She said nothing. There was no time for debate — she was in the grip of something here and it was going to play out whether or not he liked it or Eldon Thatch liked it or Pier and Francis Gherini or the commander of the Coast Guard himself. Down the stairs, across the floor and out the door to the yard, Bax clumping behind her. She overturned the box and dumped everything in the mud. Then she snaked past Bax, who was rumbling away at her in a language that was English, insistent and harsh, but might as well have been Mandarin Chinese for all the effect it had on her, propelling herself back into the house, to the main room now, stuffing the sleeping bags in the box, the backpack full of just-add-water meals, the magazines, the beer, even their rolls of toilet paper. She dragged it all outside and dumped it there, and if she heard the scream of the three-wheelers on the hill above or the harsh machine-gun clatter of the helicopter blades that could only mean that the owners were on their way to deliver their poisonous news in person, it didn’t matter a whit. Because she squared her shoulders and went straight to the truck and the spare can of gasoline Bax kept behind the passenger’s seat and in the next moment the sweet smell of benzene rose to her as she sloshed it over the whole mess and then reached deep in the pocket of her jeans for a match.
So it went up, all of it, before Bax or anybody else could stop her. And Bax did try to stop her because he was the peacemaker, the coward, the dog who would roll over on his back so the owners could scratch his belly and then sell the concession out from under him. She watched the flames rise, roiling and bright, the lanterns bursting with the violent release of their kerosene, the food pouches popping like firecrackers, cotton and leather and Gore-Tex shriveling away to nothing while the foam pads beneath the sleeping bags sent up an evil oily black smoke that forked into the sky and hung there overhead like a tattered umbrella. When Bax did get to her — scrape, clump, scrape — she swung round on him, furious. “Do you know what they’re doing? Do you have any idea?”
“I don’t care what they’re doing, you don’t come into somebody’s house—”
“Somebody’s house? This is nobody’s house. This is our house. Part of our ranch, part of what we’re paying through the nose to lease.”
“—and destroy private property. It’s not right. It’s crazy. You’re fucking crazy, you know that?”
“Yeah? And so what are you then? They’re selling our sheep, Bax, our rams that we. . for any jerk with a gun to just. .” She felt herself giving way, all the jolts and frustrations of the day tearing loose inside her, and her eyes were wet suddenly. “A thousand dollars, Bax, they’re killing our stock for a thousand dollars for one ram and two meat sheep. Meat sheep, for God’s sake!”
She saw that register on his face. His eyes went wide, his jaw locked. He was in pain — just standing up was a trial — and this was like climbing up on his shoulders and kicking the crutches out from under him. She felt bad then — he hadn’t known, or hadn’t known the extent of it. “What are you talking about?” he said, his face lit freakishly by the flames, sick flames, chemical flames, the beer cans bursting with a long liquid hiss that was the sound of capitulation and defeat.
“Upstairs. In the bedroom. His bedroom. He’s got an ad in Field and Stream, for Christ’s sake. ‘Eldon Thatch’s Island Hunt Club.’ Prices and everything.”
It was then that the noise she’d been hearing off on the periphery grew in intensity, grew closer, and it wasn’t the clatter of the helicopter that had appeared overhead like a big ratcheting bug and vanished over the rise in the direction of Scorpion, but the angry mechanical buzzing of the ATVs come home to roost. She looked up to see the three of them, in single file, working their way down the road from the mesa. Bax had seen them too. He was already in motion, moving faster than she could have imagined, and when they came roaring into the yard he was at the truck, propped up against it, and he had the.22 in his hands.
She didn’t know guns, didn’t want to know guns. She was in a transcendent state, the hate and fear burning in her in equal portions, and where were the peace and love she’d shaped her voice around through all those years when music was the means and brotherhood the end? She’d started the fire. She’d provoked this. Her throat clenched. Somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was going to die.
She watched the three of them shut down their engines and dismount, their motions fussy and exaggerated, as if to show how purely cool and unconcerned they were, nothing out of the ordinary, just a bonfire burning in the yard and a.22 rifle leveled on them. Thatch removed the khaki cap he was wearing, shook out his hair — he had one of those layered cuts the hair bands favored to distract you from the fact that they couldn’t play their instruments, and that said all she needed to know — then ambled across the yard, the other two trailing in his wake. “Hello there,” he called, trying on a smile that was like the smile of a man stepping onto a used car lot for the first time, hopeful but expecting the worst. He wanted to know what was going on, what they were doing there, what the fire was all about. “For a minute,” he said, trying to be friendly, trying to smooth things out, as if trespassing and sheep killing and cutting their living out from under them was just a little gaffe, nothing really, “I thought the house was on fire.” But then he had a look at the piled-up mess of the fire and saw what it was and his face went hard.
“You’re killing our animals,” Bax said. “Livestock. You and these two clowns”—he had the rifle laid out across the hood of the truck and the truck was between them and him, and he indicated the two hunters, fat-faced types in their thirties or forties, with a jerk of his head—“are shooting up our sheep. That we paid for out of our own pockets. And that’s got to stop.”
She’d moved in beside him when the men had climbed down from their vehicles blinking against the light of the spreading sky. The mud sucked at her boots. A cold shiver ran through her. “And the lambs,” she heard herself say. “What about the dead lambs? Seventy-three of them.”
The big man — Thatch, and he must have been some sort of bodybuilder or something — just shrugged. “Talk to the Gherinis,” he said. “I don’t owe you shit. You owe me. You’ve got no right to destroy people’s personal property, and I tell you you’re going to pay every penny it’s going to cost to replace it, or—”
“Or what?” Bax lifted the gun now, though it was puny, ridiculous, a child’s toy compared to what the two fat-faced men had slung over their shoulders.
Thatch hadn’t moved. He was twenty feet away. The bow loomed over the back of his head as if it were attached to him, a supererogatory limb sprung up out of the jointure of his shoulder blades. “I’ll sue you. I’ll have you evicted, that’s what I’ll do. You just try me. And I’m about a heartbeat away from coming over there and kicking your crippled ass, crutches or no.” He shifted his gaze to her. “You too, you bitch.”
The violence of the curse, the hate, the explosive freight-train rush of the moment—Life and death, that was what she was thinking, life and death—stunned her. Scared her. What had she done?