Wilson, still grinning—or no, grinning wider: “We are.”
“Sort of.”
“Yeah, sort of.”
And then the gate swings wide and they’re hefting the bags—Wilson takes two and he takes one, because to this point they’re Wilson’s and he’s in charge—and heading down the ramp to where the hulls of the boats wink and nod on the remains of the swell the storm has channeled into the mouth of the harbor. Black bags rippling and catching the metallic light in creases and crescents, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing anybody would think twice about, not even Mrs. Janov, coming up the ramp toward them from the Bitsy, a boat he hates not just for its name but for the people who own it, the type who never leave port but seem to have plenty of time to sit out on a deck chair with a drink in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other, scoping out this thing or that and watching, always watching . . . for what? Normally he ignores her, just walks right on past no matter what inanities about the weather, the gulls, the gull shit or whatever else she spouts at him, just being neighborly and what kind of burr you have up your ass? But now, because he’s feeling uplifted and right on his mark and maybe the smallest bit furtive, he treats her sealed-up face to a curt nod as he passes, the catwalk swaying beneath them and her flip-flops pounding the boards like twin jackhammers.
In the next moment they’re on board the boat, sliding into the cabin like seals into a tranquil sea, and all is quiet and calm but for the faintest whisper of the drizzle on the cabin top and the salt-flecked windows of the bridge. Wilson sits heavily—or no, he throws himself down on the couch with a sigh—and announces, “Ten thousand tabs, like you said. Think that ought to be enough?”
The boat smells the way boats do when they’ve been sitting in a slip in the rain and cold, the head making itself known, wax and varnish and scale remover competing with the must of fungus and the damp grainy woody sea-stink the cold compacts and ferments and holds there till the sun—or the electric heater—comes to burn it off. He’s already bending to flick on the heater, shifting himself around the table, adjusting to the reduced space that always makes him feel as if everything he’s ever needed is right here at hand, just cast off the lines and head out to sea and forget all the rest. “You want coffee?” he asks, setting the pot on the burner. “I’m going to brew some anyway—man, that shit they served me down at the Cactus was like paint remover.”
“Cream and sugar,” Wilson says, flipping through a six-month-old copy of National Geographic. He’s got his feet up. His eyes are half-closed. He is the type, when he’s not working, that is, and he’s definitely not working now, who can fall asleep anywhere anytime, whether it’s ten-thirty in the morning on a gently swaying yacht in the Santa Barbara marina or five p.m. over a plate of deep-fried calamari on the deck at Brophy Brothers.
“I don’t know,” he says, easing two mugs from their hooks, “this is all just guesswork, of course. They estimate there’s something like three thousand rats out there—”
“That all?”
He shrugs, a gesture that brings both mugs up to chest level, then drops them back to the counter. “Seems low to me too. But the environment’s limited, I guess, not like here where you’ve got people. And garbage. But what’s the deal with them—they’re fat-soluble, right?”
“Yeah, right. Fat-soluble. B-complex and C are the water-soluble ones, meaning you piss them out. Which is why you get scurvy. Or sailors do. Or used to, in the old days. But this stuff gets stored in the body fat or the liver.”
“So one shot should work? They eat this, they’re protected?”
“Hell, I don’t know. All I know is what I found on the Internet. Vitamin K2, one hundred micrograms per tablet, totally natural. Says they’re a ‘biologically active form extracted from a fermented Japanese soyfood called natto.’ You ever hear of natto?”
“No, can’t say as I have.” He sets the mugs down on the counter, just then noticing that one of them has a blackened ring worked into it about two-thirds of the way up. Which he chooses to ignore. “Sounds good enough to me, though. I mean, how complicated can it be—it’s just a vitamin, right?” He can feel the first stirring of warmth from the heater. The kettle is just coming on to a boil. Outside, the rain has picked up again, drilling the deck, and he’s suddenly transported back thirty years to the cabin of his father’s boat anchored off Santa Cruz Island, a day like this, his mother at the stove making toasted cheese sandwiches—Swiss on rye with mustard and sauerkraut, her specialty—so that the air grew dense and sweet with the smell of them, and he with a cup of hot chocolate and a stack of comics, cozy, cozy and safe and enclosed. Like now. Like right here and now. “What kind of price did you get, by the way?”
