When the Killing's Done (57 page)

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!”

The
Tokachi-maru
, a twelve-thousand-ton freighter out of Nagoya, bound for Long Beach with a load of Chinese-made textiles and machine parts, was one of the oldest ships still flying a Japanese flag. She’d been commissioned in the late 1960s and except for brief spells in port or dry dock had been at sea continuously ever since. She was etched with rust from the waterline all the way up her six decks to the bridge, and though paint had been applied belowdecks and above in various eras (elephant-gray and dirt-adherent white for the most part), she tended to stand out in any harbor as an eyesore, if not a derelict. Still, she was a moneymaker for her owners, who intended to sail her until it was no longer economically feasible—or better yet, till she went to the bottom in some fortuitous South Sea typhoon, fully insured, of course, and with all hands spared. There had been surprisingly few accidents aboard, given the miles she’d logged and the years she’d been at sea (the usual broken bones, heart attacks and cases of alcohol poisoning, and just one man overboard, off the coast of Georgia in the late 1980s, who was, regrettably, never found), but for all her unsightliness and the problems the crew had with doors that rusted shut and the galley that still relied on the original four-burner gas range and three antiquated microwave ovens, her instruments were state of the art and her captain, Noboru Nishizawa, nephew of the ship’s first commander, was among the most reliable and cautious in the entire fleet.

On this particular day, a Saturday in June, the ship encountered dense fog on entering the Santa Barbara Channel from the north and Captain Nishizawa himself appeared on the bridge to oversee operations. As a precaution he cut the engines to three-quarter speed and ordered the ship’s horn to sound at intervals. Beyond that, he relied on his instruments, his experience and the sheer mass of the ship to keep them from harm. He was right dead center in the middle of the southbound lane and nothing was showing on the radar up ahead of him. If there was an emergency, the
Tokachi-maru
would take two miles and three and a half minutes to come to a stop. The tightest turn of which she was capable was nearly a mile across. And at seven stories above the surface, even in the clearest conditions, the crew on the bridge would have little chance of sighting any small craft below in any case.

That was the way it was. That was what the shipping lanes—and the Separation Zone—were meant for. Was the system perfect? Of course not. The Separation Zone functioned like the median on a freeway, but there were no lines drawn on the water to delineate the lanes and no concrete bumpers, palms or oleanders to separate north- and southbound traffic. Were there accidents? Of course there were. But in most cases the crew of a freighter or tanker never saw, felt or heard a thing when a small craft was unlucky enough to blunder across its path. Think of it this way: a heavyset woman, heavier even than Marta at the Cactus Café, a real monument of flesh and bone and live working juices, plods out to her car on aching feet after a double shift and can’t begin to know the devastation she wreaks on the world of the ant, the beetle and the grub.

Wilson is fast, he’ll say that for him. By the time he bolts down the steps Wilson’s already got the hatch in back of the table open and manages to grab one of the sacks from it before Dave can get there and slam it closed. The girls—the second bottle of wine, Anise’s chardonnay, is half gone and they’re eating something now, helping themselves to the sandwiches he’s made without even having thought to offer him one—look up in amusement as if he and Wilson are playing some sort of game, but this isn’t funny, not at all. It’s stupid is what is. Idiotic. And he won’t have it, not on his boat. The table is between him and Wilson and Anise is wedged in on the bench, right there in his way. “Put it down,” he says.

And Wilson, all teeth, bright as a toothpaste commercial, wags the sack out front of him. “No way, man. I’m just going to”—he drops his eyes to pull loose the cord at the neck of the bag even as Dave snatches for it and draws back all in the same instant, afraid of the dark shape within, of the fangs, and didn’t Stiles say they can bite through the bag?—“loosen this and show the girls. . . the, ta-da, surprise!”

In that moment, the moment at which the neck of the bag falls open and Wilson, so quick of reflex it’s as if the bag has never been there at all, thrusts his hand in and comes out with the thing itself, his hand clamped behind its flat triangular head and its body twisting on itself like a hard sure slap to the face, Dave can’t remember ever having felt more powerless. And hopeless. He’s frozen there, both girls erupting with choked-back little shrieks of horror and amusement because that’s what girls are supposed to do in a situation like this and Wilson flashing that smile and brandishing the snake as if he’s given birth to it, and all he feels is that things have gone terribly wrong.

There it is, the snake, his snake, the one he’s bought with his own private funds to possess it and free it again because that’s his pleasure and it’s not secreted in a bag anymore, not wrapped in burlap and hidden from sight, but right there in his face, coiling and uncoiling, rattling its tail in a high furious buzz like a stirred-up hive of bees, thick, potent, menacing, revealed in its essence. A snake. A rattlesnake.
Crotalus viridis
. Its mouth is open in outrage, the fangs yellow-white and slick with wet, with venom. The cabin closes in. The sea moves. And he understands, for the first time, how wrong this is, how wrong he’s been, how you have to let the animals—
the animals
—decide for themselves.

Then the ship’s horn sounds, loud as a cannon blast.

Then the crash comes.

Then nothing.

