Before she can think what to do — Is it Alicia? Is she really prepared to question her, discipline her, wonder why she’s not at her desk in the absence of her boss, opening the mail, answering the phone, for God’s sake? — the light shifts as if someone’s put a hand over the shutter of a lens and a man comes backing out the door, a cardboard tray with two cups of coffee and a package of powdered doughnuts held out gingerly before him. But she knows him, doesn’t she? The earring, the goatee, the incongruous shock of the blue eyes in a Latino’s face, or part Latino, Chicano, mestizo, whatever you call it, and who—?
And it comes clear. Because he recognizes her in that instant and in that instant she knows him, knows him in a flash of recollection, even as Alicia turns her head to look over her shoulder to see what’s keeping him. Alicia, her features gone slack and her eyes retreating. Alicia, shrinking. Alicia revealed. But he — Wilson, that’s his name, Wilson— he’s unfazed. He saunters up to the table, sets the tray down, and looks back to where Alma stands arrested at the door to the shop in which her Coca-Cola Regular, cheese and cracker combination and breath mints await. Then, so casually he might have been posing for a snapshot, he flashes her a smile — a beautiful, full-lipped, effervescent smile, as if they’re the best friends in the world — and slowly pulls up the chair beside Alicia, puts an arm around her shoulders, and draws her to him.
Prisoners’ Harbor
He’s at home, glancing up from the morning paper in what he likes to call the sunroom to look out the window on the crew he’s hired to lay sod over the desiccated remnant of the lawn. The whole operation has him conflicted — lawns are bad news for the environment, yes, but he’s got to keep up property values, or his property’s value anyway, and he did turn down two contractors who wanted to go the herbicide route in favor of this crew, amigos of Wilson, who dug everything up and then laid down plastic sheeting to stifle the weeds — but the bottom line is that the old lawn, the one he inherited when he bought the place back in 1993, was looking pretty ratty. Now, with the sod — and they’ve already rolled out two long dense sections of it, like carpet — he’ll have a deep blue-green Kentucky-perfect lawn right out of one of those glossy magazines, and he won’t have to wait for it to grow in either. And it’s not a question of vanity or keeping up with the neighbors or anything like that — it’s about protecting your investment, because this house is the best investment he’s ever made, a Spanish mission-style beauty situated on a hill, two stories high with carved wooden beams in the main rooms and intricate wrought-iron grillwork everywhere you look, nearly five thousand square feet of living space set on an acre and a half, and now, twelve years after he bought it, worth four times what he paid. He couldn’t have done any better investing in a gold mine.
The sunroom is on the second floor, facing south, and he can look out beyond the humped backs of the Mexican laborers — three of them, two bareheaded, one in an off-white baseball cap with El Jefe looped across the crown in what looks to be black Magic Marker — to the stucco wall in front and over the roof of the house across the street and out to the ocean, five blocks distant. Today — it’s the end of October, the air clear and sharp — he can see all the way out to Santa Cruz Island, the channel spread out beneath him like a placid little pond and the oil rigs like stepping-stones lined up along the shore. Of course, this time of year the winds can come up and make things hazardous out there in a heartbeat, everybody knows that, and if Anise doesn’t show up soon he’s going to have to call and remind her of that fact. But the forecast is for light to moderate winds and he’s trying to reform his behavior, trying not to be so controlling, so quick to explode — she’ll get here when she gets here, he’s thinking, lifting a spoon of granola to his mouth and watching the faintest little rumor of a breeze finger the leaves of the trees along the road.
Her mother’s in town — Rita, flown in all the way from Port Townsend, Washington — and while he doesn’t care much about that one way or the other, Anise does, Anise certainly does, and when they arrive, if they arrive, if they can ever get their shit together and understand that winds rule the channel and sunset comes early this time of year, he will drive them down to the marina in his Beemer, hop aboard the Paladin and take them out to the island for the day. For pleasure. For a day off from walking the picket line outside the Park Service offices and for the not incidental purpose of testing the limits of the Park Service’s authority: the island is officially closed to all comers because they want to do their killing in private.
But just the thought of it is enough to set him off. Down goes the spoon, the bowl, the newspaper, milk sloshing, the wicker table trembling under the violence of it, and he’s on his feet and across the saltillo floor, pacing now, because he just can’t sit, can’t eat, can’t read. The dogs, conscious of trouble, get up from their beds in the corner and come to him, tails thwapping at their bony haunches, but he takes no comfort in them. It’s as if deep inside him a hammer has dropped, the rush of hate and rage and frustration shooting from his gut right on up to the top of his head to inflame the roots of his hair till they ache, actually ache. Every lawsuit he’s brought has been thrown out of court because the judges work for the system and the system is the National Park Service. And now they’re closing the island in their typical imperious way, no matter what the will of the people says, no matter how many petitions come across their desks or how many protestors stand out there chanting, because they’re confident no one’s going to cross that channel when the water gets rough. With the Civil Rights Movement you could get on a bus and drive down to Mississippi, with Vietnam you could bring people to Washington in cars, buses, trains and jet planes. But not here. And don’t they know it. The sons of bitches.
Just then — the workers out there unrolling the sod, the wind stirring the trees and his mind going up in flames — he sees Anise’s car at the gate and Anise’s pretty white bare arm reaching out to punch in the code that will roll it back on its wheels so she can enter, with her mother, and the day can begin.
It can’t be more than fifty degrees out on the water, the wind chill dropping the temperature a whole lot lower than that, but Anise’s mother insists on sitting out on the deck the whole way across. He tried to tell her it was going to be chilly before they’d even climbed out of the car, but she dismissed him. “You think I don’t know these islands?” she said, her eyebrows lifting till they floated on the furrows that ran up into her hairline. Her face was a template of Anise’s, uncanny, exact in every detail, as if her daughter had been cloned instead of generated in the usual way — the same broad forehead, the round face and strong chin, eyes that jumped out at you from ten feet away, the perfect shells of her ears and the sexy slight eversion of the upper lip, the whole of it framed by a whipping hurricane of dirty-blond hair that was going to gray in long electric streaks. She was tall, square-shouldered, leaner than Anise, but built, still built, though she must have been in her mid-fifties. At least. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, a short-sleeved blouse and a bandanna at her throat. The blistered leather jacket, fleece-lined, her concession to the weather, was knotted round her waist. She wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry.