The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (8 page)

“Could you stop that noise?”

Marika's body jerks, as if she didn't realize he was sitting beside her.

“I was lost in thought. Thinking of crabs.”

A tear is running down her cheek.

“In Guatemala,” she says, “there's a species of crab that burrows into the ground and brings up in its claws shards of ancient pottery.”

She lays down her knife and wipes a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand.

“The crabs descend beneath layer after layer to different cities that have been piled on top of each other, over time. Each city is hundreds of years younger than the one below it. The crabs mix the pottery shards together, all these ancient layers mixed together in the light of day. You really know very little about me. You know nothing about science.”

Julian notices that both Marika's eyes are watering now and realizes she's crying.

In his dreams the stories Marika tells him are fables. He dreams about a crab that presents him with a jacket of glass shards that came from a wine bottle he once threw at Olivia. Olivia wears a cloak of stars. She opens her arms and the cloak is wrenched away from her, leaving her naked. She becomes two women, a blurred image, Marika and Olivia both.

That night Julian leaves the house at midnight and walks for hours. Outside the Royal Ontario Museum the moonlit gargoyles are covered with burlap bags, and look like robbers with nylon stockings over their faces. A group of five people dressed in cartoon costumes emerges from a church basement. They skip across the empty street and get into an idling mini-van. A man in a Pink Panther costume trails behind. He has removed the head of the costume and carries it under his arm. The man's own head looks abnormally small against the giant pink neck of the costume. Julian takes a picture of him.

Lately, Julian thinks about a memory lit with a big number one candle, a wax monkey wrapped around it. Julian carried the cake. He could feel the yellow of the flame under his chin, like the shadow of a buttercup. He could see his daughter's face buried in Olivia's blouse, both their party hats sticking off the sides of their heads. There was a blizzard outside and Julian felt like they were wrapped in white tissue paper. He left a few days after that. He hasn't spoken to either of them since.

Julian remembers things he didn't notice when they happened. He remembers a party in the country. Someone had shoved a hotdog wiener through a hole in a screen door, and every time the door slammed the hotdog wagged obscenely. It was the night he met Olivia. At midnight everyone went skinny dipping, the sound of diving bodies swallowed by the dark water. He was drunk and naked. When it came time to get out of the water he suddenly felt embarrassed. He asked Olivia to give
him a hand, so he could hold a towel in front of himself. When she did haul him out he managed to drop the towel and got caught in the skittering path of a flashlight.

When Julian gets home from his walk he finds Marika asleep on the couch, a bowl of chips resting on her knee. She has fallen asleep in the middle of the night with her wrist hanging over the rim of the chrome chip bowl. The phone is ringing. Julian nearly trips over one of the cats in his rush to get it. It's ringing near Marika's ear. She doesn't stir.

Olivia's heels click down the hall through the loose pools of fluorescent light. It's Monday and the Topsail Cinemas mall is mostly deserted, except for the games arcade which shoots out synchronized pings and buzzes. Most of the stores have been in various stages of renovation all winter. Someone has been going at a cement wall with a jackhammer. Chunks of cement have fallen away and rusted bars stick out.

When Olivia turns the corner she sees the exhibit by a taxidermist from British Columbia named Harold. He's standing next to a chair, one hand on his hip, his index fingers looped through his change apron. When he sees Olivia he becomes animated.

“Step this way beautiful, beautiful lady. Let me take you on a whirlwind tour of purgatory's wild kingdom. Here you will see beasts miraculously wrested from the claws of decay. They
have looked death in the eye. They have been consumed by death, but they are not dust. Thanks to the strange alchemy of embalming fluid and my own artistic wizardry, they live. They live.”

He does this with a little flourish of his hands and a slight bow. Then he sighs as if he has used up all his energy. Pinching his nose, he says, “Two-fifty if you want to see it.”

Olivia is twenty minutes early for the movie, so she says, “Sure, I'll treat myself, why not, it's my birthday.”

