“Bruce, you there?”
“Raccoons,” he says finally, as if reluctant to pronounce the name of the guilty party. “They’re after the worms — nightcrawlers, you know? Worms are part of the product, necessary, you understand? For aeration, fertilizer. You get rid of the raccoons, the holes’ll grow over in a week, you won’t even know they were there.”
But here it comes, rising in him, and he just can’t stop it. “You mean you’re not even going to get your ass over here and take a look? This a new lawn, new. I didn’t pay for any raggedy torn-up piece of second-rate shit.” There’s an unfortunate emphasis on the last epithet, because the pressure is ticking in him now, scraping away at the core of him like a thousand gray-gloved little claws. “I’ll cancel that check quicker than you can spit.”
The voice that comes back over the wire is so reduced he can barely hear it. “Ten-thirty,” Diaz says. “But I tell you, it’s raccoons. I could lay a whole new lawn tomorrow and it won’t make a lick of difference.”
Diaz — tall, with the build of a heavyweight gone to seed — appears half an hour later and stands with him on the lawn looking down sadly at the cored-out scatters of turf, the whole thing like a big green blanket the moths have got to, tells him he’ll replace the worst two strips at no cost at all, and then lifts his head to look him square in the eye. “But on condition you get rid of the raccoons first.”
“How do I do that?”
“Call Animal Control,” he says, and then he’s shuffling off to his pickup truck and the gate is opening magically for him and he’s gone.
Animal Control — amazingly, they answer on the first ring — informs him, through the offices of some overblown sandpaper-voiced clown half a step removed from a rent-a-cop, that they don’t trap raccoons. He’s in no mood. In the interval between the departure of Bruce Diaz and this phone call, Anise called to wonder what he was doing because maybe she was mistaken but hadn’t they agreed on eleven o’clock for him to come by for her and her mother to go wine-tasting over the hill in the Santa Ynez Valley, and he was maybe just a tad abrupt with her. But now, before he can respond—Well, what the fuck are we paying you for then? is on his lips — the person on the other end, the Animal Control officer, says, “But we’ve got the traps here and you’re welcome to come down and pick them up on overnight loan. Or we can do long-term too.”
This takes him by surprise. “By traps, what do you mean? They don’t, I don’t know, hurt the animal — do they?”
“No, no, no — these are Havahart traps, same as you use for rats and mice, only bigger.”
“A lot bigger, I hope.”
There’s an odd aspirated sound over the line as if the man on the other end were stifling a yawn. Or a laugh. Maybe he finds this funny. Maybe he’s in Animal Control for the sheer hilarity of it, just to get his rocks off. “You’re going to need a pickup or SUV,” the man says finally.
It takes him a moment, picturing it. And then, with the phone to his ear, already on his way out the door to back the Yukon out of the garage, he thinks to ask, “What about bait?”
“Peanut butter. Peanut butter’ll catch anything. They love it, let me tell you. But if you want to get fancy, just open a can of sardines, and you’ll have every raccoon in the neighborhood fighting to get in — and half the cats and opossums too.”
Again he pauses, the connection breathing static in his ear. One detail remains, and it looms up now like a submerged log riding a contrail of swamp gas. “Okay, yeah, but once I catch them, what do I do with them?”
Wine-tasting. To his mind it’s just a euphemism for getting shit-faced in the middle of the afternoon, the kind of activity tourists and busloads of retirees get a charge out of, but as it turned out he was glad of it. For a few hours, it took him out of himself, and after their second stop — at a place he loved, the cellars cold and dank, the great oaken casks standing in ranks like monuments to all those corrupted livers of the past — he really loosened up for the first time in what seemed like weeks. Not that he hadn’t felt the tension lift when they’d motored out of the marina the previous morning, but by the time they got to the island he was twisted up inside all over again. So the wine-tasting was a nice break. And he enjoyed Rita — she seemed to like him, respect him even, unlike his ex-wife’s mother, who regarded him out of her black Sicilian eyes as if he were the Antichrist and jumped up from her chair with a little gasp every time he stepped into the room, wailing, Oh, God, does he sit here?
They had a late lunch — supper, really — outdoors at a little café in the studiously quaint town of Santa Ynez, then drove back up 154 and through the San Marcos Pass in the decanted sunshine of the dying afternoon and wound their way down to Santa Barbara with the islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel laid out before them as if on a tray, the perspective shifting and shifting again as they wound their way through the switchbacks and watched the night begin to gather in a gray tumble of thickening gloom up ahead of them while the islands rode off to the west in red streamers of illumination. Rita remarked on how pretty it was and Anise chimed in to agree. “Maybe I ought to write a song about it,” Anise murmured, her voice gone whispery in collusion. “Call it ‘Floating Islands,’” her mother said, and though he was calm, floating himself, on an even keel, he couldn’t help working up a little venom: “How about ‘Killing Floor’? Or no. That one’s already taken, right?”
At home, still half-looped, he parked the Beemer in the garage beside the Yukon—“Let’s go to your place, and then maybe walk down to one of the restaurants in the village,” Anise had said — and he’d said that that sounded just fine, and he was feeling no pain at all. Then he remembered the cages and he led the women out onto the lawn in the fading light to examine the depredations of the raccoons and it became a sort of game to position the cages, set the triggers and smear peanut butter all over the bait trays. At one point Anise had gone into the house for a bottle of wine and he shouted to her to see if there were any sardines in the pantry — there were — and when she returned they laid three sardines atop the smears of peanut butter in each cage, then stood back, satisfied with their work, sipping wine while the night deepened around them.
And now, at dawn, he awakens with a lurch, because something’s wrong, something’s definitely wrong, but what is it? He’s been dreaming. . what? Of pursuit, terror, faces out of the past diachronically summoned to cluck over his failures and inadequacies. A height. A drop. Laughter as ragged as hate. He sits up. Shoves the dreads up out of his face. His scalp itches. His stomach curdles. He has a mild headache, a fact of which he’s just becoming aware in a stealthy crepitating way. While he’s at the bathroom sink, staring numbly at his reflection in the mirror and mechanically filling and draining two glasses of tap water, he remembers the traps.
Filled with purpose, he ducks back into the bedroom to pull on a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt and slip into his sandals — made of synthetic materials, not leather, because leather just allows the killers to profit all the more — and then he’s out the door and into the cool of the morning, shutting the dogs in behind him so they won’t run on ahead and mess with the traps. He doesn’t really expect to have caught anything, not yet, not the first night, but he finds himself quickening his pace nonetheless. Yesterday, when he picked up the traps, the Animal Control officer — he of the blowhard’s voice, hoarse, too-loud and far too pleased with itself — had answered the question he’d posed over the phone. “What do you do with them?” the man had thrown back at him. He was skinny as a bread-stick, his eyes close-set and his hair slicked down over his scalp like the pelt of a sea otter. “That’s your decision. But we can’t take them here. And it’s illegal to possess wildlife.”