Freeman is watching his waistline. He orders grapefruit, cottage cheese and coffee, “Black, no cream.” He’s not overweight, or not at least as far as she can tell, but he’s one of those men who just seems big all over, big in the shoulders, arms, wrists, fingers, big right on down to his fingernails, his head massive, his neck thick as one of the stanchions under the pier. The only incongruous thing is his feet, which are disproportionately small, so that he always seems to be floating above them as if he’s been pumped full of helium.
Frazier — forty-six and big enough in his own right, dressed in his khaki bush shorts and matching short-sleeved, multi-pocketed shirt, his silvering hair in a military buzz cut and his legs stretched out casually in the aisle — orders the Captain’s Breakfast, crab-stuffed crepes, fresh fruit plate, eggs benedict and sourdough toast saturated in butter, with a side of fries and homemade coleslaw. He upends the sugar container over his coffee, then fills the cup to the top with half and half. And smiles round the table. “Hard work chasing pigs up and down those canyons,” he says. “A man’s got to have calories to burn. Not to mention a beer or two and maybe a wee little nip of something at the end of the day.”
“Wee?” Alma echoes, and she’s grinning at him while the waitress hovers, all in good fun. “Wee” for Frazier translates to half a pint, minimum, which is what his engraved silver flask holds. She’s seen him refer to it time and again as they tramped the fence line, looking for pig sign, and when they sat down to an evening meal at the picnic table out front of the ranch house at Christy Beach on the far end of the island, he was able to put away a six-pack all on his own — and never, not for an instant, had she detected any change in him. Half a pint of Mexican brandy and a six-pack of beer in a system all sweated-out, and no clumsy movements, no slurring of words, just a steady stream of Kiwi talk on every subject under the sun. She looks to the waitress, then nods to Annabelle, to see what she’s having before committing herself to the strawberry crepes and crème fraîche.
Annabelle — she’s Alma’s age exactly — is a white blonde with see-through eyebrows and invisible lashes, dressed today for the office, in a blue silk suit and matching heels in a shade so close to the color of her eyes it’s uncanny. How many shops did she trundle through to find that ensemble, Alma wonders, envisioning whole armies of sales girls paraded across the floor in consultation, the multifarious phases of light parsed against the sheen of the material and the narrowly focused hue of her eyes. Where does she find the time? Not to mention the money? Like Alma, she’s unmarried, but unlike Alma she’s currently unattached — and working for a nonprofit in service of the environment is hardly the way to worldly wealth. She must be a real bargain hound. Either that or she has family money. Alma watches her push the menu away with a languid flick of the wrist and lift her eyes to the waitress. “I think I’ll have the spinach and goat cheese omelet with a side salad — the endive. It comes with a balsamic vinaigrette, right? Nothing creamy?”
The waitress — all of nineteen or twenty, with a ponytail that reaches to her waist and a skirt so short she might have come directly from early cheerleading practice — answers in the affirmative and then turns to Alma. “Have you decided, ma’am?”
“Yes,” she says, handing over the menu and snatching a quick glance round the table, “I’ll just have the organic oatmeal. With skim milk.”
Phase I of the project — Administration, Infrastructure and Acquisition — involved securing the funds from their overlords in Washington and, in Annabelle’s case, the Nature Conservancy, hiring additional staff to oversee the project, acquire equipment and supplies and take bids from the hunting and fencing contractors. Not to mention dealing with an inflamed press ($7 Million Awarded to Foreign Hunters to Slaughter Santa Cruz Island Pigs, read one Press Citizen headline) and an ongoing campaign of harassment from the Dave LaJoy-Anise Reed contingent, both in the courts and in the parking lot out front of their offices in Ventura. Phase II, the division of the island into five zones for the purpose of constructing forty-five miles of pig-proof fencing so that each zone can be sequentially hunted till it’s pig free, was completed in the spring, which means that Phase III is well under way. Afterward, and the nearest estimate is that it will take up to six years to achieve an island-wide extirpation, Phase IV will be implemented, in which the fences will be monitored for an additional two years to ensure that the eradication is complete, after which they will be removed and the island will return to the way it was before humans began altering it. At least that’s the plan. And the hope. The fervent hope of them all.
“Well, yes,” Freeman is saying, his coffee cup held aloft and beating time to some inner rhythm, “we’ve posted signs and sent out the press release stating that the entire island, not just the TNC property, will be closed to the public while the hunt is under way. We’re making it a public safety issue. And the promise is that once Zone One is cleared, we’ll let people back in and open up the campgrounds at Scorpion.”
“As soon as possible,” Alma puts in, looking round the table. “We don’t want to give people any more reason to gripe than they already have.”
“Oh?” Frazier’s giving her a sardonic grin. “Are they griping? I hadn’t heard.”
“You can’t really blame them,” Annabelle says, turning to him.
“I can,” Alma says.
“Because they don’t like to see violence — like me, like us. Life is sacred, I believe that. And yet—”
“And yet no matter how many times you explain it”—Alma’s voice jumps up the register—“they just don’t get it because they don’t want to. Logic means nothing to these people. Long-term goals. Expert opinion.” She can feel the caffeine working in her to the point of coffee jitters, of running at the mouth, of cutting people off — she needs to put something on her stomach, needs her steel-cut oatmeal and her skim milk. “But we’ve been through all this before and we’re just going to have to grin and bear it. For the greater good. For the foxes.”
“Or bear and grin it,” Freeman says. Lamely.
“At least the courts are on our side.” Alma can feel her smile bloom and then fade. She reaches for her coffee cup, then thinks better of it, pulling both hands down into her lap.
“For now,” Annabelle says. “But you can’t count on that. Every time one of these crazies sues for an injunction I tremble to think what’s going to happen if we wind up with a judge that just doesn’t get it.”
“Amen,” Alma says, “me too. I can hardly sleep nights thinking of what it would be like if they stop us now, when we’ve committed the funds, when weeks, days even, could mean the difference for the foxes. I mean”—looking round the table, caught in the grip of her emotions, so wired she can’t find the off switch—“they’ve got money behind them. Have you seen their website? The ticker there showing how much people are donating? And the local paper. The editorials? They’re just manipulating public opinion. Cynically. Stupidly. But it works. I mean, the pig in the bull’s-eye?”