The Devil You Know: A Novel (20 page)

Plus they’ve figured out how to turn old tires into shoes and purses now, Lianne said. It’s the wave of the future. Petroleum products. Now put it on me.

What, Frank said.

The mink, of course. I want it over my shoulders like a stole.

Stoles are usually made of fox, I said. A fox stole. No one says
a mink stole
.

Lianne raised her eyebrow at me.

Even better. Give me a fox stole made of live mink. Come on, she said.

Frank Churchill held the mink out toward her and shimmied it up and down softly, like a wave.

They bite, he said.

So do I, Lianne said.

Frank told her to turn around. He held the mink’s body against the back of her neck.

If I do this, he said, you can’t tell your mother. This is between you and me.

Okay, Lianne said.

If it bites you, you have to say you stuck your hand in the cage, Frank said. You can’t say I put the thing all over you.

Okay, Lianne said. Go.

Frank lowered the mink’s back end over Lianne’s right shoulder and showed her how to grip its jaw with her left hand just under its chin.

He’s shaking a little, Frank said.

Lianne moved slowly toward the front desk. She walked like a girl balancing a slim stack of books on the top of her head. Frank and I just watched her go.

There’s the mirror, I said.

She stopped about a foot and a half away from a tall mirror that was leaned up against the wall next to a Komodo dragon. The lizard’s terrarium was the size of my bed frame at home.

He likes me, Lianne said. He sounds like he’s clucking. She dropped her hand away from the mink’s jaw. A moment later she screamed.

The thing had gone for her immediately, catching her collar and a chunk of her hair in its teeth before Frank grabbed it off her and swung it out like a pendulum by the tail, upside down.

They’re vicious fuckers, I told you, he said.

It didn’t hurt, Lianne said. It didn’t hurt, I’m fine. She ran her hand up and down her neck and pulled her shirt off the shoulder a little in front of the mirror, to check. Look. Look, she said. It didn’t get me.

The thing about Lianne is that she knew how to draw attention. People remembered her. Frank Churchill called her a prime suspect.

We came out of the storefront and walked back through the park, toward my house. I had purple streaks on my legs where my Popsicle had dripped. There were bits of wood shavings in the toes
of our sandals. In front of the library, a man was getting into his car. He turned and saw us and stood against the open door. I thought he was airing it out, trying to cool down the vinyl seats before driving off.

Hey, girls.

We didn’t stop because why would that guy be talking to us, right?

He shut the door and walked toward us. He was tall with wide shoulders but maybe not much meat on him. Dark hair and most of a beard. Or else long hair and a full beard. I don’t know. I was mostly looking at Lianne. She stuck out her chin like she was getting ready to argue. We stopped. There was something about him that made me feel like I’d done something wrong. Now I was caught.

Hey, girls, he said again, taking a few half-jog steps and arriving on the grass where we were waiting. You seen a dog running around here?

Neither of us answered. Sometimes when you’re a kid, you get that stun on when adults ask you a question.

Big guy, he said. Black and white. Ears like this, see? He leaned forward and held his hands up to his temples and flapped them at us. Lianne cracked a smile.

He’s real friendly, the guy said. But he don’t stay on his leash.

Where did you lose him? Lianne stepped forward. She was interested now. Lost dog? Her specialty. Almost as good as a chinchilla, when it comes to that.

Oh, like over that way. The guy waved his arm vaguely in the direction of my house.

Were you in the school yard? Lianne said.

What’s your dog’s name? I said.

It was the first time I’d spoken. I was losing the attention battle to Lianne again. There was nothing about this that felt different to me from any other day at school. That was the way Lianne moved through the world. It was the effect she had on boys. At recess, there was always some boy who wanted to spray her with water from the
fountain or tell her the name of his favorite band or race her the four hundred meters around the goal posts in the field. I was along for the ride at recess time. I got to be the audience. I was the witness in a blue sweatshirt.

Yeah, he was running around in the school yard, the man said. He was talking only to Lianne now. He stepped forward so close that the tips of his shoes almost touched her sneakers and he ran a hand through his hair, making it stand up and look spiky. He’s a real sweet dog, he said. I rescued him from some bad people that used to beat him with a broom. Stupid mutt, he’s still afraid of brooms.

What’s your dog’s name? I said again.

Lianne tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.

Maybe we can help you find him, she said slowly. We’re walking that way, anyhow.

I was just going to take a drive around, the man said. He paused and then stepped back and pointed to his car like he was showing us what
drive around
meant.

We have to go, I said. There was a flavor to this interaction that irritated me and also made me ashamed, the beginning of something I was feeling more and more at school. I didn’t want to waste my afternoon riding around looking for a dog, but I didn’t want to be left on the sidewalk, either. If Lianne had survived and we’d gone on to high school together and stayed friends, this is pretty much how I imagine it: Lianne getting to ride around in cars, and me being left on the sidewalk. The logical extension of our recess routine.

We could go for a while, Lianne said. Looking at me. Then: But I’ve gotta ask first anyway, she said. In case my mom needs me to babysit or something.

She was pretty used to catching hell for not being home when she was needed.

A woman came out of the library holding her two-year-old under one arm like a football and a bag of books in the other hand. Behind her a sulky-faced older kid trailed along, crunching a lollipop. I hate kids who crunch lollipops. You know they’re going to
be hard to deal with, because they can’t even wait for candy to melt in their mouths.

The man flinched, like he couldn’t deal with the noise of the screaming toddler. He bounced on the balls of his feet.

