The Journey Prize Stories 22 (4 page)

“Are there men like this where you come from?” the woman asked.

“I didn't think so,” the hunter said. “Not until tonight. You follow a trail – a broken branch, a footprint, some leavings – and you're surprised when it leads back to yourself.”

“Did you do something like that? Even once?”

“I meant there were signs. Left after my thoughts. I don't go where they go.”

The hunter and the woman followed the bloody trail south and then west, until grey dawn. Blood spatters wound up and down the streets, daubed a curb on Triumph and streaked a yellow cement barrier near Pandora. The woman found a black pump split at the heel, in the parking lot behind the Waldorf Pub. “It's Val's,” she said. “Size seven.”

They heard sirens from the southwest.

“He can't be far,” the hunter said.

“She,”
the woman said.

The woman led the hunter at a run. They crossed Hastings into Strathcona and ran after the sirens. The buck was close now, the hunter could feel it; his heart sped up, his hands turned cold. Those ghosts of those old kills, he didn't need his
scope to see them now. They moved everywhere in the shadows; each overlaid another, limbs entwined with limbs, torsos entwined with torsos, innards with innards. He wouldn't call them human.

The air grew heavy with the scent of cherry blossoms. A police car with its lights flashing sped away up another street. A crowd of men and women were gathered in the middle of East Pender. Some of them held candles and they sang a song the hunter didn't recognize. The blood trail led right up to the crowd.

“Val!” the woman cried and ran towards them.

If the buck is there, the hunter thought, at least he isn't suffering anymore. If Val is there, at least she isn't suffering anymore. He could go home, back to the hospital to visit his father. Get warm again. Get off this path.

His rifle leapt to his shoulder. The buck's antlers pushed past the corner of a large brick building. The hunter began to exhale as he waited for the buck's head to appear.

The woman sobbed. “Val!”

The hunter exhaled all his breath. His finger squeezed the trigger.

There! The buck's head and neck came past the comer of the building, but it was twisted at an impossible angle as if broken and wrenched too far to the right. The beast was moving, floating as if it were on its side, asleep on the arms of a strong wind. But it didn't move under the wind's power or even its own. The buck lay splayed across the front of the black Escalade, tied down with yellow rope. Its body steamed in the cold night; its blood cooked on the left headlight.

“Val! Val, come back!”

The crowd pressed in around the hunter. The ghosts of those old kills pressed in around the hunter. The crowd implored him with tears and sobs. Where they'd held their vigil, where the tracks he and the woman followed ended, there was a tangle of bloodied trails. Blood led off in every direction up the street – into desolate buildings, into the yards of houses. Some of it stopped where parked cars had been, some of it led to dumpsters.

He thought for a long time about which trail to follow. He feared they all led back to him. He feared what lay at the end of his thoughts.

I
liked the way Nate told the story. He was happy to reel it off, starting with the part where Genevieve, his first mother, collapsed on the kitchen floor with a blood clot in her lung. “It only took a second or two for her to die,” he said, slowly lowering his hand in a side-to-side motion as though his mother had been a piece of windblown paper. “She probably didn't even feel it.” Nate was a baby when it happened, and he had almost cried himself to death by the time the landlord unlocked the apartment door. His father – our father – lived with my mother by then. The day Genevieve died, my mother was busy giving birth. “But don't feel bad, Elaine,” Nate said to me. “You almost died, too. You were early.”

It seemed obvious to us that Genevieve's death was a lot better than our father's. It was definitely faster and there were no hospitals or operations, and Genevieve didn't have to lose her hair or spend a lot of time throwing up into stainless-steel bowls. My mother agreed with us on principle, she said, catching our eyes in the rearview mirror, but either way it
wasn't appropriate to make a sport out of it. “Death isn't a contest, you know. Everyone gets the same prize.” She lifted one hand from the steering wheel to make the point as we drove through the cemetery gates. Genevieve and our father were in different sections, but my mother said it was still very convenient for visiting, even if the traffic in this part of the city was hell.

