“I need to talk to you,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
“You don’t understand — we’re screwed, it’s over. Toni Walsh — you should have seen the look on her face. She’s going to crucify me.”
There’s a silence on the other end of the line.
“Come over,” he says.
“Sleep on it, Dave.”
The finality in her voice infuriates him. “No”—he’s shouting suddenly, and the dogs, alarmed, back away from their dish in a scramble of frantic clacking paws—“you fucking sleep on it! I need you. Don’t you hear me?”
A pause. Then, utterly unruffled, calm as a sedative, her voice seeps back to him in a slow drip of unforgiving syllables: “Good night, Dave. See you in the morning.”
He wakes, embittered, just after noon. At what hour he finally did fall off to sleep after lying there staring at the ceiling and listening to every least crepitation of the house as if it were amplified ten times over, he can’t say, but the moment he blinks open his eyes, all the misery and dislocation of the previous day rush in to repossess him. The morning’s gone. If Anise called — or Wilson or Sterling or anybody else, the AP wanting a statement, the Hog Butchers’ Journal, Harley Meachum telling him all four stores burned to the ground simultaneously — he didn’t hear the phone ring. And he’s too sore, mentally and physically, even to think about checking his messages. Fuck them, that’s what he’s thinking. Fuck the world. Fuck them all.
Barefoot, in a pair of shorts and a flannel shirt, he goes to the door to let the dogs out and continues on down the drive, walking gingerly, to retrieve the morning paper (which will have nothing in it yet, he knows that, Toni Walsh stuck out there on the island till it was too late to do anything about it, but he can’t help scanning the thing nonetheless). No, no mention. But tomorrow will be a different story. Tomorrow the shitstorm starts in all over again, a hurricane of it, Force 10 winds, and he’s wondering vaguely if he should write up his own version of events and post it on the FPA website as a counterweight to whatever Toni Walsh is going to lay on him, when he hears the phone ringing in the depths of the house.
He’s up the front steps and back inside, snatching up the phone in the living room on the fourth ring — and wincing, wincing too, because he must have pulled every muscle in his body out there yesterday, a pure searing jolt of pain rocketing from his left knee to his groin so that he has to fling himself down in the nearest chair and grab hold of the inside of his thigh and squeeze till it passes. “Hello?” he snaps, expecting Anise.
“Is this Dave I’m talking to?”
He doesn’t recognize the voice, a man’s voice, low and whispery, jangling with some sort of unreconstructed redneck accent. “That’s right,” he says. “Who’s this?”
The name means nothing to him. It flies right out of his head. He needs coffee, eggs, toast, something substantial on his stomach. It takes him a moment to register what the man on the phone, a friend of an associate of a friend of Wilson’s, is trying to communicate. “I can git you what you want,” the man says. “As many as you want. Only question is price. Thirty apiece? That sound okay to you?”
What he’s talking about, and it comes to Dave in a flash, is rattlesnakes — the western rattlesnake, Crotalus viridis, to be exact. He’s too surprised — or no, overwhelmed by the timing — to respond.
“You there? Can you hear me? I say this is Everson Stiles, from Wellspring? In Texas?”
“Yeah,” he says, recovering himself. “Yeah, okay. Yeah, I hear you. I’m interested. Very interested.”
It was months ago, around the time he’d gone out to the island with the raccoons, that he’d asked Wilson to put out some feelers for him, and this was the contact he’d come up with. Everson Stiles, formerly pastor of an evangelical Christian church that believed in bringing the serpent right into the house of worship. Every year there would be a rattlesnake roundup and the parishioners would show up with burlap sacks of them and roll around on the floor in their midst, speaking in tongues and prevailing upon the Lord to keep them from harm. But the Lord, apparently, let them down, and people were bitten — one, a ten-year-old girl, fatally. There was a lawsuit and it went against the church and that was the end of the practice and the church too.
“Plus expenses. Travel, I mean. Gas money.”
“What, all the way from Texas?”
There’s a brief snort of laughter on the other end of the line. “No, all that’s done with. Now I’m in Ojai. Right up the street from you. And I tell you, this is the time to get ’em, when they’re denned up for the winter? Big balls of ’em, all wound up together. You wait till they emerge in spring and it’s basically one snake at a time, and then the price’s going to go up.”
He’s trying to envision it, snakes in a bag, flexing and roiling, three bags, four, laid out on the concrete floor in the garage, and he’s going to want other things too — more raccoons, rabbits maybe, gophers, what about gophers? “Sounds fine,” he says, feeling himself expand with the exactitude of that vision, rabbits in cages twitching their noses, thumping their feet, giving him a wide anxious walleyed look. And not the white ones you get as a kid at Easter, but jackrabbits, big rangy wild-hearted things honed for survival. “No, the price is fine, and I want them, I do. Definitely. But listen, this isn’t a good time — can I get back to you?”
The instant he hangs up the phone rings, startling him out of his reverie. It’s Anise, asking if he slept well, and his mood comes crashing down all over again.
“You know I didn’t. And no thanks to you.”
“Look, why don’t you pick me up for lunch and fill me in on the details, then we can go up to the gig together, all right?”
He says nothing, hating her.
“I can make an announcement,” she offers, and he can picture her in her kitchen, chewing on the end of a pencil or a breadstick, everything in its place, gleaming and safe. “About the girl and what happened, what we’re up against. Or flyers, we can do flyers, if you want.”
“You don’t know what I’ve been through,” he says finally, sounding soft and self-pitying in his own ears, giving in. “You can’t begin to imagine.”
The Wreck of the Anubis
When she gets off the phone with Maria Campos, the lawyer Freeman Lorber recommended, she’s so wrought up she has to go directly into the kitchen and pour herself a glass of sake just to keep from collapsing like a vacant suit of clothes. She takes a long steady drink, staring out into the sodden pit of the yard, the ferns bowed by the recent storm, the lawn a swamp, the eucalyptus shedding bark in long tattered strips. The sun is shining, at least there’s that, but the condo feels alien and sterile and everything in it, from the woodblock prints her grandmother Takesue left her to the forest-green leather couch with the cherry frame that cost her a month and a half’s salary to the stereo and the potted Dracena and even the Micah Stroud CDs stacked on the bookshelf, seems as if it belongs to someone else. Tim is gone. And without Tim, the place is empty, abandoned, useless. For a moment she feels as if she’s going to cry, and she doesn’t want to cry, not over Tim or Dave LaJoy or anybody else, and she has to press the cold glass to her forehead, hold it there right between her eyebrows like a compress, till the moment passes.