The Journey Prize Stories 24 (8 page)

My neighbour threw his arms around the carcass and the head lobbed back. The eyes were baby blue, but the beak was triangular, and the arms scaly, reptilian wings.

“My Angela,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“She’s still breathing.”

He put his mouth over the beak, exposed the red gums and razor teeth and blew until the meagre chest inflated. I grabbed him by the shoulder and struck him in the face.

“Stop it.”

“How can you say that?” There was blood on his lips and on the sand.

“It is not your daughter.”

I cut off the barbed coils with a pair of pliers. The wings flopped apart in an arc of crude oil. Rolled out, the span was six feet. The eye sockets were filled with vitreous humour that had soured in death and the claws on its feet had punctured the rubber boots like ivy grown through concrete.

“We have to bury her,” he said. He kissed the leather jaw and did up the blue buttons on the dress. “We have to bury her and give her something proper.”

“We have to call the museum,” I said.

“Museum? How can you say my daughter belongs in a museum?”

“That is not your daughter.”

“She’s not an animal, she’s not something to be shot with formaldehyde and stuffed in a jar. She’s a human being.”

“All right, we have to call the medical examiner then,” I said.

“No,” he said. “They’ll just take her away. It would be like everything else. They’d just take her away and then I’d never see her again.”

This was long past reason. The dead creature’s eye gazed into the stark splinters of poplar night to a place where there was no family and no dawn.

“We have to take her home,” he said. He had thought this out. “We’ll take her home and we’ll put her there on the kitchen table until it’s time. That’s where all children go. That’s the way it should be. We’ll burn frankincense and pray. Then I’ll find a minister and we’ll have a service. In the churchyard, the steepled one behind the train tracks. You’ll come, won’t you? I want you to come. You’re the only one who will come, no one else will. You’ll have to be with me when I tell my wife. I can’t do it alone. She’ll die. She’ll crumple in grief.”

Then he wrapped his hand around the tiny set of claws that extruded from the wing and squeezed them. Balled inside the fingers was a coil of kite string.

—

Russell Fairbanks had slipped on the front deck of a Massey Ferguson combine and fell down into the blades. His leg was severed at the knee and his femoral artery was punctured in not one but two places. He was rushed to the hospital and I cannot recall if he lived or if he died, because his parents were religious and would not allow a blood transfusion. I remember Lilly Carmine died of frostbite and her parents looked for her everywhere, but someone else found her in an old latrine. Perhaps they were secular.

I thought about these things as I walked up the steps to my neigbour’s house. He stayed in the back of the pickup truck with his waterlogged corpse. He kept whispering, “My little fallen fruit,” and there was no chance I’d be wading back through that. There are two ways to rationalize a criminal act. One is to say that it is not criminal, that it is for the greater good. Like a crusade, or starting a war. Perhaps keeping a handgun at home. The other is to embrace the criminality and eat your young. I knocked on the door and straightened my collar.

His wife was standing in the sparse living room smoking Virginia Slims with her heel hooked on a coiled hot water heater. She watched the ceiling fan turn. She wore silver bangles on her ankles and her legs were tanned. The windowsill smelled of lemon pledge.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

I closed the door. On the table was a gin fizz and a pair of earrings.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” She pointed at a silver tray that held crystal decanters; bourbon, scotch, and rye.

“You’ve no clue what’s going on?”

“With him?” she said. “I’m adjusting.”

She turned to the fireplace and twisted a portrait of a small child around to reflect the light from the kitchen chandelier.

“Is that her?” I said.

“Who?”

“Your daughter.”

She wasn’t listening. She stared into the glass for a moment and then glossed her lips with cherry balm. The portrait was a five-by-eight black-and-white photo of a small girl with blonde hair on a swing set.

“I think I took it better than he did,” she said. “He’s always been the soft one. He’s always been the one that in the end couldn’t handle loss. For all of the loves we know, death makes us fonder. That might be Shakespeare. Or maybe it’s Hunter S. Thompson. Who knows?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Do? I’m going out,” she said.

