“The thing is,” Frazier is saying, now dabbing at a bright smear of egg and hollandaise at the corner of his mouth, “with pigs you get ninety percent of them right off, but it’s that remaining ten percent that gives you hell. And you can’t run the risk of missing a single individual because that could be a pregnant sow for all you know and then the whole business just starts in over again.”
The oatmeal goes down like a brick, the wrong thing to order, definitely the wrong thing. Her stomach is on fire suddenly — too much coffee, too much tension, dealing with her mother, hitting the squirrel, fighting traffic to get here — and she has to square herself in the chair and sit rigid a moment till the burning passes. Is she developing an ulcer, is that it?
“Aerial starts when — next week? That’s what you’re projecting?” Freeman asks, leaning into the table, the rind of his grapefruit at one elbow, coffee cup at the other. The pen in his breast pocket has left a dark blue Rorschach blot on his pale blue shirt and the silver points of his bolo tie are tarnished — or maybe they’re smudged with ink. But his eyes are bright. He’s attached to the notion of the park superintendent as a man of action, like the legendary Bill Ehorn, who flew into San Miguel to personally pull the trigger on the last pregnant jenny, thus ending the occupation of the island by introduced mules, and Alma knows he’s angling for an invitation.
Frazier nods genially. “As best we can figure. Because we’re already having good success on the ground, but we need to get up on the ridges and work our way down. And I tell you, you only do a kill if you can get the whole group. If there’s a chance even one’ll get away, you draw back. Because, you understand, these are very clever animals — they say they’re smarter than dogs, smart as a three-year-old child for that matter, but for my money even the dopiest dog beats that. . anyway, they’ll communicate to the others and go into hiding. And that’s a nightmare.”
Alma catches the waitress’s eye from across the room, thinking to expedite things and get the check now, but the waitress misinterprets her meaning and brings the coffeepot back round. Frazier, gesturing broadly now, holds out his cup to be refilled, giving the girl a quick wink and then going on about how while aerial is indispensable the real hunt takes place on the ground, now that the dogs — his own dogs, from New Zealand — are out of quarantine. And then, Freeman and Annabelle edging their cups forward for refills while Alma lays a palm over hers and mouths, “Check, please,” he brings up his Judas pigs, a concept so devious it gives her a thrill every time he mentions it.
Annabelle, who to this point hasn’t been as closely involved with the details of the hunt as she herself has, gives him a bemused smile and drops her voice. “Judas pigs?” she echoes. Her look says, Amuse me.
And Frazier stops right there to take in that look and sweep his eyes over the restaurant, the retreating waitress, the view out the window, before he comes back to her. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Very effective in an operation like this. You see”—leaning in over his plate to pin her with his gaze—“we use their own sex drive against them, and if that seems unfair, well, dearie, I guess it is. But this isn’t a game. This is war. All-out war. And wave goodbye to the little piggies.”
“Okay,” Annabelle says, flashing a smile, “we can all agree with that — but what do you mean?”
“What we do is trap as many as we can and hope to find a couple females in estrus — these things’ll breed all year round in this climate, so it’s not so hard as you might think, especially if you cage a boar with them for a day or two. Then we radio-collar the females and let them go.” He’s leaning so far over the table he’s practically in her lap at this point and Alma has to remind herself, while sitting rigid and fighting down the gas pains, that it doesn’t really matter to her one way or the other if he finds a little solace wherever he can. “And you’d be surprised,” he says, “or maybe not, maybe it’s just what you’d figure. But each of those females will wind up with a whole parade of boars around her, rooting and fighting and sniffing her up — even the wiliest old scarred-up paranoid razorback’ll come charging up out of his hole for a chance at that — and it can bring in a whole bloody contingent of sows and juveniles too, whether they’re in heat or not, just to be close to the action. Like a pig disco.”
“And then?”
“Then we track them and move in.”
He pauses to take a sip of coffee, all three of them playing that scenario over in their heads, the abrasive hides, the mobile snouts, pig sex. “And believe me,” he says, “nobody gets out alive.”
Afterward, after she’s put the bill on her card and said her goodbyes all around, she finds herself in the deserted ladies’ room, the light of ten o’clock in the morning suffusing the high glass-block windows. She should be at work. And she will be, she promises herself, in just a minute — she’ll leave the car where it is and walk so she can get a little sun on her face and steal a march on the protestors, blending with the tourists and slipping in the service entrance before they even know she’s there — but for the moment she just needs to clear her head. And breathe, breathe as deeply as she can. The pain in her abdomen hasn’t gone away — in fact, it seems worse, as if she’s swallowed some sort of corrosive, Drano, Emma Bovary’s strychnine, brodifacoum. The image of a rat flits through her head, its feet churning, eyes fixed. It’s the coffee, it has to be. And the oatmeal. Whatever possessed her to order oatmeal? She should have stuck to toast, dry toast, but then the thought of it — brittle, abrasive, crushed and wadded and stuck in her throat — sends her banging into the stall and suddenly everything’s coming up, the coffee, the oatmeal, the dregs of her mother’s pasta and the thinnest disembodied hint of Onikoroshi sake, too much sake, formerly on the rocks.
Immediately she feels better. She flushes twice, watching the water swirl in the bowl, but the smell lingers even as the outer door wheezes open and footsteps approach in a sharp high-heeled tattoo. Her first thought is of Annabelle, but that can’t be because she watched her go down the steps in animated conversation with Frazier ten minutes ago. At least. The heels tap closer and she freezes while the handle of the stall briefly rattles and whoever it is pulls back the door of the adjoining stall and settles in with a sigh, followed by a fierce hissing rush of urine. Then she’s out of the stall and at the sink, cupping her hands for a sip of water to rinse her mouth, wishing she had a toothbrush — or breath mints; she makes a note to stop in the place downstairs to pick some up — and though she’d like to take a minute with her lipstick and hair, she doesn’t dare because the occupant of the other stall is noisily unraveling toilet paper and she doesn’t want to be seen. Not now. Not after being sick. So she’s out the door and down the stairs, thinking to freshen up in the restroom at the office, thinking she’ll get herself a Coke and maybe a package of crackers to settle her stomach. And the breath mints, definitely the breath mints.
Just below the restaurant, on the promenade that wraps around the marina, there’s a shop that caters to tourists and carries the usual cornucopia of things, from Dramamine, sunblock and cheap straw hats for the whale-watching crowd, to postcards, T-shirts and bobble-head dolls for the landlubbers, to the soft drinks, hot coffee, prepackaged sandwiches, crackers and cheese in the shrink-wrapped single-serving portion, breath mints, candy and tabloid magazines everybody needs all the time. She’s about to duck in the door — a drift of metallic balloons in a stand there, artificial poppies sprouting from a styrene ball in a papery blaze of red, T-shirts clothespinned to a wire like wash — when she catches herself. There’s a young woman, a girl, seated at one of the white plastic tables out front, her back to Alma, and her hair — dyed a uniform copper red — trailing down her back in a spill of trained curls. But isn’t it Alicia? Alicia doing what, taking her lunch break? She checks her watch. At ten-thirty in the morning?