Way the Crow Flies (44 page)

She says, “I hurt the tree,” and weeps inconsolably.

She wakes herself up screaming. She was punching the tree and her hand was full of chocolate blood.

She finishes out the night in Mike’s room.

“But what if there isn’t a war on?” she asks him, savouring the canvas smell of the hard camp cot. “How can you fight in one?” They are discussing the future.

“There’s always a bit of war on somewhere,” Mike replies in the dark. “And there’s assassin jobs that are so secret, you never even hear about them.”

“And that’s when you’re a missionary?”

“Mercenary.”

It sounds like someone going around being merciful to people, but it’s just the opposite, thinks Madeleine. How can you go around killing people you’re not even mad at, who aren’t even your enemy?

“It’s nothing personal,” says Mike, “you’re a professional soldier, you work for pay. Anyhow, mercenary’s just my third choice—like if something happens to me, say I lose an eye like Daddy.”

Madeleine can just make out the framed photo of an elegant airborne CF-104 on the wall over Mike’s bed. The pilot is looking at the camera from the window of the cockpit, but his face is not visible because he is wearing an oxygen mask—corrugated snout and goggles.

“What’s your first choice?” Madeleine knows the answer but she doesn’t want him to fall asleep.

“No question about it,” he says. “Fighter pilot. That’s what I’m going to be doing six or seven years from now.”

“What’s your second choice?”

“NHL.”

“What position?”

“Forward.”

“I’m defence.”

“You’re not on the ice, you’re a girl.”

“Let’s say I’m a boy.”

“Yeah, but you aren’t.”

“Yeah, but let’s say.”

“Well….”

“Yeah, and my name is Mike, I mean Mitch, okay? And I’m really a boy.”

“You’re stunned.”

“Pretend I’m really your brother, okay?”

“Mitch?”

“Yes Mike?”

“No, I mean are you sure you want your name to be Mitch?”

“What should it be?”

“… Robert.”

“Okay.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while and Madeleine figures he has fallen asleep. Then he whispers, “Hey Rob?”

“Yeah?” Her voice feels slightly different. Not deeper, really. Lighter. Like a basketball off the driveway. Like red jeans. Madeleine waits for him to continue. After a moment he does. “What do you think of Marsha Woodley?”

Madeleine is so embarrassed she wants to squeal and pull the covers over her head, but she remembers she is Rob. “Gee, Mike. I don’t know. Why?”

“Do you think she’s…. You know. Special?”

“Yeah.” Madeleine nods in the dark. “She’s a real lady.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think.”

She hesitates, then says, “And Rick is a real gentleman.”

“Yup.”

In the silence that follows, she waits for him to continue, but hears his breathing change and knows that he really is asleep this time. She falls asleep and has no nightmares. Rob never has nightmares.

Captain and Mrs. McCarroll are relieved when Mr. Lemmon calls their daughter’s teacher into his office, and Mr. March is able to assure the worried parents, “Claire is a bright and pleasant student but she is a little given to daydreaming.”

Captain McCarroll blushes and Mrs. McCarroll smiles, saying, “She gets that from her daddy.”

Mr. Lemmon shows Mr. March the note. “Do you have any idea who might have written this?”

Mr. March takes a moment to consider, then shakes his head. “I can ask my pupils,” he volunteers.

“Oh please don’t bother.” Sharon blushes.

Captain McCarroll says, “We don’t want to embarrass her.”

Mr. Lemmon asks if Mr. March has had occasion to keep Claire after three, and he replies that he did keep her and one or two other children for a few minutes to go over some spelling exercises, “but certainly not as a punishment for bad behaviour.”

Mr. Lemmon thanks the parents for coming in, and Mr. March for clearing the matter up.

Claire is never again required to remain after three.

It is Marjorie Nolan who first feels his hands around her neck. Then Grace Novotny brings home bruises that no one asks her to explain. And that is all you need to know about Grace’s mum and dad.

T
HE WREATHS HAVE WILTED
at the base of the cenotaph in Exeter, felt poppies have fallen from lapel pins and washed up against curbs softened by autumn leaves, damp and exhaling the last earthy smell before winter puts all scent and soil to sleep. Overhead, the remaining leaves have lost their lustre, clinging sparse and ragged to trees revealed magnificently complex against a hard orange sky at five in the afternoon. November. Two minutes of silence at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, to mark the end of the war to end all wars in 1918—and all the others since then. It seems also to have marked the setting in of the deep hibernation that muffles the land like a blanket. Shhh, winter is coming. In the air is the unmistakeable smell of snow.

Madeleine can smell it and she supposes Colleen can too. In the park it’s cold and growing dark. Cold enough for mittens, but until the first snow comes who thinks of wearing them? Colleen’s feet are still bare inside her tattered runners. Madeleine has turned nine. A wily number, able to look after itself. She had a pajama party and felt guilty for not inviting Colleen, but she couldn’t picture her with her other friends, in baby dolls and curlers, levitating and talking about boys. And Madeleine would not have known which self to be. There is also a sense that the time she and Colleen spend together is something separate. Private.

They are crouched now at the far end of the park behind Colleen’s house. It borders a number of backyards, including Philip Pinder’s, where, this evening, there is a deer hanging upside down from a tree. Cold blood drips out of its mouth into a metal pail. Its eyes are staring open and a drop of liquid hangs from its nose. It’s draining. As it turns slowly from its rope and pulley you can see where it has been slit open
as though it had just unzipped its deer suit, like in a cartoon. All of its insides are piled green and brown and pink in a plastic bucket. It’s an evil thing. Not the deer. But what has been done.

