When the Killing's Done (28 page)

The proprietor’s will had divided the island into seven parcels, one for each of his children, and one—parcel 5, by far the largest, on which the main ranch and winery stood—for their mother, Maria Christina Sara Candida Molfino Caire, or Albina, as she was known, mercifully, for short. The division was contentious. Each of the siblings felt cheated. Arthur, the eldest son, for instance, was given title to Christy Ranch in the west, but there was no serviceable harbor there to make it useful, while Edmund Rossi, son of his deceased sister Amélie, was awarded the far more desirable parcel number 7, on the eastern end of the island, and Arthur’s sister Aglae wound up with parcel 6, which included Scorpion Ranch and its excellent and protected anchorage. Litigation ensued. The original heirs began to die off and their heirs in turn took up the fight. Conditions deteriorated, the Depression intervened, the sheep kept on grazing.

Finally, in 1937, the main ranch and the four western parcels adjoining it were sold in large to an oil man from Los Angeles, Edwin Stanton, who attempted to revive the sheeping operation, bringing in domestic stock to interbreed with the remnant of the original flock and lure in the outliers. He soon gave it up when the whole of the flock, domestic and feral alike, scattered to the far ends of the island, making it too great a nuisance to round them up annually for shearing, docking and branding, and so he shipped 30,000 sheep to slaughter and focused on cattle, with mixed success. On his death in 1963, his son Carey took over majority ownership and ran the cattle operation until he himself died in 1987 and ceded the entire property to the Nature Conservancy, which hired a professional hunting concern to exterminate the remaining sheep, finally putting an end to the ovine occupation of the major portion of Santa Cruz Island.

But on the eastern two parcels, which remained in the hands of Monsieur Caire’s descendants, the sheep went right on ruminating, stripping the bark from the endemic oak, cherry and ironwood trees, grinding the bishop pine seedlings between their reductive molars, running every stamen and leaf and scrap of pith through the chambers of their four contiguous stomachs till the hills felt the pressure of them like a cinched belt, cinched and looped and cinched again.

By the time Bax took over the operation in 1979, things had fallen to ruin and the sheep were little more than an afterthought. The current owners, Pier and Francis Gherini, great-grandsons of the
propriétaire
, had come up with a scheme for developing their portion of the island into a resort, replete with marina, golf course, lodges and restaurants, but when the County of Santa Barbara denied them permits at the urging of the National Park Service, their interest flagged and whatever Scorpion Ranch once was, it was no more. It was Bax who brought it back to life. They hired him in an attempt to squeeze some profit out of the place, and he threw himself into the task, taking on new hands, repairing fence, rounding up as many of the ferals as he could and bringing in seventy prize Rambouillet rams to breed up the stock. Rita threw herself into it too. And Francisco. And Anise. They all did. But how could anyone hope to hold anything together when the world was as liable to fracture as Bax’s ribs and the long white bone that was like the bone of a ghost on the sheeny black X-rays of his left leg? Bax was laid up, that was the fact, and trespassers were out there shooting their guns at will and scaring the ewes off their lambs.

Anise had been inconsolable. Once it was over—and it was over when the ravens decided it was, lifting themselves from the bloat and scatter like great winged slugs—Rita went to her. She found her crouched in the beaten grass with the lambs all gathered to her, the hair strung dripping across her face, her shoulders quaking and her clothes wet through with the rain and the blood. Some of the lambs were too weak to stand, their outsized ears fanned out in the grass, their bleating like some diachronic dirge. They needed their mothers—for protection, warmth, milk—and if they didn’t get them soon the loss would go far beyond the seventy-three corpses Rita had already counted.

“Come on, honey,” she said, struggling to control her voice. “Let’s go back to the house and get into some dry clothes. I’ll make you some tea. Or hot chocolate. How about some hot chocolate?”

Anise didn’t respond. She sat hunched over her knees, rocking back and forth, the line of her clenched jaw as bloodless and jumpy as a diviner’s rod. She didn’t even lift her eyes.