“You might want to hang around.”

“Why?”

“He’s outside.”

“What’s he done this time?” She scooped up the earrings and pushed the portrait back into place so the glass reflected her lobes. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? But I have to use it. He doesn’t tolerate mirrors. He says they’re vain. It’s got something to do with the book of Daniel. Is there anything going on at your place tonight?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was just out with your husband in the river. We’re both soaking wet.”

“In the river?” She stopped and examined the gin. She declined. Perhaps there was something better down the road.

“Whatever for?”

“Listen, he dragged this thing out of the water. You might want to have a look.”

“What kind of thing?”

“I’m not sure. It’s grotesque, really.”

“Just give me the synopsis, okay?”

She walked over to the picture window and let some ashes drop into a chrome tray. The ashes fluttered down like owls and I thought for a moment she might lick one up.

“Well, you’re going to find out,” I said. “He’s bringing it inside.”

“Figures,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go over to Jamieson’s. He’s a bourbon drinker. They’ve got friends in from the Coast. Why don’t you come along?”

“Not tonight.”

She opened her mouth a little and the smoke crept out. She reached over and adjusted my lapel. She picked off a reed.

“That’s too bad. I need to get away. Look, he hasn’t told me much,” she said. She shrugged. “I’m leaving. He’s keeping the house. I don’t care. I don’t want it. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s not the greatest with words. Besides, I don’t tell him everything, do I?”

There was sick mutton feeling in the room. The floor had gone gritty with the silt my boots had dragged in from the river and between my teeth there was a dirty feeling too. She reached out and rested the end of her cigarette an inch away from my Adam’s apple, then teased me by drooping the ember closer.

“Where is your daughter?” I said.

“What?”

“Where is your young daughter right now, I mean, is she at relatives’, or out lawn bowling or drinking Jack Daniel’s or in her room sleeping or what?”

“I have not a clue what you’re talking about.”

“Who is this portrait of?”

She picked the framed photo off the mantel. The girl sat on the swing with a trace of sepia melancholy on her lips.

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Where is the photo from?”

“He cut it out of a Sears catalogue, I think.”

“He said your daughter was drowned in the river.”

“Is that what he told you?”

She sucked on her cigarette with her thumb under her chin. She was nodding, gazing off to the ceiling, perhaps at the crepe-paper chickens, perhaps at the jar of cashews. Not at all at the photograph. The young girl was wearing boots and bells around her neck, dressed up and delicate as if her parents were shipping her off to an event that she was too young to understand.

O
ver the course of a couple of weeks, Amanda has moved some of her things into a spare guestroom down the hall from her and Earl’s bedroom. She now spends a lot of time in this room, rather than in the living room, or the bedroom, or the room that was once her study. She’s moved only a few books, her laptop, some underwear, and pyjamas. This move, though deliberately slow on her part, has nonetheless put the entire household on edge: her aunt Grace, her mother Millie, who walks around looking perplexed and afraid, and of course Earl, who has so far been quiet about this problem. Earl strokes his beard a lot and occasionally smokes a cigarette somewhere in the yard, out of view.

When Amanda started being down, crying in the evenings in secret, dressing badly, Earl must have decided that optimism was the best attitude to adopt. Better encourage her than dwell on the sadness. He is nearly thirty-eight and has suffered from depression before; Amanda is twenty-four and until recently has seemed to everyone confident and happy.
Now, no one is sure what Amanda does in her room when she is alone there for hours. Sometimes they’ll find her with one of those thick women’s fashion magazines spread out in front of her; Earl understands the magazine is probably a cover, but a cover for what? Nothing, it seems. She sometimes gets a little angry when they disturb her, and if Earl asks her whether she’ll have supper with the others she might impatiently tell him that she’ll eat later. But following that, she also might take his hand, smile, apologize, and thus give him temporary relief.

