When the Killing's Done

The Wreck of the Beverly B

Picture her there in the pinched little galley where you could barely stand up without cracking your head, her right hand raw and stinging still from the scald of the coffee she’d dutifully — and foolishly — tried to make so they could have something to keep them going, a good sport, always a good sport, though she’d woken up vomiting in her berth not half an hour ago. She was wearing an oversized cable-knit sweater she’d fished out of her husband’s locker because the cabin was so cold, and every fiber of it seemed to chafe her skin as if she’d been flayed raw while she slept. She hadn’t brushed her hair. Or her teeth. She was having trouble keeping her balance, wondering if it was always this rough out here, but she was afraid to ask Till about it, or Warren either. She didn’t know the first thing about handling a boat or riding out a heavy sea or even reading a chart, as the two of them had been more than happy to remind her every chance they got, and Till told her she should just settle in and enjoy the ride. Her place was in the kitchen. Or rather, the galley. She was going to clean the fish and fry them and when the sun came out — if it came out — she would spread a towel on top of the cabin and rub a mixture of baby oil and iodine on her legs, lie back, shut her eyes and bask till they were a nice uniform brown.

It was only now, the boat pitching and rolling and her right hand vibrant with pain, that she realized her feet were wet, her socks clammy and clinging and her new white tennis shoes gone a dark saturate gray. And why were her feet wet? Because there was water on the galley deck. Not coffee — she’d swabbed that up as best she could with a rag — but water. Salt water. A thin bellying sheet of it riding toward her and then jerking back as the boat pitched into another trough. She would have had to sit heavily then, the bench rising up to meet her while she clung to the tabletop with both hands, as helpless in that moment as if she were strapped into one of those lurching rides at the amusement park Till seemed to love so much but that only made her feel as if her stomach had swallowed itself up like in that cartoon of the snake feeding its tail into its own jaws.

The cuffs of her blue jeans were wet, instantly wet, the boat riding up again and the water shooting back at her, more of it now, a shock of cold up to her ankles. She tried to call out, but her throat squeezed shut. The water fled down the length of the deck and came back again, deeper, colder. Do something! she told herself. Get up. Move! Fighting down her nausea, she pulled herself around the table hand over hand so she could peer up the three steps to where Till sat at the helm, his bad arm rigid as a stick, while Warren, his brother Warren, the ex-Marine, bossy, know-it-all, shoved savagely at him, fighting him for the wheel. She wanted to warn them, wanted to betray the water in the galley so they could do something about it, so they could stop it, fix it, put things to right, but Warren was shouting, every vein standing out in his neck and the spray exploding over the stern behind him like the whipping tail of an underwater comet. “Goddamn you, goddamn you to hell! Keep the bow to the fucking waves!” The ship lurched sideways, shuddering down the length of it. “You want to see the whole goddamn shitbox go down. .?”

Yes. That was the story. That was how it went. And no matter how often she told her own version of what had happened to her grandmother in the furious cold upwelling waters of the Santa Barbara Channel in a time so distant she had to shut her eyes halfway to develop a picture of it — sharper and clearer than her mother’s because her mother hadn’t been there any more than she had, or not in any conscious way — Alma always drew her voice down to a whisper for the payoff, the denouement, the kicker: “Nana was two months’ pregnant when that boat sank.”

She’d pause and make sure to look up, whether she was telling the story across the dining room table to one of her suitemates back when she was in college or a total stranger she’d sat next to on the airplane. “Two months’ pregnant. And she didn’t even know it.” And she’d pause again, to let the significance of that sink in. Her own mother would have been dead in the womb, washed ashore, food for the crabs, and she herself wouldn’t exist, wouldn’t be sitting there with her hair still wet from the shower or threaded in a ponytail through the gap in back of her baseball cap, wouldn’t be teasing out all the nuances and existential implications of the story that was the tale of the world before her, if it weren’t for the toughness — in body, mind and spirit — of the woman she remembered only in her frailty and decrepitude.

Of course, she felt the coldness of it too, the aleatory tumble that swallowed up the unfit and unlucky while the others multiplied. And if there were a thousand generations of shipwrecks in the same family, would their descendants develop gills and webbed toes or would they just learn to stay ashore and ignore those seductive unfettered islands glittering out there on the horizon? She was alive, in the crux of creation, along with everything else sparking in the very instant of her telling, and one day she’d have children herself, add to the sum of things, work the DNA up the ladder. Her mother’s father was dead. And his brother along with him. And her mother’s mother should have been dead too. That was the thing, wasn’t it?

The month was March, the year 1946. Alma’s grandfather — Tilden Matthew Boyd — was six months home from the war in the Pacific that had left him with a withered right arm shorn of meat above the elbow, nothing there but a scar like a seared omelet wrapped around the bone. Her grandmother, young and hopeful and with hair as dark and abundant as her own, broke a bottle over the bow of the Beverly B. while Till, restored to her from the vortex of the war in a miraculous dispensation more actual and solid than all the cathedrals in the world, sat at the helm and the gulls dipped overhead and the clouds swept in on a northwesterly breeze to chase the sun over the water. Beverly was happy because Till was happy and they ate their sandwiches and drank the cheap champagne out of paper cups in the cabin because the wind was stiff and the chop wintry and white-capped. Warren was there too that first day, the day of the launching, a walking Dictaphone of unasked-for advice, ringing clichés and long-winded criticism. But he drank the champagne and he showed up two weekends in a row to help Till tinker with the engines and install the teak cabinets and fiddle rails Till had made in the garage of their rented house that needed paint and windowscreens for the mosquitoes and drainpipes to keep the winter rains from shearing off the roof and dousing anybody standing at the front door with a key in her hand and a load of groceries in both her aching arms. But Till had no desire to fix the house — it didn’t belong to them anyway. The Beverly B., though — that was a different story.

She was a sleek twenty-eight-foot all-wood cabin cruiser, solid-built, with butternut bulkheads and teak trim throughout, a real beauty, but she’d been dry-docked and neglected during the war, from which her owner, a Navy man, had never returned. Till spotted the boat listing into the weeds at the back of the boatyard and had tracked down the Navy man’s quietly grieving parents — their boy had been burned to death in a slick of oil after a kamikaze pilot steered himself into the St. Lo during the battle of Leyte Gulf — in whose living room he’d sat with his hat perched on one knee while they fingered the photographs and medals that were their son’s last relics. He sat there for two full hours, sipping tepid Lipton tea with a bitter slice of lemon slowly revolving atop it, before he mentioned the boat, and when he did finally mention it, they both stared at him as if he’d crawled up out of the pages of the family album to perch there on the velour cushions of the maplewood couch in the shrouded and barely lit living room they’d inhabited like ghosts since before they could remember. The mother — she must have been in her fifties, stout but with the delicate wrists and ankles of a girl and a face infused with outrage and grief in equal measures — threw back her head and all but yodeled, “That old thing?” Then she looked to her husband and dropped her voice. “I don’t guess Roger’ll be needing it now, will he?”

Over the course of the fall and winter, Till had devoted himself to the task of refitting that boat, haunting the boatyard and the ship chandlery and fooling with the engines until he was so smudged with oil Beverly told anybody who wanted to listen that he half the time looked like he was rigged out in blackface for some old-timey minstrel show. Her joke. Till in blackface. And she used it on Mrs. Viola down at the market and on Warren and the girl he was seeing, Sandra, with the prim mouth and the sweaters she wore so tight you could see every line of her brassiere, straps and cups and all. Careful, that was what Till was. Careful and precise and unerring. He never mentioned it, never complained, but he’d given his right arm for his country and he was determined to keep the left one for himself. And for her. For her, above all.

He had to learn how to make it do the work of his right arm and wrist and hand, punching tickets for the Santa Monica Boulevard line while people looked on impatiently and tried to be polite out of a kind of grudging recognition, the dead hand clenching the ticket stub and the newly dominant one doing the punching, and he learned to use that hand to fold his paycheck over once and present it to her like a ticket itself, a ticket to a moveable feast to which she and she alone was invited. At night, late, after supper and the radio, he’d let the hand play over her nakedness as if it knew no impediment, and that was all right, that was as good as it was going to get, because he was left-handed now and always would be till the day he was gone. And when they launched the Beverly B., he was as gentle and cautious with his boat as he was with her in their marriage bed, the right arm swinging stiffly into play when the wheel revolved under pressure of the left. The first few times they never took her out of sight of the harbor. Till said he wanted to get a feel for her, wanted to break her in, listen to what the twin Chrysler engines had to say when he pushed the throttle all the way forward and watched the tachometer climb to 2,800 RPM.

Then came that Friday evening late in March when she and Till and Warren motored out of the harbor on a course for the nearest of the northern Channel Islands, for Anacapa and the big one beyond it, Santa Cruz, because that was where the fish were, the lingcod as long as your arm, the abalone you only had to pluck off the rocks and more plentiful than the rocks themselves, the lobsters so accommodating they’d crawl right up the anchor line and dunk themselves in the pot. A man at work had told Till all about it. Anybody could go out to Catalina — hell, everybody did go out there, day-trippers and Saturday sailors and the rest — but if you wanted something akin to virgin territory, the northern islands, up off of Oxnard and Santa Barbara, that was the place to go. They’d brought along the two biggest ice chests she’d been able to find at Sears, Roebuck, both of them bristling with the dark slender necks of the beer bottles Warren assured her would have vanished by the time all those fish fillets and boiled lobsters were ready to nestle down there between their sheets of ice for a nice long sleep on the way home.

“We’ll have fish for a week, a week at least,” Till kept saying. “And when they’re gone we can just go out again and again after that.” He gave her a look. He was at the helm, the weather calm, the evening haze with its opalescent tinge clinging to the water before them and the harbor sliding into the wake behind, the beer in his hand barely an encumbrance as he perched there like some sea captain out of a Jack London story. “Which,” he said, knowing how sensitive she’d been on the subject of sinking money into the boat, “should cut our grocery bill by half, half at least.”

She’d made sandwiches at home — liverwurst on white with plenty of mustard and mayo, ham on rye, tunafish salad — and when they settled down in the cabin to take big hungry bites out of them and wet their throats with the beer that was so cold it went down like mountain spring water, it was as if they’d fallen off the edge of the world. After dinner she’d sat out on the stern deck for a long while, the air sweet and unalloyed, everything still but for the steady thrum of the engines that was like the working of a sure steady heart, the heart at the center of the Beverly B., unflagging and assured. There were dolphins, aggregations of them, silvered and pinked as they sluiced through the water and raced the hull to feel the electricity of it. They seemed to be grinning at her, welcoming her, as happy in their element as she was in hers. And what was that story she’d read — was it in the newspaper or Reader’s Digest? The one about the boy on his surfboard taken out to sea on a riptide and the sharks coming for him till the dolphins showed up grinning and drove them off because dolphins are mammals, warm-blooded in the cold sea, and they despise the sharks as the cold agents of death they are. Did they nose the boy’s surfboard past the riptide and back into shore, guiding him all the way like guardian angels? Maybe, maybe they did.

The last of the sun was tangled up in the mist ahead of them, due west and west the sun doth sink, the lines of a nursery rhyme scattered in her head. She lifted her feet to the varnished rail and studied her toes, seeing where the polish had faded and thinking to refresh it when she had the chance, when the boys were fishing in the morning and she was stretched out in the sun without a care in the world. The engines hummed. A whole squadron of dark beating birds shot up off the water and looped back again as if they were attached to a flexible band, and not a one of them made the slightest sound. She lit a cigarette, the wind in her hair, and watched her husband through the newly washed windows as he held lightly to the wheel while his brother sat on the upholstered bench beside him, talking, always talking, but in dumb show now because the cabin door was shut and she couldn’t hear a word.

She finished her cigarette and let the butt launch itself into the wind on a tail of red streamers. It was getting chilly, the sky darkening, closing round them like a lid set to an infinite iron pot. One more minute and she’d go in and listen to them talk, men’s talk, about the pie in the sky, the fish in the sea, the carburetors and open-faced reels and lathes and varnishes and tools and brushes and calibrators that made them men, and she’d open another beer too, a celebratory last beer to top off the celebratory three — or was it four? — she’d already had. It was then, just as she was about to rise, that the sea suddenly broke open like a dark spewing mouth and spat something at her, a hurtling shadowy missile that ran straight for her face till she snapped her head aside and it crashed with a reverberant wet thumping slap into the glass of the cabin door and both men wheeled round to see what it was.

She let out a scream. She couldn’t help herself. This thing was alive and flapping there at her feet like some sort of sea bat, as long as her forearm, shivering now and springing up like a jack-in-the-box to fall back again and flap itself across the deck on the tripod of its wings and tail. Wings? It was — it was a fish, wasn’t it? But here was Till, Warren bundled behind him, his face finding the middle passage between alarm and amusement, and he was stepping on the thing, slamming his foot down, hard, bending quickly to snatch the slick wet length of it up off the deck and hold it out to her like an offering in the grip of his good hand. “God, Bev, you gave me a scare — I thought you’d gone and pitched overboard with that scream.”

Warren was laughing behind the sheen of merriment in his eyes. The boat steadied and kept on. “This calls for a toast,” he shouted, raising the beer bottle that was perpetual with him. “Bev’s caught the first fish!”

She was over her fright. But it wasn’t fright — she wasn’t one of those clinging weepy women like you saw in the movies. She’d just been startled, that was all. And who wouldn’t have been, what with this thing, blue as gunmetal above and silver as a stack of coins below, coming at her like a torpedo with no warning at all? “Jesus Lord,” she said, “what is it?”

Till held it out for her to take in her own hand, and she was smiling now, on the verge of a good laugh, a shared laugh, but she backed up against the rail while the sky closed in and the wake unraveled behind her. “Haven’t you ever seen a flying fish before?” Till was saying. He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself, woman?” he said, ribbing her. “This is no kitchen or sitting room or steam-heated parlor. You’re out in the wide world now.”

“A toast!” Warren crowed. “To Bev! A-number-one fisherwoman!” And he was about to tip back the bottle when she took hold of his forearm, her hair whipping in the breeze. “Well then,” she said, “in that case, I guess you’re just going to have to get me another beer.”

She woke dry-mouthed, a faint rising vapor lifting somewhere behind her eyes, as if her head had been pumped full of helium while she slept. In the berth across from her, snug under the bow as it skipped and hovered and rapped gently against the cushion of the waves, Till was asleep, his face turned to the wall that wasn’t a wall but the planking of the hull of the ship that held them suspended over a black chasm of water. Below her, down deep, there were things immense and minute, whales, copepods, sharks and sardines, crabs infinite — the bottom alive with them in their horny chitinous legions, the crabs that tore the flesh from the drowned things and fed the scraps into the shearing miniature shredders of their mouths. All this came to her in the instant of waking, without confusion or dislocation — she wasn’t in the double bed they were still making payments on or stretched out on the narrow mattress in the spare room at her parents’ house where she’d waited through a thousand hollow echoing nights for Till to come home and reclaim her. She was at sea. She knew the rocking of the boat as intimately now as if she’d never known anything else, felt the muted drone of the engines deep inside her, in the thump of her heart and the pulse of her blood. At sea. She was at sea.

She sat up. A shaft of moonlight cut through the cabin behind her, slicing the table in two. Beyond that, a dark well of shadow, and beyond the shadow the steps to the bridge and the green glow of the controls where Warren, with his bunched muscles and engraved mouth, sat piloting them through the night. She needed — urgently — to use the lavatory. The head, that is. And water — she needed a glass of water from the tap in the head that was attached to the forty-gallon tank in the hold that Till had made such a fuss about because you couldn’t waste water, not at sea, where you never knew when you were going to get more. It had got to the point where she was almost afraid to turn on the tap for fear of losing a single precious drop. What was that poem from high school? “Water, water, every where/Nor any drop to drink.”

The mariner, that was it. The ancient mariner. And he just had to go and kill that bird, didn’t he? The albatross. And what was an albatross anyway? Something big and white, judging from the illustration in the book she’d got out of the library. Like a dinosaur, maybe, only not as big. Probably extinct now. But if albatrosses weren’t extinct and one of them came flapping down out of the sky and perched itself on the bow right this minute, she wouldn’t even think about shooting it. Uh-uh. Not her. For one thing, she didn’t have a gun, and even if she had one she wouldn’t know how to use it, but then that wasn’t the point, was it? If the poem had taught her anything — and she could hear the high-pitched hectoring whine of her twelfth-grade English teacher, Mr. Parminter, rising up somewhere out of the depths of her consciousness — it was about nature, the power of it, the hugeness. Don’t press your luck. Don’t upset the balance. Let the albatross be. Let all the creatures be, for that matter. . except maybe the lobsters. She smiled in the dark at the recollection of Mr. Parminter and that time that seemed like a century ago, when poems and novels and theorems and equations were the whole of her life. She could hardly believe it had only been four years since she’d graduated.

Her bare feet swung out of the berth. The deck was solid, cool, faintly damp. She was wearing a flannel nightgown that covered her all the way to her toes, though she wished she’d been able to wear something a little sheerer for Till’s sake — but that would have to wait until they were back home in the privacy of their own bedroom. She was modest and decent, not like the other girls who’d gone out and cheated on their men overseas the first chance they got, and she just didn’t feel comfortable showing herself off in such close quarters with Warren there, even if he was Till’s brother. She’d seen the way Warren looked at her sometimes, and it was no different from what she’d had to endure since she’d begun to develop in the eighth grade, leers and wolf whistles and all the rest. She didn’t blame him. He was a man. He couldn’t help himself. And she was proud of her figure, which was her best feature because she’d never be what people would call pretty, or conventionally pretty anyway — she just didn’t want to give him or anybody else the wrong idea. She was a one-man woman and that was that. Unlike Sandra, who looked as if she’d been around and who’d shown herself off in a two-piece swimsuit when they’d run the boat down to San Pedro the week before — in a breeze that had her in goosebumps all over and wrapped in Warren’s jacket by the time they got back to the dock. But thank God for small mercies: Sandra had been unable to join them this time around. She had an engagement in North Hollywood, whatever that meant, but then that wasn’t Beverly’s worry, it was Warren’s.

She slipped into the head, used the toilet, drained her glass of water and then drained another. Her stomach was queasy. That last beer, that was what it was. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt all the body gone out of it, though she’d washed and set it just that morning. Or yesterday morning, technically. But she was at sea now and she’d have to make do — and so would Till, who expected her to be made-up and primped and showing herself off like one of the movie stars in the magazines. She cranked the hand pump to flush, rinsed her hands — precious water, precious — eased the door open and shut it behind her. As she slid back into bed she was thinking she’d just have to tie her hair up in a kerchief, at least till they got there and she could take a swim, depending on how cold the water was, of course. Then she was thinking of the mariner again and of Mr. Parminter, who wore a bow tie to class every day and could recite “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by heart. Then she was asleep.

When she woke again it was daylight and Till’s berth was empty. She tried to focus on the deck but the deck wouldn’t stay put. A great angry fist seemed to be slamming at the hull with a booming repetitive shock that concussed the thin mattress and the plank beneath it and worked its way through her till she could feel it in the hollow of her chest, in her head, in her teeth. On top of it, every last thing, every screw and bolt and scrap of metal up and down the length of the boat, rattled and whined with a roused insistent drone as if a hive of yellow jackets were trapped in the hull. And what was that smell? Mold, hidden rot, the sour-milk reek of her own unwashed body. Before she could think, she was leaning over and spewing up everything inside her into the bucket she’d kept at her bedside for emergencies — the last of it, sharp and acerbic as a dose of vinegar, coming on a long glutinous string of saliva. She shook her head to clear it, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. Then she got up, fumbling for her blue jeans and a sweater, Till’s sweater, rough as burlap but the warmest thing she could find, and how had it gotten so cold?

It took her a while, just sitting there and picturing dry land, a beach on the island, a rock offshore, anything that wasn’t moving, before she was able to get up and work her way into the galley. She filled the percolator with water, poured coffee into the strainer directly from the can without bothering to measure it — she could barely stand, let alone worry about the niceties, and they’d want it strong in any case — and then she set the pot on the burner, but it kept tilting and sliding till she hit on the idea of wedging it there with the big cast-iron pot she intended to make chowder in when they got where they were going. If they ever got there. And what had happened? Had the weather gone crazy all of a sudden? Was it a typhoon? A hurricane?

She looked a fright, she knew it, and she’d have to do something about her hair, but she worked her way up the juddering steps to the bridge and flung herself down on the couch there — or the bench she’d converted to a couch by sewing ties to a set of old plaid cushions she’d found in her parents’ garage. The bridge was close, breath-steamed, smelling of men’s sweat and the muck at the bottom of the sea. Till was right there, just across from her, sitting on his bench at the controls, so near she could have reached out and touched him. The wheel jumped and jumped again, and he fought it with his left hand while forcing the throttle forward and back in the clumsy stiff immalleable grip of the other one. Warren leaned over him, grim-faced. Neither seemed to have noticed her.

It was only then that she became aware of the height of the waves coming at them, rearing black volcanoes of water that took everything out from under the boat and put it right back again, all the while blasting the windows as if there were a hundred fire trucks out there with their hoses all turned on at once. And here was the rhythm, up, down, up, and a rinse of the windows with every repetition. “Where are we?” she heard herself ask.

Till never looked up. He was frozen there, nothing moving but his arms and shoulders. “Don’t know,” Warren said, glancing over his shoulder. “Halfway between Anacapa and Santa Cruz, but with the way this shit’s blowing, who could say?”

“What we need,” Till said, his voice reduced and tentative, as if he really didn’t want to have to form his thoughts aloud, “is to find a place to anchor somewhere out of this wind.”

“That’d be Scorpion Bay, according to the charts, but that’s”—there was a crash, as if the boat had hit a truck head-on, and Warren, all hundred and eighty Marine-honed pounds of him, was flung up against the window as if he were a bag full of nothing. He braced himself, back pressed to the glass. Tried for a smile and failed. “That’s somewhere out ahead of us, straight into the blow.”

“How far?”

Warren shook his head, held tight to the rail that ran round the bridge. “Could be two miles, could be five. I can’t make out a fucking thing, can you?”

“No. But at least we should be okay for depth. There’s a lot of water under us. A whole lot.”

She looked out ahead of them to where the bow dipped to its pounding, but she couldn’t see anything but waves, one springing up off the back of the other, infinite and impatient, coming and coming and coming. Her stomach fell. She thought she might vomit again, but there was nothing left to bring up. “What happened to the weather?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the wind, but it wasn’t a question really, more an observation in search of some kind of assurance. She wanted them to tell her that this was nothing they couldn’t handle, just a little blow that would peter out before long, after which the sun would come back to illuminate the world and all would be as calm and peaceful as it was last night when the waves lapped the hull and the sandwiches and beer went down and stayed down in the pure pleasure of the moment. No one answered. She wasn’t scared, not yet, because all this was so new to her and because she trusted Till — Till knew what he was doing. He always did. “I put on coffee,” she said, though the thought of it, of the smell and taste of it and the way it clung viscously to the inside of the cup in a discolored slick, made her feel weak all over again. “You boys”—she had to force the words out—“think you might want a cup?”

Then she was back down in the galley, banging her elbows and knees, flung from one position to another, and when she reached for the coffeepot it jumped off the stove of its own volition and scalded her right hand. Before she could register the shock of it, the pot was on the deck, the top spun off and the steaming grounds and six good cups of black coffee spewed across the galley. Her first thought was for the deck — the coffee would stain, eat through the varnish like acid — and before she looked to her burn she was down on her hands and knees, caroming from one corner of the cabin to the other like the silver ball in a pinball machine, dabbing at the mess as she went by with a rag that became so instantaneously and unforgivingly hot she burned her hand a second time. When finally she’d got the deck cleaned up as best she could, she fell back into the bench at the table, angry now, angry at the boat and the sea and the men who’d dragged her out here into this shitty little rattling sea-stinking jail cell, and she swore she’d never go out again, never, no matter what promises they made. “There’ll be no coffee and I’m sorry, I am,” she said aloud. “You hear that?” she called out, directing her voice toward the steps at the back of the cabin. “No coffee today, no breakfast, no nothing. I’m through!”

The pain of the burn sparked then, assailing her suddenly with an insidious throbbing and prickling, the blisters already forming and bursting, and she thought of getting up and rubbing butter into the reddened flesh on the back of her hand and between her scalded fingers, but she couldn’t move. She felt heavy all of a sudden, heavier than the boat, heavier than the sea, so heavy she was immovable. She would sit, that was what she would do. Sit right there and ride it out.

That was when the water started coming in through the forward hatch. That was when her feet got wet and she began to feel afraid. That was when she thought for the first time of the life jackets tucked under the seats in the stern that was awash with the piled-up waves — and that was when she pulled herself along the edge of the table to look up into the bridge and see her husband and brother-in-law fighting over the controls even as she heard the engines sputter and catch and finally give out. She caught her breath. Something essential had gone absent in a way that was wrong, deeply wrong, in violation of everything she’d known and believed in since the moment they’d left shore. The ghost had gone out of the machine.

In the sequel she was on the bridge, trying to make Till and Warren understand about the water in the cabin, water that didn’t belong there, water that was coming in through a breach in the forward hatch that was underwater itself before it shook free of the weight of the waves and sank back down again. But Till wasn’t listening. Till, her rock, the man who’d survived the mangling of his arm and the fiery blast of shrapnel that was lodged still in his legs and secreted beneath the constellation of scars on the broad firmament of his back, sat slumped over the controls, distracted and drawn and punching desperately at the starter as Warren, wrapped in a yellow slicker and cursing with every breath, fought his way out the door to the stern while the wind sang through the cabin and all the visible world lost its substantiality.

Disbelieving, outraged, Till jerked at the wheel, but the wheel wouldn’t respond. The boat lolled, staggered, a wave rising up out of nowhere to hit them broadside and drive down the hull till she was sure they were going to capsize. She might have screamed. Might have cried out uselessly, her breath coming hard and fast. It was all she could do to hold on, her jaws clamped, the spray taking flight up and over the cabin as Warren pried open the hatch to the engine compartment, some sort of tool clutched in one hand — Warren, Warren out there on the deck to save the day, but what could he hope to do? How could anybody fix anything in this chaos?

He was a blotch of yellow in a world stripped of color, there one moment and gone the next, a big breaching wave flinging him back against the cabin door and pouring half an ocean into the rictus of the engine well. Till snatched a look at her then, his face drained and hopeless. Warren, the figure of Warren, flailing limbs and gasping mouth, slammed at the window and rose impossibly out of the foam, the slicker twisted back from his shoulders — inadequate, ridiculous, a child’s jacket, a doll’s — and then he was down again and awash. In the next instant Till sprang to his feet, twisting up and away from the controls, the wheel swinging wildly, lights blinking across the console, the scuppers inundated, the bilge pump choking on its own infirmity. He took hold of her wrist, jerking her up out of her seat, and suddenly they were through the door and into the fury of the weather, the wind tearing the breath out of her lungs, the next wave rearing up to knock her to her knees with a fierce icy slap, and she wasn’t sick anymore and she wasn’t tired or worn or dulled. Everything in her, everything she was, howled at its highest pitch. They were going to drown, all three of them, she could see that now. Drown and die and wash up for the crabs.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Warren, unsteady, hair painted to his face, made to seize Till’s arms as if he meant to dance with him, even as Till shrugged him off and bent to release the skiff.

“It’s our only chance!” Till roared into the wind, his legs tangled and rotating out of sync like a drunken man’s. He flailed at the shell of the skiff, jerked the lines in a fury.

“You’re nuts!” Warren shouted. “Out of your fucking mind!” He was staggering too, fighting for balance, and so was she, helpless, the waves driving at her. The boat heaved, dead beneath their feet. “We won’t last five minutes in this sea!”

But here was the skiff, released and free and riding high, and they were in it, Warren leaping to the oars, no thought of the life jackets because the life jackets, for all their newness and viability and their promise to keep men and women and children afloat indefinitely even in the biggest seas, were tucked neatly beneath that bench in the stern of the Beverly B. and the Beverly B. was swamped. Stalled. Going down.

Heavily, like a waterlogged post in a swollen river, the boat shifted away from them. They’d painted her hull white to contrast with the natural wood of the cabin — a cold pure unblemished white, the white of sheets and carnations — and that whiteness shone now like the ghost image on a negative of a photograph that would never be developed. Unimpeded, the waves crashed at the windows of the cabin and then the glass was gone and the Beverly B. shifted wearily and dropped down and came back up again. The decks were below water now, only the cabin’s top showing pale against the dimness of the early morning and the spray that rode the wind like a shroud.