We remembered our father a little, Nate more than me because he was older. Our mother encouraged us to ask all the questions we wanted, which helped us make up a few more memories. No topic was off-limits when it came to our dead parents. My mother didn't want us to grow up feeling guilty or resentful about things we didn't understand. “Fear is the source of all disease,” she said as she made our kale breakfast shakes. She wasn't sure what our father had been afraid of, and we knew the theory didn't apply as well to Genevieve, but Nate and I bought into it anyway. We had a lot of questions.

“Did he walk with a cane?” Nate asked.

“Yes,” our mother said, scraping the clogged blades of the Cuisinart with a wooden spoon. “He tried, anyway. He didn't want a ramp out front. We'd already spent a lot of money on the landscaping.”

“What colour were his glasses?”

“He didn't wear glasses, Nate. You know that.”

“And what about his eyelashes?” I asked. I felt left out because I mostly remembered him as a shadow that smelled like Vicks VapoRub. “Did they fall out in clumps?” Nate said that our father had pink eye a lot and sometimes wore sunglasses to watch television.

“This blender.”

The more questions we asked, the more my mother's face went strange. The bones in her jaw looked like they had softened and stretched. It was uncomfortable to watch her when she talked like that. I felt like we were scaring her, which was the worst thing you could do to a person, in my book. Nate was going on about radiation therapy and its scientific connections to superpowers, and my mother's face kept shifting, like I was looking at her underwater. She rested the spoon on the stove-top and rolled up the sleeve of her dressy black sweater to pick at the blades, and Nate kept firing question after question: Was our dad ever a Cub Scout? Did he drink kale shakes? Which one of the three of us did he love most?

Nate had once told me that mothers, as much as you might love them, were all the same. He said that if anything happened to my mother, another lady would adopt the two of us, maybe one of our aunts in Philadelphia or Newark. Women loved babies most, he said, but we were still little enough to be okay. “It's fathers who are the tough ones. Much harder to come by.”

Nate was living proof. I heard the way my mother tucked him into the bunk above me, telling him to close his eyes, sleepy bird, and dream of flying over all the green places on the Earth, but he still had to play the Father-Son Scout Baseball Tournament with Mr. Crisander. Mr. Crisander did up all the buttons on his polo shirts and parted his hair down the middle. At Halloween he gave out toothbrushes. He said Nate could call him Captain as a kind of nickname, but Nate stuck to Mr. Crisander. Mr. Crisander lived alone next door with his pot-bellied pig, Mickey, who had been starved by her previous owners to make her small. It had worked, to a point.
Now she was about the size of our Aunt Jennifer's fat beagle, and she came if Mr. Crisander called her, but Mickey was a lot heavier than a dog and had stumpy legs. She couldn't catch a Frisbee to save her life. She also had a bad skin disease. Her raw, scaly hide showed through her black and white bristles. Sometimes she scratched against the stone pillar near the bottom of our driveway and her back oozed. Still, none of our friends could say they knew a pet pig, and she seemed to like us. Nate and I felt like we had to pet Mickey if we saw her.

“I found Mick through the
SPCA
,” Mr. Crisander said as Mickey plowed her snout into our limp fingers. “People buy them and think they'll stay piglets forever.” Mickey seemed like a good enough pig, but it made us uneasy that she rubbed against our legs, shimmying and squealing. She also had a bad habit of rooting in my mother's garden. “Leave that thing for long enough,” my mother had said, throwing out what was left of her tulips, “and it'll dig up the dead.” It didn't help Mickey's case that our mother told us to wash our hands after we touched her. It made us think certain things about Mickey, and about Mr. Crisander. Nate had recently mentioned he didn't want to go to Scouts anymore, and my mother said she had been thinking the same thing. “I mean, a father-son baseball game? What are we, Republicans?” Nate went to Science Club now, and he was collecting cans to save money for his own microscope.

