Fauna Read online

  “Hey, Billy,” she pants.

  He sidles in to push his heaving flank against her. Looks up bright-eyed, breathing hard.

  “What do you think, boy?” She tucks a hand under his jaw. “Think I broke any records?”

  He tilts his head, his tongue wetting her wrist.

  “You thirsty? I bet you’re thirsty.”

  She steps off the bike, turns the handlebars and leans into them, pushing a path through the growth. There’s little hope of hearing the Don, what with the surrounding traffic and the viaduct’s overhead hum. She can smell it, though, and so can Billy, lolloping ahead of her now, turned puppyish at the promise of a swim. Nothing like water for a water dog; it’s the oldest song he knows, the one forever singing in his skin.

  There’s no way she should let him go in, not when the two of them will be sharing a tent within the hour. When he hesitates at the bank—and he will, he’s that good a dog—she should be firm with him, tell him a drink is all he gets.

  She draws up behind him at a muddy slip between two clumps of sedge. The smell is stronger here, equal parts natural and not. The sight of the water is strangely calming. This close, she can hear it sighing in its bed.

  Billy stands quivering.

  “I know, boy.”

  He twists to show her the look in his eyes.

  “Okay,” she says. “Go on in.”

  It’s never easy breaking ground in the old garden; Guy could be digging down through a pile of soggy jute mats. He’s fixed on a spot just inside the back fence, where a twist of morning glory pushes up through the creepers. He has no need of a lamp. Warm light reaches back to him through the kitchen window, overlaid by the on-ramp’s chill.

  Eventually he cuts through to pure, dark dirt. He rests a moment, leaning up against the wall of vines. The morning glory shows no flowers as yet; even if it were in bloom, the day’s effort would be wilting by now, preparing to drop to the ground.

  The second jag of digging goes faster. He doesn’t cut corners, though—the hole has to be wide enough so the fox can lie down and rest. You want them standing to attention down there? Aunt Jan knew how to plant an image deep.

  When he’s sure there’s sufficient room, Guy opens the bin, flooding the night air with musk. He takes a deep breath, his eyes watering, and stoops over the fox. For a moment he holds its foreleg, feeling through fur to bones both sturdy and slight.

  Over time, he’s learned the gentlest way to deliver a creature into the ground is by kneeling at the graveside and making a hammock of both hands—fingers laced beneath its belly or its back, depending on how it lies. It can be awkward, even a strain, but it’s no great feat with the fox. When Guy’s knuckles meet soil, he holds still a moment—head over the pungent hole, armpits wedged against its grassy lip—then he loosens his fingers and withdraws.

  Infilling is the easy part, at least after the first couple of spadefuls have obscured the fox’s fine coat. He tamps the mound gently with his sole. No need to come up with the right words in the right order—Aunt Jan got it right long ago. Guy props the spade among the creepers, shoves his hands into his pockets and bows his head.

  “Fox, beautiful fox. Goodbye, fox.”

  Billy smells more like a swamp than a river, but Lily lets him crawl into the tent just the same. He always goes in first—that way he has room to buckle round and face the open end. The first couple of times, he wanted to sleep in a curl the way dogs do, but she’s taught him to stretch out long like a human being. The camo tent is meant to be a one-man affair; lucky thing Lily’s so thin.

  Unstuffing the mummy bag from its sack, she flings it out along the narrows between Billy and the flimsy wall. She’s tried leaving the long zipper open, but the nights are sometimes still too cool. There’s a trick to worming down inside the bag. You have to think of it as something you’re returning to, somewhere you belong. Otherwise the puffy confines can fuck with your head.

  The smell of the bag was something else she hadn’t planned on. The body it had known before hers was still present in the weave—no amount of aftershave sufficient to cloak its overactive glands. During her first couple of weeks in the valley, the odour was strong enough to give her nightmares. Time and again she woke writhing, Billy upset beside her, the tent closing in. She considered burning the bag, but survival required a tougher turn of mind. It was only a smell. It would fade. Turns out she was right; these days she only ever catches the occasional whiff.

