She made an effort. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said, the smell of the rain enlivening the odor of death that hung over the field till she felt as if she wanted to sink down in the mud — right here, right in front of her daughter — and cry herself dry. What was the use of it all? The worry, the deprivation, every penny put back into the flock and no satisfaction but in increase? “The damage is already done and all we can do now is let the mothers come back to their babies. Look,” she said, pointing across the field to where Francisco and Bumper were working to bring them in, “they’re already coming back. They’re as worried as we are.”
Anise’s voice was small and bitter. “What about the ones that don’t have anything to worry about? What are they going to do?”
“I know,” she said. “I know, it hurts.”
She was remembering the previous year when one of the ewes that had lost a lamb to a withered leg kept nosing at the remains of the carcass — the hooves, the head, the coat — long after the flesh had gone. That was a kind of heartbreak that jumped species, from Ovis aries to Homo sapiens, and here it was again, seventy-three ewes come back to bleat for the lambs that couldn’t answer, and the ravens laughing from the trees.
“We have to get the police,” Anise said in a steady low voice, and now she looked up, her eyes hard and fixed. “Make them pay, those jerks, those hunters. For every one.”
“We will, honey, believe me.” And here she felt the anger and hate and despair come up in her all over again. “I’m going to go straight in there to the radio and call the sheriff, because this is criminal trespass, and, I don’t know, vandalism—”
“And murder.”
There was a countervailing breeze coming up off the ocean — she could smell the sharpness of it, the iodine, the salty sting of scales and feathers and fins — and it loosened the grip of the rain till it began to fall off in random spatters. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s what it amounts to.” She held out her hand, impatient now. “Come on, get up, move. Let’s get to the radio while there’s still a chance of catching them.”
Anise rose from the grass and smoothed down her wet jeans. The lambs she’d gathered just lay there looking into the wind, but already the ewes were trotting up to them, each instantly identifiable to the other by smell and a distinctive note of voice. “What good’s the sheriff going to do? Even if he came, which he won’t, it might be days from now and those guys are going to be long gone.”
“I don’t know,” she said, already turning toward the house, “maybe we can get the Coast Guard on them.” One of them, the one in front, was a big square-jawed blond who looked as if he could have been one of those phony TV wrestlers her father had liked so much when she was a girl back in New York. He hadn’t even given her so much as a glance. And he wasn’t carrying a gun, unlike the other two — they roared past, as oblivious as he was, rifles slung over their shoulders as they worked the handlebars of their machines and looked out ahead for ruts, obstructions, the retreating flanks of a black tusker boar. He must have thought he was the real deal, because he had a bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Big man. Big hero. “Because they’ve got to have a boat somewhere, you know that—”
Anise, rangy, tall, her back slumped under the weight of everything that was wrong, and her book, in its plastic sleeve, pressed to her chest, fell into step with her, and there was the house ahead of them, smoke rising from the chimney, Bax’s light still on, and it was as if nothing had happened, as if all the clocks were frozen and the sun locked in place. “Where do you think they are — Smugglers’? Because we put signs there and they — they can’t just say they didn’t know. .”
“Don’t you worry, darlin’,” she said, striding along as briskly as her legs would carry her, and was she quoting some song, was that it? Lyrics clouded her head, all the songs she’d heard and sung and would sing in the years to come when all this was over with, and she was already envisioning a new song, with a blues progression and a theme of final and uncompromising revenge. “Don’t you worry,” she repeated, the words like cold little stones in her mouth, “those sons of bitches are going to regret this, and you can take my word for it.”
But they didn’t. And they wouldn’t. Because wheels were turning that she knew nothing about, and when she mounted the stairs to the bedroom she was surprised to see Bax out of bed, dressed in his faded flannel shirts — he wore as many as three or four of them, depending on the temperature — and his blue jeans with the one leg cut away for the cast. He was perched on the edge of the chair, attempting to pull on his socks, but when he tried to reach down to his good foot the ribs tugged him back as if his arm was attached to a bungee cord. He winced. Let out a curse. “Goddamn it,” he rumbled when she came through the door, “will you help me with this? And my boots. Where the shitfuck are my boots?”
She slid his socks on over his cold white feet with their horny yellowed nails and splayed toes before she said a word and when she did she was already at the door. “You mean your boot, don’t you? Because there’s no way a boot’s going to go over that cast, even if I slit it with a knife. And I don’t know that you should even be up on it.”
“I heard two shots,” he said, swiveling toward her, the left leg swinging like a pendulum in its chrysalis of dirty white plaster. “What was it — day-trippers? Hunters?”
It was day-trippers who punched holes in their illusion of serenity anytime they chose to show up, day and night, from the diver who drowned within sight of the beach while taking abalone out of season so that Anise had to find him there at low tide with his facial features all eaten away and one rigid arm hooked up like an invitation to dance, to the bonfire builders and stranded fishermen and the six teenagers in their daddy’s cabin cruiser out of Santa Barbara shooting up a pod of gray whales in the shallows off Scorpion Rock. You never knew, especially in summer, when somebody you’d never seen before would waltz right into the kitchen, as if the whole ranch was nothing more than a curiosity out of a museum. But this wasn’t day-trippers. This was worse, far worse. “Hunters,” she said.
He’d stopped just short of her, weaving on the pinions of the crutches, huge, big-headed, his hair gone white in the past year and his white-flecked beard fanning out across his collar and up into his sideburns as if a wind were spitting in his face. “Where? Not on ranch property?”
She tried to keep her voice level. “Right in Scorpion meadow. Right in the middle of it.”
“Shit. The dumb fucks. We lose any?”
She just nodded. “Anise’s downstairs trying to get the Coast Guard on the marine radio. This time we’re going to make them pay.”
“What’d they look like?”
And now she had to see them all over again. The way they’d come on, heedless, clueless, the sheep starting up. “I don’t know. Like the average jerk. The one of them had a bow and arrow and he was all in camouflage like this was Vietnam or something.”