by Boyle, T. C.
And what about her? What about the baby?
I’ll call, he’d said, lamely. And I’ll visit every fourth week. Or fifth. Whenever they rotate us back to shore.
And marriage? Commitment? Love, support, empathy—friendship, even? All that was on hold. Indefinitely.
That first night they’d wrangled in the car the whole way back from Ventura—thirty minutes that seemed like thirty hours—and by the time he turned into the driveway they weren’t talking. He stalked through the door, flung his backpack down in the entryway and locked himself in the bathroom. She could hear the thump of his crusted jeans hitting the floor, the sigh of the smoked-glass door on its abraded hinges and then the wheeze and rattle of the shower. He was washing the grit of the island off him, running water down the drain till it went cold, purifying himself—and for what? If he thought she was just going to dab perfume behind her ears, slip into a see-through negligee and give him what he wanted as if nothing had happened, he was out of his mind. She was so wrought up she was trembling, actually trembling, as she set the teapot on the stove, thinking to calm herself with a cup of herbal tea and maybe one or two of the chocolate-covered biscotti she was always craving yet denied herself because of her waistline, but that didn’t matter now, did it? She slammed the pot down on the burner, her elbow kinetic, her wrist snapping angrily. Why did everything have to be such a struggle? Why?
The tea was too hot but she drank it anyway, listening to the infuriating hiss of the shower and reminding herself that she hadn’t eaten because he’d denied her dinner, created a scene, acted like a cretin. Like a shit. A little shit who refused to grow up, who wasn’t a man and never would be. After fifteen minutes—he wasn’t showering, he was running the whole of Cachuma Reservoir down the sewer and out to sea—she pushed herself up from the kitchen table, looped her purse over one shoulder and went up the street to Giancarlo’s for a pizza margherita and salad. Giancarlo fluttered over her, too delicate to ask after Tim or why she was dining alone, and she had a glass of Chianti, a single glass, that was all, and by the time she left to walk back to the condo she’d begun to feel better, if only marginally. Tim’s reaction had been petty, mean, hurtful—inexcusable—but the whole thing had been so sudden he hadn’t had a chance to collect himself, to think things through, to think of her, of how she was feeling. He would come around, she was sure he would. Just give him a chance. He was her man. The father of the child growing inside her. She loved him. He loved her. She was sure of it.
She picked up her pace, envisioning him there in the steamed-over bathroom, stepping out of the shower, his muscles lean and workhardened, a sheen of dampness caught in the hair that framed his nipples, dripping from his chin, his moistened lashes. The lights of the shops and restaurants were suspended in a soft nimbus of mist. The eucalyptus rose white-limbed out of the shadows. Cars eased by. A jogger went up the opposite side of the street in a silent silken glide. She was alive all over again, her arms swinging wide, her heels ringing on the pavement. By the time she got to the front door, key in hand, she was thinking of reconciliation, and beyond reconciliation, seduction—she’d been without sex for ten days herself—and of the negligee tucked in the back of her underwear drawer.
The key turned in the lock, the door swung open. She didn’t notice that he’d moved the backpack—that the backpack was gone—not till she called out his name and got no answer. There were two wet towels balled up on the bathroom floor. The closet door stood open and his mud-hardened boots lay there on edge in a spill of dirty laundry. His favorite shirt, the one she’d given him—black with an overlay of tropical flowers in bright slashes of yellow—was missing, as was the jacket he liked to wear with it. Ditto his red Converse.
She stayed up till twelve, watching a movie she barely registered, and then went to bed. He never came home. Not that night or the next night either and she wouldn’t call him on his cell, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. To hell with him. He could wither away and die for all she cared. She went about her business as if he didn’t exist, cool with Alicia, indifferent to the protestors, driving to work and back in a trance, cooking for one and losing herself in Micah Stroud and mind-numbing made-for-TV movies. When she got home from work on the third day there were signs that he’d been there—the boots were gone, replaced by the Converse, and the dirty laundry had disappeared—but he didn’t come home that night either. She called her mother because she had to talk to someone, and her mother, to the accompaniment of ice cubes arhythmically clicking against the rim of her cocktail glass, spent a vodka-fueled hour and a half assailing his character, his looks, his upbringing and intelligence, but all it did was open up the hole inside her till it was so wide she could have dropped all of Santa Cruz Island into it. Finally, on the fifth day, he left her a note pinned to the refrigerator beneath a magnet shaped like a fox in profile. I’m sorry, the note read, I know I’m wrong but I can’t help the way I feel. What it is, is I’m just not ready for this. He’d signed it, redundantly, Sorry, Tim.
The next day he was there when she got home and there were flowers on the table and he’d made her a meal and they went straight to bed, both of them starved for it, and he told her he loved her, but still he held back and the next day he was gone again. They talked it out, over and over, face-to-face and on the phone too. Her position was that she was going to have the baby whether he liked it or not and his position was that he wasn’t going to be boxed in and certainly wasn’t going to bow to any ultimatums. In the end he badgered her into making an appointment at Planned Parenthood—Seven billion people, he kept droning, seven billion—and he went with her and talked to the counselor and tried to get her to pin down a day for the procedure. She saw his point—she agreed with him—but her body resisted. November wore on. He was staying with a friend—male—downtown. Every few days he was there when she got home and they made love out of desperation, but it was sad and lonely and mechanical and they both held back, resentful, angry, at war, until finally he announced that he was going to the Farallones and she was left to do what she had to do all on her own.
And now it’s February and she’s sick in the mornings and her body is transforming itself day by day to accommodate the fetus growing inside her and nobody at work knows a thing about it. She’s been out to the island three times since the first of the year, twice with Annabelle and once with Fred Sampson, the biologist from UCSB who’s overseeing the captive breeding program for the foxes, and if she had to stand in the stern of the boat and lose her breakfast over the rail, it was only to be expected because the channel’s notoriously rough in winter, everybody knows that. The good news is that the foxes are thriving. The first six pairs, captured and caged in ’02, produced five kits, three of which were released back into the wild, only to fall prey to the goldens. Late that year they brought in another three pairs, which in addition to the two kits held back and the original six pairs, gave them ten breeding pairs. In all, to this point, four years later, they’ve produced eighty-five offspring, happy enough to breed up their numbers when there’s an abundance of fox chow, handpicked berries, freshly trapped mice and quail eggs available and nothing with claws and wings homing in on them from above. With the goldens gone, or mostly gone, and the balds re-established, it looks as if all the foxes can be released by spring. As for the pigs, Frazier and his hunters—twelve of them, with a lean scrabbling contingent of two dozen dedicated dogs—are working their way systematically through each of the five zones, far ahead of schedule.
Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday, and she observes it alone, with Chinese takeout and a laptop bristling with work she’s brought home from the office, and she’s not thinking of Tim, definitely not thinking of Tim, even when the phone rings at ten past nine and she jumps up from the couch to catch it on the second ring only to hear her mother’s voice on the other end of the line wondering if she’s still having stomach problems. On Friday she has to leave work early for her monthly appointment with Dr. Chandrasoma (“Everyth
ing’s normal, not to worry”), and at sunup the following morning she finds herself driving down to Ventura under a stripped skeleton of cloud and a low uncertain sun, on her way to the boat that will take her out to the island for three days of hiking the fence lines and following Frazier on his rounds. As an observer, strictly as an observer. To get a feel for things, check up on the progress, see what it means when you pay somebody else to pull the trigger.
It’s the kind of day when the weather could go either way. She was up and out the door before the paper arrived, so she hasn’t seen the forecast—not that it matters, since she’ll be going out on that boat whether it rains in obliterating sheets or the sun hangs up there in the sky as if she were transported back to the beach in Guam. She hasn’t thrown up yet, and that’s a positive, but then she hasn’t put anything on her stomach either. She’s watching the ocean as she drives, the islands fading in and out of visibility through the dirt-spattered windows, whitecaps kicking up as far out as she can see. It’ll be rough, rain or shine. And she’ll vomit. So what else is new?