Wilson sets down the magazine so he can cradle his head and stretch, his legs kicking out and the muscles bunching in his shoulders. “Thirteen bucks for a hundred, that was the come-on, but I found a site where if you buy quantity it winds up costing like three bucks off the low end of that. So an even thousand.”
“You used your Visa?”
“No. A friend’s. And I had it shipped to her house, in Goleta.”
That sounds all right, not that anybody’s going to trace it and even if they do, even if the whole thing blows up in their faces, they’ll get it in the newspapers—and maybe save the rats too, because that’s the bottom line here and no matter how loose-jointed he might get, that’s what he has to remember: save the animals. He tilts the kettle over the brown-paper filter, fishes the half-and-half from the refrigerator. Back goes the kettle, then he’s handing Wilson his cup and settling into the chair opposite him while the boat ticks and sways, making its minute readjustments beneath them. In that moment he’s as calm as he’s been since he walked into that lecture—Alma’s lecture, and he hasn’t forgotten her and what went down in the past between them even if she acts like she has, Dr. Alma, with all her tics and airs—and he realizes how much just being on the boat does for him. It’s another world here, shut away from all the fights and hassles and the way people close in on you if you stop to take a breath. “I’ll write you a check,” he says.
“Whatever.” Wilson shrugs, stifles a yawn.
And then he’s leaning back, sipping coffee—real coffee—and thinking about the day he bought the boat ten months back—forget the cliché because it was a happy day then and it’s happy now too. He got a deal, a real deal, because the people were desperate to get rid of it, the guy some sort of executive with PacifiCare, bloodless as a corpse, took it out exactly three times in the three years he’d owned it and very nearly ran it aground each time, or so the story went, the wife (once maybe, but no longer anything to look at) pursing her feather-veined lips over the details. Fatuous people. Jerks. They’d named the boat, talk of clichés, the Easy Life. But as he sat right here in this cabin listening to the wife go on in what was meant to be ironic fashion about the husband’s seamanship, or lack of it, he knew what he would name her, as soon as the check was signed and the papers transferred, and he was thinking even then of today, of course he was, because how else was he going to make his intentions known, how else was he going to strike a blow for the animals when the animals were all the way out there across the channel where nobody could see them? And Anise—she’d been to college, but sometimes he wondered about the gaps, the yawning chasms, in her knowledge—asking, “Paladin? What’s a Paladin?”
Next morning breaks clear over the water, the fog confined to a white ruff at the shoulders of the islands, the sea calm, the winds light, though the weather service is warning of another storm system moving in from the north sometime later in the day. Which might or might not affect them, depending on how long this is going to take. Or if anyone tries to stop them, which is always a possibility. Anise is asleep in the bow berth, the rhythm of her breathing punctuated by a light rasping gargle deep in the throat—a snore that periodically rises up over the throb of the engine and settles back down again. Wilson, the man who can nod off anywhere, anytime, is st
retched out facedown on the couch, a blanket pulled up over his head. There’s fresh coffee, for when they want it, and Anise-made sandwiches in the reefer. On the table, the three black plastic bags and the three backpacks that will receive and transport them. He hasn’t got the radio on, preferring the silence. He sips coffee, watches the sea. The boat holds steady, barely a ripple on the surface.
Wilson’s friend—her name is Alicia Penner and she makes the trip from Goleta all the way down the coast to Ventura five days a week to work as a secretary in the offices of the National Park Service on Harbor Way in the marina, where the sun sits in the windows and the NPS drones shuffle papers all day and think about what to kill next—has, in her humble role as a friend of the animals, pinpointed the day of the drop for them. It’s not general knowledge. For all their lectures and Q&A sessions, these people aren’t really interested in hearing what the public has to say—and they certainly don’t want any interference, not at the museum, not in the parking lot, and especially not at the kill site, all the way out there across the belly of the gray lapping waves.
