Is his heart pounding? You bet. “Talk about high blood pressure,” he says, and tries to laugh. The women are looking back over their shoulders, all the exhilaration blown out of them. “Are they coming after us?” he asks, keeping his voice level.
He won’t look, in the same way he won’t shift his eyes to the rearview when a cop’s behind him on the freeway, on the theory that if you’re too hyper, they’ll nail you. Be respectful, let them know you’re aware of their presence, and keep the speed pinned at sixty-five, no hurry, no fears.
“No,” Anise says, “no, I don’t think so.”
Straight out, easy on the throttle, the blistered back-running slope of San Pedro Point in bright definition out there beyond the bow. He doesn’t say another word. Just watches the point come to them as he changes course ever so slightly, bearing north and east as if he’s heading back to the coast, and that’s just what Anise and her mother are thinking, that they’re done for the day, outmanned, finished, heading home. And then the cove disappears in their wake and the Coast Guard cutter with it — the snitches at Scorpion must not have radioed after all — and when the point is dwindling in their wake he changes course again, bearing west now, retracing the route that brought them here from Scorpion.
Anise and her mother are deep in conversation, every last bump and spike and guano-spattered tumble of rock bringing on a flood of recollection, and they haven’t noticed the change of course — or at least they haven’t mentioned it. But now, when his intention is unmistakable, Rita looks up and says, “Where you heading? Back around again?”
He nods, conscious of Anise’s eyes on him. “I thought we’d just go over and check out Prisoners’ for a bit, on the TNC property. They can’t be everywhere, can they?”
Prisoners’ Harbor, the main port of entry on Santa Cruz, lies on the north shore, just past the narrow eastern neck that gives the island a fanciful look from the air, as if it were a big dun plesiosaur stretching out its blocky head in pursuit of some swift-finned creature of the deep. There’s a long stretch of beach opening out from a tumble of hills and the valley that runs back three miles to the main ranch, where the defunct winery still stands, and where the ranch house, with its pool and gardens and outbuildings, gives the Conservancy a base of operations that feels like a remnant of paradise. He’s been there, twice, in happier times, before the killing started anyway, and the way the ranch house is situated to take in the views of its own private valley in a spot erased from the memory of the world moved something in him. He felt a desperate stab of covetousness, as if after ranging all over the globe he’d found his one true home, only to discover it belonged to somebody else. He wanted it. Wanted to sell the house he’d bought, mortgage his life and buy the place so he could pull all the doors shut behind him and say screw you to the world. Sure. Close it down. Live like Adam. Or the wild man who rowed out from the coast at the turn of the last century with nothing but a box of apples, a slingshot and a couple of fishhooks and took up residence on the barren shit-strewn lump of Gull Rock, gobbling up gull’s eggs and whatever he could bring down with a sling-propelled stone. He wore nothing but a ragged loincloth, winter and summer. Grew out his hair and beard. Watched the sky.
Of course, that’s all just a dream, an adolescent fantasy. Everything, every square foot of everyplace, belongs to somebody, and any contemporary wild man — or entertainment center magnate with the flicker of an idea of even thinking about going wild — would be hunted down and hustled off to the bughouse in padded restraints. He’s reflecting on that, on wildness, on peace and eternity and the natural state of man, as they round Coche Point and motor close in along the coruscating arc of China Beach, using the headland behind them as a screen in the event that the Coast Guard cutter does in fact get word and come looking for them, and between bites of his sandwich he turns to Rita to see what she has to say about it. “Did you ever hear any stories about the wild man that used to live out here?” He chews, swallows, picturing himself in a loincloth and shaking a spear over his head. “Years ago, I mean. Turn of the century?”
She considers a moment, her eyes drifting off to some other destination before sharpening with the recollection. “Francisco used to talk about him,” she says, hunched forward over her knees, beer can in one hand, half-eaten sandwich in the other, her head gently swaying with the movement of the boat. “It was like a legend or something, only real. This was in the early days, by the way, back before Prohibition when they had the winery going and all that. His father — Francisco’s father — told him the guy was a poacher, stealing sheep to eat what he could of and leave the rest for the ravens.”
“He wasn’t right in the head, was that it? I mean, sucking gull’s eggs and sleeping out in the open and all the rest of it, the loincloth—”
“He was a Dane, but the shortest Dane on record — only five feet tall. Or that’s what they say. And not only was he poaching sheep, he killed foxes, skunks, the island blue jay, whatever he could get hold of, and, I guess, just cooked it over a driftwood fire and dug in.”
“Roast pork,” he says automatically, and he means to be funny, or at least ironic, but he can’t bring himself to grin or even smile because the thought sets him off all over again. They’re out there now, he thinks, blowing away animals. And we’re laughing about it. In the distance he can make out the pier at Prisoners’, a strip of nothing out there in the sun glaze, but no boats at least. And no helicopters.
“So he was a carnivore,” Anise puts in, and she’s wearing a sour grin, needling her mother. “Just like you, Mom.”
Rita grins back at her, then digs in her breast pocket for a pair of opaque iridescent blue sunglasses and claps them over her eyes as if she’s going into hiding. “That’s right,” she says, “because that’s the way we were made.” She pauses to take a sip of her beer. “And I just love the taste of lamb.”
“Yeah,” Anise says, the grin gone now, “and meat is murder.”
“I think I’ve heard that one before.”
“Well, it is.”
“You didn’t seem to feel that way when we were living at the ranch.”
“Come on, I was just a child. I didn’t know any better.” She’s fixed on her mother now, twin creases of irritation emerging between her eyes. “But you should. After what we saw out there, I mean just that one day with the ravens and those hunters? You might not have known it, but that was the biggest trauma of my life—”
“That and Oxnard Junior High.”
“I’m not joking. I’m telling you: animals are conscious. They feel pain. They have the same right to life you have.”
“I remember one time”—Rita says, ignoring the appeal and lifting one dripping boot to brace an ankle on her knee before settling back in her seat with a sigh—“during shearing, when those vaqueros came out and raised a little hell after all the wool was in and they roasted a kid — the head, remember that? They put the head right on the coals and then split it open for the brains—”