Harold has a thick mop of black hair with silver at the sides; his body is very tall and thin. One of his eyes is lazy, straying off to the side.

The display takes the shape of a mini-labyrinth made of ordinary office dividers. At each turn the viewer comes upon another stuffed animal.

“Most of them are from endangered species. But the truly unique thing about this exhibit is that these animals have all been hit by trucks. Trucks or cars. Every one of them. Please don't think I would ever hurt these animals for the sake of the collection. I collect them only after they have been killed.

“I'm different from those taxidermists you see on the side of the road during the summer, of course. I've seen them in this province, in Quebec and Alberta as well, lined up in roadside flea markets next to tables that display dolls with skirts that cover toilet paper rolls. Those guys have a few birds, maybe, a couple of squirrels mounted on sticks, a few moose heads in the back of the station wagon. I take my work seriously. I'm always trying to get a lively posture.”

Olivia has stopped in front of a moose. The moose is making an ungainly leap over a convincingly weathered fence, one end of which had been neatly sawed off for the purposes of the exhibit. The moose is raised on its hind legs. Its head and neck are hunched into its shoulders, as if it were being reprimanded.

“This moose looks funny.”

Harold points to the neck, saying, “A less experienced man might have stretched the neck forward, and if I wished to be true to a moose in this position, that's what I would have done. I took this artistic license with the moose because it died on the hood of a station wagon. The antenna of the car, unfortunately, entered its rectum and pierced the bowel twice, like a knitting needle. After that I felt this moose should be preserved in an attitude of shame.”

“Are you serious?”

“I travel the continent with these animals, setting up in strip malls all over the United States and Canada. I have a license. It's educational. Ottawa pays me. I am very serious. People have to know what we are doing to our wild kingdom. I try to respect the animals as individual creatures. Every sentient being deserves respect. Some of these species may never roam the Earth again. They're dead, of course, but I have preserved them. My part is small, I guess. I'm like a red traffic light. That's how I see myself. I do my thing, I make them pause for a minute, before they march off into extinction. It's a chance to say goodbye. We can't forget what we've destroyed.”

The last animal is a polar bear. The office dividers are set up
so that you come upon it suddenly. Its head and forepaws tower over the divider, but Olivia has been looking at a stuffed mother skunk and suckling skunks on the floor. When she walks around the corner she almost bangs into the bear. The animal's coat is yellowed, its jaw wide.

“She scared you,” chuckles Harold and he pats the bear's coat twice, as if it's the bear that needs reassurance.

“This polar bear is my drawing card. The only animal not hit by a truck. This bear was shot. It wandered into a small town here in Newfoundland. It had been trapped on an ice floe. Starved. Dangerous. A mother bear separated from her cub. At seven in the morning a woman was putting out her garbage. The bear chased her back into the house. There was only an aluminum screen door between them. She got her husband's shotgun and when the bear crumpled the aluminum door, just like a chip bag, she shot it in the throat.”

Harold parts the fur of the bear's throat. He has to stand on tippy toes to do so. Olivia can see the black sizzled hole, the fur singed pink.

At the end of the hall Olivia can see the woman in the ticket booth for the movie theatres. There's just one woman on tonight, although the twin booth is also lit with flashing lights that circle the outline of the booths. The ticket woman has taken a Q-tip from her purse and is cleaning her ear.

“You have a truck outside?”

“Yes, an eighteen-wheeler.”

“Would you consider joining me for a beer? I can give you my address and you can pick me up later. I have a daughter
but I have a babysitter lined up for the evening. I was going out anyway.”

Olivia has asked the taxidermist out for a beer because she suddenly feels sad about being alone on her birthday. She has an image of this man driving across an empty Saskatchewan highway with these wild beasts frozen in attitudes of attack, stretched in frozen gallops in the back of his truck. He is the first person she has met in months who seems lonelier than she is. There's the chance he won't show up.