It is the end of July, and two months since the four of them have returned from a vacation in Barcelona. Millie pleaded and persuaded the reluctant Amanda into the vacation, because she wanted, in part at least, to commemorate the togetherness of the four of them, to affirm how pleasantly Grace, Millie, Amanda, and Earl have lived together. Millie’s sister Grace is getting remarried in three weeks and they won’t be under the same roof, most likely, ever again. Grace has lived here for nearly a year; she moved in when Dan, Millie’s husband, left for the States on business. Grace and Larry’s ceremony and reception will be right here at the house. The house is large, as is the yard, and the yard slopes onto a ravine; you can stand at the far end of the yard on the edge of the ravine and see the shimmering surface of the river. There is lots of room for a small outdoor wedding of forty or so guests.

One part of Millie hopes Dan will come back for Grace’s wedding as he has told her he would. He has also promised he’d be flying back regularly, and has not been back once in more than a year of being away. But another part of her would prefer not to have the interruption of him at the wedding. Let
him come when there are no guests, when the house is empty, formidable, silent except for the rustle of the poplar leaves outside, and Millie is ready and waiting with two glasses of Scotch on the coffee table under the sixteen-foot ceiling. Or let him not come at all. Before Dan went away this last time, he had spent nineteen months at Pennybrooke, a minimum-security prison an hour out of town. He was guilty of defrauding shareholders. Either Amanda or she visited him every week and brought him books to read. Sometimes she feels as if he has never lived here, has never slumped his slim frame onto the sofa and put his feet up after work, has never greeted the neighbours with friendly obscenities, as if it was always she and Amanda, or she and Amanda and Earl here in the house. Many times already she has bartered Dan away for the return of Amanda as she once knew her.

Today they are having dinner together, but Amanda has not shown up yet. Everyone worries about Amanda since she has changed the location of her pyjamas, and especially since she has told them that she wants to go back to Barcelona in the fall, for an eight-week course in Spanish language and culture. Millie has acquired the habit of writing her worries in letters to Grace; these letters often contain things she most wants to say, and she slips them to Grace in passing, on her way out to work, or even while they’re sitting in the living room. In the last letter she wrote about a dream she had in which Amanda, looking not quite like herself, tells her that there is no heart left in it, and Millie, panicked and heavy with foreboding, tries to understand what it means, what is the
it
. She wants to ask but for some reason can only touch Amanda’s hair, which in the dream is inexplicably blond. She gave the letter to Grace while
Grace was having her one nightly cigarette out in the yard; so far, Grace has not brought it up.

“We have to fix up the yard,” says Grace as she spoons mashed potatoes onto Millie’s plate. She is just the kind of person to fill your plate when you’d like it to be filled, thinks Millie. She watches with admiration her sister’s tall figure, with a straight posture, thick around the waist and hips.

“Is Amanda upstairs?” Millie asks Earl.

“I knocked earlier but got no answer,” he says.

“I’ll go look,” says Millie.

“Oh, she’ll come on her own, let her be,” says Grace. “Though I do need to ask her about the tablecloths.”

They’ve put Amanda in charge of certain things to do with the wedding, the chair and linen rental, because it seemed beneficial and sensible to keep her involved with the wedding and to give her a preoccupation that could not, as far as they could see, have anything painful about it.

“Good luck getting her up in the morning if you don’t,” says Earl. They are in the habit of talking about Amanda as if she were quite inaccessible, though she goes hardly anywhere and spends most of her time upstairs.

“I’m sure she’s not forgotten. Amanda wouldn’t forget. Amanda is efficient with these things,” says Millie, and everyone knows that in saying it she is only remembering a time gone by.

When they start stacking the dishes, Amanda comes in from outside. Her brown hair is limp and her jacket undone. She’s gained weight in this last year and it shows most clearly in a layer of pudge around her jaw. She was once known for her beauty, and that she is indifferent to it now, is killing it with
her indifference, makes the change in her seem, to Millie, an even greater loss.

“We’d all thought you were in your room and didn’t want to bother you,” says Millie. The look on Amanda’s face is part of the inaccessibility: a closed face, eyes averted to just below eye level. Because of the look, no one is sure if it’s a good idea to ask what she’s been up to.