“Yes,” Giancarlo said, in answer to both questions. “This is one of our rarest and finest wines, and we do have at least a few bottles on hand, I’m quite sure.” And then he attempted a witticism, which was lost on LaJoy: “If you should consume them, I would be more than just happy, perhaps even rhapsodic, and I will personally drive back to the house and get you yet another from my own personal cellar.”
Through all this, Alma had held on to her smile, but she’d begun to view LaJoy—Dave—in a new light. He was agitated, she could see that, but why? Was he trying some sort of power play, putting down Fredo and now Giancarlo himself, as if this would impress her? But Giancarlo was gone now to fetch the wine—wine, she saw, glancing at the list she eased from the table—that cost three hundred and twenty-five dollars a bottle, and she tried to let the moment pass. “I’m sure it’ll be good,” she said, forcing a different kind of smile altogether, a smile that was two parts reassurance and one of unease.
All he said was, “It better be. At these prices.”
And then Giancarlo was back, taking on the burden himself, presenting the bottle against a snowy cloth. He held it out for LaJoy’s approval, then uncorked it and discreetly slipped the cork onto the table beside his plate. LaJoy snatched it up, sniffed it with a sour look, and set it back down again. Then there was the ritual of the trial pour and LaJoy’s lifting the glass to his nose, holding it up to the light and swirling the wine to aerate it—it was as dark and viscous as the blood at the bottom of the polystyrene tray steak comes in at the supermarket, the steak she hadn’t seen or consumed since she was a teenager because it was against her principles—and then, finally, tasting it.
She watched his face expectantly. Giancarlo was watching too, solicitous, more proper than proper, waiting for the command to pour the glasses full. But LaJoy’s expression was pained. He took a second sip, rinsed his mouth and spat it back into the glass. “Rotgut,” he pronounced.
Giancarlo said nothing. He stood there erect, the restaurant—his life’s blood, his pride, his being—opening up behind him to the gracious tables of murmuring diners, the paintings spotlighted on the deep ochre walls, the potted palms and lacy ferns.
She didn’t know what to do. Certainly she couldn’t demand to taste it herself—or even request it. LaJoy was the expert here. He was the one paying—this was a date, a dinner date—and she had to defer to him. But he was rude, no doubt about it, unnecessarily so—no, boorish. Absolutely boorish. He didn’t say anything in extenuation, not Excuse me, I’m very sorry, and I know this rarely happens, but please bear with me here or even, It must have turned in the bottle—he merely flicked his wrist as if brushing away an insect and dropped his eyes, once again, to the wine list.
This time he ordered a French wine—the second priciest bottle on the list—and this time it was Fredo who presented the bottle and assisted, in his rigidly decorous way, with the ritual of the uncorking, the examination of the cork, the pouring of the sample taste. And this time, without even glancing at the waiter, LaJoy, his lip curled and his gaze locked on hers, said only, “Vinegar.” And when he did look up, his eyes burning with the kind of fanatical hatred you saw in the eyes of revolutionaries, he pronounced his words very carefully, fighting for restraint, “Bring me the list.”
It was then that she began to gather her things, her purse, her shawl, the glasses she’d raised briefly to her eyes in order to glance across the table and match price to wine on the list LaJoy hadn’t thought to offer her, as if her opinion—the opinion of a sake drinker—counted for nothing, first date or no. She was pushing back the chair even before Giancarlo glided across the room, looking grave, to inform them—to inform her as well as this peevish show-off of a smug insensitive tightly smiling man she unaccountably found herself sitting across from—that he was very sorry, but he just couldn’t keep on opening bottles of wine, his finest wines at that, only to have them sent back.
Shoulders slumped, face burning, she made for the door even before LaJoy—not Dave, just LaJoy, as she would ever after think of him—said, “Well fuck you then. We’ll just go someplace else. Someplace that’s the real deal. You know what I mean? A place”—she pictured him gesturing over the table, the napkin slipped from his waist and trailing behind him as he rose to his feet—“with some class. Where they know what wine is.” She pushed through the door and out into the night, turning right, away from her apartment, taking the opposite direction from which they’d come, moving quickly, finding the shadows, cursing under her breath and praying that he wouldn’t try to catch up with her.