Rita stood there in the rain, trying for her daughter’s sake to be gentle, reasonable, calming, motherly, but she felt none of these things. The fact was that in that moment Anise looked exactly like Toby, Toby when he was down, when they played and nobody showed, when the A&R man at the record company told them he had reservations about some of the songs on their second album, that they were weak, worse than weak, that they were shit, pure and unadulterated, and Toby was the last thing she wanted to think about now. Toby with his tantrums, his cheating, his coke.
Cocaína
, he always called it. As in,
Let’s do some cocaína
. Cute. Real cute. When they couldn’t even pay the rent.

She made an effort. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said, the smell of the rain enlivening the odor of death that hung over the field till she felt as if she wanted to sink down in the mud—right here, right in front of her daughter—and cry herself dry. What was the use of it all? The worry, the deprivation, every penny put back into the flock and no satisfaction but in increase? “The damage is already done and all we can do now is let the mothers come back to their babies. Look,” she said, pointing across the field to where Francisco and Bumper were working to bring them in, “they’re already coming back. They’re as worried as we are.”

Anise’s voice was small and bitter. “What about the ones that don’t have anything to worry about? What are they going to do?”

“I know,” she said. “I know, it hurts.”

She was remembering the previous year when one of the ewes that had lost a lamb to a withered leg kept nosing at the remains of the carcass—the hooves, the head, the coat—long after the flesh had gone. That was a kind of heartbreak that jumped species, from
Ovis aries
to
Homo sapiens
, and here it was again, seventy-three ewes come back to bleat for the lambs that couldn’t answer, and the ravens laughing from the trees.

“We have to get the police,” Anise said in a steady low voice, and now she looked up, her eyes hard and fixed. “Make
them
pay, those jerks, those
hunters
. For every one.”

“We will, honey, believe me.” And here she felt the anger and hate and despair come up in her all over again. “I’m going to go straight in there to the radio and call the sheriff, because this is criminal trespass, and, I don’t know, vandalism—”

“And murder.”

There was a countervailing breeze coming up off the ocean—she could smell the sharpness of it, the iodine, the salty sting of scales and feathers and fins—and it loosened the grip of the rain till it began to fall off in random spatters. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s what it amounts to.” She held out her hand, impatient now. “Come on, get up,
move
. Let’s get to the radio while there’s still a chance of catching them.”

Anise rose from the grass and smoothed down her wet jeans. The lambs she’d gathered just lay there looking into the wind, but already the ewes were trotting up to them, each instantly identifiable to the other by smell and a distinctive note of voice. “What good’s the sheriff going to do? Even if he came, which he won’t, it might be days from now and those guys are going to be long gone.”

“I don’t know,” she said, already turning toward the house, “maybe we can get the Coast Guard on them.” One of them, the one in front, was a big square-jawed blond who looked as if he could have been one of those phony TV wrestlers her father had liked so much when she was a girl back in New York. He hadn’t even given her so much as a glance. And he wasn’t carrying a gun, unlike the other two—they roared past, as oblivious as he was, rifles slung over their shoulders as they worked the handlebars of their machines and looked out ahead for ruts, obstructions, the retreating flanks of a black tusker boar. He must have thought he was the real deal, because he had a bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Big man. Big hero. “Because they’ve got to have a boat somewhere, you know that—”

Anise, rangy, tall, her back slumped under the weight of everything that was wrong, and her book, in its plastic sleeve, pressed to her chest, fell into step with her, and there was the house ahead of them, smoke rising from the chimney, Bax’s light still on, and it was as if nothing had happened, as if all the clocks were frozen and the sun locked in place. “Where do you think they are—Smugglers’? Because we put signs there and they—they can’t just say they didn’t know . . .”

“Don’t you worry, darlin’,” she said, striding along as briskly as her legs would carry her, and was she quoting some song, was that it? Lyrics clouded her head, all the songs she’d heard and sung and would sing in the years to come when all this was over with, and she was already envisioning a new song, with a blues progression and a theme of final and uncompromising revenge. “Don’t you worry,” she repeated, the words like cold little stones in her mouth, “those sons of bitches are going to regret this, and you can take my word for it.”

