’ll have you evicted, that’s what I’ll do. You just try me. And I’m about a heartbeat away from coming over there and kicking your crippled ass, crutches or no.” He shifted his gaze to her. “You too, you bitch.”

The violence of the curse, the hate, the explosive freight-train rush of the moment—
Life and death
, that was what she was thinking,
life and death
—stunned her. Scared her. What had she done?

No one moved. No one said a word. Movie images flickered through her head, shootouts and quick draw, Technicolor irreality, playacting, and who were those people lying there in the dirt with the fake blood spurting? Extras, stuntmen, bad guys. Not Bax, not her. But where was the reality, exactly, where the restraint? The law? Normalcy, even?

Ultimately—and it happened before she could draw her next breath—there was only a single shot fired, and it was Bax who squeezed it off, a sudden sharp snap like the crack of a whip that kicked up a puff of dirt all the way on the far side of the house, and Bax wasn’t aiming, maybe didn’t even mean to pull the trigger, but it had its effect. The two fat-faces staggered back as if their knees had buckled and she watched the color drain out of Thatch’s face.

Bax—she couldn’t read him, couldn’t tell if his own stone-cold look was the result of the pain of his ribs or a flare of anger or even surprise at what he’d done, what it had all come to—dropped his voice down to its fiercest pitch and said, “You cocky son of a bitch—who the hell do you think you are?”

And Thatch, white still, white as Gold Medal flour, his blood drained as neatly as if somebody had pulled out the stopper, fought to master his voice. “You think you can intimidate me?”

And Bax, check and checkmate: “You’re damn right.”

She could see it was going to be difficult getting back into the truck, Bax fumbling and exposed for the fatal space of one long moment while she twisted the key in the ignition and Thatch and his sheep killers did whatever it was they meant to do to get their own back, and so she started round the truck to the driver’s side, saying loud enough for all to hear, “The hell with it. Let’s just leave. Let’s just get out of here.”

Thatch made no move to stop them, though the look he gave her was death delivered. She had the truck up and running and blasting its exhaust, and the noise and her motions, the briskness with which she sprang into the seat, squared herself and jerked at the gear shift, gave Bax cover enough to juggle gun and crutches and heave himself into the truck, and she never gave Thatch a second glance as she pinned the accelerator to the floor and slashed away up the road until the ranch and the bonfire with the three puny figures in front of it was just a speck in the rearview mirror.

She’d never been so torn up in her life. Her hands were trembling, her feet were like dead things, and she could feel her stomach, the very bottom of it, as if it had been pinned to her with a tack. Bax roared out his rage all the way up the snaking muddy road to the mesa and she roared it right back at him. They made all sorts of resolutions, what they were going to do, what Bax was going to say to the owners and to the police and the Coast Guard and anybody else who would listen, but none of it did the least bit of good, because when they wound down the other side of the mesa and Scorpion Ranch appeared beneath them and grew larger and larger till the view out the windshield was filled to surfeit with it, they saw the helicopter there, inert in the yard, and the pilot and a man in suit and tie—the Gherinis’ agent or lawyer or whoever he was—standing beside it and Anise and Francisco with them, looking grim.

Yes. That’s right. Pull the plug and let it all wash down the drain, the blisters, the backbreak, the stock and the improvements, the gas-fired water pump and the saddle horses and all the rest, the taste of the dirt between your teeth when the sundowners are clipping over the hills and the deepest requited love of a place that was like the love of the soul of God, let it go. Because Mr. Gherini’s agent, stepping delicately through the mud in his city shoes, said, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Russell, but I have instructions to inform you that you’ve got two weeks to vacate.”

Bax had thrown it back at him: “What are you talking about?”

The agent—erect, in command, though he couldn’t have stood more than five feet five and his eyes were mortised with disgust—gave a little speech then, peppered with figures torn from a ledger sheet, forty thousand dollars total profit to the Gherinis in the business year just concluded versus the promise of some hundred and fifty thousand in annual revenues from sport hunting alone, and all that with the Park Service breathing down their necks and threatening a public taking of the property that had been in his clients’ family from their grandfather’s time for a compensation too mean even to mention. “Let’s face it, Mr. Russell,” he said, lifting one foot from the ooze and then, thinking better of it, setting it down again, “the world’s moving on. Sheeping’s something out of the old west and the old west is dead.”

Bax, strung tight, trying to gesticulate and hold on to the crutches at the same time, tried to reason with him, but the man kept shaking his head and interrupting him. “Two weeks,” he kept saying. “I’m very sorry. My clients are sorry. Everybody’s sorry.” He moved forward then, very carefully, like a man wading through cake batter, removed an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it over. “Two weeks. You’ve been duly served.”

It was as if the breath had been knocked out of her. She felt like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a scrap of rock as the seas rose and crashed. She was drowning on dry land. “What about the lambs?” she asked, angling toward him, her palms held out in extenuation. “We can’t just—”

He looked at her now for the first time. His eyes were black, his hair close-cropped. He was a very little man in a very expensive suit and a pair of ruined shoes who’d come from another world on an urgent errand and that errand had been completed. “Leave them.”

“For what? For those, those”—she couldn’t find the word—“
people
to shoot them?”

“I’m not here to argue,” he said.

Francisco was staring at the withered cracked upturned toes of his boots. Anise brought a hand to her face. From the distance came the long withering bleat of the lambs.

“But that’s our profit,” she protested. “Our increase.”

And now, as if things weren’t black enough, Bax turned on her. “You keep out of this,” he said.

The man stared through her as if she didn’t exist, his eyes on Bax.

“What about the lease?” Bax demanded. “You can’t break the lease just like that. We could sue. Anybody could.”

“No visitors,” the man said.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Your lease. It states, quite clearly, that you’re to have no visitors here without express permission of the owners.”

Bax did a little dance inside the cage of his crutches, every hope he had dying right there in the mud in front of him. “Visitors? We never had any visitors here—”

The agent had turned to wade his way back to the helicopter, the pilot—a pair of arms and legs, two eyes and a face as bland as the Los Angeles white pages—standing there looking on as if he were already gone, whirling overhead in his thunder machine, goodbye, so long, and this has nothing to do with me.

“Mr. Hazeltine?” Bax was stumping after him, a pleading tone come into his voice, an oiliness she’d never imagined in him, a begging, a soul-selling, and what was he doing? Who was he to plead? He should have been roaring, should have thrown down the crutches and wrung the little shit like a rag. “Mr. Hazeltine, we never—”

But the agent, on his high horse now, with all the lawyers and contracts and lease-breakers in his pocket, just swung round on them, and with a long slow rising gesture, pointed to Anise. It took her a moment—she was rinsed clean, blown clear of words, and so was Bax—before she could say, or no, bleat, because that was what she was doing, bleating, “But that’s my daughter.”

The man was at the door of the helicopter, the pilot already settled in at the controls. “Exactly,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. “
Quoderat demonstrandum
. Case closed.” He lifted himself up into the glass bubble, careful to dangle his feet outside the open door long enough to unlace his shoes—cordovans, in oxblood, with black rubber heel lifts—remove them, and rap them gingerly against the body of the machine. They stood there watching him in silence as if he were performing a holy ritual, a little man on a gray day on an island far from shore, beating the mud from his shoes. Then the big blades began to whirl and they stepped back away from the wash of them and the sudden shrieking assault of noise. “Two weeks,” he mouthed over the roar, and then the door pulled shut and everything they knew and wanted and hoped for lifted off into the sky.