But here he is, on her beach, coming toward her with that same hateful gloating look on his face, and she’s not going to let him spoil her morning—she’ll ignore him, that’s what she’ll do, walk right past him as if he didn’t exist. He’s fifty feet away, thirty, ten, and the dogs, tight lariats of skin, are sniffing at her, poking the long tubes of their overbred snouts into the folds of her jeans. “Nice write-up in today’s paper,” he says, and he’s stalled there, right in front of her, gloating, gloating. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it? The one about your little celebration yesterday? No? Hey, don’t turn away, I’m talking to you.”
She’s past him now, her heart pounding—article, what article?—focusing on the bluffs ahead, fighting to keep her pace steady because she’s not going to give in, not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing her run or even quicken her pace.
“Hey!” he shouts, whirling round to throw his words at her back. “Hey, Alma Boyd Takesue, Dr. Alma—don’t you want to hear what I have to say? Are you in denial or what? Just look in section B, nice article by Toni Walsh. Hey, nice headline too—‘The Real Pests of Anacapa.’ Catchy, huh?”
A hundred feet separate them. The sand is damp beneath her feet, the waves drawn all the way back and gentle as bathwater. Shorebirds run on ahead. Another dog walker solidifies in the distance. Her morning is ruined, she knows it. All she can think of is to get home and find that article, the nail in the coffin of her efforts to woo the Press Citizen. As she will soon discover, the real pests of Anacapa, in the august Toni Walsh’s estimation, are the members of the Park Service in general and Dr. Takesue in particular, the kind of people who think they can manipulate nature and make a theme park out of the islands. And Sickafoose, Tim Sickafoose, consulting ornithologist, whom you would think should know better, wrapping a gloved hand round an auklet chick for a cheesy photo op.
“I’m going to bury you!” he shouts, and she would have laughed at the cliché, but there’s nothing funny about this sick and hateful man and his agenda and the battle to come. “You’ll never get away with it on Santa Cruz! We’ll fight you in court, you wait and see!”
And now she swings round. He’s standing there, pumped up in his T-shirt, bristling, red-faced, taunting her like a bully on the playground. The dogs have drifted away from him, sniffing at an exposed rock at water’s edge, preparatory to marking their territory. A pair of female joggers—matching white shorts and sunshades, their limbs blurred, faces annulled by the sun—close on him from behind while their own dog, a shaggy white-whiskered golden, bolts on ahead of them to confront the greyhounds. She shouldn’t get into this, she knows it, but she can’t help herself. The mention of court, that’s what does it. Court. He means to sue, just as he’d sued over the rat control on Anacapa, but it’s an empty threat because the justices know who’s in the right—who’s serving the public interest—and who’s the crank.
But she will see him in court, in two weeks’ time. And she won’t be the one squirming—she’ll be a spectator, there to watch Tim testify against him and see justice done. Because finally, after all the motions and delaying tactics his lawyer could dredge up out of the depths of the legal books, after every avenue has been closed to him and there’s no escaping the consequences of his actions, he will go up before the federal magistrate on the two misdemeanor charges against him and attempt to explain exactly what he was doing out on Anacapa Island on
that gray wind-shorn day when Tim stopped him, and the park ranger, with the Coast Guard providing backup, stepped in to make the arrest.
“That’s right!” she shouts out, ignoring the startled looks the joggers give her and the way the dogs, all three of them, glance up sharply at the vehemence in her voice. “See you in court!”
Coches Prietos
On the back side of Santa Cruz Island, the side that faces out to sea, there are any number of snug anchorages—Yellowbanks, Willows, Horqueta, Alamos, Pozo, Malva Real—but the one he prefers, especially on a weekday when nobody else is likely to show up, is a horseshoe-shaped cove with a buff sand beach called Coches Prietos. That’s where he’s heading now, Anise in the galley fresh-squeezing limes for a batch of margaritas (which he won’t even sample till they’re past the shipping lanes—he can’t count the times he’s been motoring along without a thought in the world only to glance up and see one of those big implacable seven-story container ships coming straight at him like a floating mountain), the chop moderate and the sun burned clear, for two days of R&R. He’s been making an effort to get the boat out of the harbor at least once a month, because what’s the use of owning the thing if you’re just going to park it in a slip like the Janovs and all the rest of the slip hogs who like the idea of having a boat a whole lot better than the reality of sailing it, but with one thing and another there are long stretches when the Paladin sits idle. The motor has been rebuilt, top to bottom, and he’s twice had her out of the water to be scraped, sealed and repainted, there’s a new refrigerator with an ice maker and a seriously upgraded stereo-video system (put in by his best installer from the Goleta store), and she handles beautifully, como un sueño, as Wilson would say. So yes, he is making the effort to get his sea legs under him and motor out to the islands whenever he can find the time.
It’s not that easy, actually. There’s always something in the house that needs fixing, he can’t seem to stay out of the stores no matter how much he’s paying Harley Meachum to do his fretting for him and the FPA business is staggeringly time-consuming, what with fund-raising, e-mail campaigns, mass mailings and the website. Then there are the endless meetings with his lawyers, not only over the various lawsuits going forward but the final and ultimate hassle of the upcoming bench trial to answer the charges from that fiasco two years back when the engine failed him and he had to sit there at anchor while the Coast Guard came aboard with Tim Sickafoose, bird-watcher and first-class snitch, and Ranger Rick Melman of the National Park Service. That was a sad day all around. Within minutes of getting back to the boat it had begun to rain hard, the sea coming up fast and nasty, and he’d had no choice but to radio for help. Help came, all right—the Coast Guard wound up towing them back to the harbor, but not before arresting him and Wilson on the utterly asinine charges of feeding wildlife and interfering with a federal agency.
Wilson had been ready to fight. He’d been opposed to radioing for the Coast Guard to begin with—“What do we need those motherfuckers for, because you know they’re going to want to poke through everything and how many life jackets do you have and like where’s the fire extinguisher and what’s with the empty cat food bags at the bottom of the trash when you don’t even have a cat aboard?”—but there was nothing either of them could do about the engine and even if they sat there for a day and a night and another day till the weather cleared, what were they going to do, paddle back to Santa Barbara? The champagne was in the refrigerator, untouched, and Wilson was fuming. Finally, he did come around—and Anise was vocal here, since she had a gig the following evening at the Night Owl and there was no way in hell she was going to miss it—but when the Coast Guard cutter pulled up alongside and he saw Sickafoose and Ranger Rick there, his eyes went hard. “Don’t let them on board,” Wilson kept saying. “Shove the motherfuckers right the fuck over the rail.”
When it came down to it, when they were actually standing there on the deck in a tight little crowd and poking their noses into the cockpit and the cabin, Anise had gotten hot too. Ranger Rick was tricked out in one of those big black leather belts beat cops wore, replete with nightstick, dangling handcuffs and firearm. She wanted to know what right the Park Service had to board a private boat in public waters off an island owned by the people of the United States—all the people, not just the ones in teal shirts with nameplates on them—and he had informed her, in the sober monitory tones of cops worldwide, that if she didn’t shut it he was going to have to think real hard about working up a conspiracy charge to go along with the misdemeanor counts against her boyfriend and his accomplice.
He was on the point of exploding himself—all this trouble and expense only to get arrested on his own boat in a bay eleven miles from the nearest reporter while the vitamin K was dissolving in the rain and he was utterly helpless to do anything about anything—but for once, he curbed himself. His focus was on keeping things from escalating. This was bad, sure it was, but he was already calculating how he could play it up for publicity, the charges clearly trumped-up, absurd—it’s against the law to feed animals and perfectly fine to poison them wholesale? All he said was, “We’re a vessel in distress, with a storm coming up. The rest of it, I never heard of. It’s crazy. We took a hike, that’s all. Tell me there’s a law against that?”