But they didn’t. And they wouldn’t. Because wheels were turning that she knew nothing about, and when she mounted the stairs to the bedroom she was surprised to see Bax out of bed, dressed in his faded flannel shirts—he wore as many as three or four of them, depending on the temperature—and his blue jeans with the one leg cut away for the cast. He was perched on the edge of the chair, attempting to pull on his socks, but when he tried to reach down to his good foot the ribs tugged him back as if his arm was attached to a bungee cord. He winced. Let out a curse. “Goddamn it,” he rumbled when she came through the door, “will you help me with this? And my boots. Where the shitfuck are my boots?”

She slid his socks on over his cold white feet with their horny yellowed nails and splayed toes before she said a word and when she did she was already at the door. “You mean your
boot
, don’t you? Because there’s no way a boot’s going to go over that cast, even if I slit it with a knife. And I don’t know that you should even be up on it.”

“I heard two shots,” he said, swiveling toward her, the left leg swinging like a pendulum in its chrysalis of dirty white plaster. “What was it—day-trippers? Hunters?”

It was day-trippers who punched holes in their illusion of serenity anytime they chose to show up, day and night, from the diver who drowned within sight of the beach while taking abalone out of season so that Anise had to find him there at low tide with his facial features all eaten away and one rigid arm hooked up like an invitation to dance, to the bonfire builders and stranded fishermen and the six teenagers in their daddy’s cabin cruiser out of Santa Barbara shooting up a pod of gray whales in the shallows off Scorpion Rock. You never knew, especially in summer, when somebody you’d never seen before would waltz right into the kitchen, as if the whole ranch was nothing more than a curiosity out of a museum. But this wasn’t day-trippers. This was worse, far worse. “Hunters,” she said.

He’d stopped just short of her, weaving on the pinions of the crutches, huge, big-headed, his hair gone white in the past year and his white-flecked beard fanning out across his collar and up into his sideburns as if a wind were spitting in his face. “Where? Not on ranch property?”

She tried to keep her voice level. “Right in Scorpion meadow. Right in the middle of it.”

“Shit. The dumb fucks. We lose any?”

She just nodded. “Anise’s downstairs trying to get the Coast Guard on the marine radio. This time we’re going to make them pay.”

“What’d they look like?”

And now she had to see them all over again. The way they’d come on, heedless, clueless, the sheep starting up. “I don’t know. Like the average jerk. The one of them had a bow and arrow and he was all in camouflage like this was Vietnam or something.”

Bax wedged himself through the doorway and she followed him to the head of the stairs, the kitchen opening up beneath them, the long table, the boar’s head Bax had had stuffed presiding over the room with its meshed tusks and lopsided grin, as if death were a rare joke. “He didn’t”—handing her the crutches so he could take hold of the rail and begin easing himself down the stairs, one step at a time—“have blond hair by any chance?”

“He did, yeah,” she said, stepping down to him and forcing her shoulder up under his arm for support.

“Big guy? Forties?”

“Yeah, I guess. Why, you know him?”

“Shit, yes. That’s Thatch.” Another step down and then another, the room looming beneath them, opening up like a chasm, the stove, the oven, the dull glow of the battered pots and pans, a pit of domesticity and daily strife. She could hear Anise’s voice at the radio—“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”—and the screech of static on the other end.
Who’s Thatch?
was what she was about to say, but he was already spinning out the answer. “Doesn’t he know the rules? They told me he was strictly to stay off the ranch and just hunt the hills.”

“Who told you?”

He was breathing hard, sweating, though it couldn’t have been more than fifty-five degrees in the house, and when they reached the bottom of the stairs he winced as she ducked out from under his arm and handed him the crutches. His eyes pulled away from hers. “The owners,” he said.

“What do you mean? They didn’t—?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice gone to the very bottom of the register, more a snort or growl than a human vocalization, “and I’ve been meaning to tell you about it for a couple of weeks now, but with the accident and all I just—”

She was furious, burning. “Just what? Lied to me? Kept me in the dark? Treated me like a hired hand, like a cook, instead of what I am, or what I thought I was anyway. You son of a bitch. You’re worse than they are.”