When she’d put her rhetorical question to him, she wrapped an arm round Anise and said, “Now that Bax is dead and probably Francisco too, I don’t think there’s anybody alive knows them — or at least the one we’re heading for — better.” She broke into a smile and turned her face to Anise’s as if she were going to kiss her — and she did, on the tip of her nose, a quick compression and release of the lips that made him uneasy in a way he couldn’t quite pin down. “Right, honey?”
But that’s all right. Everything’s all right. The water’s a cloud and he’s floating on it now, living in the moment, getting away, and he feels his mood lightening by the minute. There’s not much chop. The sun’s unencumbered by even the hint of a cloud or the slightest tatter of fog. The dolphins come gamboling. The engine never misses a beat. And if he hammers it all the way out it’s because he’s eager to get there if only to reconnoiter, but he’s hoping — they’re all hoping — to be able to land at Scorpion, or if not Scorpion, then Smugglers’, so Rita can see for the first time in all these years what’s left of the place. So she can reminisce, spin stories, talk about sheep and ravens and the way it was sitting round a bonfire on summer nights strumming a guitar and blending her voice with her rangy tall pubescent daughter’s while the moon rose up full-bellied out of the channel and all the dwarf foxes and skunks pinned back their ears and howled. Or barked. Or whatever it was they were capable of. For the most part, Anise stays out on deck with her mother, the two of them chattering away, Rita’s mood so airy she might have swallowed his entire bottle of Xanax, and he doesn’t mind. It’s his pleasure — his privilege — to escort her and if that involves hearing the old stories over and over, that’s fine with him. If it makes Rita happy — and here he steals a look over his shoulder to see the two of them seated in deck chairs, their heads together and the wind at their hair — it makes Anise happy. And what makes Anise happy absorbs him totally. Or so he tells himself as he pushes the throttle forward and the cove at Scorpion heaves into sight.
He knows better than to anchor before he can sweep his binoculars over the pier and the beach and the beaten dirt trail that curves around behind the rock face on the right, because that’s where the house is and that’s where the rangers will be, if the rangers are here at all. Rita, windblown, flushed, is leaning way out over the rail as the boat swings round in the chop. She’s got her own binoculars, a little 8 × 22 birdwatchers’ pair she pulled out of her purse. “There,” she cries, her voice pitched high with excitement, “isn’t that the Jeep? Bax’s Jeep?”
And now Anise is in on the act, a hand shielding her eyes till her mother passes her the binoculars. She takes a moment to focus, steadying herself over the flexion of her legs. “I don’t know,” she says, “is that a patch of yellow or just my imagination?”
From where he sits at the bridge he can see nothing but a rusting heap of old ranch equipment the Park Service dragged down away from the house and left there in the tall weeds above tide line. They’d probably meant to haul it all away, wipe the place clean, but then they would have had to bring a crane out to lift the wreckage onto a barge and transport it back to the coast, so some Park Service genius decided they ought to just leave it there as a curiosity, a historical artifact, a reminder of the times when people like Anise’s mother were out here running sheep. Maybe he can make out something in the pile that might once have been a Jeep, but he’d have to use his imagination to force the lines to coalesce and he’s too busy jumping the binoculars from one point to another, looking for authority figures, for hunters, guns, hounds, helicopters, to pay it more than passing attention.
So he decides to drop anchor and lower the dinghy. What are they going to do — shoot him? He sees nobody, nothing, not a flicker of movement but for the shorebirds doing their thing in quick-footed runnels of color. The outboard fires up right away, a long smooth swell rocking beneath them, and in the next moment they’re planing toward the pier, Anise and her mother riveted ahead, their faces tight with anticipation, and for a moment he sees them both as children, Girl Scouts maybe, and here’s their field trip, their wienie roast and the return of the native all rolled in one. Of course, there’s a sign there, posted on the face of the pier, right where the tourist boat bumps up against the crossbeams to offload, and it tells them what they already know: ISLAND CLOSED TO ALL ACTIVITIES/NO LANDING UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. BY AUTHORITY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
But they’re right there now, thirty feet away, Anise demurring—“Maybe we shouldn’t. .”—and her mother, Rita, in a soft coaxing voice, saying, “What’s the harm? I mean, do you hear any gunshots? Do you see anybody? If we could just — I just want to feel the dirt under my feet, that’s all. For five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
And he’s thinking: The sons of bitches. And shoving the tiller to swing the bow abruptly and chase along the beach. Shouting to make himself heard over the noise of the motor, he says, “Maybe if we pull up on the beach we can always say we didn’t see the sign.” Spray shoots up. He eases off on the throttle and then they’re riding the gentle crest of a wave up onto the beach as he tips back the motor and there’s a long shudder and groan of the sand beneath them, everything glinting in the wet, shells, stones, the tiny scrambling things that make their living in the wash.
Rita’s already out of the boat, quick-limbed and agile, tugging at the braided yellow nylon line to pull them up and away from the sea. Anise springs out behind her and now he’s on the beach too, all three of them scooting the inflatable across the sand.
“Wow,” Rita says, hands on her hips, not even winded, “just look at it!” What she’s seeing goes back twenty years and more, but what he’s seeing is the six-foot sign pounded into the sand, a duplicate of the one on the pier, made out of the same sheet metal as a road sign, and before he can register the next one down the beach and the one beyond that he’s wondering if the convicts up at Soledad or wherever had to pound it out in metal shop. Strange twist if they did, forming those proscriptive letters behind bars to keep people out of a place with no bars on it at all.
It is then — Rita exclaiming, Anise following her up the slope toward the house, which is just visible from this angle, some five hundred yards off, adobe, white walls, green tiles anchoring the roof, the sun throwing javelins at everything — that the two jerks in Park Service regalia come hustling out the door. He’s startled, despite himself, because this is just what he expected, isn’t it? His voice is a bark, harsh, snapping like a dog’s. “Anise! Hey, get your ass back in the boat!”
She’s fifty feet ahead of him and her mother’s fifty feet beyond that.
“Rita!” he shouts, and when she turns he stabs a finger in the direction of the men in the distance and then sweeps his arm over his head like a third-base coach waving the runners home. There’s a moment of inaction, Anise’s wide wondering face, her mother’s stacked in duplicate behind hers, and then they’re both running and he’s running too, for the boat, for the line, to haul the thing back in the water and get off before he has to listen to yet another lecture — or worse, go through the whole sick charade of another arrest.