Today, though, it’s different. It’s been a long time since the incident, time enough for everybody to forget all about it—except the court, that is, and the Park Service and Alma Boyd Takesue and all the rest of the vengeful sons of bitches—and his lawyer has put things off with one motion or another till finally he can put them off no longer. The trial—or farce, as his lawyer calls it—isn’t till Monday next and at this point it’s nothing more than a formality. Or at least he’s ninety-nine percent sure it is. Or will be. Wilson’s already pled to the charges and received a suspended sentence and a $200 fine—and since it made no sense for both of them to go down, Wilson stepped forward and stated for the record that he’d acted alone, that Dave LaJoy had no knowledge whatever of what he planned to do to save the lives of innocent animals and protect the planet from the people who would rather kill than preserve, that his friend was along merely to take a hike that day. How they’d missed the sign at the trailhead, he couldn’t say. But it was windy, dust blowing in their faces, so they had their hoods up. And then it rained.
That’s how things stand. So he’s not sweating it. Or at least that’s what he tells himself, because he’s facing six months in jail and a $5,000 fine on each of the two counts, but today he’s not going to think about it. He’s here, out on the water, on an afternoon made to order, doing what he needs to do more of—and for now he’s just going to push the off switch in his brain and open up and appreciate the world in all its glory.
The Anacapa Passage is a little rougher than he’d like, but nothing his stomach can’t handle, given that he hasn’t put anything in it except a slice of dry toast and two Dramamine, and the chop goes flat once he makes San Pedro Point and the big cliffs start knocking down the wind. He stays just offshore, in twenty to thirty feet of water, as they cruise along the southern shore, round the point off Albert’s Anchorage and ease into the cove at Coches. Which, he sees to his satisfaction, they have to themselves. Every once in a while, especially on weekends, he’s come all the way out here only to find that somebody else has beaten him to it, sometimes two or even three boats, but today, a Monday in early June while school’s still in session and it’s nose to the grindstone for the average wage-slave who can only dream about his two weeks off in August, it’s deserted and looking as pristine as if he were the first to discover it, as if he were Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo himself, sailing for the Spaniards four hundred and fifty years ago. He’s thinking about that, about what it must have been like when no one knew what was here, when the world was a mystery and the maps teemed with sea monsters and vast null stretches of terra incognita—anything could have happened, any miracle or horror, each new island more bizarre than the last, a fantasia of imaginary
flora and fauna made concrete in the instant it took to record it on the retina—as he cuts back on the throttle and glides in on his own wake. In the next moment, when they’re more or less in the middle of the cove, he swings the boat around to anchor stern-in so they can sit out on the deck and take in the view of the beach and the cliffs that frame it.
The anchor drops. The boat drifts tranquilly out to the end of the line and the line tightens. Satisfied, he settles into the deck chair, and Anise pads up barefoot from the galley and hands him the first margarita, the contemplative one, so cold there’s a rime of frost on the glass. She’s in her bikini, two little black strips of cloth that seem nothing more than an interruption in the blinding white spill of her. Her hair is up and she’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat and retro shades that make her look like she’s stepped out of an old black-and-white movie. “Nice,” she says, easing into the deck chair beside him.
The margarita, the simplest recipe and the best—fresh lime juice, Herradura reposado, triple sec, shaken and poured into a salt-rimmed martini glass—is, he’s thinking, the finest he’s ever had. It kicks in right away on an empty stomach and as he lifts the glass to toast her he’s feeling so relaxed he might as well be asleep. “Yeah,” he says. “As nice as it gets.”
Time compresses. There is no human sound, nothing, not the ticking of a clock or the murmur of a radio, no digital beeps, no sough and wheeze of appliances. He can hear the water trickling along the hull, the cartilaginous creaking of a gull’s wings as it cranks past. The beach glows as if lit from beneath. The cliffs hold everything in.