Beverly was there to witness it, huddled wet and shivering in the bow of the skiff, Till beside her, but she wasn’t clinging to him, not clinging at all because she was too rigid with the need to get out of this, to get away, to get to land. No regrets. Let the sea have the boat and all the time and money they’d lavished on her, so long as it spared them, so long as the island was out there in the gloom and it came to them in a rush of foam and black bleeding rock. They rode up over two waves, three, and they were on a wild ride now, wilder than anything the amusement park would ever dare offer, and all at once they were in a deep pit lined with walls of aquamarine glass, everything held suspended for a single shimmering moment before the walls collapsed on them. She felt the plunge, the force of it, and all of a sudden she was swimming free, the chill riveting her, and it was instinct that drove her away from the skiff and back to the Beverly B. for something to hold fast to — and there, there it was, rising up and plunging down, and she with it. The wind tore at her eyes. The salt blistered her throat.

She didn’t see Warren, didn’t see where he was, but then she’d got turned around and he could be anywhere. And Till — she remembered him coming toward her, his good arm cutting the black sheet of the water, until he wasn’t coming anymore. Where was he? The waves threw up ramparts and she couldn’t see. He was calling her, she was sure of it, in the thinnest distant echo of a cracked and winnowed voice, Till’s voice, sucked away on the wind until it was gone. “Where are you?” she called. “Till? Till?”

The waves took her breath away. Her bones ached. Her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. A period of time elapsed — she couldn’t have said how long — and nothing changed. She clung to the heaving corpse of the Beverly B. because the Beverly B. was the only thing there was. At some point, because they were binding her feet, she ducked her head beneath the surface to tear off her tennis sneakers and release them into the void. Then she loosed her blue jeans, the cuffs as heavy as lead weights.

When finally the Beverly B. cocked herself up on a wave as big as a continent and then sank down out of sight, she fought away from the vortex it left in its wake and found herself treading water. The waves lifted and released her, lifted and released her. She was alone. Deserted. The ship gone, Till gone, Warren. She could feel something flapping inside her like a set of wings, her own panic, the panic that whipped her into a sudden slashing breaststroke and as quickly subsided, and then she was treading water again and she went on treading water for some portion of eternity until there was nothing left in her arms. Till’s sweater dragged at her. It was too much, too heavy, and it gave her nothing, not warmth, not comfort, not Till or the feel or smell of him. She shrugged out of it, snatched a breath, and let it drift down and away from her like the exoskeleton of a creature new-made, born of water and salt and the penetrant chill.

She tried floating on her back but the wind drove the sea up her nose and into her mouth so that she came up coughing and spewing. Had she drifted off? Was she drowning? Giving up? She fought the rising fear with her spent arms and the feeble wash of her spent legs. After a time, she lost all feeling in her limbs and she went down with a lungful of air and the air brought her back up, once, twice, again. She thrashed for a handhold, for anything, for substance, but there was no solid thing in all that transient medium where the dolphins grinned and the flying fish flew and the sharks came and went as they pleased.

And Till? Where was Till? He could have been right there, ten feet away, and she wouldn’t have known it. She closed her eyes, snatched a breath, let herself drift down and let herself come back again. Once more. Could she do it once more? She’d never known despair, but it was in her now, colder than the water, creeping numbly up from her feet and into her ankles and legs and torso, overwhelming her, claiming her degree by degree. Water, water every where. Just as she was about to surrender, to open herself up, open wide and let the harsh insistent unforgiving current flow through her and tug her down to where the waves couldn’t touch her ever again, the ocean gave her something back: it was a chest, an ice chest, floating low in the water under the weight of its burden. A silver thing, silver as the belly of her fish. Sears, Roebuck. Guaranteed for life. She claimed it as her own, and though she couldn’t get atop it, it was there and it sustained her as the wind bit and the sun rose up out of the gloom to parch her lips and scorch the taut white mask of her upturned face.

Rattus Rattus

She had never been so thirsty in all her life. Had never known what it was, what it truly meant, when she read in the magazines of the Bedouin tumbling from their camels and their camels dying beneath them or the G.I.’s stalking the rumor of Rommel’s Panzers across the dunes of North Africa and water only a mirage, because she’d lived in a house with a tap in a place where the grass was wet with dew in the morning and you could get a Coca-Cola at any lunch counter or in the machine at the service station around the corner. If she was thirsty, she drank. That was all.

Now she knew. Now she knew what it was like to go without, to feel the talons clawing at your throat, the tongue furred and bloating in the tomb of your mouth, barely able to swallow, to breathe. There was ice in the chest — and beer, chilled beer, the bottles clinking and chirping with the rhythm of the waves — but she didn’t dare crack the lid, even for an instant. It was the air inside that kept her afloat and if she lifted the lid the air would rush out and where would she be then? The bottles clinked. Her throat swelled. The sun beat at her face. But this was a special brand of torture, reserved just for her, worse than anything devised by the most sadistic Jap commandant, and she kept wondering what she’d done to deserve it — the ice right there, the beer, the sweet cold sparkling pale golden liquid in the bottle that would shine with condensation just inches away, and she dying of thirst.

She swallowed involuntarily at the thought of it, the lining of her throat as raw as when she’d had tonsillitis as a girl and twisted in agony with the blinds closed and the starched rigid sheets biting into her till her mother came like an angel of mercy with ginger ale in a tall cold glass, with sherbet, Jell-O, ice cubes made of Welch’s grape juice to suck and roll over her tongue and clench between her teeth till all the moisture was gone. Her mother’s hand reached out to her, she saw it, saw it right there framed against the waves, and her mother’s face and the dripping glass poised in her hand. It was too much to bear. She gave in and wet her lips with seawater, though she knew she shouldn’t, knew it was wrong and would only make things worse, and yet she couldn’t help herself, her tongue probing and lapping as if it weren’t attached to her at all. The relief was instantaneous, flooding her like a drug — water, there was water inside her. But then, almost immediately, her throat swelled shut and her cracked lips began to bleed.

To bleed. That was the secondary problem: blood. Both her elbows were scraped and raw and there was a deep irregular gash on the back of her left hand, the one the scalding coffee hadn’t touched. How it had got there, she couldn’t say, and she was so numb from the cold she couldn’t feel the sting of it, though clearly it would need stitches to close the wound and there’d be a scar, and for some time now she’d been idly examining the torn flesh there, thinking she’d have to see a doctor when they got back and already making up a little speech for him, how she’d want a really top-notch man because she just couldn’t stomach having her skin spoiled, not at her age. But she was bleeding in the here and now, each wave washing the gash anew and extracting from it a pale tincture of pinkish liquid that dissolved instantly and was gone. That liquid was blood. And blood attracted sharks.

Again the flap of panic. Her legs trailed behind her like lures, like a provocation, like bait, and she couldn’t see them, could barely feel them. If the sharks came — when they came — she’d have no defense. She was trapped in a childhood nightmare, a vestigial dream of the time before there was land, when all the creatures there were floated free amidst the flotilla of shining jaws that would swallow them. She tried to hold her hand up out of the water. Tried not to think about what was beneath her, behind her, rising even now from the lazy depths like a balloon trailing across the sky at dusk. But she had to think. Had to terrify herself just to stay alive.

For as long as the ice chest had been there she’d maneuvered around it, straddling it like an equestrian as it rode beneath the clamp of her thighs, pushing it all the way down to tamp it with her feet and perch tentatively atop the tenuous wavering shelf of it, lying flat with its lid tucked between her abdomen and breasts so that her back was arched and her legs could spread wide for balance. Now she tried to huddle atop it, to kneel beneath the full weight of her limbs and torso as if she were praying — and she was praying, she was — struggling to hold her gashed hand clear of the water and balance there like an acrobat stalled on the high wire, but the waves wouldn’t allow it. She kept slipping down while the cooler bobbed up and away from her so that she had to swim free and snatch it back in a single searing beat of white-hot terror, thinking only of a mute streaking shape lunging out of the depths to snatch her up in its basket of teeth.

She’d seen a shark only once in her life. It was on the Santa Monica pier, just after Till had come home from overseas. They’d walked on the beach for hours and then promenaded all the way to the end of the pier, her arm in his, the stripped pale boards rocking gently beneath their feet and the sea air deliciously cool against their skin. She was so alive in that moment, so attuned to Till and his transformation from the recollected to the actual, to the flesh, to the arm round her waist and the voice murmuring in her ear, that the smallest things thrilled her with their novelty, as if no one had ever conceived of them before. A paper cone of cotton candy, so intensely pink it was otherworldly, seemed as strange to her as if it had been delivered there by Martians from outer space. Ditto the tattooed man exhibiting himself in his bathing trunks in the hope of spare change and the eighty-year-old beauty queen in the two-piece — even the taste of the burger with chopped raw onions and plenty of ketchup they ate standing under the sunstruck awning of the stand at the foot of the pier was like that of no other burger she’d ever had. Her feet weren’t even on the ground. They were there in the flesh, both of them, she and Till, strolling along like any normal couple who could go home to bed anytime the urge took them, day or night, or go get a highball and listen to the jukebox in the corner of some dark roadhouse or drive slow and sweet along Ocean Boulevard with the windows down and the breeze fanning their hair. It was her dream made concrete. But then, right there in the middle of that dream, was the shark.

There was a crowd gathered at the far end of the pier and they’d gone toward it casually, out of idle curiosity, people looping this way and that, little kids squirming through to the front for a closer view, and there it was, more novelty, the first shark she’d ever seen outside of a picture book. It was suspended by its tail on a thick braid of cable that held it, dripping, just above the bleached boards of the dock. The fisherman — a Negro, and that was a novelty too, a Negro fisherman on the Santa Monica pier— stood just off to the left of it while his companion, another Negro, took his photograph with a Brownie camera. “Hold steady now,” the second man said. “Less have a smile. C’mon, give us a grin.”

A woman beside her made a noise in her throat, an admixture of disgust and fascination. “What is it?” the woman said. “A swordfish?”

The first man, the fisherman, smiled wide and the camera clicked. “You see a sword?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t see no sword.”

“It’s a dolphin,” somebody said.

“Ain’t no dolphin,” the fisherman retorted, enjoying himself immensely. “Ain’t no tunafish neither.” He bent close to the thing, to the half-moon of the gill slit and the staring eye, and then cupped a hand over the unresisting snout and tugged upward. “See them teeth?”

And there they were, suddenly revealed, a whole landscape of stacked and serrated teeth running off into the terra incognita of the dark gullet, and it came to her that this was a shark, the scourge of the sea, the one thing that preyed on all the rest, that rose up in a blanket of foam to ravage a seal or maim a surfer and ignite an inflammatory headline out of La Jolla or Redondo Beach that everybody forgot about a week later.

“What this is, what you looking at right now? This a great white shark, seven feet six inches long. As bad as it gets. And this one’s not much more than a baby. Hell, they five feet long when they come out their mother.”

The crowd pressed in. Till’s eyes were gleaming, and this was a thing he could appreciate, a man’s thing, as bad as it gets. There was only one question left to ask and she heard her own voice quaver as she asked it: “Where did you catch it?”

A pause. A smile. Another click of the camera. “Why, right here, right off the end of the dock.”

The image had stayed with her a long while. She’d asked Till about it, about how that could be, what the man had said — right off the dock, right there where she’d been swimming since she was a little girl — and he’d tried to reassure her. “They can turn up anywhere, I suppose,” he said, “but it’s rare here. Really rare.” He gave her a squeeze, pulled her to him. “Where you really find them,” and he pointed now, out into the band of mist that fell across the horizon, “is out there. Off the islands.”

People died of shark bite. They died of thirst. Of hypothermia. She was dressed in nothing but bra and panties, naked to the water and the water sucking the heat from her minute by minute, and she clung there and shivered and felt the volition go out of her. Let the sharks come, she was thinking, dreaming, the cold lulling her now till she was like the man in that other Jack London story, the one who laid himself down and died because he couldn’t build a fire. Well, she couldn’t build a fire either because water wouldn’t burn and there was nothing in this world that wasn’t water.

She woke sputtering, choked awake, a cold fist in her throat. She was coughing — hacking, heaving, retching — and the violence of it brought her back again. Sun, sea, wind, waves. Sun. Sea. Wind. Waves. The ice chest bobbed and she bobbed with it. And then, all at once, there was something else there with her, something new, a living thing that broke the surface in a fierce boiling suddenness that annihilated her, the shark, the shark come finally to draw the shroud. She shut her eyes, averted her face. She didn’t draw up her legs because there was no point in it now, the drop was coming, the first rending shock of the jaws, sadness spreading though her like a stain in water, sadness for Till, for her parents, for what might have been. . but the next moment slipped by and the moment after that and still she was there and still she was whole, bobbing along with the ice chest, bobbing.

The next splash was closer. She forced open her eyes, tried to focus through the drooping curtains of her swollen lids. Her pupils burned. The blood pounded in her ears. It took her a moment to understand that this wasn’t a shark, wasn’t a fish at all — fish didn’t have dog faces and whiskers and eyes as round and darkly glowing as a human’s. She stared into those eyes, amazed, until they sank away in the wash and she looked beyond the swirl of foam to the sun-scoured wall of rock rising out of the mist above her.

Anacapa is the smallest of the four islands that form the archipelago of the northern Channel Islands and the closest to the mainland, a mere eleven miles from its eastern tip to the harbor at Oxnard. It parallels the coast in its east-west orientation, from Arch Rock in the east to Rat Rock on the western verge, and is, geologically speaking, a seaward extension of the Santa Monica Mountains. In actuality, Anacapa comprises three separate islets, connected only during extreme low tides, and it is of volcanic origin, composed primarily of basalt dating from the Miocene period. All three islets are largely inaccessible from the sea, featuring tall looming circumvallate cliffs and strips of cliff-side beach that darkly glisten with the detritus ground out of the rock by the action of the waves. As seen from the air, the islets form a narrow snaking band like the spine of a sea serpent, the ridges articulated like vertebrae, claws fully extended, jaws agape, tail thrashing out against the grip of the current. Seabirds nest atop the cliffs here and on the tableland beyond — Xantus’s murrelet, the brown pelican and Brandt’s cormorant among them — and pinnipeds racket along the shore. Average rainfall is less than twelve inches annually. There is no permanent source of water.

Beverly knew none of this. She didn’t know that the landfall looming over her was Anacapa or that she’d drifted some six miles by this point. She knew only that rock was solid and water was not and she made for it with all the strength left in her. Twice she went under and came up gasping and it was all she could do to keep hold of the ice chest in the roiling surf that had begun to crash round her. All at once she was in the breakers and the chest was torn from her, gone suddenly, and she had no choice but to squeeze her eyes shut and extend her arms and ride the wave till the force of it flung her like so much wrack at the base of the cliff. Stones rolled and collided beneath her knees and the frantic grabbing of her hands, she was tossed sideways and had the breath pounded out of her, but her fingers snatched at something else there, sand, the floor of a beach gouged out of the rock. It was nothing more than a semicircular pit, churning like a washing machine, but it was palpable and it held her and when the wave sucked back she was standing on solid ground. She might have felt a surge of relief, but she didn’t have a chance. Because she was shivering. Dripping. Staggering. And the next wave was already coming at her.

The foam shot in, sudsing at her knees, driving her back awkwardly against the punishing black wall of the overhang. She found herself stumbling to her left, even as the next breaker thundered in, and then she was crawling on hands and knees up and away from it, the rock pitted and sharp and yet slick all the same, up and out of the water and onto a narrow perch that was no wider than her berth on the Beverly B. She hugged her knees to her chest, clamped her hands round her shoulders, shaking with cold. Her hair hung limp in her face. The waves crashed and dissolved in mist and everything smelled of funk and rot and the protoplasmic surfeit of all those galaxies of wheeling, biting, wanting things that hadn’t survived the day. She didn’t think about Till or the boat or Warren, her mind drawn down to nothing. She just stared numbly at the wash as it stripped the beach and gave it back again, torn strands of kelp struggling to and fro, a float of driftwood, the suck and roar, and then she was asleep.

When she woke it was to the sun and the beach that had grown marginally bigger, a scallop of blackly glistening sand emerging from the receding tide, the teeth of the rocks exposed now and the wet gums clamped beneath them. She’d been in the shadows all this time, huddled on her perch, tucked away from the tidal wash and the sun too, but now the sun had moved out into the channel and the heat of it touched her and roused her. For a long while she sat there, absorbing the warmth, and if she was sunburned it didn’t matter a whit because she’d rather be burned than frozen, burned anytime, scorched and roasted till she peeled, because anything was better than the cold locked up inside her, a numbness so deeply immured in her she might as well have been a corpse. She gazed out on the sea with a kind of hatred she’d never known, hating the monotony of it, the indifference, the marrow-draining chill. And then, abruptly, she was thirsty. Still thirsty. Thirstier than she’d been out there on the sea when she was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life.

In that moment her eye jumped to the gleam of metal at the near end of the cove. The ice chest. There it was, upright in the sand, its lid still fastened. She sprang down from the rock, slimed and filthy, her limbs battered and her tongue made of felt, and ran to it, threw open the lid and saw that the ice was gone and the bottles smashed — all but one, the precious last remaining dark brown sweating bottle with the label soaked off and sand worked up under the cap. Lifting the beer to the sun, she could see that it was intact, its bubbles infused with light and rising in a slow hypnotic dance. Beer. Cold beer. But she had no opener, no churchkey, no knife or screwdriver or tool of any kind. And where was Till? Where was he when she needed him?

She remembered how casually he would slam the neck of his beer against the edge of the counter or the workbench in the garage and how instantly the cap would fly up and away and the cold aperture of the bottle would come to his lips, all in a single fluid motion, as if the opening and the draining of the bottle constituted the same continuous physical process. Overhead, chased on a draft, a gull appraised her, mewed over her torn and abraded flesh, and was gone. She looked wildly around her for something, anything, to make a tool of, but there was nothing but sand and driftwood and rock.

Rock. Rock would do it. Of course it would. And then she was smoothing her hand over the wall of the overhang, feeling for a rough spot, a ledge, any kind of projection, and here, here it was, the cap poised just so and the weight of her burned hand coming down on it, once, twice. . and nothing. She worked at it, frantic now, angry, furious, but the best she could do was flatten the ridges till the cap was even more secure than when she’d begun, and it was too much, she couldn’t take a single second more of this — and then it was done, the neck shattered and gaping and she draining the whole thing in three airless gulps and if there was glass in it and if the glass cut her open from esophagus to gut she didn’t give a damn because she was drinking and that was the only thing that mattered.

But the beer was gone and the thirst was there still, rattling inside her like a field of cane in a desert wind, and was it any surprise she was light-headed? She’d always been a capable drinker, proud of her ability to match Till beer for beer, but this one hit her hard and before she knew it she was down in the sand, sitting there cross-legged like a statue of the Buddha, as if that was what she’d meant to do all along. The sun seemed to have shifted somehow in the interval, dropping down close to the flattening gray surface of the sea where the fog could take hold of it and snuff it out like the burned-up butt of the cigarette she suddenly wanted as much as she wanted water. She stood shakily and went to the ice chest. It was right where she’d left it not ten minutes ago (or had it been longer? Had she dozed off?), but now the incoming tide was running up the beach to take it from her all over again. Seizing it by one corner, she dragged it awkwardly across the sand to the declivity beneath the overhang, then worked it up to her perch six feet above the beach. Inside, amidst the litter of broken bottles and stripes of sand and weed, there was a liquid that might have been a mix of beer and meltwater, that might have been potable, that might have quenched her thirst, but when she thrust a finger into it and licked that finger all she could taste was salt.

Dusk fell, aided and abetted by the fog, which closed off the beach even as the tide ran in, and though the water was up past her knees, she probed the scalloped ledges at both ends of the cove, looking for a way out. She braced herself, one foot up, then the other, straining for a handhold. Working patiently, her face pressed to the rock, she got as high as fifteen or twenty feet above the beach, but after she fell for the third time, coming down hard amidst the stones and the cold shock of the water, she gave up. It was no use. She was trapped. A single pulse of panic flickered through her, but she suppressed it. She wasn’t afraid, not anymore — that was behind her. All she felt was frustration. Anger. Why had she been spared only to wash up here to die of thirst, hunger, cold? Where was God’s hand in that? Where was His purpose? Finally, when it was fully dark and the fog settled in so impenetrably as to close off even the stars, let alone the running lights of any boat that might have been plying the channel looking for them, for survivors — and here she saw Till and Warren, wrapped in blankets in a gently rocking cabin, the glow of the varnished wood, lanterns a-sway, mugs of hot coffee pressed to their lips — she held fast to the ice chest and willed herself asleep.

In the morning, at first light, there was the sound of the gulls that was like the opening and closing of a door on balky hinges, but there was no door here, no bed or room or clothes or warmth, and she couldn’t see the gulls for the fog. She shivered into the light, slapping at her thighs and shoulders and huddling in the cradle of her arms, and then the thirst took hold of her. It roused her and she rose to her feet, fighting for balance, the tide having receded and risen all over again, reducing her world to this rock and the wall above her. She wanted a pitcher of water, that was all, envisioning the white bone china pitcher in the kitchen at home, a hand-me-down from her mother she brought out for special occasions, and it took her a long moment to realize that there was a persistent cold drip tapping at her shoulder and that she’d been shifting unconsciously to avoid it. She lifted her face and saw that the cliff was wet, the fog whispering across the rock above her, condensing there, dripping, dripping.

What she didn’t know was that forty years earlier a man named H. Bay Webster had leased the island from the federal government for the purpose of raising sheep, but the sheep had failed to thrive because of overgrazing and lack of water, and finally, in their distress, they had been reduced to licking the dew each from another’s fleece in order to survive. Not that it mattered. All that mattered was this drip. She held her tongue out to it, licked the rock as if it were a snow-cone presented to her by the lady behind the concession stand at the county fair. And when one of the little green shore crabs came within reach, a flattened thing, no more than two inches across, she crushed it beneath her foot and then fed the salty cold wet fragments into her mouth.

It took her a long while after that to get her courage up, because she knew now what she had to do though her whole being revolted against it. She kept praying that someone would come for her, that the prow of a ship would ease out of the fog or a rope come hurtling down from above, anything to spare her getting back into that killing water. The funny thing was that she’d always liked swimming — she’d joined the swim team in school and trained so relentlessly her hair never seemed to be really dry her whole senior year — but now, as she climbed down from the rock, clutched the ice chest to her and fought through the surf, she hated it more than anything in the world. Instantly, she was cold through to the bone and thrashing for warmth, then she was fighting past the breakers and out into the sea.

Here was the nightmare all over again, but this time there was a difference because she was saved, she’d saved herself, and she kept close to shore, trembling, yes, exhausted, thirsty, but no longer panicked. There wouldn’t be sharks, not this close in, not with the sea full of seals, armies of them barking from the rocks and sending up a sulfurous odor of urine and feces and seal stink. The sea was calmer now too, much calmer — almost gentle — and from time to time she tried floating on her back, head propped on the chest and elbows jackknifed behind her, but invariably she had to roll over and pull herself up as far as she could in an effort to escape the cold. Fog clung to her. Great fields of kelp, dun stalks and yellowed leaves, drifted past. Tiny fishes needled the water around her and were gone.

As the morning wore on, the world began to enlarge above her, birds uncountable lifting off into the fog and gliding back again like ghosts in the ether, the cliffs decapitated above skirts of guano, shrubs and even flowers so high up they might have been planted in air. She let the current carry her, periodically forcing herself to unfurl her legs and paddle to keep on course, telling herself that at any moment she’d come upon a boat at anchor or a beach that spread back to a canyon where she could get up and away from the sea. How far she’d drifted or how long she’d been in the water, she had no way of knowing, the cold sapping her, lulling her, killing her will, every seal-strewn rock and every black-faced cliff so exactly like the last one she began to think she’d circled the island twice already. But she held on, just as she had when the Beverly B. went down a whole day and night ago, because it was the only thing she could do.

It must have been late in the morning, the sun lost somewhere in the fog overhead, when finally she found what she was looking for. Or, rather, she didn’t know what she was looking for until it materialized out of the haze in a cove that was no different from all the rest. A rust-peached ladder, so oxidized it was the color of the starfish clinging to the rocks beneath it, seemed to glide across the surface to her, and when she took hold of it she let the chest float free, pulling herself from the water, rung by rung, as from a gently yielding sheath.

The universe stopped rocking. The sea fell away. And she found herself on a path leading steeply upward to where the fog began to tatter and bleed off till it wasn’t there at all. Above her, opening to the sun and the chaparral flecked with yellow blooms that climbed beard-like up the slope, was a shack, two shacks, three, four, all lined up across the bluff as if they’d grown out of the rock itself. The near one — flat-roofed, the boards weathered gray — caught the flame of the sun in its windows till it glowed like a cathedral. And right beside it, where the drainpipe fell away from the roof, was a wooden barrel, a hogshead, set there to catch the rain.

She was in that moment reduced to an animal, nothing more, and her focus was an animal’s focus, her mind stripped of everything but that barrel and its contents, and she never felt the fragmented stone of the path digging into her feet or the weight of the sun crushing her shoulders, never thought of who might be watching her in her nakedness or what that might mean, till she reached it and plunged her face into its depths and drank till she could feel the cool silk thread coming back up again. It was only then that she looked around her. Everything was still, hot, though she shivered in the heat, and her first thought was to call out, absurdly, call “Hello? Is anybody there?” Or why not “Yoo-hoo?” Yoo-hoo would have been equally ridiculous, anything would have. She was as naked as Eve, her blue jeans gone, Till’s sweater jettisoned, her underthings torn from her at some indefinite point in the shifting momentum of her battle against the current and the waves and the sucking rasp of the shingle. When she touched herself, when she brought her hands up to cover her nakedness, they were like two dead things, two fish laid out on a slab, and she fell to her knees in the dirt, hunched and shivering and looking round her with an animal’s dull calculation.

In the next moment she rose and went round the corner of the house to the door at the front, thinking to clothe herself, thinking there must be something inside to cover up with, rags, a bedsheet, an old towel or fisherman’s sweater. But what if there were people in there? What if there was a man? No man on this earth had seen her naked but for the doctor who’d delivered her and Till, and what would she say to Till if there was a man there to see her as she was now? She hesitated, uncertain of what to do. For a long moment she regarded the door in its stubborn inanimacy, a door made of planks nailed to a crosspiece, weather-scored and unrevealing. Beside it, set in the wall at eye level, was a four-pane window so smeared as to be nearly opaque, but she shifted away from the door, cupped her hands to the glass and peered in, all the while feeling as if she were being watched.

Inside, she could make out a crude kitchen counter with a dishpan and an array of what looked to be empty bottles scattered atop it, and beyond that, a sagging cot decorated with an army blanket. A second window, facing north, drew the glare in off the ocean. She tapped at the glass, hoping to forestall anyone who might be lurking inside. Finally, she tried the door, whispering, “Hello? Is anybody home?”

There was no answer. She lifted the latch and pushed open the door to a rustle of movement, dark shapes inhabiting the corners, a spine-sprung book on the floor, shelves, cans, a sou’wester on a hook that made her catch her breath, fooled into thinking someone had been standing there all along. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, the shapes manifesting themselves all at once — furred, quick-footed, tails naked and indolently switching, a host of darkly shining eyes fastening on her without alarm or haste because she was the interloper here, the beggar, she was the one naked and washed up like so much trash — and she let out a low exclamation. Rats. She’d always hated rats, from the time she was in kindergarten and her mother warned her against going near the garbage cans set out in the alley behind their apartment building—“They bite babies,” her mother told her, “big girls too, nip their toes, jump in their hair. You know Janey, upstairs in 7B? They got in her cradle when she was baby. Right here, right in this building.” Her father reinforced the admonition, taking her by the hand and probing with one shoe in the dim corners of the carport so she could see the animals themselves, the corpses of the ones he’d caught in spring traps baited with gobs of peanut butter. In secret, in the dark, they would lick and paw that bait — peanut butter, the same peanut butter she ate on white bread with the crusts cut off — until the guillotine dropped and the blood trailed from their crushed heads and dislocated jaws. Rats. Disease carriers, food spoilers, baby biters. But what were they doing here on an untamed island set out in the middle of the sea? Had they swum? Sprouted wings?