Annabelle is waiting for her in the parking lot, her feet propped up on the dashboard of her two-tone Mini, sipping a Starbucks chai latte and leafing through the newspaper. She glances up when Alma pulls in beside her, her face neutral—she must not be wearing her contacts—until she recognizes her, gives a little two-fingered wave and slides out of the car. “All set?” she asks, already smiling in at the window as Alma frees herself from the seat restraint and twists round to extract her backpack from the rear seat.
She’s running through a mental checklist of the things she’s packed, feeling the first stirrings of the excitement that always steals over her when she has the chance to get out from behind her desk and back into the field, which is where she belongs. Tim might not think so. But then Tim didn’t do three years in Guam either. “Yeah,” she says, emerging from the car to weigh the backpack in one hand and slam the door with the other, “I guess I’ve got everything. Think it’s going to rain?”
Ducking one shoulder to readjust her strap, Annabelle winces momentarily before straightening up and arching her spine to readjust the weight. She’s wearing her backcountry outfit—a fawn jacket and matching shorts that look like they came off a mannequin at Banana Republic, three-hundred-dollar hiking boots, a red bandanna and a Tilley canvas, also in fawn. “I wouldn’t bet against it,” she says, as they simultaneously swing round to click their remotes and lock their cars behind them before starting off across the lot for the boat, not a protestor in sight.
“So where’re all our friends?” Alma wonders aloud. “In church?”
Long-legged, striding, her hair pulled back in a swaying ponytail that fans out across her lollipop-red High Sierra pack, Annabelle gives her a grin because they’re on the same page here, equal opportunity targets. “It’s Saturday.”
“Right. I guess they must be sleeping off their hangovers then. I mean, what time did you get up Saturday mornings in college?”
“Oh, I don’t know—ten?”
“More like noon,” Alma puts in.
“Noon? How about one? Or two, do I hear two?”
And this is funny, very funny, at quarter past seven on a forty-ninedegree February morning with the refrigerated scent of the sea riding in off the water and the prospect of three days on the island unscrolling before them, three days free of condo, supermarket, office and car, and as they descend the ramp to the boat, they’re laughing. Or no: giggling. Like schoolgirls on a field trip.
The Park Service boat is substantial, no question about it, but it’s a whole lot smaller than the Islander and doesn’t have anywhere near its stability. At first, Alma sits at the table in the main cabin with Annabelle and the three college girls on their way out to relieve the three college girls who’ve been tending the caged foxes for minimum wage and course credit for the past two weeks, but everything seems closed-in and overheated and she has to go out on the stern and stand in the wind till the nausea passes. It’s cold. The sky, which seemed so promising earlier, is beginning to cloud over. Dolphins ride the wake, surfing the swell and leaping up to surf it again. A pair of humpbacks—or are they great blues?—spout off in the distance, wild things in a wild place, the mainland rapidly falling away and the waves gloomily slapping at the hull as if the boat has been hauled out here in the middle of the channel for the sole purpose of intercepting them. After a while she has to choose between nausea and freezing to death, and so she makes her way back into the cabin and sits there rigid at the table, staring off at the horizon and willing herself to think of anything but decks and boats and the sea until she hears the engines decelerate and the long dun pier at Prisoners’ comes gradually into view.
