There are lines at the supermarket, though everybody should be sleeping still, shouldn’t they? He can’t help feeling a stab of the old familiar impatience as the checkout woman calls futilely for a checker at checkstand three—Randy? Randy, checkstand three? — and no one shows up so that he has to wait for the old man moving like an undersea diver who’s forgotten his Vons card and can’t remember his phone number and the three women buying a year’s supply of groceries each, as if they were going straight home to lock themselves in their bunkers, before he can finally get some service, and though the checker is all caffeinated and chattery he responds to every idiotic word out of her mouth in monosyllables until he’s out the door with a You have a nice day now ringing at his back.
At home, he leaves the groceries in the car, taking a moment to shift the perishables into the cooler in the back, then going on into the house to let the dogs out in the yard. He’s arranged with the maid, Guadalupe, to come over in the evening and look after their needs and then again tomorrow morning, so there’s no worry on that score. The dogs — they’ve already been out once, at dawn, when he woke and went to fetch the paper — slink across the lawn to do their business in their hunched skeletal way. They’ve been abused, imprinted with pain, running all their fine-boned lives, from the puppy mill to the track to the kennel and back to the track until they’re too old to run and along comes the man with the needle — from whom he’s saved them, these two at least. Still, they’re timid, skulking beasts, ghosting around the house as if they were ashamed to be seen. He watches them for a moment, then checks the time and whistles them back to the house. It’s eight-thirty and Stiles is due at nine.
At nine precisely there’s a buzz at the gate and then Stiles’s acid-etched tones leaching through the intercom like a message from a distant planet. “It’s me, Stiles,” he says. “I got your goods.”
If Dave was expecting some sort of Southern caricature in overalls and a reversed feedlot hat driving a hard-used pickup with bales of hay and neck-craning goats in back he’s surprised. Stiles is driving a freshly waxed GMC Yukon, same model as his own, only newer, and when he pulls up in front of the house and steps out into the paved drive to take Dave’s hand in his own, he’s dressed no differently from a suburbanite at the mall. And he’s young, much younger than Dave would have guessed from hearing his voice over the phone — Stiles can’t be much older than he is himself.
“Yeah, well, thanks for coming,” Dave says, dropping the man’s hand.
An awkward pause follows, Stiles just staring at him as if awaiting a speech of praise and deliverance. After a moment he says, “This your place?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty pricey, I’d guess.”
Dave shrugs. “It’s California.”
“Tell me about it.” Another pause, longer this time. “But I’m a man of my word, no matter, and the price we agreed on if I’m not mistaking, is thirty apiece. That right?”
“That’s right. How many did you wind up—?”
“Ten. Each one in their own separate burlap bag,” he says, moving to the back of the SUV now and pulling open the rear hatch.
Dave peers in. There’s the same interior light he’s got on his car, the same gray carpet and hard vinyl storage compartments. Atop the carpet, a sheet of plastic, and atop the plastic, distributed like sacks of onions or potatoes, are the burlap sacks. Look closely and you can see movement there, a flex and release of muscle like a wave rippling and breaking across the dull tan surface of the material.
“You put ’em separate so you don’t get ’em biting each other. They’re not immune to their own poison, you got to know that. I seen it where they get so mad they bite their own self, like suicide. You don’t want that. Not at thirty per.”
Until this moment he hasn’t really considered the lethality of the things — they’re snakes, that’s all, rattlesnakes, and if Santa Catalina has them, why shouldn’t Santa Cruz, and so what if Dr. Alma happens to step on one some blissful sunny morning? That’s nature, isn’t it? But now, looking at the mute brown sacks and the living presence lurking inside them, he can feel a thrill run through him, no different from the thrill of fear and excitement he felt the first time he ever saw a gun, a pistol, an inert black metal object lying casually on a kitchen counter in a neighborhood kid’s house. It was just there, dully gleaming beside the sugar bowl and the cookie jar, but it had the potential to come fatally to life. “How do I handle them? I mean, will they bite through the bag or what?”
Stiles reaches in and slides one of the bags out, hefting it by the knot on top. His arm strains. The shape shifts inside the bag, going heavy at the bottom. “Might. But they like the bag, like the dark. They don’t want to bite what they can’t see — or fix on with their radar.”
“Radar?”
“That’s what I call it. Heat sensors. For detecting warm-blooded prey when they come out slinkin’ at night. Mice and such. Rabbits.” He holds out the bag. “Here, you want to hold it? No?” A smile now, ungenerous, pinched down at the corners. “You want a look at least, see you’re gettin’ your money’s worth?”
“No,” he hears himself say, waving the flat of one hand. “That’s okay.”
A silence. Stiles is watching him, that uncharitable look on his face still. “All right then, have it your way. That’ll be three hundred. Cash. And forget the gas money. You want me to put ’em in the back of your vehicle for you?”
“Yeah, sure,” Dave says, trying to extract his wallet from his pocket and flip open the rear hatch of the Yukon at the same time. “Am I going to need plastic like you have?”
A shrug. “They might shit, I guess. It’s a wicked smell once it’s in the carpet. But you can have this sheet here if you want. I got no use for it.”
And that’s it. Stiles flips back the plastic sheet like a waiter changing tablecloths and spreads it across the floor of Dave’s car, smoothing out the wrinkles with a brusque stroke of one hand. Then he hoists the burlap sacks, two at a time, laying them in gently on top. When he’s done, Dave hands him the money, three hundred-dollar bills. Stiles takes a moment, fanning them out in his hand before folding them once and stuffing them in his right front pocket. Then he tips an imaginary hat and climbs into the cab of his truck. The door slams. The engine turns over, smooth as a vacuum cleaner. One final thing, his head craning out the window, his smile so tight it’s almost a grimace: “Nice vehicle you got there.” There’s a soft mechanical thump as he eases the transmission into drive. “I do like your style.”
Dave is aboard the boat nearly an hour before he told the others to show up, stowing things (the snakes he intends as a surprise, sort of like the capper to the day, and he lays them gingerly below, one at a time, careful to keep the sacks away from contact with his body) and generally making ready to go to sea. There’s a stop at the fueling dock, then back to his berth to prepare the sandwiches and marinate the tofu and veggies for kebabs. The wine is in the cooler, beer too — Wilson’s a real beer hound — and the rabbits are in their cage under the table, with plenty of newspaper spread underneath to catch their droppings. To this point he never realized just how much food rabbits process, as if they evolved on the earth for the sole purpose of producing little balls of crap, infinite crap, and having them in the garage for the past two weeks was a real trial. It was Guadalupe’s husband who got them for him — cottontails, not the big lean jackrabbits he’d been hoping for — but it was the only avenue open to him. Salvador had trapped a pair of wild rabbits that had been raiding his garden three years back and he’d kept them in a pen and bred them for food, quite a thriving business, according to Guadalupe. Well, these five would be spared anyway, and cheap at five dollars apiece. The girls — both Anise and Alicia — cooed over them and fed them slivers of carrot, lettuce and whatnot for the first week, till they lost interest and left the custodial duties to him. But they’re hot to release them, that’s for sure. “We’ll have a little ceremony on the beach,” Anise said, squeezing his biceps. “A coming out party, Rabbits in Bunnyland. Won’t that be cool?”