The thought came and went. She flapped her arms savagely. “Get out!” she shouted, rushing at them, whirling, clapping her hands. “Get!” They blinked at her — there must have been a dozen or more of them — and then, very slowly, as if it were an imposition, as if they were obeying only because in that moment her need was stronger than theirs, they crept back into their holes. But she was frantic now, snatching the blanket up off the cot without a thought for the rattling dried feces that fell like shot to the floor and wrapping it around her even as she fumbled through the cans on the shelf — peaches in syrup, Boston baked beans, creamed corn — and the utensils tossed helter-skelter in a chipped enamel dishpan set on the counter.

She ate standing. First the peaches, the soothing thick syrup better than anything she’d ever tasted — syrup to lick from the spoon and then from her fingertips, one after the other — then the creamed corn, spooned up out of the can in its essential sweetness, and then, finally, a can of tuna for the feel of it between her teeth. Only when she was sated did she take the time to look around her. The empty cans, evidence of her crime — theft, breaking and entering — lay at her feet. She sank down on the cot, pulling the rough blanket tight round her throat, and saw, with a kind of restrained interest, that the walls were papered over with full sheets torn from magazines, from Life and Look and the Sunday rotogravure. Pinups gazed back at her, men perched on tanks, Barbara Stanwyck astride a horse. A man lived here, she decided, a man lived here alone. A hermit. A fisherman. Someone shy of women, with whiskers like in the old photos of her grandfather’s time.

She found his clothes in the trunk in the corner. Two white shirts, size small, a blue woolen sweater with red piping and a stained and patched pair of gabardine trousers. Without thinking twice — she’d pay him back ten times over when they came to rescue her — she slipped into the trousers and the less homely of the two shirts and then stepped back outside to see if she could find him. Or one of the men who must have lived in the other shacks, because if there were four shacks there must have been four men. At least. And now, standing outside the door with her face turned to the nearest shack, some hundred feet away, she did, in fact, call out “Yoo-hoo!”

No one answered. The only sounds were the ones she’d become inured to: the sifting of the wind, the slap and roll of the breakers, the strained high-flown cries of the birds. She went to each of the shacks in succession, and though she found signs of recent habitation — a bin of rat-gnawed potatoes, a candle melted into a saucer, more canned goods, crackers gone stale in a tin, fishing gear, lobster traps, two jugs of red wine and what might once have been sherry turning black in the unmarked bottle beneath a float of scum — she didn’t find anyone at home. It was as if she were one of the wandering orphans of a fairy tale arrived in some magical realm where all the inhabitants had been put under a spell, turned to trees or animals — to rats, black rats with no fear of humans. Finally, after searching through all four of the habitations and calling out in the silence of futility, over and over again, she went back to the first shack, opened another can of peaches, ate them slowly, one by one, the juice running down her chin, then stretched out on the cot, wrapped herself in the blanket, and slept.

There was so much she didn’t know. How could she? She was marooned, she’d seen her husband go down in the grip of a rising swell in the open sea (though she wouldn’t admit it to herself, wouldn’t give up that slowly unraveling skein of hope, not yet), she’d never been to the islands before in her life and had no idea where she was or what to expect, and the shack she was in might have dropped down from the sky intact for all she knew. It was a shack and she was in it and it would provide shelter until she was rescued — that was all she needed to know.

Of course, the shack she’d chosen hadn’t dropped down from the sky, though there was certainly something of the numinous in its manifestation there on the bluff in her moment of need. The fact was, it had been created by human agency, by people who had wants and aspirations and very definite monetary goals, as Alma knew full well. Because her grandmother’s story was her touchstone, because she’d read through the newspaper accounts, researched the archives and written papers on the subject in high school and college both, she could say with absolute certainty that Beverly had washed up at Frenchy’s Cove on West Anacapa, the largest and most westerly of the three islets. The shacks — or cabins, as they were originally designated — had been built in 1925 by investors from Ventura, who’d hoped to run a sport fishing camp on the location. They were constructed of board and batten, with simple effects, designed to suit the rugged sorts who might come out to the island for the fishing but didn’t necessarily want to spend their nights in a cramped berth on a yawing boat.

Unfortunately for the investors, the rugged sorts never materialized, the venture failed and the cabins sat unoccupied until a squatter named Raymond “Frenchy” LaDreau moved in and took possession three years later. He lived there alone, making his living off the sea, entertaining the occasional visitor and begging water from every ship that anchored in the cove, whether it be a working boat out of Santa Barbara or Oxnard or a pleasure craft come across the channel for the weekend. What his thoughts and expectations were or whether he was lonely or at peace, no one can say, but he stayed on until 1956, in his eightieth year, when his legs failed him after he took a fall on the shifting stones of the path up from the beach and was forced to return to the mainland for good. He was the owner of the shirt and trousers Beverly was wearing and the cans she’d opened, and he would have been present and accounted for and happy to offer them himself, except that he was away on one of his extended trips to the coast at the time and had no way of knowing he was needed. When finally he did get back, all he felt was outrage over the violation of his space and his things, but it was nothing new — it had happened before, the shacks set there on the bluff like a provocation to the kind of people who think the world exists for them alone, and it would happen again. He would have to buy more peaches, that was all, more beans and creamed corn, and maybe, if he thought of it in the rush and hurry of the hardware store in Oxnard, a padlock.

Beverly woke that first day to the declining light and creeping chill of evening. She sat up with a start, uncertain of where she was, and there were the rats, gathered round, staring at her. They were leisurely, content, taking their ease, draped over the chair pulled up to the counter, nestled in the refuse on the floor, hunched over their working hands and the things they’d stolen to eat. Enraged suddenly, she shoved herself violently from the bed, casting about for something she could attack them with, drive them off, make them pay—and here it was, a shovel set in the corner. The rats fell back as she snatched it up and began flailing round the room, the heavy blade falling, digging, caroming off the walls. Within seconds, they were gone and she was left panting in the middle of the room, the shirt binding, the pants grabbing at her hips and the sea through the window as hard as stone.

She went out the door then, the rage still building in her, muttering to herself, letting out a string of obscenities she never until that moment realized she knew, and began tearing through the heap of driftwood stacked behind the shack. Without thinking, without regard for her unprotected hands or the sobs rising in her throat, she flung one log after another over her shoulder and onto the flat between the shacks. When all of it was heaped in a towering pyre and the sweat stung at her eyes and soaked her hair till the ends hung limp, she went barefoot down the path to the beach and scoured the sand for anything that would burn and she hauled that up too. There was newspaper, rat-shredded, in a cardboard box just inside the door of the second shack. The matches she found in a jar atop the woodstove.

She waited till it was full dark, hunched over her knees in the too-tight shirt and the blue sweater with the red piping that smelled of a strange man’s sweat, eating pork and beans from the can and savoring each morsel, before she lit her signal fire. And when she lit it and fed it and kept on feeding it, the flames rose thirty feet in the air, visible all the way to the mainland she could just make out through the gauze of fog as a series of drifting unsteady lights, as if the stars had fallen into the sea. The fire raged, sparked, tore open the night. Someone would see it, she told herself, someone was sure to see it. That first night she even called out at intervals, a hollow shrill gargle of sound that was meant to pierce the fog, ride out over the sea and strike the hull of whatever boat might be passing in the night to see her fire and hear her call. The second night, she saved her breath. By the third night she’d used up nearly all the wood she could scavenge and thought of setting the shacks afire — or the chaparral. At the end of the first week, she was resigned. She scattered rats, ate from the cans, drank from the barrel. When she wasn’t gathering wood she lay in bed, dozing, thumbing through the yellowed newspapers to weigh the news of events that had been decided years ago, politics, economics, war stories, and would the Allies take Monte Cassino and push through to Rome, would the Marines land at Guadalcanal, would Tojo triumph or turn his sword on his own yellow belly?

The rats persisted, gnawing, thieving, slipping in and out of their cracks, thumping in the night, and she persisted too — her fires, of necessity, smaller, but beacons nonetheless, urgent smoldering pleas for help, for release. She saw boats suspended in the distance with their tiny quavering sails and she waved her arms like a cheerleader, fashioned flags from sticks and the tatters of an old faded-to-pink towel and waved them too, but the boats never grew larger or drifted out of frame, as static as figures on a canvas tacked to the very farthest wall in the most enormous room in the world. No one came. No one landed. No one existed. And where was Till? Where was he? He would have come for her by now, if he was alive, and how could he possibly have died in America, aboard his own boat off the lobster-rich Channel Islands, when the Japs hadn’t been able to sink him in the whole wide blinding expanse of the Pacific?

The answer was too hard to hold on to so she let it go. She let it all go. Even the rats. And then, on the first day of what would have been the third week of her imprisonment in a place she’d come to loathe in its changeless, ceaseless, ongoing and never-ending placidity and indifference and sheer brainless endurance, a Coast Guard cutter, free as a cloud, rounded the point and motored into the cove.

And what did the Coast Guard find? A sunburned woman unused to the sound of her own voice, her hair stringy and flat and her eyes focused on nothing. She was the wife of a drowned man, a widow, that was all. She climbed into the rowboat and the sea shifted beneath her and kept on shifting until the big boat, the cutter, sliced across the channel under the downpouring sun, until the shore, with its sharply etched houses, swaying palms and glinting automobiles, rose up to take her in and hold her as firmly and securely as she could ever hope to be held again.

The Wreck of the Winfield Scott

Though Alma is trying her hardest to suppress it, the noise of the freeway is getting to her. She can’t think to slice the cherry tomatoes and dice the baby carrots, can’t clear her head, can barely hear Micah Stroud riding the tide of his emotions through the big speakers in the front room. Normally, aside from the odd siren or the late-night clank of the semitrucks fighting the drag of the atmosphere on the long run up the coast, the sound is continuous, white noise, as naturally occurring a phenomenon and no different in kind from the wind in the eucalyptus or the regular thump of the surf at Butterfly Beach, and she’s learned to ignore it. Or at least live with it. But this is rush hour, when every sound is magnified and people accelerate randomly only to brake half a second later, making use of their horns an estimated eighty-seven percent more often than at any other time of day — a statistic she picked up from the morning paper and quoted to everybody at work in support of her conviction that mechanized society is riding its last four wheels to oblivion, not that anybody needed convincing. And her condo — over-priced and under-soundproofed — occupies the war zone between the freeway out front and the railroad tracks in back, a condition she’s been able to tolerate for its access to the beach and the cool night air, and the option, which she almost always takes, even when it rains, of sleeping with the window open and a blanket wrapped tightly around her through all the seasons of the year.

Today, however — tonight, this evening — she’s on edge, denying herself the solace of a glass of wine. Or sake on the rocks, which is what she really wants. Sake out of the bottle she keeps chilled in the refrigerator, poured crackling over the ice cubes in a cocktail glass, one of the six special glasses remaining from the set of eight she inherited from her grandmother, clear below, frosted above, with the proprietary capital B etched into its face. She swallows involuntarily at the thought of it, thinking Just half a glass, a quarter. The carrots — slick, peeled and clammily wet in the cellophane package — feel alive beneath her fingers as she steadies them against their natural inclination to roll out from under the blade of the knife. On goes the tap with a whoosh, the tomatoes tumbling under the spray in the perforated depths of the colander. A horn sounds out on the freeway, a sudden sharp buzz of irritation and rebuke, and then another answers and another. She pictures the drivers, voluntarily caged, one hand clamped to the wheel, the other to the cell phone. They want. All of them. They want things, space, resources, attention to their immediate needs, but they’re getting none of it — or not enough. Never enough.

Of course, she’s one of them, though her needs are more moderate, or at least she likes to think so. And no, the sake isn’t a serious temptation — she can do without. Has to. Because if anything defines her it’s self-control. And drive. And smarts. People look at her and think she’s some sort of uptight science nerd — the people who want to tear her down anyway — but that’s not who she is at all. She’s just focused. Everything in its time and place. And the time for sake—in her grandmother’s etched glass with the B for Boyd front and center — is after the lecture. Or information session. Or crucifixion. Or whatever the yahoos want to make it this time.

The anger starts in her shoulders, radiating down her arms to her fingers, the knife, the mute unyielding vegetables. Furious suddenly, she flings down the knife and stalks into the front room to crank up the stereo, staring angrily out the window at the off-ramp and the rigid column of invasives Caltrans planted there to mask the freeway from her — and her from the freeway, though she expects the pencil pushers in Sacramento didn’t really have her welfare in mind when they ordered the hired help to plant oleander, in alternating bands of red, white and salmon pink, along both shoulders. If there’s a bird or a lizard or a living creature other than Homo sapiens out there, she can’t see it. All she can see, through the gaps in the bushes, is the discontinuous flash of light from the coruscating bumpers and chrome wheels and streaming rocker panels of the endless line of carbon-spewing vehicles inching by, thinking Seven billion by 2011, seven billion and counting. And where are we going to put them all?

While she’s standing there, Micah Stroud cruising high on his Louisiana twang over a low-pressure system of furious strumming and dislocated bass, one of the cars detaches itself from the flow — or lack of flow — and rockets down the off-ramp right in front of her. It’s a white Prius, humped, ugly, forgettable but salvatory, and unlike any of the other white Priuses on the road, this one contains her familiar — her boyfriend, that is, Tim Sickafoose — and he’s staring right at her with a look of startled recognition, waving now, even as the car slides out of sight and into the drive.

By the time he comes through the door, she’s back in the kitchen, keeping things simple: toast the pita, dice the carrots, slice the tomatoes, toss the salad. Hummus out of the plastic deli container, feta in a thick white slab so perfect the goat might have given birth to it. Somewhere on its farm. With all the other goats. Naa, naa, naa.

They are not the kind of lovers, she and Tim, who peck kisses when they enter rooms or hang from each other like shopping bags in public. They give each other space, time to adjust. Before she can breathe “Hey,” the usual greeting, he’s at the table, cracking a beer, his backpack splayed open on the floor beside him.

The view out the kitchen window is of raffia palms against a white stucco wall draped with bougainvillea, at the base of which a heavily mulched bed of clivia and maidenhair fern bows to an overwatered lawn of Bermuda grass so uniformly and unwaveringly green it pulls the color out of everything. Beyond the wall, a stand of eucalyptus that gives off a fierce mentholated funk in the rainy season so that everything smells of fermenting cough drops, and beyond the eucalyptus a gap for the railroad tracks, then the faded-to-pink roof tiles of the hotel that gives onto the ocean — the ocean she can’t see from here and can just barely make out from the upstairs bedroom. This is a view that irritates her. A view that’s as wrong as it can be, and not simply because it’s wasteful and cluttered and composed entirely of alien species, but because it defeats the whole point of living within sight of the ocean.

“Music’s pretty loud,” he observes.

She turns around now, her hands arrested in the act of halving tomatoes. “I left my iPod at work.”

He has nothing to say to this, though she knows he hates Micah Stroud and Carmela Sexton-Jones and all the other new-wave folkies she plays in random shuffle through most of the day at her desk. When they’d first met, the first week they were together, she’d put on a CD she thought he might like and he’d waited through the better part of a sixteen-ounce can of Guinness before passing judgment. “I don’t know how to say this without being too blunt or anything,” he said, giving her his mildest look to show that he was only trying to be sincere, “but how can you listen to this. . whatever you want to call it? I mean, give me rock and roll any day, the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Queens of the Stone Age.” It was a challenge, a testing of the waters, and she didn’t blame him for it — in fact, it was to his credit, because people didn’t have to echo each other like twins to get along in a relationship — but still she stiffened. “At least they’re committed,” she said, “at least they sing about something other than sex and drugs.” “What’s wrong with sex?” he’d countered, too quickly, the faintest shadow of a grin creeping across his lips, and she knew she’d been had. He counted off a beat, letting the grin settle in. “Or, for that matter, drugs?”

“I was just looking in the paper,” he says now, raising his voice to be heard over the music, “to see if there’s an announcement about tonight.”

Despite herself, despite her nerves, she can’t help conjuring the name of the behavior he’s just exhibited — the Lombard effect, which refers to the way people unconsciously elevate their voices to compete with ambient noise, the roar of the restaurant, any restaurant, serving as the most salient example — even as she moves away from the counter, crosses the kitchen and strides into the front room to kill the volume on the stereo. At which point the cars and trucks and honking horns rush back into her life as if there’d never been anything else. And why couldn’t they put the freeways underground, deep down, and make a park out of all that recovered acreage on top? Or a walking path? A garden to feed the hungry? Trees, weeds, anything? If she had enough money — say, five hundred billion or so — she’d buy up all the property in town, raze the buildings, tear out the roads and reintroduce the grizzly bear.

“Here, here it is,” he calls out.

The notice, a pinched little paragraph in the Upcoming Events section of the local paper, is squeezed between the announcement of a performance of selections from “Les Sylphides” by the Junior Dance Studio of Goleta and a lecture on Chumash ethnobotany at the Maritime Museum:

Lecture and Public Forum

.

Alma Boyd Takesue, Projects Coordinator and Director of Information Resources for the National Park Service, Channel Islands, will address concerns over the proposed aerial control of the black rat population on Anacapa Island. 7:00 p.m., Natural History Museum, 2559 Puesta del Sol, Santa Barbara.

She’s leaning over the table beside him, the print enlarging and receding because she’s left her glasses on the counter, a trim pretty woman of thirty-three, with her mother’s — and grandmother’s — rinsed gray eyes and the muscular, ever-so-slightly-bowed legs and unalloyed black hair she inherited from her father. Which she wears long, down to her waist, and which slips loose now from where she’s tucked it behind her ears to dangle across his forearm as he holds the paper up for her.

“Just the facts,” he says. “I mean, that’s all you can expect, right?”

It’s somehow surprising to see it there in print, this thing she’s been wrestling with privately for the past week made official, set down for the record in the staid familiar type she scans every morning for the news of things. Here is the fact of the news revealed: that she will appear at the place and time specified to make the Park Service’s case for what to her seems the most reasonable and obvious course of action, given the consequences of inaction. And if that action requires the extirpation of an invasive and pernicious species — killing, that is, the killing of innocent animals, however regrettable — then she will show that there is no alternative because the health and welfare, the very existence of the island’s ground-nesting birds, will depend on it. The entire breeding range of Xantus’s murrelet lies between Baja and Point Conception. There are fewer than two thousand breeding pairs. Rats, on the other hand, are ubiquitous. And rats eat murrelet eggs.

“Not much of a come-on, though, is it?”

“No,” she admits, straightening up and then stretching as if she’s just rolled out of bed, and maybe she should have a cup of green tea, she’s thinking, for that extra little jolt of caffeine. She stands there stationary a moment, gazing down at him, at the back of his head and the curiously fleshy lobes of his ears, at the way the hair, medium-length and mink-brown shading to rust at the tips, curls over the collar of his T-shirt and the ceramic beads he wears round his throat on a string of sixty-pound test fishing line. (“Why sixty pounds?” she’d asked him once. “So they won’t break in the surf,” he told her, matter-of-factly, as if he were stating the obvious. “They never come off?” “Never.”) She lays a hand on his shoulder, the lightest touch, but contact all the same. “But then, when you think of what happened last week in Ventura”—she looks into his eyes now and then away again, her lips compressing over the memory, the wounds still fresh and oozing—“maybe we don’t really want a crowd. Maybe we want, oh, I don’t know, maybe thirty people who’ve read the literature—”

“Thirty ecologists.”

Her smile is quick, grateful — he can always lighten the mood. “Yeah,” she says, “I think that’d be about right.”

He’s smiling now too, suspended there above the perspective line of the table like a figure in the still-life painting she’s composing behind her eyelids: the pita on the counter, the late sun breaking through to slant in through the window and inflame the stubble of his cheek, the freeway gone and vanished along with the mood of doom and gloom she’d brought with her into the front room. All is well. All is very, very well. “But I just wanted to be sure,” he says, breaking the spell, “in case you want me out front for crowd control.” He gives it a beat, reaching out to take her hand and run his thumb over her palm, to and fro, caressing her, bringing her back. “No rat lovers, though. Right? Are we agreed on that?”

On the second of December, 1853, the captain of the SS Winfield Scott, a sidewheel steamer that had left San Francisco the previous day for the two-week run to Panama, made an error in judgment. That error, whether it was the result of hubris, overzealousness or a simple mistake of long division, doomed her, and as the years spun out, doomed generations of seabirds too. She had been launched just three years earlier in New York for the run between that city and New Orleans, but in 1851 she was sold and pressed into service on the West Coast, where passenger demand had exploded after the discovery of gold in northern California. Built for heavy seas, some 225 feet long and 34½ feet abeam, with four decks and three masts, she was a formidable ship, named for Major General Winfield Scott, lion and savior of the Mexican War, a gilded bust of whom looked out over her foredeck with a fixed and tutelary gaze. On this particular trip, she carried some 465 passengers and $801,871 in gold and gold dust, as well as several tons of mail and a full crew. Where she picked up her rats, whether in New York or New Orleans or alongside the quay in San Francisco, no one could say. But they were there, just as they were present on any ship of size, then and now, and they must have found the Winfield Scott to their liking, what with its dining salon where up to a hundred people at a time could eat in comfort, with its galleys and larder, its cans of refuse waiting to be dumped over the side and all the damp sweating nooks and holes belowdecks and up into the superstructure where they could live in their own world, apart from the commensal species that provided them with all those fine and delicate morsels to eat. There might have been hundreds of them on a ship that size, might have been a thousand or more, for that matter — no one could say, and the ones that turned up in the traps set by the stewards were mute on the subject.

Captain Simon F. Blunt was a man of experience and decision. He was familiar with the waters of the channel, having been a key member of the team that had surveyed the California coast two years earlier, shortly after the territory was admitted to the union. Coming out of San Francisco the previous day, he’d encountered heavy seas and a stiff headwind, which not only put the ship off schedule but kept the majority of the passengers close to their bunks and out of the drawing room and dining salon. In order to make up time, he elected to enter the Santa Barbara Channel and take the Anacapa Passage between Santa Cruz and Anacapa, rather than steaming to the seaward of the islands, a considerably greater distance. Normally, this would have been an admirable — and expeditious — choice. Unfortunately, however, while dinner was being served that evening, fog began to set in, a frequent occurrence in the channel, resulting from the collision of the California current, which runs north to south, with the warmer waters of the southern California countercurrent, a condition that helps make the channel such a productive fishery but also disproportionately hazardous to shipping. As a result, Captain Blunt was forced to proceed by dead reckoning — in which distance is calculated according to speed in given intervals of time — rather than by taking sightings. Still, he was confident, nothing out of the routine and nothing he couldn’t handle — had handled a dozen times and more — and by ten-thirty he was certain he’d passed the islands and ordered the ship to bear to the southeast, paralleling the coast.

Half an hour later, running at her full speed of ten knots, the Winfield Scott struck an outcropping of rock off the north shore of middle Anacapa, tearing a hole in the hull and igniting an instantaneous panic amongst the passengers. People were flung from their berths, baggage cascaded across the decks, lanterns flickered, shattered, died, and the unknowable darkness of the night and the fog took hold. No one could see a thing, but everyone could feel and hear what was happening to them, the water rushing in somewhere below and the ship exhaling in a series of long ratcheting groans to make room for it. As they struggled to their feet and made their way out into the mobbed corridors, terrified of being overtaken and trapped belowdecks — water sloshing underfoot, the hands of strangers grasping and clutching at them while they staggered forward over unseen legs and boots and the sprawl of luggage, spinning, falling, rising again, and always that grim hydraulic roar to spur them — there was an immense deep grinding and a protracted shudder as the hull settled against the rock. Curses and screams echoed in the darkness. A child shrieked for its mother. Somewhere a dog was barking.

The officer of the watch, his face a pale blanched bulb hanging in the intermediate distance, sent up the alarm, and the captain, badly shaken, ordered the ship astern in an attempt to back away from the obstruction and avoid further damage. The engines strained, an evil tarry smoke fanning out over the deck till it was all but impossible to breathe, the great paddle wheel churning in the murk as if it were trying to drain the ocean bucket by bucket, everything held in suspension — the captain riveted, the officers mouthing silent prayers, the mob thundering below — until finally the ship broke loose with a long bruising sigh of splintering wood. She was free. Trembling down the length of her, lurching backward, but free and afloat. It must have been a revivifying moment for passengers and crew alike, but it was short-lived, because in the next instant the ship’s stern struck ground, shearing off the rudder and leaving her helpless. Almost immediately she began to list, everything that wasn’t secured careening down-slope toward the invisible rocks and the dim white creaming of the breakers four decks below.

Captain Blunt, at war with himself — lives at stake, his career ruined, his hands quaking and his throat gone dry — gave the order to abandon ship. By the light of the remaining lanterns he mustered his officers and crew to see to an orderly evacuation, but this was complicated by the gangs of desperate men — prospectors who’d suffered months and in some cases years of thirst, hunger, exhaustion, lack of female company and the comforts of civilization to accumulate their hoards over the backs of sweat-stinking mules — swarming the upper deck, dragging their worn swollen bottom-heavy satchels behind them and fighting for the lifeboats without a thought for anything but getting their gold to ground. At this point, the captain was forced to draw his pistol to enforce order even as the stern plunged beneath the waves and ever more passengers emerged from belowdecks in a mad scrum, slashing figures in the dark propelled by their shouting mouths and grasping hands. He fired his pistol in the air. “Remain calm!” he roared over and over again till his voice went hoarse. “Women and children first. There’s room for all. Don’t panic!”

The boats were lowered and the people on deck could see, if dimly, that they were out of immediate danger, and that went a long way toward pacifying them. It was a matter of ferrying people to that jagged dark pinnacle of rock the boat had struck in the dark, a matter of patience, that was all. No one was going to drown. No one was going to lose his belongings. Stay clam. Be calm. Wait your turn. And so it went, the boats pushing off and returning over the space of the next two hours till everyone but the crew had been evacuated — and then the crew, and lastly the captain, came too. What they didn’t realize, through the duration of a very damp and chilled night with the sea rising and the fog settling in to erase all proportion, was that the rock on which they’d landed was some two hundred yards offshore of the main island and that in the morning they’d have to be ferried through the breakers a second time.

It was a week before they were rescued. Provisions were salvaged from the ship before she went down, but they weren’t nearly enough to go round. Fights broke out over the allotment of rations and over the gold too, so that finally Captain Blunt — in full view of the assembled passengers — was forced to pinion two of the malefactors, gold thieves, on the abrasive dark shingle and horsewhip them to the satisfaction of all and even a scattering of applause. A number of the men took it upon themselves to fish from shore in the hope of augmenting their provisions. Others gathered mussels and abalone, another shot a seal and roasted it over an open fire. When finally news of the wreck reached San Francisco, and three ships, the Goliah, the Republic and the California, steamed down the coast to evacuate the passengers, no one was sorry to see the black cliffs of Anacapa fade back into the mist. The ship was lost. The passengers had endured a night of terror and a week of boredom, sunburn and enforced dieting. But no one had died and the gold, or the greater share of it, had been preserved.

As for the rats, they are capable swimmers with deep reserves of endurance and a fierce will to survive. Experiments have shown that the average rat can tread water for some forty-eight hours before succumbing, can grip and climb vertical wires, ropes, cables and smooth-boled trees with the facility of a squirrel and is capable of compressing its body to fit through a hole no wider around than the circumference of a quarter. And too, rats have a superb sense of balance and most often come to shore adrift on floating debris, whether that debris consists of loose cushions, odd bits of wood planking, whiskey bottles, portmanteaux and other flotsam or rafts of vegetation washed down out of canyons during heavy rains. Certainly some of the rats aboard the Winfield Scott, trapped in the hold when the baggage shifted or inundated before they could scramble up onto the deck, were lost, but it’s likely that the majority made it to shore. Of course, all it would have taken was a pair of them. Or even a single pregnant female.

In any case, as Alma is prepared to inform her audience, the black rats—Rattus rattus, properly — that survived the wreck of the Winfield Scott made their way, over the generations, from that naked rock to middle Anacapa and from there to the eastern islet, and finally, afloat on a stick of driftwood or propelled by their own industrious paws, to the westernmost. Only luck and the six miles of open water of the Anacapa Passage, with its boiling spume and savage currents, has kept them from expanding their range to Santa Cruz. And no one, not even the most inveterate rodent lover, would want that.