  The vest was never a problem that way. It was brand new, ordered online to replace the khaki one that had been around for years. She could almost pretend it had been meant as a gift for her, only somebody clicked on XL when they should’ve chosen S. In any case, she’s come to appreciate its shapeless bulk.

  The ground is hard beneath her shoulder blades, the twin bony points of her butt. Not many rocks, though, or roots, and the cover is good—thick enough that she’s called the spot home for more than a single night. It’s a rough, limb-scratching hike in, only the ghost of a path. Tonight’s passage was even more laboured than usual; she did her best to protect the bike’s paint job as she followed Billy deep into the blind-dark scrub. When they finally reached their little clearing, she laid the bike gently on its side in the grass.

  “Duffle bag,” she told the shape that was Billy, and he bellied in under a clump of bushes and dragged it out. She lit the Coleman, turning the flame down low. The tent she could do by feel in the dark, but she needed light to rebuild the scrim of loose brush.

  Now, tucked into the mummy bag, wreathed in a fug of damp dog, she twists over onto her belly and reaches out through the flaps to draw the camp lantern close. One more thing she needs light for. One task left before she can sleep.

  The knife is in its pocket, trapped between her small breast and the ground. She thumbs the snap and prises it out. It’s a pretty thing, the beaten aluminum hilt warmed by a swish of wooden inlay, natural against the palm. It was nowhere near the largest in the collection case—the blade maybe eight centimetres, the whole thing under ten folded closed. She couldn’t believe her luck when she opened it by flashlight in the darkened den. There was a butterfly on the blade, BENCHMADE printed across the span of its wings, U.S.A. 440 beneath its tail. She knew then it would be gentle. A fluttering you could scarcely feel.

  Always the smooth surprise of its action. Billy whines at the snick of the blade locking open, then again as Lily rises up on her elbows and pushes back her sleeve.

  The month of April filled her left forearm; now she must work awkwardly with her left hand to mark the right. She’s not sure what she’ll do when May comes to an end and she runs out of room on this side. She hasn’t thought that far.

  Tonight being her fifty-seventh night of freedom, she’s partway into a group of five. The fifth cuts are the tricky ones, slashing down across the previous four. They require a deeper breath, an extra-steady hand.

  She touches the flat of the blade to the back of her wrist. It takes more guts than she possesses to slash the fish-belly flesh of the underside, risk nicking a vessel and letting some serious blood. The way Lily does it, nobody gets hurt. Score out the new mark with the tip—just a scratch—then drop the blade, flicking inward for a neat, clean line. She has to press a little harder these days, the knife duller than it was when she began.

  There. Practice makes perfect. Not much blood, but enough.

  Billy whimpers.

  “It’s okay, boy. It’s not serious.”

  He wriggles in tight against her, nosing, then licking, the wound.

  5

  Ring of Dark Timber

  To begin with, Letty kept her books on shelves like anybody else. On weekends Edal trailed after her through the auction barn or napped fretfully in the passenger seat while Letty trolled the yard sales for “proper wood.” By the time she turned eight, her mother had burned through the small savings Nana and Grandpa Adam had left behind, and even a set of used veneer shelves had become a luxury. Letty still slowed for
every hand-painted roadside sign, but now all her pennies went on books.

  It turned out bricks and chipboard planks could often be had for the price of carting them away. What was more, they could be altered to fit any space. Letty unlocked the disused tool shed and rooted out her father’s saw. Her first attempts were uneven, but she soon got the knack of a tidy cut.

  Edal helped when she wasn’t in school. She could carry three red bricks at a time, and she often took up one end of a big grey one so her mother wouldn’t have to manage it alone. Together they lined the front hallway, stacking the makeshift shelves higher than Edal’s head. Then came the upstairs hall. It was narrower up there, and once both walls were lined, it took on the feel of a secret passage. Darkness added to the effect when Letty built over the window. The single pane had let in a surprising amount of light.