Frazier is there to meet them in the battered Toyota Land Cruiser some kind soul donated to the Conservancy and they all cram in for the three-mile run up to the main ranch, where they drop off Annabelle. They sit there in the middle of the dirt drive, engine idling, while she hoists her pack to one shoulder and then leans into the driver’s side window to bring her pale pretty face into the sun-blistered orbit of Frazier’s as if they’re about to compare hat sizes. But no: they’re kissing. And this is no mere ritual of greeting between two well-meaning colleagues, no glancing peck to the cheek or coolly affectionate salutation, but something very like the hungry soul kiss of separating lovers. As if that isn’t awkward enough, they all have to sit there for an extra sixty seconds so Frazier can watch her sway over her hips all the way across the expanse of the lot and in under the shade of the oaks to where she’ll be staying in one of the airy, clean, well-appointed rooms in what was once, before its makeover as a kind of early California ranch-style B and B for the Conservancy’s big donors, the bunkhouse of a working ranch. Then he puts the car in gear and they continue another quarter mile on up the rutted dirt road to the field station, where the rooms are not airy, clean and well-appointed, and where they’ll all unfurl their sleeping bags and try to stake out a little space for themselves amidst the working chaos of the place.
There’s a flurry of hugs, snatches of gossip, truncated hellos and breathless goodbyes as the girls exchange places and Alma ducks into the back room—a single, with a worn but serviceable mattress laid out on a makeshift bedframe—to lay claim to it before anybody else does. She’s bent over the bed, smoothing out her sleeping bag and replacing the suspect pillow (who knows how long it’s been there and what use it’s been put to?) with the one she’s brought from home, when she becomes aware that she’s not alone. She turns round to see Frazier standing there in the doorway. He’s dressed in his bush clothes: khaki cargo shorts and matching shirt, the felt hunting hat with the teardrop crown and a yellowed pair of boar’s tusks worked up under the leather hatband, thick-grid hiking boots and Gore-Tex gaiters to keep the foxheads out of his socks. Gaiters, especially, are a necessity out here and she’s brought along her own pair, having learned from experience that you can’t really cover much ground with half a dozen needle-like seedpods working their way through your socks and into your flesh, and if the foxhead isn’t a perfect example of dispersal adaptation, then she can’t imagine what else is. Aside from deer ticks, maybe. But there are no deer ticks out here because there are no deer to entertain them. “Well,” Frazier says, his smile heating up like kindling set to the match till it’s not a smile at all but a kind of maniacal ear-to-ear Kiwi grin, “are you going to take all day or do you want see some pig action?”
El Tigre Ridge lies approximately three miles south of the field station, rising in elevation to 1,484 feet above sea level amidst a tapering wall of eroded peaks that falls away precipitously into the cleft of Willows Canyon to the west. It’s a thousand feet lower than the island’s highest mountain, Diablo Peak, across the central valley to the northwest, and more than three hundred feet below the top of El Montañon, ten miles to the east, which represents the high point of the barrier ridge between the Park Service and TNC properties. Still, it’s a climb, and though there’s a buck
ing lurching potholed semblance of a dirt road winding up and away from the ranch, the Island Healers vehicle—a miniature pickup with a cramped two-person cabin and the steering wheel on the wrong side—can only take them so far. Especially now, in winter, when a succession of storms has rolled in off the Pacific to wash away everything but the rocks so that the road looks as if it’s been bombed. Repeatedly. After one especially jarring plunge into a spewing crater and a fishtailing climb up and out the other side, Frazier jerks the wheel hard to the left, pulls just off the road and kills the ignition. “From here, we walk,” he announces, flinging open the door to swing his legs out and plant his boots in the mud. If anything, he’s grinning wider now, as if all this were a grand joke at her expense, and as she slides out the other side she can’t help wondering if he’s been hitting the flask already. She steals a glance at her watch: it isn’t even noon yet.
The air is burdened with humidity, the breeze cold. What sun there was is gone for good now and though she’s never been a betting woman, she’d put everything she has on the prospect—no, the certainty—of rain. “That’s what I’m here for,” she tells him, shouldering her pack and grinning right back at him. “To get a little exercise.” (Unlike Annabelle, who begged off with a wide hypocritical smile, claiming she had too much going on at the main ranch to muddy her boots up in the hills, paperwork, accounts, maintenance issues—You know, dreary stuff. The worst.) And then, because of Tim, because Tim’s in her mind and she can’t get him out, she adds, “I’m not just a desk jockey, you know.”