The Prius is aglow with the soft amber light of the dashboard as it slips almost silently along the streaming freeway, Tim relaxed behind the wheel and offering a running commentary on the news leaking out of the radio, his way of calming her, of pretending that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this little jaunt to the museum. As if they were going to stroll arm-in-arm through the exhibits, examining the Chumash tomol and the skeleton of the Santa Rosa Island dwarf mammoth for the twentieth time, drawing down their voices to laugh and joke and feel at home amidst the dry stifled odor of preservation. Alma would have driven herself, except that she likes to free her mind before speaking in public and has learned from experience that the focus required of driving — however minimal and however short the distance — distracts her. There always seems to be some sort of problem on the road, an accident, a lane closure for repaving or reshouldering or whatever it is they do along the freeway at night — or mayhem, simple mayhem, bad manners, cell phone abuse, people with their heads screwed on backward — and the delay upsets her equilibrium. When you see brake lights ahead you never know if you’ll be stopped for five minutes or an hour. Or your life. The rest of your life.

Sure enough, half a mile from their exit, they run into a wash of brake lights and in the next moment they’re stalled behind a pickup truck elevated up off the roadway on a gleaming web of struts higher than the dwarf mammoth could ever have hoped to reach. “Shit,” she hisses, and she’s biting her lip, a bad habit, she knows it, but she can’t help herself. “I knew we should’ve gone the back way.”

Tim shrugs, reaches out a hand to switch channels, the reporter’s intimate placatory tones dissolving in the thump and rattle of timbales, congas and cowbells and the keening almost-human voice of a guitar rising up out of the deluge of percussion. “It’s probably nothing,” he says. “We’ve got twenty minutes yet. And Mission’s the next exit. See it? Right there — under this moron’s rear end?”

She doesn’t respond. Just turns her head and gazes out the window on the auto mall in the near distance — more cars — and lets the air run out of her lungs in a long withering sigh. It’s not Tim’s fault and she doesn’t mean to take it out on him. He’s doing the best he can, and the quickest way, no question about it, is the freeway. How could he know this was going to happen? (Though she did argue for the back way the minute he flicked on the signal light for the freeway. Isn’t it rush hour still? she’d said. Or the tail end of it? Nah, he assured her. Not now. We’ll be all right.) So it was his call. And she went along with it. And here they are. Stopped dead.

After a while he says, “Must be an accident.”

She’s dressed all in black — pressed cotton slacks, patent-leather heels and V-necked top accented by a modest silver bracelet and necklace, nothing showy, nothing anybody could object to — and her notes are tucked inside the manila folder atop the laptop balanced on her knees. It took her a long while that afternoon to decide on what to wear, trying to strike a balance between the formal and the casual, the ecologist dragged in from the field and turned out with just the right degree of chic to be persuasive and sympathetic rather than intimidating, and she spent the better part of an hour combing out her hair and applying her makeup. Too much eyeliner and she’d look like a slut. Too little and they wouldn’t be able to see the shape of her eyes and the way the light gathered in them and made people stop to stare at her on the street, because looking good, or at least stylish and interesting, was part of the job description. Who wanted to sit there in a stiff-backed chair and have some dowdy forest-service type rattle off statistics about the decline of this species or that? She was there to be looked at, as well as listened to, and she had no problem with that. If she could use her looks to advance her cause, then so much the better.

But damn them, damn them for making this so hard on her. And she should never have had that tea — the caffeine has her heart pounding in her ears and her nerves stripped raw, just as if she’d opened up her skin and taken a vegetable peeler to them. “I wish I was out on the islands,” she says, turning abruptly to him. “Recruiting invertebrates. Banding birds. Anything. I’m fed up with this crap.”

He’s looking straight ahead, his face dense with the reflection of the pickup’s brake lights. “You are the spokesperson, after all.”

“Director of information services.”

“Same difference. But what I mean is, spokespeople have to speak. It’s what you do, it’s what you’re good at.” He pauses, fingers tapping at the wheel, working through his variations. “And why is it ‘spokespeople’—shouldn’t it be speakspeople? Or speakpeople. There they go, the president’s speakpeople, all ready to start speaking.” He turns to her, serious suddenly. “They’d be lost without you and you know it.”

“Dave LaJoy,” she pronounces carefully. “Anise Reed.”

He waves a hand in dismissal. “Okay, okay — there are crazies everywhere. Especially when you—”

“When I what?”

“I don’t know — do something controversial. Or defend it, I mean. Explain it. Explanations always leave you open to attack, as if you’re apologizing after the fact. Or before the fact, I mean.”

She can feel a flare of anger coming up in her. “I’m not apologizing. We’ve got nothing to apologize for. We’re scientists. We do the studies. Not like these PETA nuts that come out to shout you down because they’ve got nothing better to do — and they’re ignorant, baseline stupid, that’s all. They don’t have the faintest idea of what they’re talking about. Not a clue. If they would only—”

“So educate them.”

She throws it back at him, bitter now, bitter and outraged. “Educate them. Good luck. These people don’t want facts, they don’t want to know about island biogeography or the impact of invasive species or ecosystem collapse or anything else. All they want is to stick their noses in. And shout. They love to shout.”

“I know,” he says, “I know,” and they’re moving now, the string of brake lights easing off all down the line, the tires gripping the road, rolling forward, the exit rushing at them. “I’m on your side, remember? Just keep your cool, that’s all. Be nice. But firm. And professional. That’s what you are, right — professional?”

The freeway releases them onto city streets, cars parked along the curb, storefronts giving back the glare of the headlights, trees broadcasting their shadows. People are coming out of restaurants, flicking remotes at their cars, standing in groups on the sidewalk for no discernible reason, going to meetings. A bus lurches out ahead of them and settles into its lane, shuddering like a ship at sea. They pass a storefront offering kung fu lessons and she has a fleeting glimpse of robes, faces, synchronized gestures. It’s quarter to seven. They will be there, barring further surprises, with five minutes to spare, and in a way that’s better than arriving half an hour early and having to sit in the back room staring at the ten-foot mounted grizzly and fret and pace and watch the clock portion off the seconds. She raises her hands to push the hair away from her face, then drops them to the folder in her lap. The rain, which has been threatening all through the afternoon, chooses that moment to dash at the windshield and sizzle on the dark tongue of pavement before them. “Yeah,” she says finally, long after it matters, “that’s what I am. Professional.”

She’s surprised at the number of cars in the parking lot. Every spot seems to be taken, at least the ones close in, and people are circling in predatory mode, the rain heavier now, sheeting across the blacktop and giving back the sheen of the headlights in a polished waxen glow. “Looks like you attracted quite a crowd,” he says, leaning over the wheel on both forearms to peer out into the night while waiting for the car ahead of them, a black BMW, its left rear blinker pulsing frantically, to make up its mind: left, right or straight ahead? The delay is maddening. The kind of thing that drives her over the line, indecision, inattentiveness, the laziness of people who won’t drive to the end of the lot for fear they might have to walk an extra twenty feet, who sit back with a bag of potato chips in one hand and a Cherry Coke in the other and wonder why all of America is fat and getting fatter. She actually leans forward to reach across the console for the horn—What is with these people? — before snatching her hand back. She can’t afford to be rude. Not here. Not tonight. How devastating would it be for the speaker, the guest of honor, to get caught up in some petty embroilment in the parking lot?

She says: “There must be something else going on.”

“Uh-uh. Not that I saw in the paper anyway.” The car ahead of them creeps forward, the frantic winking eye of the blinker dying out on the left only to reanimate itself on the right. Then the brake lights flare and the car stops. Again. Beyond it, she can see the illuminated forms of couples hurrying across the pavement, bowed beneath the weight of their umbrellas, and that’s when it comes to her that she’s forgotten her own.

“Tim? Did you bring an umbrella?”

He gives her one of his astonished looks, eyebrows rocketing, eyes blown open, lips scrambling for an expression, at once a parody of and homage to his favorite late-night TV host. He can be very funny, Tim, nothing sacred to him, no occasion too solemn or pressing for a gag. But this isn’t the time. Or place.

“You didn’t then?”

He shakes his head, still mugging, as if this were all a big joke, as if he could even begin to soothe her at this point. “No. Sorry. Uh-uh. You want me to swing around and drop you at the door? Or I’ll carry you. Want me to carry you?”

“No,” she snaps, thinking of ruined hair and smeared makeup, thinking of standing up there at the microphone looking as if she’s just fallen off a boat. “No, I do not want you to carry me. Didn’t you know it was going to rain? Didn’t you think?”

Before she’d taken him to Scottsdale to meet her mother the first time, after they’d been seeing each other for a month, she’d given him a full accounting of her mother’s character, habits and predilections, and while it was for the most part a loving portrait, it was unsparing too. Her mother was a shopper. An inveterate shopper. A shopaholic. There was nothing she didn’t collect, from ceramic stringheads to Zuni turquoise, Fiesta ware, porcelain dolls, antique dustpans and Victorian furniture so dense and dark it squeezed all the light out of every room in the house. In the face of a dying planet and the exhaustion of resources, this would be shame enough for any daughter to bear, but for an ecologist who’d devoted her adult life to educating the public, it was crippling and inexplicable. And hurtful, deeply hurtful. She felt bad about it on so many levels, about mentioning it even, as if she were betraying her mother and her mother’s love. And what was the first thing Tim said to her mother? “I can appreciate the hoarding urge,” he told her, sinking into the couch in the living room with the gimlet she had just handed him, “whether it’s environmentally correct or not. My mother — you’ll meet her, she lives in upstate New York, but she comes out to visit maybe twice a year — my mother used to be like that. And then I told her, ‘Look, going antiquing for women is like fishing for guys, I understand that. But in this age of conserving resources, most of us practice catch and release.’ You know, you get the thrill of stalking the trout, flicking out the fly, pulling this mysterious beautiful thing out of the water, one in a million, precious as gold, and then you let it go. Same thing with my mother nowadays, because she’s totally reformed — she goes to the store, finds a precious whatever it is, bargains like a fanatic, like she’ll die if she pays a nickel more, then counts out the money, watches the guy wrap it up, and hands it right back to him. You know what I’m saying? Catch and release.”

He doesn’t respond. But he’s begun inching forward, flicking his brights on and off by way of suggesting to the people in the BMW that their behavior stands in need of correcting. “Why don’t they just park in the middle of the fucking street? Come on,” he mutters, coaching them, “come on.” Whoever they are — shadowy forms emerging suddenly in sharp relief, the back of a man’s head and a woman beside him, in profile, her hair massed like an unraveling turban — they’ve begun to get the idea. There’s a quick sharp movement of the man’s shoulders, the wheel swinging right, and the car rolls grudgingly out of the way.

That’s when the feeling comes over her — what is it, dread, mortification, hate? — and she doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to look, staring rigidly ahead, as if she’s been frozen in place, as Tim pulls even with them, right there, right in the operatic glare of the headlights of the next car in line. She can feel his eyes sweeping sourly over them, the engine of the Prius gurgling softly, the windshield wipers beating time and the faintest whisper of a voice leaking from the radio as he eases past, but she doesn’t turn her head. She’s shut them out, negated them, hide-and-seek, but not before the sticker on the side window leaps out at her, vermilion letters on an electric yellow background superimposed over the figure of a cartoon rodent’s anthropomorphized face. FPA, it reads, and beneath it, in characters that seem to bleed away from the banner: For the Protection of Animals.

But then she feels the car accelerate and they’re parting the curtain of rain, or at least the visible portion of it, wheeling down the long double line of parked cars and back up again on the far side. Before she can protest he’s pulling up in front of the entrance, on the wide strip of macadam reserved for Pedestrians Only, skidding to a stop within inches of the snaking line of slickered, umbrella-wielding people waiting to purchase tickets in the rain, already leaning forward to reach across her for the door. “Go ahead,” he says, the seat belt tugging at his shoulder and the smell of him — of his aftershave and shampoo and the hot fungal odor of the hair under his arms and between his legs, her leman’s smell, her mate’s — rising to her, primal and comforting and confusing all at once. For a moment she doesn’t know what to do. “I’ll park back there someplace at the end of the lot,” he tells her, making a vague gesture at the expanding arena of shadow behind them, “and catch up with you later.” The door swings open. She unfastens her seat belt, tucks her folder and laptop under one arm, and emerges to the breeze and the blown rain and the taste of it on her lips, sweet and rank all at once. He’s watching her. Grinning. “Break a leg,” he says.

Before she can respond — and what would she say anyway, I’ll try? — here’s Frieda Kleinschmidt, the museum’s director, stalking up to her with a bright pink parasol, the lights along the walkway fuzzed with mist, people looming out of the shadows to hunch under the parapet, furl umbrellas and stamp and blow and brush the rain from sleeves, shoulders, hats. Tall, narrow-shouldered, her face clenched round the shine of her steel-framed glasses and the alarm in her magnified eyes, Frieda stands there rigid, staring at the Prius skewed across the pavement where no car has ever dared go before it. She shoots an anxious glance at Tim—No, he’s not a terrorist, Alma wants to tell her, only my boyfriend—and then says, “You picked quite a night for it. Who would have thought?” She pumps the umbrella in evidence, then lowers it again to Alma’s height. “I mean, it was clear an hour ago. Wasn’t it? I thought it was anyway. Last I looked.”

Alma murmurs something in response, and then they’re striding across the courtyard, past the entrance to the auditorium and up to the door of the room where the unlucky grizzly (Ursus arctos californicus, declared extinct 1924) stands guard. “But all these cars — this isn’t all for me, is it?”

“I don’t know who else,” Frieda throws over her shoulder, bending from the waist to manipulate a clutch of keys and let her into the cold too-bright room, brisk now, hugging her arms to her and revolving around the floor on the spongy soles of her running shoes as if she’s about to dash off into the night. She’s anxious, Alma can see that, anxious because of the size of the crowd and the subject matter and what happened in Ventura last week. “But you have everything you need, right? There’s water out there on the podium — and we’ll start a little late, I think, maybe ten minutes or so, just to let everyone get settled, what with the rain—”

“Yes,” Alma murmurs, “that’s fine. “I’ll just need to plug my laptop into the projector. And the microphone—”

“I did the sound check myself. You’ll take questions afterward?”

The grizzly, formerly on display but exiled to this back room for crimes unspecified, looms over them with its plasticized eyes and arrested teeth, snarling mutely down the ages. There are other artifacts here too — a great stiff comb of baleen propped up in the corner, cast-off mammoth bones aligned neatly on an oak desk and looking unsettlingly like the refuse at the bottom of a Colonel Sanders bucket enlarged to implausibility, Chumash arrowheads and shards of pottery in a dusty glass display case skewed away from the far wall at a forty-five-degree angle, museum clutter awaiting the donors’ dollars to rescue it from eternal storage. “Yes. I mean, that’s what they’re here for. Most of them, I guess.”

Frieda gives her a look. “If any of them get, well — I don’t know, contentious—don’t be afraid to cut them off, and I do have Bill Braithwaite at the door, just in case. .”

This is the point at which she’s supposed to say, Don’t worry, I can handle it — I’ve done it a thousand times. But she says nothing.

Erect, her glasses shining and her pigeon-colored eyes in retreat, Frieda claps her hands together and spins halfway round with a faint squeak of rubber or plastic or whatever it is they’re making running shoes from these days. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to your thoughts then. I’ll come get you in”—she raises her wrist to squint at a flat gold watch on a band no wider than a shoelace—“say, seven and a half minutes?”

It’s warm in the auditorium, very warm, all those people — standing room only, which means three hundred at least — bundled tightly together, post-prandial, variously digesting their dinners, processing proteins and starches and sugars, generating heat. And it’s humid, the rain beating remorselessly at the roof and percolating through the downspouts with a peristaltic tick and gurgle. And, of course, since it’s November, the museum’s central air has been long shut down for the season. Sitting there in the middle of the front row while Frieda reads through a list of announcements — upcoming events, classes, fund-raisers, opportunities to get in on museum-sponsored field trips, films and slide shows — she can feel the sweat rising from her pores, collecting at the nape of her neck beneath the thermal blanket of her hair, trailing down her spine to where the blouse has begun to stick to the small of her back. When she slipped in stage left and took her seat, she caught a glimpse of the crowd, surprised all over again by the turnout, especially on a rainy night, but she didn’t look closely enough to individuate anyone, not even Tim, who must have been part of the contingent, mostly male, milling around in the rear without hope of finding seats. If she was nervous a few moments ago, in the green room with Frieda — and the grizzly — she’s over it now. In fact, all she can think of — hope for — is that Frieda’s introduction will be short and to the point so she can get up there and get this over with.

But Frieda is not short and to the point. After a shaky start, Frieda is coming into her own, riding high on the heady business of insinuating a single human voice through the wires of a foam-jacketed microphone and the distant speakers they feed in order to hold the attention of three hundred people without lapsing or slipping up or making a fool of yourself. The introduction — Alma Boyd Takesue, B.S. in biology from the University of Hawaii, M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental studies from UC Berkeley, three years in the field studying the brown tree snake on Guam and all the rest, right on down to a recitation of the titles of her papers in scientific journals, all of them, all the journals and all the titles — manages to be both uninspired and interminable, and by the time Frieda finally announces her and stands back to shield her eyes against the spotlight and extend a blind hand of welcome, the audience is restless. The applause patters dutifully as Alma rises from her seat and then cuts off abruptly, even before she finds herself up there under the glare of the spotlight, struggling to adjust the microphone the taller woman has left poised well above the crown of her head.

“Hello,” she hears herself say, the amplification hurling her voice out into the void and then bringing it back to inhabit every crevice in a throbbing overwrought vibrato. “I want to thank you all for coming, especially on such a”—and here she pauses, searching for the right word, the one that will soften things, lighten them up, and what kind of night is it anyway? — “dismal night.” Yes, dismal. There is a collective rustling, as if the entire audience were balanced on a taut continuous sheet of paper, and then she’s bending to her computer, and the first image — of Anacapa at twilight, Arch Rock glowing iconically and the sea so multifaceted and calm it might have been painted in oils around it — infuses the big screen behind her. “This is Anacapa,” she says redundantly, “one of the islands that comprise the Channel Islands National Park, the islands often referred to as the Galápagos of North America.”

The Galápagos of North America. It’s a tired phrase, but one she conscientiously works into all her press releases and talks, whether formal or informal, because it never fails to have its effect, people drifting off on a fugue of National Geographic specials, of blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, vampire finches and marine iguanas presented in loving close-up while azure waves beat at crinkled shores, only to awaken to the connection she’s trying to make — that these islands, our islands, are equally unique. And equally worthy of preservation. And not simply preservation, but restoration.

She lifts her head to gaze out on the audience, sweeping left to right as if she’s speaking personally to each and every one of them, though with the spotlight in her eyes and her glasses on the podium beside her and the auditorium lights turned low, she can barely make out anyone beyond the second row. “Anacapa,” she pronounces, giving each of its aspirated syllables a long lingering beat, “is, as I’m sure you all know, a unique and irreplaceable ecosystem that is home to endemic species of both plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, from the island wallflower and an autochthonous Malacothrix, of the chicory genus, to the shield-backed cricket and the native deer mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus anacapae, just as the other islands harbor unique species of birds, as well as the spotted skunk and”—here a click of the mechanical mouse to display the next picture, one that never fails to arouse a tongue-clucking murmur of approval—“the island fox. Which, through some sixteen thousand years of separation from the mainland, has evolved into a separate subspecies, featuring the dwarfism often common to insular populations. On average”—she looks to the screen behind her, the fox blooming in the darkness, ears erect, paws neatly aligned and gazing out into the audience with all the ferocity of a stuffed toy—“these little guys weigh four to six pounds, the size of a house cat. . one that gets regular exercise, that is.” This last, her icebreaker, always generates the first laugh of the evening, or rueful chuckle, at least, as the cat owners reflect on the overfed, kibbleized giants curled up asleep on the sofa at home.

She has them now, and never mind that privately she’d like to see all free-ranging cats exterminated in fact and by law, because she’s ascending into her rhythm, the Latin nomenclature rolling off her tongue as if she were a priest in training, every fact and figure at her command, no need at all to glance down at the notes she’s printed in 22-point type so she can dispense with her glasses and give them the full effect of her eyes. As the images click behind her, she presents a quick overview of island biogeography, of how isolated species evolve to fill niches in the ecosystem and of how that balance, unique to each island throughout the world, can be upset by the introduction of mainland species. She talks about the dodo, perhaps the poster animal for island extinctions, a pigeon-like bird that found its way to an isle in the Indian ocean and subsequently evolved, in the absence of predators, into the waddling big-bottomed flightless bird made infamous by its very helplessness.

“The dodo was naive,” she says, giving them a hard, no-nonsense look, because this is the reality, this is what it comes down to — the permanent loss of an irreplaceable species — and there’s nothing funny or even remotely ironic about that. “That is, it had had fear and suspicion bred out of it, and so waddled right up to the first seaman to land on the island of Mauritius, who plucked and roasted it, then introduced pigs and rats, which fed avidly on the eggs of this ground-nester. Flight is expensive,” she goes on, “in light of caloric resources expended, and so too is tree-nesting. Why fly, why nest in a tree, if you’ve evolved in a place where there are no predators? The answer for the dodo — the result, that is — as every schoolchild knows, was extinction.”

The audience has settled in, the initial rustling, nose-blowing and fist-suppressed hacking fading away into what she’d like to construe as engaged silence rather than a collective stupor. But no, they are engaged: she can feel them, alert and awake and alive to the argument to come (key words: rats and poison) and the bloodletting of the Q&A that will follow. All right. Time to bring it on. She clicks the mouse and the next image to infest the screen behind her is of those very rats, eyes gleaming demonically in the sudden illumination of the photographer’s flash, as they rifle the nests of gulls and murrelets, their paws and snouts wet with smears of yolk, albumin and chalaza.

“Rats,” she announces, letting the final s sibilate on her lips till it buzzes back to her through the speakers, “are responsible for sixty percent of all island extinctions in the world today.” A pause for effect. “And rats are killing off the ground-nesting birds of Anacapa Island.” Pause the second, this time accompanied by the steeliest squint she can manage, considering that she can barely see the audience. “Which is why I am here tonight to tell you that we must act and act now if we want to save these endemic creatures from the same fate that met the dodo, the Rodrigues solitaire, the Stephens Island wren, the Culebra Island giant anole and dozens — hundreds, thousands—of others.”

And now the rustling, the creaking of the chairs and the whisper of voices, excitement flashing through the crowd like an electrical charge: this is what they’ve come for. And it’s what she’s come for too, the moment of truth. She straightens up, squares her shoulders. She has them in her power and now is the time to lean into the microphone, hold them with that squint, and say: “Which is why we have, after long deliberation and with the full backing of the National Park Service’s biologists and the California Department of Fish and Game as well as the scientific community at large, decided to go to the air with the control agent brodifacoum to suppress the invasive rodent population, which, incidentally, is threatening the native deer mice in addition to the murrelet, the pigeon guillemot, the western gull and the cormorant.” She clicks the mouse to display a close-up of a tiny Xantus’s murrelet with its black head and mask over a white throat and underbelly, looking stricken as the snaking dark form of a rat gnaws the egg out from under it. “And let me assure you that this agent is quick-acting and humane, and that if we were presented with any other alternative we would gladly have taken it, but given the urgency of the situation and our confidence in the method of control, we have, have. .”

The crowd has fallen silent. They’ve become aware of a presence she’s just now perceived at the periphery of her vision, the figure of a man risen from a seat at the far end of the front row, his hair in rusty dreadlocks, his head bowed, muscles rigid, his jaw clamped in fury. She knows him. Of course she does. And of course he’s here and of course he’s interrupting her and behaving like a brownshirt, like a, a—

“Bull,” he pronounces, and his voice echoes from one end of the auditorium to the other. “Propaganda and doublespeak.” He swings round on the audience suddenly, his arms raised like a prophet’s. “Did we come here to listen to the party line like a bunch of drones under some communistic dictatorship, or is this a public meeting? Do we want our questions answered? Our point of view represented? Or is this show for mutes only?”

A groundswell of applause, a scattering of voices, male and female alike, calling out encouragement and then a chant starting like the rumor of a distant wind and blowing stronger with each repetition, “Q and A, Q and A, Q and A!”

And now she’s raising both her hands, palms out, in a gesture for silence, patience, simple common courtesy, and a rumble of voices arises in support. “Sit down,” someone calls from the darkness. “Button it.”

“All right,” she hears herself say, her amplified voice coming at them like the voice of a god, stentorian, omnipotent — she has the microphone and they don’t—“we’ll address all your concerns and take your comments in a minute. As for you, Mr. LaJoy”—he’s still standing there, his arms crossed in defiance—“your opposition to our goals is well documented, and you will have your chance to comment, but I’m going to have to ask you to sit and wait your turn.” And then she adds, superfluously, “All things in time.”

The applause now is definitely on her side, on the side of civility and restraint, and it continues until Dave LaJoy sinks back into his seat and she’s had a chance to take a sip of water from the glass Frieda has left for her on the ledge beneath the lectern, and is her hand shaking as she lifts it to her lips? No. It’s not. It’s definitely not. Determined not to let them ruffle her, she sets the glass firmly down and picks up where she’s left off, describing — and yes, minimizing — the effects of the control agent and once again bringing home the point, in ringing terms, that there is absolutely no alternative to the proposed action, even as the final image, of a murrelet tending its nestlings against a soft-focus background of clinging plants and dark volcanic rock, crowds the screen behind her. She takes the applause graciously, bows her head and waits till Frieda has mounted the stage in her rangy unhipped slump-shouldered stride and thrust herself into the spotlight. “Now,” Frieda projects into the microphone on an admonitory blast of static, “now Dr. Takesue will take your questions. In turn. And one at a time, please.” She waits a moment, as if daring anyone to defy her, shields her eyes against the glare, and calls out into the void, “Up with the house lights, Guillermo. We want to see just whom we’re addressing.”

Immediately, Dave LaJoy is on his feet, his hand rocketing in the air — and there she is, Anise Reed, seated beside him in her cyclone of hair, her eyes burning and her hands clenched in her lap. Alma, her glasses clamped firmly over the bridge of her nose now, ignores them and flags a woman ten rows back. Red-faced, with a corona of milk-white hair and a pair of rectangular wire-rimmed glasses that could have come from the same shop as Frieda’s, the woman unfolds herself from the chair and in a thin sweet aqueous voice asks, “What about the mice? Won’t the poison hurt them too?” then drops back into the chair and the anonymity of the crowd as if to stand for one second more under the public gaze would crush the breath out of her.

“Good question,” Alma purrs, congratulating her, relieved to field a query from someone who’s come to be informed, to learn something rather than suck up attention like a parasite, and that’s exactly what Dave LaJoy is, a parasite on the corpus of the Park Service and the museum and Frieda and everyone else who works to improve things rather than tear them down. “Our field biologists”—her voice is soft now, honeyed, the pleasure of the exchange erasing the tension that settled in her stomach and migrated all the way out to the tips of her fingers till they tingle as if they’ve been frostbitten—“have taken the mice into account and we’ve trapped a representative population for captive breeding and release after the rats have been extirpated — and we expect them to repopulate very quickly in the absence of competition from the rats.”

“And the birds? What about the birds? Isn’t it a fact that there’ll be a massive kill-off?” A man on her left — a confederate of LaJoy’s? — has popped up out of nowhere, unrecognized. She sees a goatee, the glint of gold in one ear, the glaring blue unbreachable eyes of the fanatic, and for an instant she thinks to ignore him, but immediately relents — if she doesn’t answer she’ll look as if she’s evading the issue.

“The bait is colored bright blue, a hue that doesn’t fall within the range of anything the avifauna might be expected to consume. And, of course, we’re going to do the aerial drop now, in winter, when bird numbers are down.” She raises a placatory palm and lets it fall. “We expect very little collateral damage.”

“Little?” It’s LaJoy again, again on his feet. “The loss of a single animal — a single rat — is intolerable, inhumane and just plain wrong. Why don’t you tell them—Dr. Takesue — about what this poison does to any animal unlucky enough to ingest it, whether that’s a rat or one of your precious little birds? Huh? Why don’t you tell them that?”

She can see Frieda stirring in the chair she’s taken in the front row, Frieda the watchdog, her neck craned, glasses shining militantly. And where’s Bill Braithwaite — wasn’t he supposed to provide the muscle here? And Tim? Where’s Tim?

“The agent is quick-acting and humane,” she hears herself say.

“More doublespeak.” LaJoy is swinging round to incite the crowd, juggling his arms and flaying the dreadlocks round the stanchion of his neck. “The fact is that this poison — call it by what it is, why don’t you? — this poison causes slow death from internal bleeding over anywhere from three to ten days. Ten days! You call that humane?”