From the teeter-totters in the park, it seemed as though the deer might not be real. Or at least you could say, “That’s a deer that Philip’s father shot,” and feel almost normal about it, because hunting is normal. But when Madeleine came closer and saw the deer slowly rotating by its hind ankles, legs stretched so that it seemed they must snap and recoil any second, it was different. It did not feel normal. But Philip, his older brother, Arnold, their father, their mother and their Uncle Wilf are all out in the yard, working on the deer and behaving normally; although with an added air of seriousness, the way a person might if they were, for example, practising backing their new Airstream trailer into the driveway: “It’s not that I’m trying to show off. This is work.”

A neighbour comments, “That’s quite a deer, Harve.” But Madeleine can see that the neighbour is a bit embarrassed, trying to be polite, saying something about a dead deer that you would normally say about a garden. “That’s quite a rhododendron, Harve.”

As Colleen and Madeleine linger, however, a couple of other dads arrive and smile openly, wanting to know the whole story. They have a look in their eyes that Madeleine has seen on television shows—the look just before the wolf whistle at the pretty girl walking down the street. Philip’s father keeps working and more or less ignores the other men. He tells the story briefly, quietly, accepting a beer almost as an afterthought. “Son of a gun!” they say and gaze at the deer. “She’s a beauty, Harve.” Philip is grinning in a strange way, fetching things for his dad. He picks up the pail of guts, pretend-vomits into it and offers it to Madeleine and Colleen.

“Philip,” his dad warns softly. Philip puts the bucket down and looks up at his father, who has begun to chop meat off the deer. “Are you giving me a hand or are you playing with the girls?”

Philip turns red and proceeds to ignore Madeleine and Colleen. So do all the other men and boys—there are no women out here now that it’s getting dark. The sky is sad and beautiful, stained orange where the sun splashed down. Someone’s hi-fi is playing, music drifts from a window two or three doors away, “Bali Hai” is calling….

Arnold Pinder is up in the tree now, with an extension cord, positioning a light bulb over the deer. The men have forgotten that Madeleine and Colleen are present. Spying.

Madeleine knows that no girls are allowed here. No women either. They will cook the meat and serve it, but it is not decent for females to be out here. Not because of the hacked-up deer—they’re taking off its head now—“Hang on. Got it, okay…. Weighs a ton”—but in the way it’s not decent for an older girl or a woman to go into a barbershop. Never mind a tavern. Those are men’s places. Madeleine knows that her days of accompanying her father to the barber are numbered. This backyard has become a men’s place.

They let out a short whoop as they cut down what’s left of the deer, take the weight and lay it on a tarp. Philip’s dad leans over the carcass with a hacksaw. The girls can’t see past the men and boys, gathered and relaxed now around the tarp with beers and Cokes, but they see Arnold Pinder come around the side of the house. He’s got his dog, Buddy, by the collar, and Buddy is practically walking on his hind legs, pulling Arnold toward the tarp. Mr. Pinder straightens up and tosses a stick to Buddy, who lunges and carries it off. It is not a stick, it’s a leg.

Madeleine pokes Colleen, but Colleen just shrugs. Madeleine knows that deer was murdered. But Colleen would never say that. She rarely gives her opinion—even though it is clear to Madeleine that she always has one. Not just an opinion, but the right answer. Trouble is, she refuses to say it. “If you don’t know, what’s the use of me telling you?”

“That’s a stupid answer,” Madeleine recently got up the nerve to say.

To which Colleen raised her eyebrows and smiled slightly with a corner of her mouth.

Colleen can fire a neat and tidy round of spit off the tip of her tongue. She does this after she has given an opinion, silent or otherwise. She does so now, and says, “My brother shot a deer once.”

For a moment Madeleine wonders who Colleen means, because the images of Ricky Froelich and shooting a deer don’t go together.

“Ricky?”

“How many brothers do I got?”

Madeleine knows that Roger and Carl don’t count. They’re babies.

She swallows. “How come?” Colleen doesn’t answer. Madeleine asks, “For food?”

Colleen has risen and is walking off. Madeleine follows. They slip into the chill of deeper shadows, up the gentle incline through grass that has begun to feel sinewy underfoot with the coming of frost.

She follows Colleen to where the monkey bars and merry-go-round glint glamorous and strange in the night. Through the gloom, the bare patch in the oak tree glows white, and she reaches out to stroke the wound as she passes—
Get well soon
.

The darkness makes the swings look bigger—giant metal A’s at either end supporting gallows in between. The teeter-totters tilt astride their hitching post like bucking broncos, the slide gleams sly and skinny, everything says, “I dare you.” Madeleine experiences a thrill at the lateness of the hour, only now realizing that she has stayed out long past when she is allowed. Her parents must have left by now for the Woodleys’. She lost track of time, what with the sunset and the electric light in the tree, the music, the men, the boys. And the deer.

“He had to shoot it,” says Colleen, walking up the teeter-totter till she is balanced at the centre.

Madeleine follows. “Why?”

“It was suffering.”

They stand back to back at the fulcrum of the teeter-totter and walk slowly toward opposite ends, as though about to fight a duel, trying to keep the board perfectly stable. Then they turn carefully and face one another. The object is to jump off with no warning, causing your opponent, should she not be quick enough, to come crashing down. They take turns. The darkness shines around them. The only light is from the houses and street lamps beyond—and from a wedge of moon that looks more remote than ever in the black sky. Certain questions may now be asked that would be impermissible during the day. Madeleine hears her own voice in the cold clarity of night—like the sound of a rifle being broken open. “Are you guys Indian?”

Colleen appears not to have heard the question. She stands at her end.

Madeleine swallows and says, “I don’t care if you are, ’cause anyhow I like Indians.” She cannot read Colleen’s expression. Her skin is darker, blue eyes paler in the night.