Scorpion Ranch

S
he’s never seen the channel so smooth. There isn’t even so much as a bump coming out of Ventura Harbor and at ten in the morning it’s as warm as midday. As far as she can tell there’s no hint of a breeze, nothing at all—it’s dead calm, the surf flat, boats fixed in place, the kelp fanned out limp on the water. There won’t be many sailboats out today, but the weekend sailors are just going to have to suffer, that’s all, because she doesn’t mind being a little selfish here—even if she had the ability to arrest the planet on its axis, she couldn’t have ordered up better weather for the occasion. Amazing, really. Though the
Islander
’s full to capacity with Park Service and Nature Conservancy people and campers and day-trippers alike, everyone’s just standing around as if they’re at a cocktail party in a crowded apartment with unconquerable views. Nobody’s looking green, nobody’s got their head down and there’s no Bonine or Dramamine in evidence. It’s so flat that when Wade brings her a cup of tea in the recycled cardboard container, he’s able to walk from the galley and down the length of the cabin without flailing his arms or lurching like a tightrope walker—and he doesn’t spill a drop. “It’s not water out there, it’s glass,” he says, leaning into the table where she’s sitting with Annabelle and Frazier. “We’re not sailing, we’re just skating. And will you look at that sun.”

“You’re right,” she says. “It couldn’t be more perfect.” She’s thinking of the last end-of-project celebration, the one out on Anacapa three years ago, and so is he.

“Nobody’s going to freeze today,” he says, “that’s for sure. And the paper cups and plates and all the rest—shit, even the cake—aren’t going to blow out to sea either, right, Fraze?”

Frazier and Annabelle are dreaming over their coffee, their faces soft and content, their posture so relaxed they might have been in a trance. He’s cradling his cardboard cup in his left hand and she’s got hers in her right. They’re sitting very close, hip to hip, and their two otherwise unoccupied hands are interlocked and resting casually in Annabelle’s lap. Alma is thinking how serene and pretty Annabelle’s looking—she’s wearing an aquamarine jacket and yellow blouse set off by the dangling boar’s ivory earrings Frazier gave her and gazing soulfully off across the water to where Anacapa and Santa Cruz rise up in the distance like the original Eden, the one before Eve, before Adam, before names.

Frazier looks up, distracted from his thoughts. “I wouldn’t know, mate. I wasn’t here for that one”—he gives first Alma, then Annabelle a look—“because you people didn’t think to get us out here to put holes in all those scampering little rats. . . at, oh, I don’t know, a bargain rate of let’s say fifty dollars per. Do I hear fifty?”

Wade gives him a quizzical look, as if he’s not quite sure whether he’s joking or not, then ducks his head and announces that he’s got to get back and make sure everything’s in order. “No screwups this time, right?” He flashes a nervous smile, rubs his hands together as if he’s personally molding the dough for the wood-fired pizzas. Alma can see he’s worked up. The party’s his to worry over, beginning to end—his and Jen’s. Jen is her new secretary and factotum, a month on the job now, and she’s a rock—a computer genie with two years of biology courses at SBCC under her wing. Jen can handle anything. And so can Wade. They’d better. Because she’s taking the day off herself. She didn’t even bring her laptop.

There’s an interval, Wade gone, people milling, the boat moving forward so imperceptibly they might have been at anchor for all anyone knew, and then Frazier takes a sip of coffee, glances up casually over the folded lip of his paper cup, and says, “So, this’ll be Beverly’s first sea voyage then? Or have you had her out already?”

This is Annabelle’s cue to roll her eyes and release his hand to give him a playful shove. “She’s only nine weeks old, Fraze, what do you think?”

The weight of the baby against her shoulder, her breast, the whole right side of her body, is like the weight of a comforter on a fogged-in night, light, reassuring, indispensable, nothing at all like the immovable lump growing inside her that had made her feel as if she were about to sink through the earth with every step she took. Beverly. She has Tim’s eyes, two bright flecks of green like forest leaves touched with sunlight, though Tim doesn’t matter, not anymore, and she’s got the strong ever-so-slightly bowed legs of the Takesue clan. She’s a greedy insatiable feeder. She gurgles. She laughs. Her smile could stop traffic. Alma says, “Uh-huh, yeah. First time.”

“She’s a good little traveler, I’ll say that for her. I haven’t heard a sound out of her.”

“Wait’ll she wakes up and realizes she’s hungry. My mother says she’s got the lungs of a prima donna.”

“Don’t sell her short—the way she’s going now she could be the first baby to sail solo around the world. What do you think? Asleep at the wheel?”

Beverly stirs. The green eyes flash open and don’t particularly like what they see. Two or three heaves for breath and then the encapsulated wail breaking free to startle the cabin, everybody looking her way now, some in annoyance, some in the fondness of reminiscence, and then they look away and there’s the maneuver with the blouse and the nursing bra and the baby’s at the nipple, the flow of milk commencing and conversation starting up again.

“I don’t know about you,” Frazier says, looking to Annabelle, “but I’m ready for a beer. Anybody want one? Alma?”