  Edal was confused when her mother suggested they do the spare room next. Since when was Nana and Grandpa Adam’s room spare? It wasn’t that Edal went in there often; in fact it took a rare state of mind to get her to crack that door. They had both died in there, in the big maple bed—Grandpa Adam first, then Nana, not even a year later. Pneumonia was a disease old people caught when they were sad. Edal’s mother told her this, her face wet and streaky, and Edal wondered how old was old, and whether Letty was trying to tell her she too would soon be lying down forever in the maple bed. She didn’t, but for months Edal kept watch whenever her mother mounted the stairs.

  Wasn’t the room somebody had died in supposed to be special somehow? And didn’t that go double if it was two people? Letty didn’t seem to think so. She closed both windows and covered them up. When Edal took a rest from carrying bricks up the stairs and stood still in the middle of the room, Letty turned and said, “Nana and Grandpa Adam would want us to have all this nice space.”

  There was space going to waste in the living room too. Letty cut shelves to fit on either side of the mantelpiece, then in between Grandpa Adam’s chair and the sideboard that held Nana’s tea set and very best plates. After that she took her measuring tape to the kitchen. A good three feet lay between the refrigerator and the back door—and then there was the door itself. “It’s silly, right?” Letty said. “Who says a house needs two ways in?”

  Edal began to make excuses when her mother asked her to help: she had to get started making supper, she had a project due the next day. Not being there worked best of all; Letty rarely came calling for her in the woods.

  Not long after she lost her helper, Letty stopped constructing shelves. The books stood in piles then—Historic Hairstyles of the World, A Guide to Grouting, The Good Earth. Edal grew accustomed to clearing a space when she wanted to open the fridge, or run a bath, or watch one of two stations that came in striped and blurry on their rabbit-eared TV. One afternoon she came upon a Canadian Club box full of Trixie Belden mysteries sitting on the stovetop, directly over the pilot light. I only set them therefor a second, Edal. I was coming right back.

  Edal was eleven when she took the small brass key from its hook and eased the fat padlock from the bolt on Grandpa Adam’s shed. The light in there was brown, like ditchwater, and the smell was like an old tin can fished out of that same ditch. She ducked under the cobwebs and found a screwdriver and a handful of long, biting screws. The bolt gave her a little trouble, the screw heads rusted tight, but she kept at it, raising blisters on her palm, until it finally came away.

  Her mother must have noticed when she found herself locked out the next time she came to Edal’s bedroom door with an armload of drab local histories or bright travel guides—but she never mentioned it. Maybe she knew by then, as Edal did, that there was a word for what was happening in their house. It wasn’t a word Edal said out loud to anyone; she saved it for herself, for times like when she woke from the dream that Letty had bricked her in, the upstairs hall packed solid with books. Alone in her bed, Edal would whisper the word aloud. “Crazy.” Sometimes once wasn’t enough, and she had to repeat it—cra-zy-cra-zy-cra-zy—until finally she slept.

  6

  The Chronicles of Darius

  Darius was used to his mother spending forever in the tub. I’m going for a soak, she might say, you be a good boy. Or she might say nothing, and he would know from the moan of the pipes, the faucet’s coughing stream.

  The second round tended to use up whatever hot water was left. Sometimes she’d drag her pale feet up to keep from getting scalded; sometimes she’d let them turn pink under the flow. Occasionally she just lay there, letting the water go icy cold. When Darius was really little, it made him nervous. He’d pretend he needed to pee so he could come in and check she hadn’t let her head slip under the surface, forgetting her need to breathe. By the time he was six, even when he did need to go, he’d hold it. Rather than see her long, waterlogged hair, her small, floating breasts and upturned hands, he’d pee in her lonely, long-dead plant.

  He knew something was different the night she slipped and fell. For one thing, there was the sound. She often dropped things—not out of clumsiness so much as an abiding fatigue—so he told himself she’d dropped the chipped Chinatown cat their toothbrushes stood in. Only the cat would’ve smashed, making a splintery noise. Maybe the toilet tank cover. She’d lifted it up after jiggling the handle hadn’t worked. Relaxed her grip and let it slide.

  After a time, he peed in the plant. Perhaps an hour later, he decided it was all right not to brush his teeth and turned the TV down low to help himself drift off.

