“I don’t want to hear it.”
“—and that good rich creamy pale fat you used to spread on a slice of oven-hot bread like it was butter. Did you know that, Dave? Anise used to be a regular little mutton glutton.”
“Yeah, well, me too,” he says, trying to play peacemaker. “Until I saw the light. But anyway, you know we’ve got to stop this pig hunt — I mean, it’s crazy. Nobody, not even the guy that runs the slaughterhouse, would want to see animals hunted down for nothing. Or you either, right?”
What he’s trying to ask is whether she’s on their side or not, but Anise jumps in to answer for her: “No, no way. She’s as opposed to it as we are. Anybody would be.”
They’re both looking to her, the harbor running up on them, waves creaming along the shore and the chaparral above it patchy and parched and waiting for the rains, when she sets down the beer in the cup holder in front of her and raises her head to level a savage uncompromising glare first on him and then her daughter. “Of course I am,” she says, spitting out the words. “It’s a waste of good meat.”
That night, after taking them both out for a very pricey dress-up dinner at a new French restaurant Anise seemed to have heard about somewhere, during which he got into an unfortunate debate with the waiter over the way his sole meunière had been prepared, which he’d had to send back twice, Anise clucking over the fate of the fish—“If you’re going to commit to vegetarianism you can’t go halfway, Dave, because that’s just cowardly”—and Rita giving him a sour smile while lifting dainty slices of all-but-raw filet mignon to her lips, he drops them off at Anise’s apartment without comment and drives home to inspect the new lawn. And if he drives too fast and if a cop he vaguely recognizes pulls him over and asks him how much he’s had to drink and does he know the speed limit on city streets is thirty-five miles an hour and lets him off with a warning, it’s all because the day has been, well, complicated. He’s tracing the chain of events that blasted his mood to fragments — the frustration at Prisoners’ Harbor when the helicopter appeared out of nowhere to buzz the boat till he swung round and nosed it out to sea, the blaring circumambient voice warning him that “THE ISLAND IS CLOSED TO ALL VISITORS, REPEAT, THE ISLAND IS CLOSED,” Anise taking so long to get dressed they missed their reservation by forty-five minutes and had to prostrate themselves before a little frog bastard of a snooty maître d’ before they got seated, and then the waiter, and the fish and the way Rita sucked at her filet mignon as if she were draining it of blood drop by drop — when the gate pulls back and he glides into the driveway to the streaming welcome of the motion-sensor light mounted over the garage door.
It’s past midnight. He’s tired. He’s aggravated. He’s not thinking deeply. The car door eases open, the radio dies on a jam from some anonymous band he must have heard ten thousand times, and why, in Christ’s name, can’t the programmers come up with something different, something obscure and new and unfamiliar, the B sides, nothing but B sides, just to give everybody a break before they go out and shoot themselves? He steps out on the firm hardscape of the cobbled brick drive, feeling the familiar boater’s illusion that the ground is moving beneath him. For a moment he just stands there, taking in the night chill, the stars, listening to the silence and the muffled drone of the freeway. And then, just as he’s about to dig a flashlight out of the trunk and stroll out onto the lush new yielding carpet of the turf, to admire it and congratulate himself on his decision to go with sod instead of scattering grass seed and worrying over birds and weeds and bald patches till it comes in, he becomes aware of movement there, out along the perimeter of the yard.
His first thought — and here he steels himself, ready to call out a warning or better yet a threat — is for intruders, burglars, thieves, but then he sees the shadows there, two of them, humped close to the ground, and thinks of the dogs, but the dogs are in the house where he left them. It takes him a moment before he understands that these are nature’s animals, wildlife, come to enjoy what he’s provided for them. Very slowly, with exaggerated caution, he slides along the length of the car, and with both hands, one to turn the key and the other to keep the lid from springing all the way up, he quietly slips open the trunk. There’s a wince of escaping light, and then he has the flashlight in hand, thinking, Coyote? Or just a neighbor’s dog? as he eases it shut again, stifling the click of the lock with the pressure of his hand.
He forces himself to stand stock-still, listening, until the smallest sounds begin to drift to him out of the shadows. What does he hear? A soft wet swishing, the faintest tick of breathing or mastication, then a rustle, a soughing, then nothing. He’s almost afraid to lift his feet and so he shuffles forward, an inch at a time, the darkened cylinder of the flashlight held out before him like a homing device — he wants to get closer before switching it on, wants to be as close as he can before the light explodes and the animals scatter. He can feel the excitement building in him, the lure of the strange, the recondite, the hidden world that prowls through the dead hours of the night. A step closer, then another. And then, at the edge of the lawn, shadows enfolding shadows as if there were infinite depth to the night, as if the night were an ocean, as if he were underwater, in a cave, feeling for signs of the blind cave fish, he flicks on the light.
Two raccoons, their eyes flaming as if they were the source of the light and not he, stare up at him, the gray gloves of their paws arrested and revealed for the fraction of a moment, and then they turn away from him as if he weren’t there at all, and go on with their business. Which, he sees now, is digging. They bend forward, paw at the turf, then rock back on their haunches, feeding something into the dark absence of their mouths. He runs the light over the belly of the lawn, each individual blade of grass clutching its shadow, and sees, in fact, that the new lawn is already pocked with holes, moonscaped, as if it were the apron of a driving range. It takes him a moment — this is nature, these are wild creatures, he is the interloper here and they the inheritors of the hills that have run continuous up the coast all the way to Alaska from the time the glaciers lost their traction — before he shouts out. “Get out of that! Get!” he cries, trying to pin them with the beam and clap his hands at the same time, running now and watching the two shifting golden forms pull back reluctantly and scoot over the ruined turf to the wall, which is no impediment at all.
In the morning, after a closer inspection of the damage, he dials the number of Bruce Diaz, the friend of Wilson’s whose crew installed the lawn. He lets the phone ring eight times before hanging up — patience is not one of his virtues — and dialing again. On the fifth ring a woman answers in Spanish—“¿Bueno?”—and his mind goes momentarily numb until he can think to say, “¿Quiero hablar con Bruce? ¿Por favor?”
There’s a shuffling and wheeze, voices mingling and separating, the muffled bark of a dog. Then Bruce’s voice, too loud, comes hurtling at him: “Yeah?”
“Bruce?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Dave LaJoy.”
There’s a silence.
“You installed a new turf lawn for me yesterday?”
“Yeah, sure. Dave. Okay. Sure.”
“Well, it’s all full of holes. I mean, I get home at midnight, I haven’t even had a chance to see the job yet, and I turn on the flashlight and all I see is holes and bunches of dirt and dead grass piled up.”
Another silence.