When they got to the top and the road began to dip down again, she and Bax had a view of Smugglers’ Ranch and the grove of olive trees, gone wild now, that somebody had put in the ground when the place was a going operation and they planted hayfields for the cattle, picked grapes and pressed olives for their oil. Nothing looked amiss, at least not from a bird’s-eye view, and she didn’t dare take her eyes off the road for more than a hurried glance as she humped in and out of the gullies and kept so close to the inside she scraped whatever paint might have been left off the long run of the fenders and the battered door that was all there was between Bax and the gouged-out hillside. “Jesus,” he said — twice — but that was all he said.
The wheel jumped like a fistful of snakes, the tires slipped and grabbed and slipped again. She snatched a quick glance out the window, and as far as she could see, there were no boats in the bay or drawn up on the beach, but when finally the road stopped pitching and she could lift her eyes from the hood for a better look, she saw the tracks the three-wheelers had left in the yard out front of the abandoned house. They ran in tight graceful arcs, looping in on themselves, weaving and interweaving, their message all too plain.
She pulled up in the yard, killed the ignition and set the brake with a jerk of her arm. The house was a two-story adobe, like the ranch house at Scorpion, but here the glass of the windows was gone, long since shattered by day-trippers practicing their marksmanship with stones and bullets alike, and the three parallel doors — one on each end and one set in the middle as if the place had been designed by kindergartners on a stiff sheet of construction paper — stood perpetually open on their ruptured hinges. It looked the way it always had: unoccupied, deserted, bereft. Heart leaping, she slammed out of the truck and went straight for the middle door, the one that gave onto the main room. If she saw Bax tugging at the dead weight of the cast and fumbling for his crutches, it didn’t register because this wasn’t about being polite or compassionate or even loving, and it was cold fury that propelled her. He shouted something at her back, but she was already inside.
The light faded to gray. Shadows fell away from the walls. She made out an irregular shape on the floor of the entryway, something that didn’t belong, and it took a moment for it to cohere out of the dimness: a blue backpack, its flap flung back on a box of dehydrated meals in silver pouches. Beyond it, there was a jumble of clothes and equipment, manufactured things, shucked wrappers, crumpled cans, three twelve-packs of Tecate stacked haphazardly one atop the other in their flame-red jackets. The smell she remembered — mild and botanical, the odor of dry rot, mold, the dehisced seeds of the plants that drifted through the broken panes and settled in the cracks of the floorboards — was different now, coppery and hard, with an overlay of the mechanical, of oil, gun oil, and here were the rifles, two, three, four of them, propped against the back wall like an exhibit in a gallery.
The sleeping bags she found laid out on the floor of the main room, a pair of Coleman lanterns propped up beside them in a scatter of hunting magazines—Oregon’s Mule Deer Paradise, Ozarks Bear and More! — and a yard-long ice chest, orange and white plastic, set like a bench beneath the lintel of the shattered window. She heard Bax call out her name, but didn’t answer. Inside the ice chest, amidst a slurry of melting ice, were two plastic-wrapped slabs of meat, what looked to be a liver in one and four or five crudely cut steaks in the other. Behind her, at the door, there was the sound of a heavy footfall and then the thump and grate of the crutches. Bax’s voice echoed through the emptiness: “Rita, where in hell are you?”
Still she didn’t answer. She was too angry, each crumpled cigarette pack and balled-up wad of underwear or grease-stained rags infuriating her anew, and what did they think this was, a hotel? A flophouse? She took the stairs two at a time, cursing under her breath. At the top of the stairs was a door, and that was strange, because she hadn’t remembered a door there at all. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if it had new hinges, or at least they’d been newly oiled and scraped of rust. She lifted the latch and pushed the door open, and here she was surprised — or no, shocked and outraged — all over again.
The room had been transformed. The floorboards gleamed as if they’d been varnished, or if not varnished at least scrupulously swept and mopped. And the windows — there were two of them, set in the side and back walls — were covered in plastic sheeting, which had been carefully affixed to the window frame with duct tape. A camp bed stood against the far wall, complete with blankets, pillow, sheets and pillowcase. There were jackets and shirts suspended from nails driven into the wall above it, another backpack — this one in plain unvarnished khaki, as if it were military issue — set atop a slab of driftwood beside the bed, a crude desk and chair fashioned from produce crates squared off against the wall opposite. And worst of all, a fleece, a tanned fleece splayed out on the floor in front of the bed so the sheep killer wouldn’t have to get his feet cold when he shucked off his boots, strung his bow, sharpened his steel-tipped arrows.
“Rita?”
She was frozen with hate. “Up here,” she called. “I’m upstairs.” She could hear Bax scraping around below, muttering to himself. And then, as if she needed anything more to provoke her, vinegar to rub in her wounds, a jab with a sharp stick, she saw what was on the table. There, beside a Coleman lantern and half a dozen paperbacks, was a hunting magazine turned back to a full-page ad. From a distance, it looked as if a huge pair of binoculars was staring out from the page, but when she snatched up the magazine, she saw that she’d been looking at two circular photographs, one of a boar flashing its tusks and the other of a ram, a Rambouillet ram, perched on a crag. The legend at the top read: Eldon Thatch’s Island Hunt Club. There was a phone number and a Ventura address, followed by a price list: $750 for a razorback boar, $1,000 for a trophy ram and two meat sheep. Meat sheep. What went through her mind in that moment wasn’t so much a thought process as it was an escalating flood of images, each more bitter and ironic than the last. Their sheep, their rams, the animals they’d paid for themselves and broken their backs over, nurtured, docked, dipped, were going to be hunted down—were being hunted down — at prices that were twenty times what they could get for them. And by strangers. Interlopers. Jerks.
In the next moment she was sweeping everything — bedding, paperbacks, the lantern, even the plastic sheeting she ripped from the windows as if she were ripping the skin from their backs — into one of the wooden crates, and in the moment after that, her breath coming so fast she might have been hyperventilating the way she had over the lines of coke Toby would chop and lay out for her any time of day or night whether she wanted it or not, and she did want it, she always wanted it, she was bumping the thing down the steps and yelling out to Bax, who was standing there at the base of the staircase gaping up at her, to get out of her way. “What in Christ’s name?” Bax said. “You can’t touch this stuff, this is private property, this is—”