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.