The audience breathes out, massively. Chairs creak. A soughing murmur of opposed voices starts up. She’s losing them.

“Listen, Mr. LaJoy,” she says, her voice as sharp-edged as one of the arrowheads in the back room, and she’d like nothing better than to run him through, pull back the bowstring and let fly, “I’m not going to debate you here—”

“Then where are you going to debate me? Name it. I’ll be there. And then maybe people can get around to the truth of this thing, that you and your so-called scientists—”

“Frankly, nowhere. We’ve had your opinion. Thank you. Now — yes, you, the man in back, in the plaid shirt?”

But LaJoy won’t give it up, just as he wouldn’t the week before in Ventura when he had to be escorted from the room, spewing threats and curses. “You’re no better than executioners,” he shouts over whatever the man in plaid is trying to say. “Nazis, that’s what you are. Kill everything, that’s your solution. Kill, kill, kill.”

Suddenly Frieda is there beside her, the microphone riding up to the level of her irate face. “Now that will be enough. If you can’t be civil—”

He throws it right back at her. “How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being tortured to death? Civil? I’ll be civil when the killing’s done and not a minute before. Those rats—”

Alma feels the heart go out of her. She’s standing there at Frieda’s side, feeling helpless and exposed, trying to keep her shoulders from slumping, the scepter of the microphone taken from her and the crowd too, even as Frieda glares at the rear of the auditorium and calls for order. “Bill,” she cries, “Guillermo. Will you please have this gentleman removed from the hall?”

And here they come, Bill Braithwaite, all two hundred fifty ventricose pounds of him, and the tech person, Guillermo Díaz, head down and a hundred pounds lighter, making their way up the right-hand aisle, looking grim. “Those rats have been there for a hundred and fifty years!” LaJoy calls out, edging down the row to box them off. “What’s your baseline? A hundred years ago? A thousand? Ten thousand? Hell”—and he’s out in the far aisle now, facing the crowd—“why not just clone your dwarf mammoth and stick him out there like in Jurassic Park?”

“Bill,” Frieda pleads in a long expiring sigh of exasperation that bleats through the speakers like a martyr’s last prayer. “Bill!”

Everybody seems to be standing now, voices caroming off the high open wood-beamed ceiling, no bringing them back, another night lost — or at least the most instructive part of it. And why couldn’t the informed people speak up? Or the schoolchildren who want to know about the fox’s habits or what the spotted skunk eats and how it got so small? Why the controversy? Why the anger? Why the hate? Jurassic Park. That was a low blow, the demagogue’s trick of confusing the issue, and she wants to snatch the microphone back and let him have it, but she can’t because she’s a professional, she abides by the rules, she has taste and manners and truth on her side, and getting into a shouting match with a sociopath just isn’t the way to advance her agenda.

She looks out into the audience, LaJoy already at the exit, a good half the crowd between him and Bill Braithwaite and Guillermo so that she won’t even have the satisfaction of seeing him thrown out. He’s taking his time, all hips and shoulders, his head swaying cockily, carrying himself like a wrestler marching into the arena. He’s almost there, the crowd at the door parting to make way for him as they would for any embarrassment, any pariah, but at the last moment he jerks himself up, swings round to shoot a withering glance at the podium where she stands beside Frieda on the forgotten stage and lifts his chin to deliver the parting blow, loud enough for all to hear: “And who exactly was it appointed you God, lady?”

Afterward, over warm white wine and stale tortilla chips at the reception the museum board has arranged for her, a number of people come up to tell her how stimulating and informative her lecture was and how much they support what she’s doing for the islands and how they deplore the sort of rude behavior and ignorance on display in the audience tonight. They mean to be kind, but a reflexive smile and a gracious “thank you” is the best she can come up with. Once LaJoy had been ejected — Anise Reed slithering off with him — Frieda managed to settle the crowd and the Q&A went off as planned, people genuinely interested and Alma taking advantage of the opportunity to educate them with all the graciousness and facility at her command. Which was plenty, especially considering the dramatic tension left hanging in the air — in a strange way, the outbursts made the audience all the more sympathetic and receptive. All things considered, she’s weathered the evening well — and, more important, gotten her point across, nudging people toward the light in a calm and reasonable fashion that went a long way toward negating the distortions of the PETA fringe and the FPA and all the rest. Yes. Sure. And so why is she standing here balancing a plastic cup of tepid undrinkable wine on one palm while fielding the sort of looks usually reserved for the perky little gymnast who falls off the balance bar at the Olympic trials?

She’s talking to a bony seventyish woman in a pink silk blouse the size of a football jersey about the feasibility of preserving island botanical specimens in mainland gardens, when Tim appears out of nowhere to take hold of her elbow—“Sorry,” he mouths to the woman, “emergency”—and guide her to the door. “I just called Hana Sushi and they’re serving till ten. You want that sake—that sake rocks, crisp on the palate, with the faintest nose of Hokkaido forest breezes and underlying hints of vanilla and pomegranate — or not?”

“But I need to say goodbye to Frieda—”

“With deep overtones of pineapple and, I don’t know, wet schnauzer?”

“But Frieda—”

“Call her from the car.”

“I can’t do that,” she’s saying, but they’re already out the door and into the night, where the parking lot stands all but empty and the clouds crouch low over a rejuvenant drizzle. She’s thinking I’ll send her a note, thinking she’s had enough for one day, thinking of the sushi bar wrapped in its soft calm glow of the familiar, jazz softly leaking through the speakers and Shuhei and Hiro poised there to joke and gossip and whip up something special just for her, thinking of halibut and yellowtail and albacore tuna from the depthless sea, and sake in a clear beaded glass, with ice.

She’s fifty feet from the car, its chassis moth-colored and palely glowing against the deeper darkness, when she realizes something’s wrong. Everything seems blurred, even with her glasses on, but they’re walking faster now, Tim aware of it too, and even when they’re standing there right beside the car, she still can’t make out what the marks are. They seem to be black bands of some sort — spray paint?

Tim, a shadow beside her, one facet of a deeper complication, lets out a curse, his voice strained with surprise and outrage. “Aw, shit! Shit! They graffitied the car!”

Great looping letters, coming into focus now as her eyes gradually adjust. Die, she reads. Gook, she reads. And, finally, Bitch.

The Paladin

If there’s one thing he hates, it’s a runny yolk. And toast so dry it shatters like a cracker before you can spread the butter. And rain. He hates the rain too. Three days of it now, making a mess of the streets and keeping shoppers out of the stores (pathetic numbers, absolutely pathetic, in all four units, and with the Christmas season coming on no less), depressing people, drooling like bilge down the plate-glass window at the Cactus Café, where he eats breakfast five days a week and they still can’t figure out what over fucking easy means. His dried-out toast is cold. The coffee tastes like aluminum foil, and it’s cold too, or lukewarm at best. And the newspaper has one stingy little article about what went down at the museum last night, tucked away in the Community Events roundup for Tuesday, November 20, 2001, the date in bolder type than the headline, as if to indicate that everything included beneath it would be just as mind-numbing and inconsequential as it had been the day before and the day before that. Under the headline “Protest at Museum Lecture,” there’s a scant two paragraphs that don’t begin to get at the issue, and worse, don’t even mention him or FPA by name, let alone set out the counterarguments he’d thrown right in the face of that condescending little bitch from the Park Service who was fooling nobody with her gray-eyed squint and her all-black outfit as if she were going to a funeral or a Goth club or something and all her tricked-up images of the cute little animals that just have to be saved in the face of this sudden onslaught by all these other ugly little animals, made uglier by somebody’s Photoshop manipulations, as if the birds wouldn’t last another week when a hundred and fifty years had gone by in complete harmony and natural balance with all the other birds and plants and the rats too, something Alma Boyd Takesue, Ph.D., didn’t bother to mention.

Suddenly he’s jerking his head around — and there’s Marta, fat Marta with her two-ton tits and big pregnant belly that isn’t pregnant at all, only just fat, bending over some other guy’s table by the door, flirting with him, for Christ’s sake — and before he can think he shouts out her name, surprising himself by the violence of his voice. Everybody in the place, and there must be thirty of them, half he recognizes and half not, looks up in unison, as if they were all named Marta, and what does he think about that? He thinks, Fuck you, collectively. He thinks he might have to find another goddamn diner where they know the difference between—

And here she is, her face drawn down around a mouth shrunk to the size of a keyhole beneath the flabby cheeks, coming to him as swiftly as her too-small feet can carry her, trying to act as if she cares. “Is everything okay?” she asks before she’s halfway to him so everybody can hear her doing her job, even Ricardo, the cook, who’s giving him a hooded look from behind the grill, a cigarette in one hand, spatula in the other.

“No,” he says, still too loud, and they’re still looking, all of them, because they’re a bunch of sad-assed pathetic voyeurs with nothing better to do, and fuck them. Really, fuck them. “No, everything isn’t okay. Because I come in here every day, don’t I? And you people still don’t know what over easy means? Shit, if I wanted sunny-side up, if I wanted a runny yolk, that’s what I would have ordered.”

She’s already reaching for the plate, already apologizing—“Sorry, sir, I’ll have the cook” and all the rest of the mollifying meaningless little phrases she dispenses a hundred times a day because the cook’s a moron and to call her incompetent would be a compliment — but he can’t help saying, snarling, and why is he snarling? “Take it away and do it right or don’t do it at all.” And, to the retreating twin hummocks of her butt: “And the toast is like that shit they give babies, what do you call it — Zwieback — and I don’t want Zwieback, I want toast.” She’s at the swinging door to the kitchen now, making a show of upending the plate in the trash while Ricardo shrinks into the Aztecan nullity of his face and everybody else in the place pretends to take up their conversations where they left off and he can’t help adding, his voice lower now, the rage all steamed out of him though the heat’s still up high, “Simple toast. Is that too much to ask?”

After breakfast, he heads out into the rain, picturing his umbrella back at home leaning up against the doorjamb, but it’s not a problem because the moisture has the effect of puffing up his dreads, giving them body, frizzing them out — especially on top, at the roots, where he’s been noticing a little too much scalp in the mirror lately — and this is more drizzle than real rain anyway. He pauses a moment outside the diner to shift the newspaper under one arm and pull up the collar of his black nylon jacket, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden, as if the upturned collar were an affectation out of the dim past and an old Clash concert at the Bowl. Which, he supposes, it is. Glancing up, he catches some balding geek giving him a covert look through the rain-scrawled window, but the show’s over and he’s not going to get himself worked up over runny eggs or this jerk or anything else, and yes, he took his blood-pressure medicine and no, he didn’t take — will never take — the Xanax Dr. Reiser talked him into as a tool to combat the rage that seems to sweep up on him inexplicably like a rogue wave on a flat sea, which really isn’t anger so much as impatience with people and the multifarious ways they can and will screw up just about anything, given the chance, over and over again.

The car is two blocks away, down a gently sloping street studded with meters and sloppily parked Volvos and Toyotas, mixed use, apartments and businesses side by side, the odd lawn, street trees, then around the corner to the cross street below. He’s walking now, striding along in his business-as-usual gait, forty-two years old and as fit as the gym and Dr. Reiser’s Lotensin and blood thinners can make him, ignoring the cars lined up at the light with their wipers clapping and the exhaust coiling out of their tailpipes in the last petrochemical gasp of the black stuff pooled up under layers of shale in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and Venezuela, the death of the earth, the death of everything, smelling crushed worm, rotting leaf and the wet acidic failure of the newspapers stuck to the sidewalk where the Mexicans tossed them short of house stoops and storefronts in the grim desperate hour before dawn. He’s walking, thinking he won’t bother stopping in at any of the stores today — LaJoy’s Home Entertainment Centers, with locations in Santa Barbara, Goleta, Ventura and Camarillo — because whatever might be happening or not happening there on a day like this is not so much his worry anymore as it is the problem and responsibility of the individual store managers and Harley Meachum, who’s being paid more than he’s worth to do just that: worry.

Semi-retired. That’s his status and he’s earned it, because he’s done his scrambling and made his bundle and he’s got his house in Montecito and his two cars and his boat and Anise too, time on his hands now, just the way he wants it — just like the bum he finds standing there by the Beemer when he turns the corner, a lean philosophical-looking white-haired bum planted there as if he’s thinking of making an offer on the car.

And that’s an automatic thing with him, calling a bum a bum instead of one of the homeless or less fortunate or needy or apartmentally challenged or whatever the phrase of the week is, Anise forever trying to correct him on that score, because his sympathies lie with the animals that can’t help themselves — the pigs electroshocked into the killing chute, the chickens dismembered on the assembly line while they’re still half-alive and conscious, the rabbits and donkeys and sheep the Park Service slaughtered on Santa Barbara and San Miguel and Santa Cruz islands without batting an eye — and not some white-haired upright primate who’s had all the advantages of living in America instead of some third-world country and still just wants to plant himself in the grass and suck on a bottle all day long in infantile regression. Is this a fundamental inconsistency: pro-animal, anti-human? Let it be, because it’s no worse than the way the eco-cops see things, and with what they’re spending on brodifacoum and the helicopters to deliver it they could put up every bum in town at the Holiday Inn for a month.

His favorite bum, not that he’d ever actually give him anything and would be more than happy to see him put on a bus back to Echo Park or San Jose or whatever hole he dragged himself up out of, is a guy who must weigh three hundred pounds, always in a pair of shorts and workboots and a dirty white T-shirt the size of the sail on a Hobie Cat. He’s got concrete pillars for legs and a gut that climbs up out of the shirt like a separate living thing all ready to set up on its own. His modus operandi is to stand outside whatever restaurant he’s in the mood for, begging doggy bags off the pouchy sated half-looped tourists coming out the door. And don’t try to hand him sushi when he wants Italian, uh-uh. Not this guy. He knows what he wants. He’s discerning. He’s a gourmet.

But this bum, the philosopher, has just become alerted to his presence as if he’s awakened from a dream, eyes grappling toward him like fingers reaching for a ledge in the dark, and as Dave eases around the car to the driver’s side, the bum, in a voice of carbon and phlegm, says, “You got a dollar?”

Key in the lock, rain on his dreads, collar turned up, and there is no anger here because he’s got things to do, an appointment to keep, and no bum who isn’t worth the time it takes to look at him, at his stunted eyes and deflected wrists and salvaged rain-wet black-and-red-plaid flannel shirt that droops away from him like shucked skin, is ever going to get a nickel from him, let alone piss him off enough—You got a dollar? — to tell him what he really thinks about the moral valence of this little interlude. He just holds up his hand like a stop sign, ducks into the driver’s seat and lets the scene shift to leather and the glow of the dash and the sweet German-calibrated tune of the engine that sings the bum and the rotting newspapers and dead worms and all the rest to oblivion.

The traffic is backed up on State, but he turns onto it anyway, because he’s in no hurry and he wants a look at all the stores with their newly erected Christmas displays — just, he tells himself, to get in the Christmas spirit and not at all to focus a trained eye on the hordes of shoppers and calculate who’s doing what kind of business. His own stores — specialty shops for people with money who want the sixty-inch Sony LCD flat-screen wall-mounted TV and the top-of-the-line Linn electronics imported from England with the five mini-speakers and the big subwoofer all set up for them in their media room so all they have to do is tap the remote to be engulfed in a truly theatrical experience — are never crowded, no matter the season. It’s always been that way, even as he transitioned from the audiophiles of the eighties to the big-screen TV and surround-sound aficionados of the nineties and now the zeroes. No, his business is high-end, appealing to a need rather than a want, the society closing down day by day, people investing in home entertainment because they’re increasingly reluctant even to go out into the backyard, let alone to the movie theater or anyplace else. His clientele is ready-made — they practically come to him — and he’s always had the luxury of forgoing advertising and of locating in the more modest retail spaces off the main drag, where the rent’s lower and you don’t need all the bells and whistles.

Still — and he’s looking at Macy’s now, women parading in and out with their shopping bags strung from both arms, striding along the sidewalk with real satisfaction radiating from the play of their haunches and the no-nonsense strut of their heels — he has to admit the big displays are something, all that color and glitz, all that slick retail über-perfection that makes the shoppers want to attain über-perfection themselves, and in the easiest way possible, by spending money. Make me over. Make me well. Make my eyes bigger and my gut smaller, my calves harder and my hair fuller. Make me beautiful and successful and above all longed for, admired, loved. Sure, and how about a home entertainment center while we’re at it?

It’s just past ten but the colored lights girdling the palms are lit and softly shining against the long descending backdrop of the rain-misted street, which sinks through the center of the shopping district and down through a maze of surf shops and eateries to the pier, where it intersects with Cabrillo, the Ocean Boulevard of Santa Barbara, famous as a tourist attractant and the earthly paradise of the peripatetic bum, broad, spacious, palm-lined, and stretching along the ocean from the cliffs at East Beach to the marina at its western verge, which is where he’s headed. He stops for the red at the intersection, wipers intermittently snatching away the misting rain. Directly across from him is the fountain at the base of the pier, and for a moment he’s distracted, thinking of the twenty-something bum in the top hat and scarlet jacket — and what is it with bums today? — who used to work the fountain with a generic Disney dog he’d dressed up in a crinoline tutu and taught to dance on its hind legs while the water leapt and flared in the background. King of the bums, that kid, the tourists lining up to empty their pockets for him. Of course, he’s gone now, probably pushing a shopping cart down an alley someplace, the hat crushed, the dog dead, the rest of his life one long continuous road to nowhere.

And then he’s thinking of the guy who could have passed for a board member of AT&T if you gave him a suit and a haircut, an industrious type who worked the sand just below the railing where beach and pier conjoin, fashioning boats out of discarded cardboard and handing them up to the tourists as they breezed past chattering in Korean, German, Swedish and New Yorkese. Nowadays the bums just spread a blanket in the sand with a cup located like a bull’s-eye in the middle of it, then sit in the shade of the big pilings, passing a pint bottle of whatever it is they drink, till the tourists sink cup and blanket under a rising tide of quarters, dimes and nickels. Jesus. It’s like crabbing or something. Like a sport.

A horn sounds sharply behind him. The light has changed. He looks to the rearview mirror — some asshole with his hat turned backward and his girlfriend and big yellow panting dog crowded in beside him in the front seat of an SUV — and then guns the car, shearing to one side before he rights it and rockets off down the street, not even angry, just. . expeditious. There are two more lights to the marina, both in his favor, and at the first he slows just enough so that it goes red as he passes beneath it, trapping the asshole, who was trying to come up on him, trying to provoke him, and Goodbye, friend. Suck on this. A moment later he’s out of the car and striding along the concrete pathway that runs along the waterfront, already digging out his card key. When he comes within sight of the wire-mesh gate erected at the entrance to the catwalk specifically to keep out unauthorized persons (read bums, and what was that story a couple years back where a seafaring bum had got out to one of the yachts and took it for a joyride down to Ventura, where he wrecked it on the rocks?), Wilson is there waiting for him.

Wilson Gutierrez is twenty-seven, a first-rate carpenter whose mother came over from Copenhagen in the sixties and never left, and whose father, according to the check-one-or-more-boxes feature on the census form, is a white Hispanic from the west side of Santa Barbara via Culiacán, and he pronounces his name Weel-soan, something he’s very particular about, edgy even. His eyes are blue, he wears a black silken goatee and a gold pin thrust through the auricle of his left ear that makes him look as if somebody’s nailed him with a blowgun, he burns under the sun like anybody else, he’s lithe as a weed but built in the shoulders, upper arms and especially forearms—“Like Popeye,” he likes to say, “and it ain’t from no spinach, man, but swinging a hammer all day long because I am am-bi-dextrous and you better believe it”—and Wilson is one of the three charter members of FPA, along with himself and Anise, going all the way back to its founding six months ago in direct response to what was happening out on the islands. At his feet are three visibly swollen black plastic trash bags. “What up, Dave?” he says, swinging round on him with an ear-to-ear smile that lights his face like the screen of an LCD in a darkened store window.

“Not much. You get the stuff?” And then, because he can’t help himself, he’s laughing aloud. “Shit,” he says, bending forward to swipe his card, “it sounds like we’re doing a drug deal or something.”

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 stretched 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.

“Okay,” he says, bracing himself against the table as the boat rocks on the swell, “I don’t see any helicopters, or not yet anyway — when they do the drop they’re going to close off the island, and if we don’t hustle out there, who knows how long before some Park Service honcho comes along and tells us we can’t land at all.” He hefts one of the backpacks experimentally. “Oh, and we’re going to need to fit everything in just two of the packs.” He glances at Anise, then drops his eyes. “The wind’s up, baby. You’re going to have to stay aboard. Like we discussed.”

“Uh-uh. No way.”

“Sorry.”

“Shit,” she explodes, jerking her pack across the table as if it’s come to sudden vicious life before snatching it up and slamming it to the floor. “I don’t want to be cooped up in here while you’re out there, I don’t know, doing things. I want to do my part. Why you think I even came?”

This is the kind of thing that goes right by him, because there aren’t going to be any arguments, not here, not today, and he doesn’t bother to answer. He props his own pack between table and bench, folding back the flap to expose the interior, which, he sees, is a little better than half-full. Without looking up, he bends wordlessly to retrieve her pack and invert it over his. There’s a dry rattle as the tablets tick against the nylon interior, Wilson gliding forward to offer up his own pack so as to balance out the load. When they’re done, when they’ve shrugged into the packs and adjusted their identical black baseball caps — Anise’s idea, as are the black jeans and hoodies, a way of confusing their identities in the event anyone should spot them on the trail — he digs out a tube of sunblock and extends it to her. “It’s not fair,” she mutters, squirting a dab of the stuff in one palm and leaning forward to work it into his face and neck in a firm circular motion, her hands cold, fingers wooden, making her displeasure known.

What can he say? That he’s sorry, that he’ll make it up to her, that someone has to be in charge? That life is imperfect? That’s she’s not in kindergarten anymore and neither is he? He gets to his feet while she’s still applying the stuff, impatient, nervous now, in danger of losing it, and all he can say is, “If the boat breaks anchor, you just start the engine and keep her away from the rocks till we get back. All right? You got it?”

Then they’re in the dinghy, the waves jarring them like incoming rounds even though they’re in the lee of the boat, and Anise is handing down the backpacks while he yanks at the starter cord on the little 20-horsepower Merc, thinking Please God, do not let them get wet. Not now. Not after all this. He can picture the thing flipping, the vividest image, the shock of the water, the crippling waves, he and Wilson clawing and blowing while the swamped boat slews away from them, a thousand bucks’ worth of vitamin K₂ spread across the bottom of the bay and every rat on the island bleeding out its mouth and ears and anus. The wind tastes like failure, like defeat and humiliation. It’s over, he’s thinking, over before we start. But Wilson is sure-handed, Anise adept, and the engine catches on the second try. He shifts into gear as the dinghy drifts free on a whiff of exhaust, twists the accelerator and noses the boat toward shore.

Because of the cliffs, the only place to land is at the dock, where they’ll be plainly visible, but the dock is deserted and the sky is closing in, and he wonders if the Park Service will risk flying their helicopters in weather like this. Maybe not. Maybe he and Wilson can get out in advance of the poisoners, give the rats a head start. Save them. Rescue them. Champion them. Nobody else is going to do it, that’s for sure, nobody but him and Wilson and Anise, FPA, For the Protection of Animals. All animals, big and small. No exceptions. The wind’s in his face, flapping the hood of the sweatshirt round his throat, the dock coming up fast — action, he’s taking action while all the rest of them just sit around and whine — and he can feel the giddiness rising in him, the surge of power and triumph that rides up out of nowhere to replace the bafflement and rage and depression Dr. Reiser and his pharmaceuticals can’t begin to touch. This is who he is. This.

There are something like a hundred and fifty steps up the cliff and onto the plateau above, and his hours on the StairMaster hold him in good stead here, he and Wilson climbing stride for stride and flinging out handfuls of kibble and rat vitamins as they go, taking pains to hit even the most inaccessible spots, and so what if the tabs tend to dribble down the rock faces? No place is off-limits to a rat. When they get to the top — humped and treeless, nothing in sight but the lighthouse and a couple of whitewashed outbuildings, one of which features a plaque that says Ranger Residence—they decide to split up, Wilson taking the loop trail to the right and he to the left. “Okay,” he says, the wind beating at him and the blood surging through him till he feels as if he could take right off and hover overhead with the gulls, “remember to hit the cliffs all along the way, not just the trail—”

Wilson is watching him from beneath the pulled-down brim of his cap, looking as if he’s just heard a good joke. Or told one. “Yeah, you already said that. About six hundred times.”

“And we’ll meet in the middle”—the trail was an easy hike, mainly flat, two miles or less—“and cut across on a diagonal, just to make sure we cover as much territory as we can.”

Wilson holds his grin, brings one fist up for a knuckle-to-knuckle rap of solidarity, and then they’re going their separate ways. The sun is in retreat now, the clouds twined across the horizon to the north like weathered rope, the wind coming in gusts strong enough to rake the pellets out of his hand, and before long he’s tossing the stuff as high as he can and letting the wind do the work. It’s exhilarating. Like being a kid at play. The vitamin tabs are a pale yellow, the kibble rust-colored, blood-colored, and he doesn’t want to know what it’s composed of, doesn’t want to think of offal, bone, the leavings of the slaughterhouse floor — it’s enough to watch the stuff fly from his hand to loop and twist away from him like confetti.

Up the path, head down against the wind. And what if it rains? Will they postpone the drop? Will the vitamins dissolve, the kibble rot, stink, fester? He doesn’t know enough about the properties of either compound to make that determination — besides which, it’s too late to go back now. And even if the mix does break down, the most likely scenario has the rats eating it anyway — they’re rats, after all, born to scrounge and hoard and eat till their stomachs swell like balloons — and it’ll stay with them, fat-soluble, buried deep in their tissues. Who knows, maybe they’ll find it so satisfying they’ll ignore the cascade of blue pellets the Park Service plans to unleash on them. That’s what he’s thinking as he makes his way along the ridge, detouring when necessary to heave the mixture right out to the edge of the cliffs, lost in the rhythm of it — clutch, lift, release — and he begins to feel better, begins to think everything will work out after all. He’s in the moment, breathing deep, working his legs, the scent of coastal sage in his nostrils, birds hovering, lizards licking along ahead of him. Before long, he finds he’s actually enjoying himself, twenty million people strung along the coast across from him and the island as deserted as it was when it rose up out of the sea. Except for Wilson, of course. And whatever Park Service types came out on that boat. And — lest he forget — the resident ranger, who’s no doubt sitting on his ass in his little white house with a view to die for, reading crime novels, boiling spaghetti, blinding himself with gin.

He’s off the path now — clutch, lift, release — thinking of the almost unimaginable degree of evil it must take to be a scientist in some big chemical company lab, Monsanto, Dow, Amvac, devoting all your talent and energy, your whole life, to coming up with a compound as deadly as brodifacoum and finding just the right mix of ingredients to make it irresistible, a kind of rat candy, rat cocaine, when his feet get tangled in the brush and the air goes suddenly still. It happens so fast he can’t get a grasp on it, the cracked and veined earth vanishing beneath the thrust of his elbows as he pitches forward, dust in his eyes and the stones sifting away from him, flying stones, stones raking down the length of the chasm that opens up before him like a movie gone to wide-screen. Warning: The cliffs are unstable. Stay on the path. And then what’s beneath him, beneath his torso and flailing legs, is going too, dropping away, and he with it. There’s a brief moment of weightlessness and the panic that seizes him with an electric jolt, and then the blow he catches from the ledge ten feet down.

He lands on his right side, on his rib cage, the air punched out of him and the backpack wrenched askew. At first he knows nothing, and then what does he know? That he has fallen from the cliff, the unstable cliff, the friable, loosely compacted and stony cliff, and that he has not plummeted — that’s the word that comes to him, a word he wouldn’t use in any other context — to his death. On the rocks below. Where the sea, riding in on the swell of the storm, thrashes and foams and pulverizes. For a long moment, he’s unable to move. And then, like a cat waking from sleep, he flexes each of his muscles in turn, reacquainting himself with the mode of their functioning, thinking, Anise isn’t going to believe this, thinking, What if I have to be rescued? What if the helicopter, the Park Service helicopter, the poisoners’ helicopter—?