  In the morning, he folded his blanket away beneath the big brown cushion like always and visited the plant again, leaving a yellow puddle in the saucer beneath the pot. He was good at getting himself ready for school. Cereal in the blue bowl, milk if there was any, otherwise dry. Sometimes just bread. Or if the bread had turned green, then a can of SpaghettiOs; he could work the opener just fine. There was always something if you checked every cupboard. There had never been nothing at all.

  It was one thing going to bed with dirty teeth, but he couldn’t see going to school that way, risking that Mrs. Gamble might catch a whiff of sourness when he opened his mouth at attendance to say Here. He tried the bathroom door and found it open. There was no blood—the edge of the tub wasn’t sharp enough to cut. There was a bump, though, bubbling out from her skull. She lay naked on her back like usual, only for once her green eyes weren’t closed.

  After standing for a time gripping the sink, Darius backed out of the bathroom on tiptoe. He made two baloney sandwiches—one for now, one for lunch—and he went to school, leaving the door to the apartment ajar.

  He never did learn whether it was the super, Mr. Kane, or maybe the old Indian lady down the hall who noticed the open door. Somebody called out to see if anyone was home, then pushed the door wide and went inside. Somebody telephoned the police. Not from the apartment, though; the phone on the kitchen wall had been dead for as long as Darius had understood about phones.

  The officer who came to his class had a lady with him. She was old like Mrs. Gamble, but her silvery hair was cut short instead of wound up like a doughnut and pinned to her head. She asked him about his family.

  “There’s only us,” he told her. And then, remembering, “Only me.”

  But it turned out he was wrong. After only a few days back in the happy canned-soup smell of the Miskes’ house, the short-haired lady came again. This time the man at her side had no uniform, though he stood as though he might be wearing one under his stiff tan coat. He was the wrong size for the Miskes’ crowded kitchen, his shoulders the width of their refrigerator, his forehead reflecting a white slash of fluorescent tube. His hair was the colour of metal. Slicked close to his skull, it was long enough to curl over the collar of his coat. His eyes, when he brought them closer, bending awkwardly at the waist, were a familiar green.

  Darius didn’t notice the woman at first, but when she eased out from behind the big man, he saw that she wore his mother’s mouth. She was older than Faye, though, and she had more flesh on her bones.
She looked as though she just might last.

  She knelt down before him on the Miskes’ kitchen floor. She was like a dog then. Darius had never had one of his own, but he’d talked to plenty of them in the parkette. The woman looked at him the way they all did—the secret streak of wildness, the well of bald, beseeching love.

  It was a long drive back to his grandparents’ home, soft light in the foothills, abrupt night once they truly began to climb. While he could manage to stay awake, Darius maintained a fair grasp on things: he was in the cab of a truck, wedged between the man and woman who had made Faye. She’d never spoken of them as far as he could remember, but then she’d tended to keep her thoughts to herself. Anyway, the fact that he’d never heard of Ron and Agnes Grimes didn’t mean they were strangers. Mrs. Miske had told him so that very morning while she’d helped him dress. They’re family, sweetie. They’re your flesh and blood.

  The road wound on and on, the Rocky Mountains crowding close. Try as he might to keep his wits about him, Darius succumbed to a rumbling sleep. Flesh and blood, flesh and blood—his dreaming mind made a taunt of the words, and then a horror. The woman on his right became flesh, pinkish-white and formless. The man on his left—hard-thighed, hard-sided—became a brilliant crimson rush.

  Once, when they hit a pothole, he jolted awake for the space of a brief exchange.

  “Slips in the bathtub and dies. In the bathtub. Can’t even manage to take a bath.”

  “Ron—”

  “Ron what?”

  “He might wake up.”

  “What if he does? Boy’s got a right to know what his mother was.”

  ——

  They roused him from both sides as the truck juddered to a stop—a gentle Darius, a hand dropping from the gearshift to close on his knee. In the headlights’ beam, there stood a small, solitary house. It was made of logs, and for the first time ever, Darius saw wood for what it was: the bodies of fallen trees.