Okay, yeah, I’ll be at the school yard, he said. If you see him, you gotta catch him for me, right? He moved back toward his car and gave Lianne a little salute, like she was his right-hand man. He threw himself into the front seat in a lazy way.

We totally have to find this dog, Lianne said. That would be so awesome if we were the ones to save it.

Save it from what? I said. He says he already rescued it.

But Lianne was moving off, backward, jogging like she was a boxer in training. She was hopping on one foot. We were just young enough to be able to skip in public. We still made hopscotches on the sidewalk in front of my house.

Call me! she yelled. She turned around and started running.

I looked back and the man in the car was gone.

I
started running, too. If I didn’t show up, Lianne would go on and find the dog without me and have some fun time with ice cream and then she’d get in the guy’s car and open up the glove compartment and find a necklace and wear it to school on Monday. The
Town Crier
would print a picture of her with the black-and-white dog. Girl Hero Finds Rescue Dog, Enlists Help of Trained Mink.

The
Town Crier
isn’t a real paper. It’s like the neighborhood paper that reports on the church bazaar every Christmas at St. Cuthbert’s Anglican. It lists events at the high school and sales at Bruno’s Fine Foods and reviews any new restaurants on Bayview Avenue. But somehow Lianne’s picture made it in about three times a year, for one thing or another, and I wanted a piece of that action.

I came bounding up the concrete steps in front of the house and grabbed the door handle and pulled. The door didn’t swing open and the force of my bounding and pulling made my hand slip and
I fell backward down the stairs. I landed on the little flagstone path that led to our front door.

The real door was wide open inside. It was the screen door, the little lock on the interior handle. The screen door was never locked.

My mother came to the screen and flicked the little switch and opened it up, but instead of saying something nice, she said: What are you doing?

Like my falling was something I’d done on purpose to embarrass her or to make her life hard. I came inside with my elbow bleeding and started talking right away.

There’s this dog lost! I said. A lost dog, Lianne and me are going to go find it.

No, she said. No, you need to go upstairs. My mother stood with her back half-turned, facing the living room instead of me, like she was keeping half an eye on something there, a pot in danger of boiling over.

I’ll only be gone for a little while, I said. I’ll only be gone for an hour. I’ll be home for dinner. It’s this black-and-white dog. What if it gets hit by a car? What if it falls down into the ravine and breaks its leg?

I’d read a story the year before about a cat that had fallen down into Moore Ravine and broken two legs and was amazingly found by a lady and her two little kids. It had probably been lying there, starving and fighting off skunks, for a few days. The cat had fallen out of a tree but I didn’t see why the situation couldn’t occur to a dog, especially a big galumphing dog that was a rescue and used to being alone and too stupid to stay near its owner.

Evie! My mother spun around and pointed up to the second floor. Upstairs.

What are you so mad for? I said.

Get a Band-Aid on. Look after yourself. Read a book or something, Jesus fuck, I don’t care, just get up there.

I walked slowly up the stairs. I was on the landing when I heard a man’s voice calling out for my mother. Impatient, like she was a kid and he was sending her to her room.

From where I stood I could see only the interior wall, the long wall mirror my father had put up over the couch. He’d put it there to reflect the window, to make the room feel twice as big and shiny and surrounded by glass and light.

My mother walked quickly from the hall into the living room.

When you’re a kid, there’s heavy investment in the status quo. You like it best when there are no surprises. What you want is to come home every day to the same house and the same parent and have the same snack. When I was nine I read
Harriet the Spy
and envied her, how lucky she was to have that cake and milk every day after school. And she knows it, she sings a little cake-and-milk song to herself. If your mother yells at you for no reason, you don’t apply logic to the situation. You don’t think, Why is she in this terrible mood that clearly has nothing to do with me?

You just want her to stop screaming at you and give you a kiss on the forehead. You want what’s bad to go away and for things to be good and normal again. I waited on the landing for my mother to come back and hug me but she didn’t come.

There was a man standing just inside the living room, a tall man with a brown beard and a leather jacket. Not my father. I could see him reflected in the mirror. I don’t know if I thought about the locked screen door and my mother’s mood or even the man I’d just seen at the park. I know this man wasn’t in the house later, when I came down for dinner at the regular kitchen table with my regular parents.

I didn’t ask any questions. I went upstairs and never thought of him again.

I
made you something.

David pulled up a chair next to mine. I was in a study room at the university library, looking at the morning edition of the
Free Press
. There was no new information on the Bernardo case, just a rehash of what we’d already reported on the day before. We’d agreed to meet at the library so David could do some field research on Higher Education: Why David Patton Keeps Avoiding It. I’d slept twelve hours and was fully recovered from the hangover but hadn’t been able to talk myself back into the newsroom.

I called in sick, I told David.

I hear Bernardo’s still in jail. So you’re not missing much. He passed me a little black notebook. Like Hemingway’s, he said. See? I get you. Reporter and etcetera.

He was a sports reporter, I said.

Baseball to bullrings, David said.

I flipped the book open. On the inside front cover, David had neatly printed out a list for me:

TOP TEN JOB OPPORTUNITIES FOR GIRLS WITH SOMETHING TO PROVE

1. High Park Personal Trainer, Midnight Shift

2. Improv Coach at the Don Jail

3. Amateur Sherpa

4. Handler, John McEnroe

5. Bullfight Cheerleader

6. Getaway Driver for the Rainbow Warrior

7. Grizzly Tagger

8. Underwater Scout, Swim with the Sharks

9. Competitor, Pro Hitchhiking Circuit

10. Frontline Reporter, Vicious Murder Unit