The ledge, this projection of volcanic rock bristling with the spikes of xerophytic plants that has broken his fall — saved him — is one of many, a series of jagged battlements projecting from the cliffs as if to impede an invasion. He sees this, can trace the pattern that is no pattern at all up and down the rock face in both directions, as he very gingerly shifts his weight. It takes him a moment, forty-two years old and with high blood pressure and a knifing pain in his right side, before he’s able to work his feet beneath him and rise, inch by staggered inch, hugging the rock. When he’s fully erect and can see above him to the place where the ground gave way, he becomes aware of the shag of plants to the near side of him, Dudleya mostly, succulents that would snap in two, pull right out, send him plummeting, but something with a woody stem too, Ceanothus or scrub oak maybe, right there, just inside the limit of his reach. He takes hold of it. Tries it. And then, pressing himself so close to the rock that he will later find pebbles, sand, bits of leaf and twig worked under his belt and into the seams of his underwear, he lifts himself, snatching at the next handhold while the toes of his hiking boots dig for traction. Twenty seconds later he’s on top, his legs churning at the loose dirt, the pack binding, his blood howling in his ears, and then he’s safe, scrambling fifty feet into the brush before he collapses.

The next thing he remembers is looking at his watch. And this is the astonishing thing — only five minutes have elapsed. Five minutes. Not an hour, just five minutes, three hundred seconds, from what seemed certain death to resurrection. He is sweating, though the wind is cold, the T-shirt beneath the hoodie wet through. There’s a deep blue bruise on the back of his right hand. His ribs ache. But he gets to his feet, digs out his plastic water bottle for a long hissing squeeze of the filtered water from the reverse-osmosis tank he installed in the kitchen at home, aqua vita, then tucks it away and starts back up the trail, mechanically scattering pellets. The decision has already been made: he will tell no one, not Anise or Wilson or Dr. Reiser, about what has just happened. Or almost happened. Why should he? He feels like enough of an idiot as it is, and as he settles back into his rhythm — clutch, lift, release — he can’t help wondering how much more an idiot he would have felt if he’d had to have been rescued. Or worse: a posthumous idiot, splayed on the rocks with a crushed skull and his hips reverted, forever a totem of the Park Service, just like the pygmy mammoth. Remember that clown? What was his name? The one that splattered himself all over the rocks trying to spread vitamin K?

Despite the sweatshirt, he’s begun to shiver by the time he spots Wilson coming along the trail toward him. The sky is uniformly dark now, the wind stronger, colder, the brush whipping, bits of chaff and seed beating past him on gusts that seem to come from every direction at once. He keeps pitching handfuls of the vitamin mix into the air, though he’s beginning to understand that there will be no drop today, no helicopters hovering overhead, no rats bloodied, no authorities to dodge or confront. He’s thinking he should have paid more attention to the weather report, should have been more flexible — but then he’s the kind of person who makes a plan and sticks to it, which is why he’s been so successful in business, never crap out, never say die, never, above all, admit you’re wrong. Wilson, loping along, his right arm shooting out rhythmically to toss one handful after another of the mix over his shoulder, gives him a grin as he closes on him. “How’s it?” he calls when they’re still twenty feet apart. “You got any stuff left? Because I’m just about out.”

They stand there together a moment, backs to the wind, and Wilson digs a pack of cigarettes out of his inside pocket. “Freakin’ cold, eh?” Wilson says. “They say the weather’s changeable out here, but this is”—he tucks a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, cups a hand and puts the lighter to it—“this is brutal. You know it was going to be like this? I mean, could you even guess?”

He’s not complaining, just commiserating in the way of a comradeat-arms. “Yeah, colder than shit,” is all Dave can manage in response, though he appreciates the sentiment. The shock of the fall is fading, and no, he’s not going to mention it, not now, not ever. It’s like when he used to play football in high school — somebody blindsides you, you just get up and walk it off. The coach’s face comes to him then, a joyless ego-glutted overworked sinkhole of a face above a gray sweatshirt and a shining silver whistle on a red lanyard. Walk it off. That’s what the coach would say, even if you’d separated your shoulder or dislocated your knee.

Wilson looks to the sky from beneath the pulled-down brim of the baseball cap. “I don’t know, man — feels like rain to me.”

“Yeah. Me too. But at least it’s going to keep the bastards out of the sky. At least for today.”

“I was wondering,” Wilson says, kicking the toe of one boot into the dirt at his feet, the smoke of the cigarette torn from his fingers, his eyes squinted against the blow, “if, you know, it does rain, like what is that going to do to this stuff? What if it really rains. I mean, like buckets, like the monsoon, because it’s that time of year, you know. Are we wasting our time here? Is this all just going to wash away?”

If it is, he’s not about to admit it. “Nah, I don’t think so. And the fact that they’re obviously not going to do the drop is okay too. It gives the animals a chance to store up, and even if the stuff gets wet, they’re not going to care. You don’t think a rat’s that particular, do you?”

Wilson just shrugs. He’s looking out across the water to where the horizon dissolves in a cauldron of cloud. “Shit, I don’t know — that’s your department. You’re in charge, you tell me.” A drag on the cigarette, the butt end glowing. “You’re the one that wanted to come out here, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, well here we are, so let’s stop gassing like a pair of old grannies in their rocking chairs and get this over with so I can sit by that heater you got and crack the champagne. Long live the rats, right?”

It takes another half hour to cover the plateau, he and Wilson branching out at a forty-five-degree angle, the wind, if anything, getting worse. When he’s done, when the backpack is empty and his fingers numb and his ribs throbbing as if he’s being kicked with each step he takes, he makes his way back to the trailhead to find Wilson there waiting for him, hunkered down on the steps with a paperback and another smoke. “We out of here?” Wilson asks, glancing up at him. “Yeah,” he says, and then they’re both bouncing down the steps, the cove expanding beneath them to reveal the Park Service boat still tied up to the buoy, and the Paladin—not that he was worried — still at anchor, nose to the wind and the waves streaming round it like creases on a sheet.

It isn’t till they get halfway down to the landing dock that they spot the figure there, a man in a teal shirt with his back to them, busy going up and down the ladder to secure his gear in a white Zodiac inflatable tied up next to the dinghy. Since there’s only one other boat in the cove and only somebody escaped from the asylum would take that thing across the channel in weather like this, he has to conclude that the man is attached to the Park Service boat. “Don’t look now,” Wilson says, but he’s already shushing him. “No worries,” he says, striding across the dock as if the man on the ladder doesn’t exist.

Up close — and the guy turns around on them now, as if he can sense their presence, or, more likely, feel the reverberations of their tread radiating along the boards of the dock — he’s startled by the certainty that he’s seen him somewhere before. The guy hoists himself up onto the dock, no smile, and he’s tall, six-three or — four, giving them an expectant look, as if he’s been waiting there for them.

If it was up to him he’d just brush right by without a word, not What’s happening or Looks like rain or Fuck you, but Wilson takes it upon himself to be their ambassador of goodwill. “Nice day,” Wilson says, rolling his shoulders side to side and showing off his grin, all lips, no teeth, as if that much pure white enamel would blind anybody with its radiant power.

Still no reaction from the man in the teal shirt. Who just stands there, arms folded, as if he’s waiting for something, still waiting. His shoulders are narrow, his back slightly stooped. He looks to be in his mid-thirties, his face unlined and with something of the college frat boy in it, the tight cartoon slash of a mouth sketched in under the exaggerated nose that cants ever so slightly to the left, as if it’s been reshaped. Green eyes. Mud-colored hair, whipping round his head with the wind. And one more thing: a plastic nameplate, like cops wear, on the breast of his teal shirt. Sickafoose, it says.

So there’s the wind, the dinghy jerking back on its painter, waves slapping at the pilings of the landing dock, the smell of rain on the air, the Paladin sitting right offshore and this jerk standing in their way. “The island’s closed to the public,” he says finally. “Will be closed for the next three weeks. Maybe you didn’t see the sign?”

“No,” he hears himself say, and he’s not going to get worked up here, he’s not. “No, we didn’t see any sign.”

Sickafoose measures out one of his long big-knuckled fingers and directs their attention to a white enameled sign the size of a regulation backboard, the squared-off admonitory letters stamped there in take-no-prisoners red. How had he missed it? Not that it would have mattered. This is public land, reserved for the public, owned by the public.

“So what are you,” Dave says, “some kind of cop?”

“I’m a biologist.”

“Congratulations.”

Sickafoose ignores him. He’s got something in his hand, in the palm of his hand, which opens in a kind of slow phalangeal striptease on a spatter of rust-red cat kibble and pale yellow vitamin tabs, even as Wilson tugs at the brim of his cap and says, “Well, we got to be going, see you later, man,” and starts for the ladder.

“One minute,” Sickafoose says. The hand thrusts forward. “You know what these are?”

He can feel it now, the quickening pulse of that rage the drugs can only snatch at, and it’s all he can do to stop himself from spitting at the guy’s feet. “Uh-uh,” he says, the voice threshed in his throat. “Never saw them before.”

A beat. Wilson has his hands on the ladder, ready to kick down into the boat, in retreat, and that’s what he should do too — just get out of here and forget it. “You know it’s against the law to feed the wildlife in a national park?” Sickafoose says. “If that’s what you were doing. This is food, right?”

Another beat. Longer. Much longer. He’s thinking of the rat he saw along the road one sorrowful morning, huddled there in the tight binding robe of its agony, a perfect being, perfectly made, every detail of it alive in his memory, the pale exquisitely shaped fingers and toes, whiskers brushed back as if they’d been groomed, the suppleness of the nose, the dark bloodied holes of the nostrils and the pits of the suffering eyes, all of it senseless and wrong, wrong, wrong. All he says is this: “You going to step aside or what?”

Then they’re in the dinghy. Then the boat. Then the rain comes, washing across the surface in a series of sweeps that bring the waves to a boil, and forget the champagne, forget the whole thing, because the engine selects this moment, out of all the myriad others since he’s owned, maintained and piloted the Paladin up and down the coast and out to the islands and back in every sort of weather and the most violent of seas, to fail.

Boiga Irregularis

In the mid-1950s, when the indigenous birds of Guam began to dwindle in number, and then, in the sixties and seventies, to disappear altogether, no one could trace the cause. Researchers serially suspected DDT, herbicides, habitat loss and disease, but it wasn’t until the early eighties that Julie Savidge, a graduate student doing field work for her Ph.D., focused on a hitherto little-noticed reptile that first appeared on Guam just after World War II. The brown tree snake, native to Australia, Malaysia and New Guinea, was thought to have arrived as a stowaway in a crate of munitions, the engine compartment of a military vehicle or perhaps the wheel well of a Navy transport plane. Its appearance had been duly recorded but very few people came into contact with it. Nonetheless, having eliminated the other possible causes, Savidge decided to plot the snake’s spread from the main port at Apra to the southern, eastern and northern verges of the island, and found that she was able to correlate its expansion with the progressive topographical decline of the island’s avifauna. The mystery had been solved. The problem remained.

In fact, when the brown tree snake reached the island, it found itself in an ophidian paradise. The only other species of snake on Guam, an innocuous thing the size of an earthworm, was no competition at all, and there were no predators to limit its numbers. The food supply, consisting of some eighteen species of birds found nowhere else in the world, was rich and abundant, and the birds, in common with other insular species, suffered the sort of naïveté to predation that had doomed the dodo and its ilk. Boiga irregularis lives in equilibrium with the other species in its native environment, and isn’t particularly impressive or dangerous as snakes go. For one thing, its venom, distributed through fangs located at the back of the throat, is relatively mild and only marginally a threat to humans. For another, it is nocturnal and thus rarely seen, and so reedy — no thicker around than a man’s index finger until it reaches a length of three feet or so — as to pale in comparison with some of the snakes of the continental tropics, the cobras, boomslangs, mambas and water moccasins that slither through the herpetophobe’s nightmares.

Still, it has proven to be one of the most insidious and successful invaders on record, reducing those eighteen species of unique birds to eleven, of which two — the Guam rail and the Micronesian kingfisher — exist only in captivity, while six are considered rare and three uncommon. The snake’s density — up to 13,000 per square mile — is among the highest recorded densities of any snake anywhere, and it has proven infinitely adaptable, feeding quite happily on the island’s native frogs and lizards in the absence of the birds, as well as snapping up introduced geckos, skinks, cane toads and just about anything else it can work its jaws around. It grows to some ten feet in length. It appears in toilets, showers, infants’ cradles. Since 1978, 12,000 power failures have been attributed to its climbing electrical poles and shorting out the carrying wires — unintentionally, of course, but knocking out lights, computers and refrigerators all the same. Above all things, it is a climber. A great and undaunted and increasingly voracious climber that has adapted its diet to include pet food as well as pets — in one documented case, a three-week-old golden retriever pup — and anything, alive or dead, that carries the scent of meat. Or blood.

Alma is reminded of all this by the printout—“The Use of Acetaminophen in Controlling Boiga irregularis Among Insular Populations”—spread open beside her laptop on one of the gently rocking Formica tables in the main cabin of the Islander, bound for Anacapa. Sipping coffee from a paper cup and staring into the computer screen as the neatly marshaled lines of type hypnotically rise and descend along with the tabletop and the deck and hull beneath it, she’s not yet aware she has a headache coming on, but every sixty seconds or so she looks reflexively away from the screen and out over the water so as to refocus her eyes. Then she comes back to the text, hits the backspace key and inserts a new phrase or extends a line, her lips silently forming the words. She’s frowning but unaware of it.

The boat’s carrying capacity, both in the cabin and on the upper and stern decks, is a hundred-fifty or so, and today, eighty-five of the spots have been reserved for NPS employees and assorted biologists, including Tim, who are part of the Anacapa Recovery Program, as well as a collection of journalists from the AP, the Los Angeles Times and the Santa Barbara Press Citizen, a dozen local politicians and tastemakers and a television crew from the local NBC affiliate. In the ship’s hold are three big coolers chock-full of marinated chicken, turkey sausage and tofu burgers for the barbecue grill, various salads, whole-grain breads, a pot of chili and rice, a fourth cooler of bottled water, soft drinks and dessert, and a fifth reserved exclusively for champagne. Two cases. On ice. Medium-priced California stuff, as befits the Park Service budget, but champagne — or, more properly, sparkling wine — all the same.

The sea is flat, the fog already lifting. The captain has just slowed for a pod of dolphins, and most of the passengers — NPS people, tourists, backpackers, a sugar-and-hormone-fueled group of sixth graders under the rapidly eroding control of two harried teachers — have gone out on deck to watch the glistening cetaceans slash through the water like shadows come to life. When she glances up she can see Tim out there amongst them, a paper cup of coffee in one hand, binoculars in the other.

It’s early June, ten in the morning, just over one and a half years since the initial drop of the control agent, and the purpose of this little jaunt is purely celebratory — while the journalists tap at their keyboards and the photographers manipulate their digital cameras and the TV crew homes in, Alma will lift a glass of champagne in faultless synchronization with Freeman Lorber, the park’s superintendent, and declare all three islets that compose Anacapa one hundred percent rat free. At the moment, she’s busy polishing her press release, while the article, by Robert Ford Smith, the herpetologist she’d worked under on Guam, awaits a free minute. It came to her via e-mail from the field station at Ritidian Point on the northernmost tip of the island, where the beaches are soap-powder white and the vegetation gnarled and snake-haunted, before she left her office at seven-fifteen this morning, and she’s as eager to get to it as a child with a new video game, but duty calls, always calls, and always takes precedence.

The press release, which she’s been tinkering with for the past two days, will inform the assembled journalists, and through them the public, that the rat-eradication project has been an unqualified success. No rat sign has been detected anywhere on Anacapa since the release of the control agent, neither nests nor scat or tracks or any evidence whatever of predation, and the dummy eggs the consulting ornithologist has slipped into the nests of various birds have not been disturbed, whereas formerly they would have been scrimshawed with tooth marks. Careful monitoring over this period has led her to be able to declare with absolute confidence that all the target animals have been eliminated. And the result has been swift and dramatic. The seabirds have rebounded, not to mention the Channel Islands salamander and side-blotched lizard — whose numbers have doubled — as well as the native deer mouse, the population of which is estimated at 8,000, the highest count on record. And more: Tim Sickafoose, consulting ornithologist, resident humorist and all-around prince of a man, has discovered the first pair of Cassin’s auklets nesting on Rat Rock in living memory, a place which, she imagines — and yes, this will be the sly and triumphal joke to insert in an otherwise by-the-numbers text — will soon have to undergo a name change. How about Auklet Rock? she’s thinking. Do I hear any takers? Or what about Sickafoose Point? Will that fly?

Jokes aside, she can’t help worrying over the small details — punctuation, paragraphing, the drum-beating phrases that seem increasingly fatuous every time her eyes fall on them. Or not just fatuous: asinine. Right here, right in the first paragraph, for one. She calls Lorber “a monument of preservation,” which conveys a modicum of truth, but doesn’t it make him sound like something static, like one of the carved heads at Mount Rushmore or a blade dulled by use? Or worse: dead. And here’s his epitaph: Loving husband, loving father, and a monument of preservation.

“Hey,” Tim breathes, sliding into the seat beside her. The boat has begun to move again and the passengers are trooping back into the cabin, all but the sixth graders, who will linger along the rail until they’re soaked through and shivering and in dire need of the hot chocolate, popcorn and microwave burritos the galley dispenses. “You done with that thing yet?” he asks, his voice oily with insinuation. She gives him a sidelong glance. He’s right there, invading her personal space — which is the prerogative of a lover, she has to remind herself — and holding his lopsided grin. “Because there’s a point you reach where you’re just going to tinker it to death, right? And isn’t this supposed to be a party, or am I wrong?”

She’s on the verge of snapping at him, but she catches herself. For a long moment she stares into his eyes, the spray flying beyond the windows, the squeals and shouts of the sixth graders rising round them like the cries of the raptured. “Yes,” she admits finally, and she can smile now too, relax, celebrate, because he’s right — the worst is behind her and this is a day for looking ahead, not back. “Yes, you’re right.”

And it works. The air’s been cleared. Her headache — the incipient headache she’s just begun to become aware of — extends its tendrils and begins to recede all in a single moment. She shifts the mouse, shuts down the laptop and dips forward to reach into her pack and dig out a bag of trail mix, just to keep her energy level up. Party or no, she’ll still have to make a speech after distributing the press release, and she’ll have to oversee her assistant, Wade, who’s in charge of the food, and shine with glowing interest as Freeman gives his own speech replete with awkward pauses, furious lip-tugging and jokes amusing by definition only. But this is a party, or the very beginning of one, and she slips her laptop into its case with a definitive shrug of her shoulders and a business-like chafing of one palm against the other, then cracks the Ziploc bag of trail mix. She sifts a handful into her mouth and works her molars over a cud of sunflower seeds, dates, raisins and M&M’s, the sugar rush almost instantaneous, before offering it to Tim, who takes it absently. He’s giving her a dubious look, as if he’s thinking about something else altogether, as if he’s anticipating her, worrying for her. “You better hope the printer out there’s going to work—”

Her smile is richer now, spreading across her lips till she can feel the tug of it in the muscles at the corners of her mouth, and what are they called? Zygomaticus major. Or minor. Or both. That sounds about right, but it’s been a long time since she took anatomy, and if she remembers correctly something like seventeen different muscles are required to achieve a full smile. But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is she’s smiling because this is Tim smiling back at her and they’re getting a rare day off together, if that’s what you can call this.

“He don’t know me very well, do he?” she says, reaching down to pat the backpack at her feet. “I brought my own along. Just in case.” Before he can respond, she’s holding up a hand to forestall him. “Yes,” she says, “yes, I know. And paper too.”

She’d gone to Guam seven years ago because the opportunity presented itself, because Julie Savidge was one of her enduring heroes and because she’d just broken up with Rayfield Armstrong, who played his guitar in the bars and coffeehouses around Berkeley when he wasn’t working on his dissertation assessing the impact of a species of introduced crab — the European green — on the local invertebrates in San Francisco Bay, and whose chest, shoulders and back were so intricately and finely muscled from all the hours he spent in the water he looked like a living mosaic. She’d moved in with him, and that was a commitment, the first real commitment of her life, but as the months wore on he depleted her patience and her hope and goodwill too. He was never home, always diving, strumming his guitar under the gaze of a spotlight in some bar or coffeehouse somewhere or riding a Greyhound bus to play in towns nobody had ever heard of, and when he was home he was so self-absorbed — crabs and guitar, crabs and guitar — he didn’t seem to have much time for her. And so she moved out. And took a job in the field. In Guam.

What she expected to find there was something like the environment she’d known in Hawaii, only less developed, more primitive, closer to the edge, and she wasn’t disappointed. The roads, hacked out of the bush, were congested and deadly, the architecture tended toward reinforced concrete block (out of necessity, as a way of surviving the typhoons in this corner of what meteorologists dubbed “Typhoon Alley”) and everything, even the inside of the plastic bleach container she kept under the sink in her bunker cum one-room apartment, smelled of the festering explosive microbial life of the tropics. The jungle was lush, but many of the native trees, destroyed during the war, had been replaced by a South American import, the tangantangan, and it was eerily silent in the absence of the birds. With the birds gone, the insects had bred out, with the attendant result that the spiders — palm-sized, with iridescent yellow stripes on a gleaming black body — had experienced a population explosion, draping understory and canopy alike with the great trembling tents of their webs so that it was impossible to move through the jungle without having the stuff cling to you like a second skin. Not to mention the spider itself, presumably disappointed at being displaced from its web to your sleeve, hair, face.

The local people — Chamorros and Filipinos, mainly — never gave her much more than a vaguely curious glance. They saw her as Asian, or some variant thereof, and so, despite her Big Dogs running shorts and T-shirts touting Micah Stroud and Carmela Sexton-Jones, less an anomaly than someone like Robert Ford Smith or his wife, Veronica, both from Lancashire, with great beaky English noses and skin as blanched and lusterless as potato meal. She felt at home, as she had in Hawaii and at Berkeley, and perhaps she would have felt differently if she’d gone to lily-white Wisconsin to study the effects of cat predation on woodland birds or to Salt Lake City to monitor the grebe population on the Great Salt Lake, but she hadn’t.

Robert — not Bob or Rob or Robbie, just Robert — was in his mid-fifties and had been working to undermine the brown tree snake since the time of Julie Savidge, who’d since moved on. He was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the Brown Snake Research Program and his primary objective was to devise barriers to keep the snake away from the shipping containers at the port and the planes at the airstrip, the fear being that it would hitchhike to one of the neighboring islands — or worse, Hawaii. That was the first step — to limit its spread — but the second, and larger initiative, was to find some biological agent, a bacterium, virus or parasite, that could control its numbers so that the captive-bred native birds could be reintroduced. To that end, he trapped snakes and experimented on them. And her job, both in daylight and at night, with a headlamp and a stick to clear away the spiderwebs, was to check the traps and return to the lab with her clutch of snakes — there were always plenty — so that she could dissect them and determine what they’d been feeding on. It was solitary work—“creepy,” as Tim, no fan of snakes, would describe it — but it got her out of doors, which was the whole point of working in wildlife management to begin with.

There were three hundred sixty-five days in a year, that was incontrovertible, but in the three years she was on the island it seemed as if time had become elastic, stretching like a finely gradated bungee cord till a single day felt like two or even three. She learned to do without culture — American culture anyway — and while she did make several Guamanian friends and attended their various family gatherings and fiestas and came to relish octopus kelaguen and breadfruit stewed in coconut milk, she never went native as so many of the others at the field station invariably did. Her time was for the most part solitary and she moved through the bush like a native creature herself — smallish, with abundant pelage, keen observational powers and a reflexive ability to duck branches draped with spiderwebs. She trapped snakes in a wire basket in which a second much smaller wire basket held a white mouse and its ration of chopped potato, stuffed them in a sack and brought them back to the field station, where she removed, euthanized and dissected them or fitted them with miniature radio collars and let them go again to see exactly what they were up to.

The snakes were whips of muscle, powerful enough to raise three-quarters of their length up off the ground and hold it there for minutes at a time, but her muscle, a primate’s muscle, was superior. She killed thousands of them. She was bitten half a dozen times. She became intimate with the peculiar dry pickled odor of the brown snake’s intestines. And she found, contrary to popular opinion or the first law of amateur snake collectors, that this snake did not require live prey or even prey at all. It was so adaptable as to be frightening. When the birds were gone, it ate rats and lizards. And when it couldn’t find a rat or lizard, it came into the yard and the house and snapped up what it could, whether animate or not. Twice, while slitting open the bellies of snakes, she came across pale greasy twists of the plastic raw hamburger is packaged in. And once, in an image worthy of Buñuel, she discovered the stained white tube of a used sanitary napkin, saturated in blood. Even now, when she closes her eyes at night, she can see the snakes in the twilight of her consciousness, erect and weaving their heads, looking for the purchase to climb.

Tim chatters. The boat hydroplanes. Her stomach flutters around the fragments of trail mix and the coffee she’s washed it down with, but she doesn’t get seasick — she never does. It’s a question of mind over matter — or rather, mind over peristalsis. And reflux. Some people can control it and some can’t. Tim, for instance. Tim’s a rock. He could eat a seven-course dinner and ride the roller coaster at Magic Mountain all day long and it wouldn’t affect him in the slightest — in fact, if it weren’t for the centrifugal forces involved he could probably tuck in his napkin and chow down while on the coaster. A number of the passengers are a bit more delicate, though, including at least one of the journalists this little jaunt is meant to win over, and Alma can’t help feeling a prick of anxiety. Toni Walsh, of the Santa Barbara paper, which to this point has been less than enthusiastic over the rat issue and the ensuing question of pig control on Santa Cruz, came aboard looking as if she’d had a rough night, and as soon as they left the harbor she settled in at a table by the window and put her head down, feigning sleep. Now, when they’re no more than a mile out, she rises abruptly and staggers outdoors to the stern, where the wind can carry off whatever she’s had for breakfast. Not a good start. And of course, just to needle her, Tim lifts his eyebrows and whispers, “There’s a shitty write-up in the making.”

As the boat slows and they cruise into the dock, the sun cutting through what’s left of the mist in great rectilinear columns, the cliffs rearing, birds squawking, everyone seems to come alive. People who’ve been silent the whole way across are suddenly gabbling in high excited voices, the sixth graders are uncontainable — What are they getting out of this, she wonders, besides sugar and sunburns? — and the faces of her office mates have that rare look of release she sees only on Friday afternoons. She’s right there in the middle of it, helping people up the ladder, making small talk, bantering, even drawing a smile from Alicia, the pale shy secretary who seems locked up like a box without a key, and then she’s shaking hands with Fausto Carrillo, the mayor of Oxnard — he’s all smiles — and guiding a shaky Toni Walsh to the levitating rungs of the ladder.

There’s a brief conference with Wade, then out come the coolers, lifted from the hold and propelled across the sun-blasted planks of the dock with a whoosh of molded plastic, all the details settled, the picnic in its nascent stages and nothing left to do but distract everybody with what she hopes will prove to be the highlight of the day, the nature walk. While Wade and some of the others go on ahead to light the charcoal and set up the portable picnic tables in the courtyard of the visitor center — a spot calculated to move even the palest driest desk-bound cynic with its views across the channel — she and Tim, as planned, begin working their way up to the bluff to lead the group hike along the loop trail. She reminds herself to go slowly, especially up the steps, pausing at each landing to flag one plant or another and give the less fit a chance to catch their breath. Once they get to the top, where the walking is easy, she’ll have ample opportunity to score points for the principles and rationale of island restoration, indicating the nests of the western gull and other recovering birds while subtly but unfailingly bringing home the point that all this has been made possible by the rat-control project, which, incidentally, was funded by a court judgment against one of the gross polluters of the ecosystem — Montrose Chemical Corporation, responsible for pumping over a hundred tons of DDT-contaminated waste into Santa Monica Bay between 1947 and 1982—and so cost taxpayers virtually nothing.

In her detail-oriented way, she’s reminded each of the guests through repeated e-mails to dress appropriately for what should be a moderate two-mile hike in changeable weather conditions, and most seem to have gotten the message. She sees hiking boots and windbreakers, daypacks, water bottles and the like, but Toni Walsh, bringing up the rear in a pair of blood-red espadrilles, cropped crepe pants in a jungle print and a spandex tube top — sans jacket or sweater — is already hugging her arms to herself and looking as if she’s in need of a cigarette. Or no, Alma corrects herself, that’s cruel and judgmental — she doesn’t even know if the woman smokes. But then all writers smoke, don’t they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy? Tim has the floor at the moment, telling those gathered round him something of the nesting habits of the gulls, how they pair for life and defend the same patch of ground year after year and will attack and even kill any chick from a neighboring nest that might blunder onto their turf, so she gives him a truncated wave of her hand and makes her way back down the trail, thinking she’ll offer Toni Walsh the extra windbreaker she’s brought along for just such a contingency as this.