At the bar Olivia gets drunk very fast. Harold drinks the same bottle of beer most of the evening. At last call he buys himself another. He feels jumpy, excited. He's been on the road for six months and almost always finds himself eating in empty hotel restaurants where the waitress watches a miniature TV with an earphone so as not to disturb him.

Olivia is beautiful, Harold thinks. She's wearing a man's shirt of moss-coloured material, and grey leggings. When she walks to the bar he can see all the muscles in her long legs. She reminds him of a giraffe, graceful despite her drunkenness and the fact that her legs are too long for her. Harold is adept at recognizing different kinds of drunkenness. In some people it twists free something bitter, but Olivia is blossoming. Her cheeks are flushed, her s's are lisping against her large front teeth. She has been telling him about the father of her child.

“My memories are like those animals in the back of your truck. I can take them out and look at them, all but touch them. Today is my birthday. I'm thirty, but time hasn't moved at
all since he left. I don't look any older. I'm just waiting, that's all. Do you know what I think? I think he'll be back. I know he will. I know how to get in touch with him if there's an emergency with Rose, our daughter. I've got the number in my bedside table. But I haven't called him since he left. I'm waiting until he comes to his senses. You know what I think? I think he's been enchanted by an ice queen. You know, a splinter of glass in his eye, but one of these days an unexpected tear is going get it out. He'll be back, don't you worry, Harold.”

Suddenly Harold is seized with worry. He removes his glasses. He puts his hand over hers on the table.

“Be honest with me, now. Does it bother you that I have a wandering eye?”

Olivia lays down her beer glass and draws one knee up to her chest.

“At first it was strange. I didn't know which eye to look into.”

“In some cultures it is thought to be auspicious. In some cultures it's a sign. I'd like very much to go home with you this evening.”

Olivia looks into his eyes, first one, then the other. Without his glasses they look even stranger. They are flecked with gold, the lashes, long and black, like a girl's.

They are lying side by side in bed. Harold is already asleep, his cheek nuzzled into her armpit, her arm over her head. He insisted on bringing the polar bear into the bedroom. He said it was worth thousands of dollars. He couldn't afford to leave it in
the truck. A gang of men in a Montreal parking lot had broken into the truck, which was empty at the time, but he hadn't yet gotten the lock replaced.

The steps to Olivia's apartment were icy and when they got to the top, both of them straining with the bear, it slipped and its head thunked down the fifteen steps, denting its cheek. This almost made Harold cry with frustration.

He said, “What an indecency for that poor creature, the most noble creature in the wild kingdom.”

The thumping woke the babysitter, who had fallen asleep on the couch. She pulled on her coat and boots and helped them with the bear.

The cold sobered Olivia considerably. They are lying in bed talking, with all their clothes on except for their shoes. She says, “Harold, do you mind if we don't make love?” and he says, “Not at all,” but he is very disappointed.

She talks more about the father of her child. She has glow-in-the-dark stars pasted onto the bedroom ceiling. When Harold removes his glasses, the galaxy blurs and it looks as though they are really sleeping under the milky way. While she talks he puts his hand under her shirt onto her belly. The warmth of it, the small movement as she breathes is so charged with unexpected pleasure that Harold becomes almost tearful. He can't trust his voice to speak, so he lies beside her silently. They both fall asleep.

Olivia's eight-year-old daughter, Rose, is awake in her bed, terrified. She heard the thumping of something large and
dangerous on the stairs outside, and drunken laughter. She heard whispers from her mother's room. She makes herself small against the headboard of the bed. She sits there watching the door of her room, waiting for something terrible to bash it open. She watches the clock radio with the red digital numerals change, change, change. Then she gets out of bed. She creeps along the hall to her mother's room. The hall light is on. She squeezes the glass doorknob with her sweaty hand and slowly, so the hinges won't creak, pushes the door open. The light falls on the raging polar bear, frozen in the act of attacking her sleeping mother. Rose doesn't move. The bear doesn't move. Everything stays as it is for a long time until the man next to her mother raises himself up on his elbow and says, “Little girl?”