My mother didn't mind that Nate kept a picture of Genevieve taped to the ceiling above his pillow. Genevieve had a big pink flower behind one ear and her nose was sunburned. He didn't really miss her, he said, because how could you miss someone you didn't have space for? I felt like I knew
what he meant. This was why we didn't have questions about Genevieve, why her death sounded like a grocery list of events and why we never played the game with her. It was our father who was the hole in our lives.

“Did he die in the morning or at night?”

“Morning.”

“How did you know he was dead?”

“He stopped breathing.”

“Did his heart stop beating, too?”

“After a minute, yes.”

“What happened then?”

My mother's face was sliding out from under her skin. She whacked at the blades with the spoon.

“Fucking blender,” she said.

She flung the spoon across the counter and it smashed into Nate's shake. We jumped as the glass hit the tiles and the spoon clattered under the dining room table. Gobs of kale splattered onto Nate's suit pants as the glass broke apart with a barely audible click. The three of us looked at the mess on the floor. I started to cry.

My mother quickly picked up the biggest pieces of glass, the clink of them in her hand like a stunted wind chime. “He was dead, Nate. Nothing happened then.” She wrapped the shards in a sheet of newspaper and threw the package in the garbage. “Don't cry about the glass, Elaine. If we were Buddhists, we'd already think of it as broken. Now go put your shoes on and wait for me in the car. And don't pet Mickey if she's in the driveway.”

The drive was quiet, just the sound of Stevie Wonder from the tape deck. When we got close, our mother sang along
softly. Nate and I didn't look at each other. Instead we watched the people on the sidewalk and tried to guess their names. Nate said the woman with the puppy in her bike basket was a Shirley, but I thought she was a Tory. We agreed that the man with the bundle buggy full of wine bottles was a George. We couldn't quite decide on the woman with the fabric shopping bags and bunches of sunflowers. A Rebecca, we thought, or maybe a Donna.

“A Genevieve,” my mother said. “You can always tell a Genevieve. Nate, do you feel like telling Elaine the story?” We knew this was her way of asking us to forgive her, which we did right away. It was just a glass.

“She had a blood clot in her lung, which is also called a thrombus,” Nate started, and the story went from there.

The cemetery roadways were narrow and our mother drove slowly in case a car came from the other way, which it almost never did. The grass was neatly mowed. Any fresh mounds of dirt were covered with strips of bright green sod, making it look like the newer graves had more life in them. Some of the headstones, usually the ones with carvings of angels or inset pictures of Jesus, even pictures of the person who died, had lots of flowers around them. There were carnations in sturdy vases and votive candles everywhere. Our mother told us that people paid extra to have the cemetery staff come and leave those things once a month, once a week, if you really wanted to, but she said it didn't matter how many flowers there were, it was the love you left that was important. “Cemetery workers are paid to care,” she shrugged. “Dead people may be dead, but they can still tell the difference. Not that we're judging.”

We parked the car and Nate got the beach towel out of the trunk. The ground was a little soft and our mother's high heels sunk into the grass, kicking up lopsided cones of dirt as we headed over to our father's grave. She started walking on the balls of her feet, knees bent. “God,” she said, “I feel like a praying mantis.” She took off her shoes and hooked one finger into each heel, the toes dangling.

“Praying mantises eat each other when they mate,” Nate said.

“Actually, that's not true.” My mother tapped the toes of her shoes together. “They only do that in laboratories when people are watching.”

“But we saw them do it in the wild, on TV,” I said.

“Well, somebody had to be holding the camera, don't you think?”

I helped Nate spread the beach towel lengthwise over our father's grave. It was yellow and it had a hot pink flamingo wearing pineapple-shaped sunglasses. Our mother bought it on sale. She said that most people probably found it a bit loud, even for the beach, but that's what the graveyard needed, wasn't it? A little colour.

“How would you like to live with only grey furniture?” she asked us, pointing at the gravestones. But it didn't really matter. All the towel had to do was keep our graveyard clothes clean.

Our father's name was carved into a large polished piece of granite, and then below that it said, “Son, Husband, Father, Caregiver.” When Nate was younger, he had asked our mother if our father worked in schools or office buildings.