The trail is half an inch deep in dust the consistency of waffle mix. The sun has burned off the mist by now but there’s a wind out of the north that brings the chill factor down into the low fifties, she guesses, and as she eases past people (“What’s with you, Alma,” the mayor jokes out of a flushed moon face, his eyes exophthalmic and his tongue licking for air, “giving up so soon?”) and down a gentle incline to where Toni Walsh seems to be struggling to put one foot in front of the other, she’s already got the windbreaker out of her pack and bunched in her hand. Though her intention is obvious, the reporter — what is she, forty, forty-five? — just stares numbly at her. “You okay?” she asks.

“Me?” Toni Walsh hasn’t bothered with makeup, not even lipstick. Her shoes are coated in dust. Her hair, dyed an unnatural shade of red, hangs limp at her shoulders, over-processed and dry as the bunch grass at their feet. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Just not used to boat rides, I guess. In the morning anyway.”

“You look cold.” Holding out the windbreaker now. “I’ve got this if you want it. It’s extra, so—”

There’s something in the woman’s face that warns her off and she feels embarrassed suddenly, as if she’s been attempting in some unconscious way to bribe her, or at least curry favor, but that’s not the case. She’s just being accommodating, that’s all, because everyone here is in a sense her guest, and a good host. . or just common courtesy. .

“No, no, thanks,” Toni Walsh says, and she’s fishing in her purse for — yes — a cigarette. Which she puts to her lips and lights in a windblown puff of smoke. There’s gooseflesh on her upper arms. Her eyes are red-veined. The ends of her hair, split and eroded, flail round her throat.

Alma drops her arm awkwardly, the rejected garment catching the wind till it flaps like a pillowcase on a clothesline. “If you want, you can just go back to the visitor center and have a cup of hot coffee — Wade’ll have the fire going by now — or wine, if you want a glass of wine. We won’t be long.”

Toni Walsh looks over her shoulder to where the white monolith of the lighthouse rises up out of the scrub against the broad bright pan of the ocean, the light spanked and coppery, the thin distant sail of a yacht like a scrap of cloth blown on the wind. The rest of the group has begun to move off now, Tim, his shoulders slumped, loping on ahead of them, talking all the while. “Yeah,” Toni Walsh says finally, puckering her lips to exhale a lungful of smoke and watch the breeze snatch it away, “that sounds cool. Think I’ll just do that.”

Later, after she’s caught up to the group to add her comments and exhortations to Tim’s running monologue and the hikers have had an opportunity to absorb something of the island’s rare solace and beauty on their own, she begins to forget herself, trying to imagine the experience through their eyes, as if she were seeing the place for the first time. It’s not all that different geologically from what they’d find along the coast opposite, where Highway 1 bends away from Port Hueneme and the cliffs stagger back from the breakers under a mantle of coreopsis and coyote brush, except that there is no highway, there are no roads or buildings or trash. And it’s quiet, as quiet as the world must have been before the invention of the internal combustion engine, the sea and the wind providing the backdrop to the barking of the seals and the mewling of the birds. Sometimes, when she’s out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.

Today, of course, she’s too wound up to get to that point or anywhere even close. Yet still everything looks fresh and eternal at once, wildflowers in bloom, the views unencumbered, the gulls cooperative, lizards exploding underfoot as if to underscore the point that the rats are gone and all is well. The hikers are enjoying themselves, she can see that, the hands-on experience of the place worth a thousand press releases. And isn’t this what she took the job for to begin with — to familiarize the public with the specialness of these islands and by extension all the dwindling retreats of the world made so much more precious by their rarity? To turn them on? Make them advocates? Engage them in the fight against the land-grabbers and developers and people like Dave LaJoy, who might mean well, or think they do, but act solely out of ignorance and vindictiveness?

She’s left her hair loose and the wind takes hold of it, flinging it across her face, and when she shakes her head to settle it, any thought of Dave LaJoy and the rest of the self-appointed saviors is gone. She shuts her eyes, lifts her face to the sun. This is perfect. A perfect day. She feels like a conqueror, like a queen, like the first Chumash woman come ashore ten thousand years ago. She’s soaring. High on the moment. And the feeling sustains her for a whole thirty seconds — until she thinks to glance at her watch, that is. How did it get so late? They’re ten minutes behind schedule, ten minutes at least.

She feels a familiar stab of unease, swings round and maneuvers herself to the front of the group, beside Tim. He’s made a platform of a rock the size of an ottoman and he’s standing atop it, arms akimbo, sunglasses dangling from one hand. The frayed baseball cap he hung on the bedpost last night so as not to forget it is pulled down tightly over his brow, leaving the lower half of his face to incandesce in the sun. At the moment, he’s delivering a synopsis of the burrowing owl’s habits and predilections, and the hikers have gathered round him to reflect on the cored-out habitation of the creature itself, which proves to be absent. She clears her throat to get their attention. “Anybody getting hungry?” she asks. “Because I sure am.”

Well, they are. Of course they are. There is an unspoken quid pro quo here. Whenever she leads a group hike for PR purposes, there’s always the promise of a good and bountiful free lunch and the chilled wine to go with it. One of the hikers, a stout woman in an unfortunate straw hat that whips round her face in the wind till it’s like one of those plastic hoods the veterinarians use on dogs — and is she the mayor’s wife or his special friend? — looks particularly ready, so Alma focuses her smile on her. “All right then. Follow me.”

Then she’s leading them down the trail and back to where Wade and his helpers, Alicia among them, have set out the meats, salads and other dishes on a long table made festive with a crisp white cloth and a vase of wildflowers. Beyond the table, in the near distance, the lighthouse stands burnished and welcoming under the sun, the sea fanning out in a dazzle of color beneath it, everything companionable and inviting. Like a party. Exactly like. The hikers break ranks as they approach, what had been single file giving way to drift, people talking in low voices, chugging from water bottles, joking in the spirit of camaraderie a shared experience of nature always seems to bring out. Alma’s eyes flit critically over the scene, not keeping score exactly, but noting who’s elected to stay behind and trying to get a quick take on their various moods and postures — do they look hungry, bored, pleased? That sort of thing. It’s almost a reflex with her.

She spots Toni Walsh standing on the far side of the fire pit, a glass of wine in one hand, cigarette in the other, chatting up Alicia. Alicia? But then Alma can’t control everything and whatever Alicia — dark-eyed, stylish, twenty-something, about as talkative as a stone — can tell Toni Walsh probably won’t amount to much and certainly can’t hurt the cause. Alicia’s a secretary, that’s all, and she’s stolidly efficient, if bloodless, but she’s had no training in restoration ecology except what she’s picked up by osmosis, and Alma doesn’t doubt for a minute it’d be all the same to her if she worked in industry or service or for the polluters themselves.

In fact, she’s remembering a time when she and Alicia were alone in the office, working late on a paper the superintendent was going to deliver before a gathering presided over by the secretary of the interior, Alma reading proof aloud and Alicia checking it against her own copy. It was fairly dull going — Freeman was no Rachel Carson — and at some point they took a break and went out on the deck to watch the fog tangle itself in the shrubs. Alma found herself doing the talking, trivial things mostly, nothing to do with work, and if Alicia didn’t want to open up, even then, when things were more relaxed than during regular working hours and the boss-employee dynamic might have constrained her, Alma could understand that. But to get the girl to say anything, about her boyfriend, her parents, a movie she’d seen — the weather even — was all but impossible. With her it was always yes or no or uh-huh — if she had any opinions, she kept them to herself. And yet on this occasion — just this once — she did speak up, apropos of nothing. Or, as Alma later realized, of a minor point Freeman was making with regard to biological control in closed ecosystems.

“I don’t know why we have to kill everything,” she said, studying her nails, which had been done in two colors, aquamarine and raspberry, and speaking in a voice so soft it was barely audible. No eye contact. Eye contact would be confrontational, assertive, and Alicia, if anything, was non-assertive, more the vessel than the substance that fills it. “What if we just left everything alone like the world was before us — like God made it. Wouldn’t that be easier?”

Alma had been stunned. To think that this girl, this young woman, this locked box of a personality, had been working and breathing and thinking amongst them since she left community college, and she’d absorbed nothing? Zero? Zilch? And maybe she could have responded more gently, more in the tutorial mode, in the way of the educator she ostensibly was, but that was the end of the conversation and of Alicia’s attempt to reach out and engage the issues, because Alma, her voice gone flat, said, “But that’s exactly wrong, don’t you see? Because we’re the ones who put the animals there, the sheep and cattle and pigs on Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa, the rats on Anacapa and cats and rabbits on Santa Barbara, and it’s our obligation, our duty”—and then she was lecturing, she couldn’t help herself, and Alicia never raised her eyes from the nest of her hands and never said another word that wasn’t yes or no or uh-huh.

At any rate, she reminds herself yet again, this is a party and she should just let go, at least for today. She tries out a smile and a little wave for Toni Walsh and Alicia, clasps hands with half a dozen people and casts a quick glance over the table. Wade — with Alicia’s help — has done his job well, as usual, and everything’s ready to go. Beautifully. Swimmingly. And if there’s a detail that’s escaped her, some niggling thing she feels sure she’s forgotten as if she’s trapped in one of those early-morning dreams where she’s late for class or the airplane or can’t find her blouse or brassiere or jeans, it’ll just have to remain undiscovered. Determined, she lifts an empty glass from the table and wades into the crowd, going from one group to another to encourage them to step up to the buffet, the smell of roasting meat shifting with the wind in promise of what’s to come, and there’s nothing more primal, more celebratory, the animal itself plucked out of the bush and offered up to the tribe. People are beginning to form a ragged line now, taking up plates and silverware and the paper cups she insisted on rather than plastic because plastic is the devil’s polymer, but that’s another issue, and she erases the thought from her mind as soon as it arises.

She waits and watches, the anticipation building in her as people work their way through the line, filling their plates, pausing to chat in groups of three and four or exchange pleasantries with Wade and some of the others dishing up the food. As soon as the last couple (the mayor and his wife, definitely his wife, and what’s her name — Yolanda?) have entered the line, she snatches a dripping bottle of Piper Sonoma from the ice as if it’s a living thing, raises it high and begins rapping a spoon against the base of it in a sharp peremptory way. “Attention, everybody!” she calls, whirling about to draw their eyes to her. “The time has come to gather round for champagne”—holding her grin, watching their faces—“because we’ve got some toasting to do here.”

And now Wade’s beside her, furiously untwisting the wire from one bottle after another, the corks jumping in succession and people crowding in with their paper cups as the bottles go round. Laughter rings out. There are sallies, quips. Freeman, a plate in one hand, glass in the other, makes his way to her. The TV camera, shining and insectoid, moves in. Smiles abound. When all the glasses are full and she’s feeling a rush of triumph and vindication as purely satisfying as anything she’s ever known, she lifts her glass and Freeman follows suit. She holds it there for one climactic second, and then, grinning so furiously she can barely form the words, she sings out, “To Anacapa, one hundred percent rat free!”

On Guam, there was no champagne, because Guam wasn’t snake free and never would be. There were too many species involved, too much vegetation, too many invasives, too perfect a pest. Half a dozen times Robert teased himself into thinking he had a solution, the last being a virus able to survive only in cold-blooded creatures, and he busily inoculated snakes with the pathogen and set them free, but the pathogen didn’t take and there was no noticeable change in the population numbers. He used to joke that the only way to eliminate them would be to nuke the island, and even then it was his bet that some would survive, hidden in a crack in a wall or coiled in a lead pipe. Once, when she was working in the field with him, they discovered a length of PVC tubing no more than half an inch thick and there were six snakes wedged in it, aligned like the wires of a conduit. And now, according to the article he’d sent her, he had a new hope: acetaminophen. Simple, cheap, the active ingredient in Tylenol. A blood thinner, like brodifacoum, but far more selective in what it kills.

Early experiments had been promising. Two three-hundred-milligram tablets, delivered in the carcass of a dead mouse, would kill a brown tree snake, through internal bleeding, in three hours. Yes. But how to deliver it? Robert and his colleagues had air-dropped a thousand Tylenol-laced mice over a carefully cordoned-off section of forest, but most had become hung up in the branches and gone to rot before the snakes could discover them and there was the further question of what the bait would do to non-target animals. Plus, how many mice would it take? How many drops? There were estimated to be upward of two million snakes on the island and even if the staggering amount of funding for that kind of operation could be raised and even if the agent was found to be non-reactive with other animals, the chances that all the snakes could be eliminated was, roughly — or no, exactly — zero. They were there for good. And so the native trees would continue to decline because there would never be birds sufficient to broadcast their seeds, and the spiders and insects would thrive, and in a hundred years, fifty, Guam would no longer be Guam.

The sun is in her eyes and she has to pinch them shut to tip back her head and allow the cool affirmation of the wine to trickle down her throat. She will give her little speech, hand out her press release, lie back on a blanket with Tim and watch the birds slip overhead against a sky drawn back to the infinite. This will be her reward, her peace, her joy. She has been an instrument of good, striking down the invaders that plagued her grandmother in her distress all those years ago and for all the years hence wrought havoc on the eggs and unfledged chicks of the birds that evolved to roost and breed in a ratless world. Well, she’s given them back that world. Given them a chance. And now, as she’s about to avow publicly on the raising of the next glass, she is prepared to move forward, undaunted, with the aid and guidance of Freeman Lorber and all the other incomparable people of the National Park Service, Channel Islands, to the far bigger challenge of Santa Cruz.

“Santa Cruz!” she’ll call out, the bludgeoning trochee rising from deep inside her like a war cry while they lift their glasses in unison, in support and encouragement and as a mark of their commitment to the cause, right-thinking people, educated people, caught up in the intoxication of the moment in this place she’s come to love more than any other on earth, more than Hawaii, more than the Berkeley Hills, more even than Guam. “On to Santa Cruz!”

And then it’s the next morning, a Sunday, fresh-squeezed orange juice, bagel with cream cheese, the newspaper. Tim’s habit is to sleep late whenever he can and today is no different. When she slipped out of bed at her usual time — six-thirty — he was hunched under the blankets, breathing lightly, looking as if he’d sleep till noon, and she saw no reason to wake him. Let him sleep. Her life isn’t like one of those soft-focus movies where couples moon at each other over poached eggs and coffee out of cups the size of salad bowls and then stroll hand-in-hand along the beach — no, it’s real, and she has a real relationship with a living breathing man who likes to sleep later than she does. And so what? Good for him. Tim has his life, she has hers. And when they intersect, so much the better.

Outside, the fog is already lifting, the sun emerging as a pale presence among the trunks of the trees, till suddenly, in a single burst, it slices through the window to illuminate the kitchen, taking hold of the stainless-steel knobs of the oven and the glass lens of the clock on the far wall. The yard jumps to life. The begonias fire. Morning in Montecito. She’s had a lazy glance at the headlines — Bush and his war — and filed the dishes away in the dishwasher. There won’t be anybody on the beach this early but for a handful of dog walkers and joggers, or at least that’s her hope, and so she slips on her sneakers and heads out the door and into the morning.

On down the block, past the hotel and its Lucullan expanse of lawn, the air cool and fresh still and no cars moving along the access road out front. Cutting diagonally across the blacktop, she takes the direct route to the stairway down to the beach. She doesn’t follow the tide charts — no time to bother, and besides she’d rather be surprised — and so she feels a little lift to see the expanse of wet sand running out to the flats cobbled with the slick dark mounds of boulders rubbed smooth by the twice-daily shifting of the waters. Low tide. When the tide’s up full, the waves beat at the seawall and she’s reduced to taking the sidewalk above it. This beach, directly across from the long tan smudge of Santa Cruz on the horizon, doesn’t catch the big waves, which tend to run lengthways down the channel, and so isn’t especially interesting as far as beaches go. It’s pretty, no doubt about it, but there isn’t much by way of tidepools and relatively little washes ashore. Aside from trash. And dogshit wrapped in neat little plastic bags. Does that drive her crazy? Yes, it does. That people should take something natural, waste, feces, the end product of an animal process, and seal it in plastic for future archaeologists to unearth from the landfill in a thousand years is pure madness. This world. This skewed and doomed world.

But here she is, on the beach, weighing her options — right or left? — before deciding to turn right toward the bluffs that wrap around to Santa Barbara proper and the pier beyond and all the mad crush of civilization that comes with it, thinking there might be something of interest among the slabs of rock that have successively peeled away from the cliff face over the years and come crashing down into the surf. When the tide is exceptionally low, as it looks to be now, a reef is exposed there, with some scattered pools hosting the usual suspects — mussels, barnacles, urchins, winkles, anemones and hermit crabs, in addition to the occasional surprise of a brilliant blue-and-white nudibranch or stranded octopus. The carcass of a juvenile gray whale had washed up on the rocks there one spring — bearing what had to be wounds inflicted by a great white — and summer before last, during a dinoflagellate bloom, she’d come upon a crowd of people gathered round a seal pup, trying to urge it back into the water, when clearly it had drawn up on the beach to warm itself.

The animal was obviously undernourished — she suspected domoic acid poisoning as a result of the toxin concentrated in the plankton working its way up the food chain and delivered in its mother’s milk — and when she reached it, a shaven-headed young Latino in a wife beater was attempting to drag it over the rocks and back into the sea. Before she could think, she was on him, furious, snatching at his arm and trying, for all his bulk, to pull him away. There was a screaming in her head — here was yet another well-meaning animal lover doing exactly and precisely the wrong thing, the fatal thing — and she could feel the blood rush to her face. “Let it go!” she barked, rigid with anger, locked there — her hand fixed to his arm as if it were mechanical, made of nuts and bolts and titanium tubing — until he obeyed her. And then, as the pup fell away from his grasp and he gave her a look of such confusion she almost felt sorry for him, she added, in a voice of steel, “Stay back, all of you.”

She’d maneuvered herself between him and the seal, which was scrabbling at the rocks in a panic, but too weak to do much more than that, rising on its flippers and falling back again, and the man came to life in the flicker of that instant, thrusting his face in hers. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded. He had a slim faded blue tattoo on the inside of his left wrist — a dolphin, leaping — and his breath smelled of tangerines, as if he’d just worked his way through a citrus grove.

It was an interesting question: who was she? It went to a point of authority — what gave her the right to interfere when he’d got there first and was only trying to do the obvious, flexing his muscles and his will for the benefit of his girlfriend and maybe his buddies and the crowd too, a true Samaritan motivated not by love of self but by love of all things? Even now, with a twinge of embarrassment, she remembers the answer she’d offered up: “I’m a scientist.”

Well, all right. At least she’d saved the animal, punching in the number of the Marine Mammal Center on her cell while the crowd stood back and the seal settled into its skin and the angular blades of its bones. Now, making her way toward the bluffs, the memory of the incident rises up and fades away again, because she’s spotted a pod of Risso’s dolphins — five, six of them — working the shoreline two hundred yards out. These are among the biggest of the dolphins, ten to twelve feet long and as much as eleven hundred pounds, normally a deepwater species but feeding in close this morning, and she takes their appearance as a rare treat. She’s walking briskly, trying to keep the animals in sight as they move toward the bluff, when she spots a figure up ahead, a man coming toward her with a pair of dogs. The dogs — airbrushed skulls, plunging pelvises, skin painted to bone — are greyhounds, she sees that now, and she’s thinking, Good for him, he’s rescued the animals from one of the racetracks in Florida, until she focuses on him and sees her mistake. There’s the set of the jaw, the wide shoulders and disproportionately long neck, something in his stride — but none of that gives him away. There are plenty of people, plenty of men, built like that, men who kick out their legs as if they’re trampling something or somebody with every step they take. No, it’s the dreads. Sand-colored dreads that fan out from his head as if he’s striding through a wind tunnel.

She feels a beat of panic. He’s seen her, she’s sure of it. Does she need an ugly confrontation now, this morning, when all she wants is a walk on the beach and a chance to savor the moment? She thinks to turn away, to walk in the opposite direction, retrace her steps — she can explore the reef anytime, tomorrow, the next day — when he calls out her name and she freezes. “Hey, Alma!” he shouts, the dogs fanning away from the bare struts of his legs like interceptors. “Alma Boyd! Alma Boyd Takesue!”

What she’s never told Tim — he never asked and he wouldn’t believe it anyway; she can barely believe it herself — is that once, for one disastrous truncated evening, she dated Dave LaJoy. Or had dinner with him. Or tried to. She’d met him at one of the music venues downtown, a coffeehouse that featured new young singer-songwriters. She was there alone one night — she was new in town, just weeks into the job she’d felt so lucky to get, six months away from meeting Tim — and here was this good-looking guy in his thirties sitting with another guy at the table next to hers. He was wearing a concert T-shirt with a likeness of Micah Stroud, guitar in hand, imprinted on the back of it, and that was an immediate plus in her eyes because in those days Micah Stroud was known only to those in the know. She liked his smile, the way he held himself, his hair — his hair made a statement. You didn’t see too many men his age in dreads. She figured him for a musician or an artist, maybe a writer, a photographer, someone independent anyway. “You look lonely over there,” he said. “Want to join us?”

And she did. And it went well. And when the weekend came he called and asked her to dinner, her choice, anyplace she wanted to go. She wasn’t really looking to get involved, not after Rayfield and her three years on Guam, where she’d got used to entertaining herself, and since she knew nothing about him except his own version — he owned some electronics stores, had done well, liked the outdoors, was currently unattached — she decided on a place she knew in the lower village. Pricey, but what wasn’t? The cuisine was nouveau Italian and she’d been there often enough, either alone or in the company of one of the girls from work, as to qualify as a regular. Often enough in any case to rate special treatment from Giancarlo, the owner and maitre d’, and to feel comfortable dining there, under his auspices, with a stranger. Who could turn out to be the love of her life. Or a disaster.

Things started out well enough. He showed up at her apartment on foot, with lilies from the flower girl — woman, actually — around the corner, and he made small talk while she put them in a vase, grabbed her black lace shawl and led him out the door. They walked up the street, across the bridge over the freeway, and into the lower village, the getting-acquainted banter running along smoothly — he had a house just up the hill, not more than half a mile away, and he went right by her place all the time, and how long had she been here? Three months? How had he missed her? He couldn’t believe it. She didn’t have a dog, he guessed, because if she’d had a dog he would have been sure to run into her on the bluff or the streets or beach. No, as he’d seen, she didn’t have a dog, though she loved dogs, but she was hardly settled yet and her business took her out to the islands a lot and dogs weren’t allowed there for fear they might spread disease to the resident foxes and skunks. The islands? he’d said. I love the islands.

Giancarlo greeted them at the door and showed them to a table by the window and then the waiter — Fredo, a tall saturnine Chileno who assumed the air and accent of a Neapolitan for the sake of authenticity — presented them with the wine list. “What do you prefer?” LaJoy had asked her. “Red or white?”

She shrugged. “I like red,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too. But of course it depends on the dish. And the occasion.”

“Actually,” she confessed, “I’m not that much of a sophisticate. Three years on Guam’ll do that to you.” She gave a deprecatory laugh. “When you’re on Guam you drink what you can get. Sake, mostly. And whiskey. Or as they say, ‘Wheesky. Wheesky-soda.’ And gin, of course. G and T, the old reliable.”

He didn’t have much to say to this. His head was lowered to the wine list, the dreads falling forward to reveal the pink tessellations of scalp beneath. He was running a finger down the columns of offerings until finally he summoned Fredo. “Let me talk to the sommelier, will you?”

Fredo, funereally proper, stood over them, hands clasped behind his back. “I am afraid,” he pronounced, fighting his accent, “that we do not have a sommelier as such—”

“As such?” LaJoy — Dave — was giving him a look of hostile disbelief. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you or don’t you? Or are all the wines on this list ordered, cellared and poured by the tooth fairy?”

“I,” Fredo began, “or Giancarlo—”

“Get him over here.”

Fredo gave a small bow and vanished. While he was gone, LaJoy, gnawing a breadstick as if it were made of wood, lifted his eyes to her. “Amateurs,” he said. “I hate amateurs.”

She said his name then, slowly, reprovingly. “I’m sure they’ll do the best they can. This place — I don’t know if you’ve eaten here before — but this place is really topflight, as good as any restaurant in town.” She paused. “What were you looking for? Exactly, I mean?”

He ignored her. He was staring beyond her to where Giancarlo was making his way across the crowded room, people beckoning to him, reaching out to shake his hand and bathe in his smile, congratulating themselves because they were on intimate terms with the owner. And Giancarlo more than fulfilled his role — fifty-two years old, born and raised in Turin, tall, open-faced, wearing a slate-gray Italian silk suit, his hair swept back like a don’s. He was smiling when he came up to the table. “Alma,” he said, repeating her name again, before bending to take her hand and kiss it. “What can I do for you and your gentleman friend?”

“You’re the sommelier?” LaJoy seemed to be glaring at him. “I’d like a bottle of the Brunello di Montalcino Riserva, 1988—the Castello Ruggiero, the one here,” pointing to the bottom of the last page of the leather-bound wine list. He raised an admonitory finger. “But only if you’ve got more than one on hand, because there’s nothing more disappointing than ordering a top-end wine and getting to the bottom of the bottle only to have the waiter try to substitute something else.”

“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.

“You want another?” she asks. “And maybe a sandwich? I’ve got some of that Gruyère you like — on a ciabatta roll. How does that sound?”

He’s put up the canopy to keep the sun off the deck because she’s worried about her skin, milk-white, white as the flesh of the calves they deprive of light and iron so they can serve them up as veal for all the butchers and carnivores out there, and when she comes back from the galley with two sandwiches and the shaker of margaritas — and here’s the first mechanical sound, the faintest click of the ice cubes dropping down out of the ice maker in the depths of the boat — he sees that she’s removed the top of her bikini, and why not? It’s not as if anybody’s coming to lunch.

The sight of her — all that incandescent skin, the heavy ever-so-slightly asymmetrical load of her breasts — stirs him, and why wouldn’t it? He’d have to be comatose not to respond to something like this, like Anise, all but naked. And that’s the beauty of it — they’ve got all day, all night, all day tomorrow and tomorrow night too. No need to rush. “Nice,” he says, the adjective of the day, as she hands him the plate and leans over him to pour the glass full, and he’s thinking of the women’s magazines she leaves lying around, a model all rigged out on the cover and the various come-ons, in neon letters, radiating out from her as if she were Kali of the supernumerary arms. Love Secrets of the Stars, How to Please Your Man in Bed (Guy-Tested!), 63 Ways to Turn On Your Mate. As if it was that hard. All you have to do is take off your clothes, baby, and if he’s not dead he’ll jump your bones.

So there’s a nice little frisson going as he eats his sandwich with a hard-on, sips his second margarita, contemplates the waves and allows the sweet purr of her voice to envelop him as if she were singing, and maybe she is. Soon, when the mood takes him, he’ll get up and slip the bikini bottom down her thighs and take her by the ankles, lift her legs and slide it off her. But right now he’s savoring the moment. Like all women she can sulk and brood for days on end over some imagined slight or a thing so inconsequential — what somebody said to her at work, the color of the dress she knew she shouldn’t have bought — as to make him question her sanity, but he’s never seen her in a better mood than this, so pleased to be here on this deck anchored off her own special island at half-past twelve when everybody else in the world’s at work, three-quarters naked and savoring the moment as much as he is. He hasn’t touched her yet but she’s wet, he knows she is, and he’s thinking maybe they’ll do it right here, right on the deck. .

“You know what this reminds me of?” she asks, stretching her legs all the way out to flex her toes against the rail, the base of the cocktail glass balanced on her sternum, between her breasts. “I mean, out here all alone like this and nothing but open water all the way down to what, L.A.? Mexico?”

“What?” he says. “What does it remind you of?”

“The Island of the Blue Dolphins. You ever read that book?”

“I don’t know. Sounds familiar.”

“It’s a children’s book, I guess, or what they call young adult now. My mother read it to me when I was a kid, over and over — it was my number one favorite for a year probably.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know. Eleven, twelve maybe.”