This is the day before Thanksgiving, a day when everybody’s mind is on turkey and chestnut stuffing and football and champagne, and the islands, if they register at all, are nothing more than a distant blur in the mist. The Park Service plan is to hit East Anacapa first, while people are standing in line at Vons and Ralphs and Lazy Acres Market, ditching work to clink glasses at the downtown bars, nipping out to the airport to pick up Grandma and Aunt Leona, basting turkeys, geese, ducks, and then, two weeks later, when the very same people are busy Christmas shopping and planning their office parties, they’ll bombard the middle and western islets. Secrecy. Privacy. Out of sight, out of mind. But what the pencil-necks in their swivel chairs haven’t taken into account is that some people don’t eat turkeys or geese or ducks, don’t eat meat of any kind, because meat is murder and every living thing has an animating spirit and the same right to life as the humans who take it from them, butcher them, feed them into their gaping greedy jaws and toss the bones into the trash as if the thing that bore them never existed at all. And those people tend to pay attention. Real close attention.
When the island begins to climb up out of the haze and spread itself across the horizon to the south, fifteen minutes out and counting, he cuts the engine and ducks down into the cabin to nudge Anise awake. She’s a heavy sleeper, a sprawler, as comatose as if she’s been conked with a ball-peen hammer, and he bends to her gently, brushes the hair away from her face and leans in to kiss the corner of her mouth. Her lips are slightly parted, her lids closed on a faint stripe of eyeliner. In that instant he’s involved in the heat of her, a rising radiant aura of flesh and fluids, the faint lingering scent of her perfume and the jojoba shampoo she uses, her breath sweet and moist and lush with sleep. “Hey,” he whispers, “hey, Ankhesenamen, wake up. Imhotep’s here.”
It takes her a moment, coming back from very far off, and then her eyes ease open without a hint of surprise, as if she knew he was there all along. Her lips are warm, puffy, lipstickless. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt, pale blue to match her eyes, with her own name done up in freehand across the front and the dates and venues—Lompoc, Santa Maria, Nipomo, Buellton, Santa Ynez—of her last modest self-financed tour in support of her last modest self-financed CD scrolling down the back. “I want my mummy,” she says, reaching out for him, and this is a routine that goes back to their first date, a trip to Paseo Nuevo to see the remake of the old Boris Karloff flick.
He holds the embrace just long enough, a morning hug, that’s all, and then pulls away from her and straightens up. He can feel the caffeine working in him, the boat rocking like a cradle, sea air leaching in from above. What he’s remembering is the first time he ever laid eyes on her, a Sunday afternoon in February or maybe it was March and she was playing at the Cold Spring Tavern high up in the San Marcos pass, opening for a grind-it-out blues band. She mounted the little five-foot-square stage with her head down, the guitar slung under one arm. He was at the bar with one of his buddies—Wilson maybe, or maybe not. Folk wasn’t really his thing, but she was the whole package, a big wide-faced beauty with skin the sun had never touched and hair the color of honey hardened in the jar that reached all the way down to her knees, and—this really got him, as if all the rest weren’t enough—bare feet. Those feet fascinated him, perfect, sleek, unadorned, the flexing toes and rising arch, the beat invested in the flesh. Her feet grabbed the stage and let it go, her lids fluttered shut and her head rolled back till her tongue found the words to ride out over the rhythm. She was like some kind of hippie princess resurrected from another time, out of sync, wrong, definitely wrong, but big-shouldered and confident and shining all the same. He began to listen, to tune out Wilson or whoever it was, and hear what she was projecting, a handful of covers and a skein of originals that went beyond cheating hearts and poisoned love to speak to the issues, to the way the sons of bitches were paving over the world, factory-farming animals, inserting their toxic genes into everything we drank and ate till they were inescapable. The songs weren’t half-bad, he was thinking, and when she walked off the stage and disappeared out back he found himself having another cocktail and then another, and he might have forgotten all about her in the rush of conversation and the fumes of his Absolut rocks, but then the members of the blues band took the stage and halfway through the first set she appeared there in the middle of them as if she were a revenant made flesh and let her voice go on “Stormy Monday” till it made something ache high up inside him.
“Later,” he tells her now, colder than any mummy, and then softens it. “Tonight,” he says, “when we get back. And I’ll take you to dinner. To celebrate. But right now we’ve got some business to do, remember?”
Stretching, her bare legs canted away from the sleeping bag and that warm, fleshy odor rising to him: “We almost there?”
