When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle

Author:T.C. Boyle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101475881
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-21T10:00:00+00:00

Yes. That’s right. Pull the plug and let it all wash down the drain, the blisters, the backbreak, the stock and the improvements, the gas-fired water pump and the saddle horses and all the rest, the taste of the dirt between your teeth when the sundowners are clipping over the hills and the deepest requited love of a place that was like the love of the soul of God, let it go. Because Mr. Gherini’s agent, stepping delicately through the mud in his city shoes, said, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Russell, but I have instructions to inform you that you’ve got two weeks to vacate.”

Bax had thrown it back at him: “What are you talking about?”

The agent—erect, in command, though he couldn’t have stood more than five feet five and his eyes were mortised with disgust—gave a little speech then, peppered with figures torn from a ledger sheet, forty thousand dollars total profit to the Gherinis in the business year just concluded versus the promise of some hundred and fifty thousand in annual revenues from sport hunting alone, and all that with the Park Service breathing down their necks and threatening a public taking of the property that had been in his clients’ family from their grandfather’s time for a compensation too mean even to mention. “Let’s face it, Mr. Russell,” he said, lifting one foot from the ooze and then, thinking better of it, setting it down again, “the world’s moving on. Sheeping’s something out of the old west and the old west is dead.”

Bax, strung tight, trying to gesticulate and hold on to the crutches at the same time, tried to reason with him, but the man kept shaking his head and interrupting him. “Two weeks,” he kept saying. “I’m very sorry. My clients are sorry. Everybody’s sorry.” He moved forward then, very carefully, like a man wading through cake batter, removed an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it over. “Two weeks. You’ve been duly served.”

It was as if the breath had been knocked out of her. She felt like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a scrap of rock as the seas rose and crashed. She was drowning on dry land. “What about the lambs?” she asked, angling toward him, her palms held out in extenuation. “We can’t just—”

He looked at her now for the first time. His eyes were black, his hair close-cropped. He was a very little man in a very expensive suit and a pair of ruined shoes who’d come from another world on an urgent errand and that errand had been completed. “Leave them.”

“For what? For those, those”—she couldn’t find the word—“people to shoot them?”

“I’m not here to argue,” he said.

Francisco was staring at the withered cracked upturned toes of his boots. Anise brought a hand to her face. From the distance came the long withering bleat of the lambs.

“But that’s our profit,” she protested. “Our increase.”

And now, as if things weren’t black enough, Bax turned on her.

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