He holds on to that a moment, trying to picture her at that age, pubescent Anise, with her honey-colored hair and rounded limbs, breasts just starting to break through as if they’d sprouted from seed, which in a way they had, everything programmed in the genes, her smile, her voice, this gentle graceful irresistible flow of limbs and hair and lips and eyes holding him transfixed in this instant on this deck off the back side of this rocky volcanic island with its skirt of white foam and the cliffs that soak in the sun as if they were molten still. Natalie, his first love, was fourteen when she magically appeared at the desk across from his in Mr. During’s third-period history class at Santa Barbara Junior High, a transfer from Plainfield, New Jersey, where she’d gone to Catholic school and learned to smoke Larks and the odd joint when the nuns were busy doing whatever nuns do. She didn’t look anything like Anise — she was short, even as a newly minted adult of eighteen, which was when he married her, with her mother’s Sicilian complexion that made her look as if she’d just stepped out of the tanning salon no matter the season. To him she was a real exotic, with her black hair and copper eyes and the way she pronounced things like fall and dog (“If it’s dawg,” he’d say, “then why isn’t it lawg and fawg and bawg?”). Exotic can only take you so far, though, and when you marry that young — he was only nineteen himself — you’re asking for disaster. Which was what he got. They lasted two years, during which he was working part-time and getting his associate’s degree at the community college, and then he started up the business with help from his father and she was gone out of his life. “I’ll bet you were sexy,” he says.

“If I was, I didn’t know it.”

“Yeah, sure — tell me another one.”

“I didn’t. Really.” She rotates the base of the glass, a pink circle of condensation left beneath it like a wet kiss against her skin, her hand balanced on the swell of one breast. “Too isolated. Way too isolated.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to this, but he’s feeling the slow seep of the tequila settling in him, taking him out of himself, and he’s going to get up, any minute now, and run his hand down her leg.

“Anyway, it’s fiction, but it’s basically a true story. About the last woman left out on San Nicolas Island? Indian, that is. Chumash. The Spanish padres took everybody off the island in the eighteen-thirties or forties or whenever, and she was left behind. And it’s great, a great story, like Robinson Crusoe. How she survived.”

“What’d she do, hide when they came to get them?” He holds up his glass, examining it a moment in the light, then snakes out the tip of his tongue to get at the salt crystals caked on the inside of the rim. “That’s what I would have done.”

“No, she wasn’t hiding — she wanted to go.”

“Or was it like in those fables where she disobeyed her parents or snuck off to have a smoke or something? Maybe she was playing with herself. That must have been verboten, right? Or did the Indians encourage that sort of thing?”

“No, nothing like that. It was her little brother. They were all on the ship, just setting sail, when she discovered he wasn’t there. He was only like three or four or something and he got lost in the shuffle. Or maybe he was hiding — I don’t remember. I don’t think the story gets into that. The point is, when she saw he wasn’t there she jumped overboard and swam back to the island to rescue him. And since the wind was up, the boat couldn’t come back for her.” She pauses, takes a sip, levels her eyes on him. “Sad story, though — he died like a month later. The wild dogs got him.”

“Wild dogs? On San Miguel?”

“Feral dogs, left there by the Indians years before. They’re gone now, of course—”

“Yeah, of course. Probably picked off one by one by Alma Boyd Takesue.”

“But anyway, she tamed two of them and she had a pair of pet ravens too. And that was it for company till she was rescued eighteen years later — they took her to Santa Barbara where she got sick and died within six weeks because she had no immunity, of course, being away from people for so long. You didn’t get this in school?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. Yeah. I guess.”

“I remember her dress,” she murmurs, her eyes gone distant over the rim of the glass. He’s watching her throat as she swallows, watching her breasts. “It was made of cormorant feathers so it shimmered in the light.”

“Really,” he says. “Feathers?”

She nods. “The pope has it now. In the Vatican. They took it to the Vatican—”

“Really,” he says.

“Yeah, really.” She’s looking at him now, a soft slow unambiguous smile playing across her lips.

“I wonder,” he says, rising from the grip of the deck chair, “what she did about sex?”

Two days and two nights, and then back to the coast, to real life and all the hassles that come with it, to the piss-poor numbers for the month of May at the Camarillo store for reasons no one can fathom, least of all Harley Meachum, and to the trial he’s entitled to as a citizen of the United States of America who’s been arrested on federal property on charges no sane law enforcement agent would have brought in the first place. He’d been hoping for a jury trial, a chance to speak to the underlying issues and maximize the press coverage, to explain himself, look people in the eye and let them know who the real criminals are, no mistake about it, until his lawyer, Steve Sterling — whom he’s retained on the recommendation of Phil Schwartz, the wizard who handles whatever might happen to come up vis-à-vis LaJoy’s Home Entertainment Centers, contracts, rental agreements, the odd lawsuit thrown at him by one litigious moron or another — disabused him of the notion. There will be no jury. No convocation of his fellow citizens from all walks of life and a grab bag of educational levels to weigh the evidence and sit in deliberation, because the counts against him don’t carry a stringent-enough penalty to warrant it — that would require a felony, and he can only imagine what he’d have to do to wind up with a felony charge. Save something, he supposes. Pick up a rat, dust it off and set it back on its feet again.

No, this will be a bench trial. That is, a roving federal magistrate will come to the Santa Barbara courthouse to set up shop for the week and hear his case and whatever else they’ve got on the docket. According to Sterling, this is a real break — otherwise they’d have to trot all the way down to L.A. — and that’s what he’s been telling anybody who’ll listen. A break. A real break. He does nothing more than go for a hike on property everybody in America owns in common, and he has to shout hosannas and kiss the sky for the great and all-sustaining break they’re giving him: no L.A. “Isn’t that something?” he tells Marta as she sets his two eggs over easy down in front of him, and Justin, the bartender at the Coast Village Grill, as he knocks back an anticipatory vodka cranberry. “Aren’t I the lucky one?”

Sardonic comments aside, he’s in a mood as he comes up the steps of the courthouse at seven forty-five a.m., Anise on one side of him, Sterling on the other. He was up two hours before the alarm rang, his stomach churning and his head cavernous and windy. He skipped breakfast — too tense to eat — downed two quick gulps of sulfurous coffee on his way to the car before upending the cup in the bushes, then got into it with Anise because he had to sit outside her apartment and lay on the horn for fifteen minutes before she hauled her sorry ass out the door. When she finally did appear, no hurry, no worry, she paused to frame her face in the passenger’s side window and give him a look that didn’t have a particle of contrition or even consideration in it, and for a second he thought she was just going to turn and walk away.

“Sorry,” she said, sliding into the seat beside him with a cardboard Kinko’s box wedged under one arm and a purse the size of a suitcase draped over the other. “I had to get the flyers together.”

“I don’t give a shit what you had to do!” He was already shouting, instantly shouting, slamming the car in gear and lurching out into traffic. “And why for shit’s sake didn’t you put the fucking things together last night like I told you? Huh? Tell me that!”

She didn’t have anything to say to this. The flyers were his idea. He’d chosen a heavy stock the color of pumpkin rind, for its visibility — you don’t just crumple up and toss paper like that, at least not before you give it a glance and absorb the message, which was the whole idea — and downloaded a very clean close-up of a pure white hog he could have sworn was grinning, its skin as smooth and supple as a human’s, its ears cocked inquisitively and its eyes lifted to the lens, which he’d enclosed within a red circle with a prohibitory slash through it and the legend Stop the Slaughter stamped across the top of the page. The rats were gone, the rats were history, but the pigs were next on the agenda.

“Because I’m the one facing jail time here, not you. And I hope you got your beauty sleep, because I was up all night. Shit. I mean, can’t you think about me for a change? Even for one fucking minute? Even when everything’s on the line — I could go to jail, you know that?”

She was sitting erect beside him, her posture flawless, her eyes secreted behind a pair of oversized sunglasses with lime-green frames. Her diction was very precise. “You’re not going to jail.”

And then, absurdly, and he knew he was making a fool of himself even as he turned to her, he was roaring, “The fuck I’m not!”

Now, his stomach in freefall, he stamps across the wide tiled entrance hall of the courthouse — wide enough to drive a truck through — and up the elaborate staircase, with its hand-painted tiles shipped all the way over from Tunisia, as if that’s going to impress him, then around a turning to the right where the hall opens out to the grassy courtyard below, and finally down another enclosed hallway to Department 2. The door is immense, a great dark oiled slab laid to its hinges when they built the place back in 1929, and it opens on a courtroom out of another era, vaulted ceilings, wood paneling, high-crowned benches arranged front to back like pews in a church, the church of the law. He makes note of the court recorder perched at her desk off to one side of the room, of the dais in the center where, he presumes, the judge will appear in his own good time, of the bailiff, with his paunch and his swagger and his look of utter indifference, nobody innocent, nobody at all.

“This way,” Sterling murmurs, guiding him by the arm, Anise half a step behind him, and he throws back his shoulders and strides down the center aisle to the front of the room as if he’s walking the red carpet at the premiere of his own movie, and let them look, all of them, what does he care? The first person he lays eyes on is Alma, Alma Boyd Takesue, right there in the middle of the second row, wearing her executioner’s face. She lifts her head to shoot him an abbreviated glare before turning to Sickafoose, who’s propped up beside her like a stick man, and how he’d like to lay into him, just once, just sixty seconds behind a closed door or out in the alley, Jesus, yes, but then Sterling’s leading him to the bench right in front where he’ll have his back to the whole mob of them and he pulls away for just an instant before thinking better of it and sliding his butt resignedly across the slick burnished wood of the bench, Anise folding under the back of her dress to slide in beside him. And she’s looking good, at least, her eyes done up, a blush of lipstick — not too much, because she doesn’t need it — dressed all in white, the color of innocence, of exoneration and respect, the dress falling to the tops of her cherry-red vinyl boots and her hair raging round her like a jungle sprung to life. He feels a surge of pride in her. Anise Reed. The beauty, the lover of animals, the singer — he has her and they don’t, not the puffed-up bailiff or Tim Sickafoose or Ranger Rick or the judge who sweeps out of a door in the back looking like the dictator of a third-world country nobody’s ever heard of, and what is he, Mexican? Armenian?

There are preliminaries, of course, just like in a boxing match. Other cases, other people. Up and down, yes and no. And then they call the United States v. David Francis LaJoy and he feels his heart seize, despite himself. Never show weakness, he knows that, and he checks off his muscles, one after another, fighting to keep his eyes locked and his expression frozen. The prosecutor, smirking, whip-thin, a preppie type with a preppie haircut in a checked suit half a size too small who could have been Tim Sickafoose’s double, calls Ranger Rick to the stand and the court has to hear Ranger Rick go through a blow-by-blow account of how his suspicions were aroused by the consulting ornithologist and how ultimately he boarded the suspect’s boat and made the arrest. Then it’s Sterling’s turn and Sterling rises from his chair to lay into Ranger Rick, going over the same ground what seems like a hundred times till the man creeps back into himself and admits that he couldn’t specify what kind of shoes the suspect had been wearing on the day of the alleged incident, nor could he distinguish them from the shoes Wilson Robert Gutierrez had been wearing, and then it’s Tim Sickafoose’s turn to throw the dagger and on and on they go.

He has plenty of time for reflection (for one thing he never realized what a bore Sterling is, his voice like a TV announcer’s — late, late-night TV, when they trot out the popcorn makers and Ginsu knives — his face as heavy as sleep and his posture so weak his bones might have been melting, his suit boring, his tie, but maybe that was a facet of his genius, maybe he meant to bore the judge comatose and how could a comatose man pronounce anything but a verdict of innocent?). Time drags. Every once in a while Anise reaches out to give his hand a squeeze, a gesture for which he should be grateful, but he only wants to lean over and throttle her because he doesn’t need pity here or empathy or affection or whatever it is. Empathy’s for the weak, for the guilty. Before long, even before Sickafoose has had his say and Sterling, boringly, tries to undermine the testimony, he’s begun to feel sorry for himself. Begun to worry. He studies the judge’s face as if it’s a timetable at the railway station, complex, unrevealing, routed in a thousand different directions to a thousand different destinations. He’s going down, he’s sure of it.

And why? Because he believes in something, the simplest clearest primary moral principle: thou shalt not kill. There was a time when he was just like anyone else, feeding burgers into his mouth, hot dogs, roast beef, pastrami, the chops and steaks and chicken wings his father seared on the grill and his mother served up with salad and corn and fresh-baked rolls, and like everyone else he was oblivious to the deeper implications. He went through school eating the spaghetti with meat sauce, the burritos and tacos and carne asada the cafeteria ladies served up in neat tinfoil packets. In the commons at the community college he sat amidst the disarray of his books and sipped his Coke and chewed his ham and avocado on rye, and if the ham, stripped and cured and sliced, had once been the tissue of a living sentient being, he never knew or cared. On weekends, he pushed his cart through the supermarket with all the rest of them, humming along to the jingles and reprocessed Beatles’ melodies tumbling through the speakers, the sanitized meat in its plastic wrapping as innocuous as if it had fallen off a tree, the lobsters in their murky sweating tank no more an object of concern or even curiosity than if they were carved of wood. Somewhere someone raised a cow and somewhere else the cow was killed and processed while another anonymous someone checked his lobster traps for the slow-witted crustaceans gathered there. And took them to market. And dropped them in the tank. And there they stayed, their claws pegged and their fate sealed, until someone else put down his money, took them home and boiled them alive. That was how it was. And he never thought twice about it.

His awakening came almost twenty years ago now, not as an epiphany per se but more a lifting of the veil, an infusion of light and clarity, and it transformed his life. He was twenty-six, putting in sixteen-hour workdays in the first of his stores, the flagship in downtown Santa Barbara, located back then in a transitional area three blocks off State, the building an anonymous cinder-block structure that could have housed anything from a muffler shop to a dental clinic. Three blocks away was life — tourists, bars, restaurants, retail — but there was nothing on his block but a taquería and a postage-stamp park populated exclusively by bums and the odd drugged-out high school kid and his pasty girlfriend. The sidewalk was pocked with dark blotches, there were empty bottles in the blighted shrubs along the street, stains of urine and worse in the alcove that gave onto the front door, tight black scrawls of graffiti scarring the pale stucco walls.

It was a sad state of affairs, as far as he was concerned, and it drove him crazy. His every thought was linked to the business, to attracting customers and upgrading his product line and, of course, it was all about perception as far as the customers were concerned — who, he asked himself, even the most diehard audio freak, really wanted to lay out his hard-earned money in a components store, however hip, that was located across from bum central? He worried over it, got into shouting matches with various burnouts and gimps, wrote letters to the mayor, the city council, the newspaper — Can’t we clean this city up? — without any appreciable difference. But he was luckier than most. He worked hard. Offered a top product at a reasonable price. And because he knew what he was doing, an electronics freak himself, and his customers appreciated it, they came to him and came back again, and very gradually the business began to grow. Still, he wasn’t exactly paying attention to the larger issues. He was absorbed. He was busy.

Then one afternoon a girl he’d hired to work the front counter while he was out doing installations handed him a slim pamphlet with an earth-green cover adorned with the old hippie sign for peace. He’d just come in the back door after fielding a complaint from a middle-aged woman with seriously sun-damaged skin who’d berated him because the remote wouldn’t switch on the amplifier in the new system he’d installed for her just the week before (she was pointing it backward, he discovered, after wasting a good forty-five minutes checking out every possible glitch he could imagine) and he looked down at the pamphlet in disgust. “What is this?” he asked the girl, turning it over in his hand. He gave her a sharp glance. “I hope you’re not handing this shit out in the store, because if you are—”

“It’s not shit,” she said, her voice so soft it was almost a whisper. “And I’m not passing it out to customers, don’t worry.” Her name was Melody Appelbaum — it comes to him in a flash while he sits there in the netherworld of the courtroom, Sterling droning on about something and the judge looking as if he’s on the verge of passing out — and she was a student at UCSB. She shrugged. “I just thought you might find it significant, that’s all.”

Significant. He might find it significant. Not useful or eye-opening or revolutionary, just significant. Without thinking, he stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans, and it wasn’t until he was getting ready for bed that night that he discovered it there. Idly, he flipped it open. The title—Animal Rights—appeared at the top of the first page, the letters faintly blurred in the way of cheap reproduction. Beneath it was a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer: “The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee to morality.” There was no author listed, and aside from a copyright symbol at the bottom of the page, no publication data at all.

He turned the page on a collage of photos that radiated out from the center like the petals of a black-and-white flower. It took him a moment before he saw what they were. And when he saw and understood, he experienced a jolt of revulsion and morbid fascination that was no different from what he’d felt when he was in junior high and came across the photographs of the victims of the Nazi camps in a claustrophobic carrel in the back room of the library. But the victims in these photographs weren’t human — they wore the mute unrevealing faces of cattle, hogs, veal calves, of chickens, their wings flapping futilely against the clamp of the conveyor and the blade to decapitate them. He looked closer. One of the animals, a hog that had been strung up by its feet in the slaughterhouse amidst myriad others, stared back at him, fully conscious and headed for the eviscerator looming in the foreground.

On the next page, there was more of the same — turkeys, lambs, dogs in a pen at the animal shelter awaiting the burn of the needle. And then the text, which put numbers to the slaughter, eight billion chickens butchered each year in this country alone, a hundred million hogs, forty million cows (twenty-five percent of which had been carelessly or inadequately stunned and thus effectively skinned alive, their writhings as the skin is torn from their faces a regular feature of the assembly line). And the line never slows, not even when the hogs come to and break loose of the shackles to careen in a panic into the pit below or when the shrieks of the ones crowding behind cause them to freeze in the chute till they’re beaten and electroshocked into moving. He read of the conditions in the farm factories, of pigs raised in pens so small they can’t even turn around, not once in their whole lives, of chickens debeaked and caged in warehouses with a hundred thousand others, knowing nothing but concrete and wire and the reek of death. Then there were the animal experiments — kittens having their eyes sewed shut to study the effect of sightlessness on development; rabbits subjected to the Draize test, in which a chemical irritant is dripped into their eyes by way of evaluating products in the cosmetics industry; dogs injected with plutonium; monkeys deprived in every conceivable way, tortured, mutilated; rats uncountable bred only to suffer and die, transgenic rats, oncogenic rats, rats upon rats.

He read the pamphlet through twice that night and in the morning he brought it with him to the store and laid it down on the counter without a word, right next to the cash register. Melody Appelbaum, nineteen, pouty, fat-cheeked, expecting trouble, gave it a glance, then looked away. “Where’d you get this?” he demanded.

She shrugged as if to say it was nothing, no more consequential than an advertising flyer, that she hadn’t meant any harm, that she’d take it back and never mention it again. “At school,” she said finally. “From a PETA person? Actually, my boyfriend.”

And he’d been so far out of the loop he had to ask what PETA was.

“It’s a group, you know? Activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?”

He mulled that over a moment, watching her eyes, animal’s eyes, no different essentially from the eyes of that hog or of dogs, cats, even fish and insects, organs of seeing and apprehension, windows to the soul. “Can you get any more of them?”

Another shrug. “I guess.”

“A hundred? Five hundred?”

“I guess.”

“Good,” he’d said. “I’m going to want them right here, right by the register. And you hand them to anybody who walks in the door.”

That was the day he gave up meat, cold turkey, and where did that expression come from? Of course, he still needed protein, especially since he was lifting at the gym, which was all about results, and so he continued to incorporate eggs and dairy in his diet, though he knew all about the battery hens in the egg-laying factories, how they’re fed the remains of the male chicks, which are otherwise useless to the industry, how they’re subjected to forced molting (that is, they’re periodically denied food for six to ten days and then brought back on diet as a way of forcing ovulation), and how after a year they’re played out and sent to slaughter. Anise is on him all the time about it — not to mention his cardiologist — but eggs are his one concession to the system, to cruelty. He means to change. He will change. Anise is a vegan and he’s moving that way, he is, but it’s hard, because through all his bachelor days from his divorce on up to the present, it’s been eggs that sustained him. Omelets, especially. In fact, the first time he had Anise over for dinner, he made a green salad and a veggie omelet — his specialty — thinking it would be just the thing, till she sipped at her wine, picked at the salad, gave him the full chill of her glacial gaze and said, “Meat is murder. And so are eggs.”

Now, sitting in the courtroom with her four years later, he comes out of his reverie to hear Sterling laying into Sickafoose, the tedious dead dry-as-dust voice come to life suddenly: “So you can’t be sure then which of the two men you saw — at a distance of what, a thousand yards? — making throwing motions?”

And Sickafoose, shifting in his seat, knotting and unknotting his bony legs, drawn down to nothing finally, and finally, in a whisper, saying: “No.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

“No. I can’t be sure.”

Anise turns to him suddenly and she’s huge, rippling, her face floating to his like an untethered balloon, the kiss, the squeeze. Is this it? Have they finally conceded, the sons of bitches, the killers, the — And then suddenly, unaccountably, he’s back on the boat, the paradisiacal island rising up out of the sea before him. “Do you know why they call it Coches Prietos?” she’s asking him, the post-coital margarita rocking gently on the rail.

“It must have something to do with cars, right. Coches? I don’t know: dark cars?”

“There were no cars here back then.” She’s wearing a playful smile. A superior smile. This is her island, after all. “There are no cars here now.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Beats me. I give.”

“Coches is slang for pigs. Get it? Dark Pigs Canyon. La Cañada de los Coches Prietos. The dark ones, those are the ones that went feral back in the eighteen hundreds. They get big and mean and they’re fast. The boars anyway.”

“Right,” he says. “That’s why they have to kill them off. All of them.”

“Yeah,” she says, reaching for the frosted glass. She hasn’t bothered with her clothes and he hasn’t bothered with his either. “But we’re not going to let them, are we?”

A week later, he’s back in court, stomach churning all over again, in a mood, but he’s forgone the tie and jacket. In their place, he’s wearing a black T-shirt with the new FPA symbol — the pig in the circle — emblazoned on the front in aniline orange with the Stop the Slaughter legend, in the same loud shout of a color, done up in biker’s script across the back. And why not? He’s here to absorb the judge’s verdict, and whether he’s going down or walking out the door, he’s going to do it in his own way.

What’s happened in the interim is purely serendipitous and a whole lot better than he could have hoped for — the press has picked it up, his story, from his point of view, because the papers find this sort of thing irresistible. “Rat Activist on Trial,” “Rat Lover Says He Acted to Save Animals,” “Local Man Defies Park Service,” “Stop the Killing LaJoy Says.” And it’s not just the local paper — the interest has blossomed beyond that to pull in any number of big-city dailies, the AP, even USA Today. He’d like to think people are on his side, that they see the value in every life, however small, but as Anise has been reminding him all week, there’s the freak factor too. Rat lover. It’s almost an oxymoron, for most people anyway. He’s heard that two of the morning disc jockeys on the local oldies station have been making jokes about it — jokes, that is, at his expense, and yet still the word is getting out in a bigger way than he could have imagined. And that means money. Since the trial started, donations to FPA have gone through the roof — at last count nearly three thousand dollars came in in the last week alone.

Sterling — fifty, bald, with doughnut residue on his lapels and a steely smile imprinted on his face — swells beside him as the judge enters the courtroom and all stand. In the next moment they’re sitting again, benches creaking, people coughing into their fists, blowing their noses, scuffing their feet. There’s a delay of fifteen minutes at least as the judge shuffles papers, fools with his reading glasses and entertains one lawyer or another in private conference, the discreet murmur of their voices like background noise, the buzzing of insects or the whisper of a fan. While the judge — Karagouzian, definitely Armenian, with an accent and a moustache and a house in Glendale — is otherwise occupied, Sterling turns to him and gives him a sotto voce pep talk meant to impart serenity but which actually winds up scaring him more than anything that’s gone down so far.

“There’s no way the judge is going to convict,” Sterling tells him, shaking his head back and forth like a metronome. “Not with how Sickafoose compromised himself on the stand—”

“Good,” he hears himself say. “Great. But you said it was no sweat anyway, trumped-up charges, no evidence, right?”

“Yes, sure, but you have to understand Karagouzian’s a ramrod for law and order and he has a reputation for ruling on the side of the authorities.”

“But not in this case.”

And here’s where the scare comes in, and it hits him, as usual, in the stomach, in the stomach lining where the digestive juices, inflamed with caffeine, chew away at him, because Sterling wags his head even harder and says, “I’m ninety-nine percent sure, but then Karagouzian hates any kind of protest or press involvement, which isn’t your fault, God knows, and it’s legitimate, absolutely, but I just thought I ought to warn you in case we — well, as I say, I’m ninety-nine percent sure here.”

He glances at Anise. She’s chosen to sit on his left this time, so he and Sterling won’t have to step over her when the judge gives his verdict. She looks great, a real presence, huge really, with her broad bleached face and big shoulders and her hair combed out and frizzed up so it spills over everything, her purse, her lap, the back of the pew and all up and down the left side of his body as if to hold him there beside her. Maddeningly, though, she’s dressed all in black — a skirt that goes right to the floor and a leotard with a little embroidered vest over it, black on black. “Why black?” he’d demanded, stupefied, when she came down the steps of her apartment and dropped into the passenger’s side of the Beemer. She took off her sunglasses to look him square in the eye. “I want to be ready for anything,” she said, and though he tried to contain himself, his voice was as bitter as the sediment at the bottom of his coffee cup. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Now she gives him a tight smile. “I’ll bake you cookies,” she whispers.

“Very funny.”

There’s a rustling behind him, to his right, and he glances past Sterling to see Alma and Sickafoose squeezing into the far end of the bench. Neither of them will meet his eye, but they’re wearing smug looks, as if no matter what happens they’ve got him where they want him, here in federal court, with a hanging judge up there squinting at his papers preparatory to coming down on the side of the law that protects the guilty and burns the innocent. But what a cunt, that night at the restaurant, the way she’d bailed on him — as if she was better than he was, as if he didn’t know his wines — and wasn’t she sworn by law to protect and nurture the resources of the national park instead of killing things off at random? Jesus. And she’s looking Asian, real Asian, with that hair and the set of her jaw and the way she’s holding herself like some little geisha, like the touch of the wood slab behind her would cripple her. .

But now the bailiff’s calling his name and Sterling’s on his feet. He feels the muscles working in his legs as he rises, his chest swelling, and he’s moving forward to stand there before the bench while all the reporters — is that what’s her name, Toni, from the Press Citizen? — snatch at their pads and pencils and laptops. The room goes silent. Sunlight sits in the tall windows. There’s a distant sound of traffic.

The judge — and there’s another shithead he’d like to have five minutes alone with — squints at him over his glasses. He does something with his lips, a kind of preliminary licking or flexing, and then, glancing down at the paper before him, he begins to read aloud: “While there is a strong probability that the defendant did in fact commit the crimes with which he is charged, the evidence submitted and admitted does not serve to eliminate the doubt that remains. Further, since the Park Service eradication project was ultimately successful, the issue becomes moot.”

And what’s this? He can feel the mood shifting, the room coming to life as if a long collective breath has been expelled. He looks to Sterling, who’s staring straight ahead at the judge, trying to keep his expression sober despite the first intimations of triumph compressing the crow’s-feet rimming his eyes and radiating down to tug at the corners of his mouth. Everybody’s watching. Everybody can see him. His T-shirt. His message. His meaning. He feels a hard hot surge of joy coming up in him and it’s as intense as an orgasm: he’s going to walk!

“Therefore,” the judge pronounces over the steady retrograde tug of his accent, and yes, he could go right up there and kiss him, right now, “I pronounce the defendant not guilty.”

In the aftermath, out in the corridor with Toni Walsh and the woman from the local TV affiliate, the fingers of his right hand entwined in Anise’s and the camera trained on him, he makes a little speech, the lines of which he’s been rehearsing in his head all week. “It’s a sad state of affairs when our own federal government considers feeding wildlife to be a crime, while at the same time raining down poison indiscriminately from the sky is okay — legitimate, I mean.” And what’s even sweeter is that he’s able to raise his voice and project it all the way down the long gleaming tiled hall at the very moment that Alma Boyd Takesue and Tim Sickafoose emerge slumped and tragic from the courtroom so that he gets to watch her turn her head to him and then turn away again as he winds it up with an inspired flash of rhetoric: “And if these people think they’re going to get away with slaughtering some five thousand native pigs on Santa Cruz Island, well they’ve got another think coming.”

He pulls back then, dropping Anise’s hand to raise his own, two fingers spread in the victory sign. “Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head so that the dreads stir and rise in bristling affirmation, “not while the FPA’s on the watch.”