He nods, already in motion. “Yeah,” he says. “And coffee’s in the galley, hot, fresh and ready. I’m going to wake Wilson, okay?”
Breakfast consists of bagels, peanut butter and a fruit medley Anise put together the night before. They eat at the helm, she perched beside him on the seat, her bare legs tucked under her, spooning up fruit while he pushes the throttle forward and the boat skips over the waves. Wilson is down below, rattling around, singing snatches of something unrecognizable in a clear tuneless voice. The sun hovers and fades. Birds skew away from them and fall back in their wake. Full throttle, a bit of chop now, the bagels rubbery, too moist, the coffee setting fire to his stomach, each sliver of fruit dropping down his throat like a stone thrown from a cliff—is he going to be sick, is that it?—and then the island’s right there in front of them, big as a continent.
The anchorage is on the north shore, near the eastern tip of the island, and as they motor into the mouth of the cove—rock right to the water, the cliffs wrapped around so tightly it’s like heading into a cave with the top lifted off—they can see the Park Service boat moored to one of the buoys there, buoys reserved for the NPS and the Coast Guard, while the dock beyond them is for the exclusive use of the concessionaire that brings day-trippers out to the island. Everybody else has to drop anchor farther out and take a dinghy into shore. All right. Fine. He has no argument with that—or maybe he does, because these sons of bitches act as if the place is their own private reserve when in fact it’s a public resource, but that’s moot now. What matters—what heartens him as he drops anchor and scans the cove—is that nobody seems to be around. No recreational boaters, no Park Service types, no Ph.D.s or bird-watchers. Just the mute black cliffs and a scurf of parched brown vegetation. And the dock, with its iron steps and railings winding up onto the plateau above.
Anise will stay with the boat, that’s what he’s decided. She’s not going to be happy about it, but the breeze is picking up and even after he puts out the second anchor he realizes somebody’s going to have to stay aboard in case of emergency—the anchorage isn’t as protected as
he’d like, and the last thing he wants is to come back to a boat blown onto the rocks. And he needs Wilson with him to spread the stuff, because Wilson has the mind-set and stamina to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible—before anybody shows up to ask what they’re doing, that is—while Anise, for all her commitment to the cause, tends to dawdle, making a fuss over this plant or that or stopping to admire the view or a butterfly or the way a hawk soars and dips over the cliffs on wings of fire, already composing the song in her head. Besides, she’s the most recognizable, especially with that hair and the long smooth white run of her legs no man could ignore, unless he’s blind, and there aren’t all that many blind park rangers, at least as far as he knows. All this comes to him as he stands on deck, scanning the shore with his Leica. Off in the distance, he can hear the barking of seals. The sea begins to slap at the hull. If it was flat-calm, dead-calm, it would be different.
Inside, in the cabin, Anise and Wilson are busy twisting open plastic bottles and upending them in the depths of the backpacks, along with a judicious measure of cat food, out of the twenty-five-pound bag, the tabs and kibble intermingled like chicken feed, not that he’s ever seen chicken feed, but it’s the principle, the scattering principle, he’s interested in. Reach in and fling—that’s what he’s after. Vitamin K happens to be the antidote to brodifacoum and other anticoagulant baits, and the idea is that if the rats consume the poison pellets, well, then they’ll eat the vitamins too—they’ll want them, need them—and, once ingested, the vitamins will go to work neutralizing the blood-thinning properties of the bait. That’s the hope, at any rate, because he’s seen what the poison does and it’s as cruel as anything he can conceive of—heartless, sickening—and people think nothing of it, not on the islands or in their own backyards.
He’s never caught any of them at it, but his neighbors must sow d-CON like grass seed, judging from all the sick and dying animals he’s found along the roads, birds especially. Jays, crows, sparrows, even a hawk. Any number of times, walking down to the post office or the beach or to have a drink in one of the bars along Coast Village Road, he’s come across rats huddled on the side of the pavement, their eyes red, a bright blooming spot of blood in each nostril, quaking, suffering, unaware of him or anything else, and what of the raccoon or opossum—or dog—that comes along and scavenges the dying animal or even its corpse? They call that secondary poisoning, and he doubts if that’s very pretty either.