The Journey Prize Stories 28 (16 page)

My daughter scrunched up her pink face in a bassinet in the third row of the hospital nursery. I recognized neither myself nor Sapna in her. She was small and delicate, too fantastic to be human. I had my first chance to hold her when she was brought out to feed, for only a moment, before the nurse passed her to Sapna.

“I am going to return to the house,” Kalpana said.

“But why?” Sapna asked. “Don't leave me here alone.”

“I won't be gone for long. We need to get things cleaned up before this one comes home, don't we?” She screwed up her face for the baby and then turned to me. “You will be here?” Her manner was suspicious. I nodded.

The hospital room was silent after Kalpana left, the only sound the soft sucking of the baby pulling milk. “She's so strong,” Sapna said. She even sounded friendly. “So healthy.”

We were waiting for the doctor, who would give us a final assessment. He arrived in a rush of energy, brandishing a smile like a clown's. “Congratulations to your new family,” he said. “How are mother and child?”

Sapna pulled her sheet to cover her naked breast. I wanted to point out that a few hours ago she had her legs spread wide.
I had fallen into a habit of cruelty with her, a habit I enjoyed because she no longer bothered to fight back, she simply ignored what I said. The presence of our daughter stopped me.

“And, Dad, how are you doing? Any broken fingers?” I was confused until I realized the doctor had forgotten I was not present during the birth.

I laughed, though I wasn't amused.

The doctor picked up the chart. “She was born a couple weeks early, and sometimes that can lead to problems. She's a bit small, but she'll catch up in no time, especially if she keeps at it like that.” He winked at Sapna, who frowned. He went through a list he must go through with all the parents before arriving, finally, at the point that concerned us most.

“About the matter we discussed a few months ago. I had warned you that your daughter could still be born with Thalassemia minor. I am happy to tell you that your daughter did not inherit.”

“Hai Ram!” Sapna kissed the top of our baby's head heavily and repeatedly.

The doctor replaced the chart. “You can speak to the nurses about the exit procedure. I'll check in in the morning.”

“I knew she would be fine,” Sapna said. “And now you can stop fighting with me for no reason.”

“She is fine,” I said, puzzled. I seated myself in the armchair by the window.

“I will name her Jaanvi. As precious as life.” She kissed the top of the baby's head again. “Actually, go ahead and be angry if you like. My daughter is healthy and that's all I care about.”

“She is my daughter too,” I said, but I felt unconvinced. It occurred to me that if Jaanvi had inherited my disease, the
connection between us would have been stronger. Father and daughter, bound by blood. It was an illogical thought.

Jaanvi's lips unloosed from the nipple. Sapna repositioned so that the baby's cheek remained against her breast. The baby's eyes closed, and her breathing deepened and lengthened, then she fell asleep to her mother's heartbeat. Soon, Sapna's eyes began to droop.

I took Jaanvi from her mother's arms and carried her to the window. The code my blood could have passed on to my child was lost in the gap between generations. A perfectly normal, even desirable event, and yet, I couldn't make sense of my disappointment. I could think only of what Darwin had said, of evolution, that
“non-inheritance was the anomaly.”

W
hen Dino gets back with the guests it's dark and the helicopter's chop has both dogs crying at the door. Loyola stands up from the table to pull bottles from the fridge. The girl on the couch opens her eyes.

“You can go to bed,” Loyola offers.

The girl, hair greased around her face, stays put. Dino brought her home last night.

Loyola follows the dogs out the side door. They fear the rotors about the same as they fear the vacuum: hackling and moaning at the asphalt's edge while the hired hands dart under the blades. Stein unropes a pair of chamois from the game cage. Heads loll and long black devil horns scrape the paint's gloss. He carries each in his arms into the hangar's white light, their beards dripping over his elbow. Inside, Riley's already hooked a tahr buck over the drain. The guests, disembarked, look on. The bird's still putting off a swell of fervid heat. Dino won't winch it the thirty feet into the hangar until season's
end. He's clambering around in it collecting firearms and ammunition, headset collaring his neck.

“You should've seen the stag,” says the man who paid. He takes a bottle off Loyola's tray.

“Twelve-pointer,” says his brother. “Broadsided him on a cliff.”

“Prehistoric,” says the wife. Her face is lit and lined by the fluorescents. Upon arrival, she'd exclaimed devoutly through the tour of the main lodge, the cabins, the green rocky pool, every glance out over the valley bowl. Down the trail, she admired the old barn's rack and ruin. Now she stands on the hangar's stained cement with sweat on her lip and navy mascara freckling the top of her cheekbone. She flashes wide eyes at Loyola. “Just breathtaking,” she says, “All those creatures out there.”

“Took a shot, anyway,” the man says. “Went down most of that bluff on his feet. Spent an hour tracking him.”

“Who knows,” says the brother.

“Bad luck,” says Loyola.

“We couldn't get down to the bottom,” says the wife. “The cliff.”

“Couldn't see a fucking thing.” The man's shrivelled smirk. That red stag's an easy twelve hundred pounds. Antlers thick as ankles. Loyola remembers him. She's not a small woman, but if she stood at his feet and embraced his neck she wouldn't reach his withers. Her fingertips spread wouldn't span the tines of his crown. No trophy for a shot like that, all the glory's in the fall.

Dino blinks all the bird's little lights off and carries an armful of slick black branches to the cage at the back of the
hangar. He doesn't look at her as he passes. He replaces each rifle into its cradle, slides drawers around, bolts the lock.

Riley's already got the tahr half-naked, hide draping his knees. The paying man wants to do the chamois, so Dino hands him a skinner. Forelegs snap wet like live wood at the ankle. The pelts peel bloodlessly. Fat greases their hands. Loyola twists her own bottle.

“Never seen deer so huge,” says the wife. This wife, who spent four hours in a helicopter with three men and an arsenal. She's had twenty years of this. She married a man who took her to the shooting range on their first date. She likes the soft muzzles so much she wants them in her home: clear eyes overlooking dark wood and grey slate.

“Biggest in the world,” Loyola agrees around her bottle's lip. Her teeth set in the ridges of the glass. The tray cocked against her right hip.

Out in the yard, the dogs writhe around each other at the lit periphery. They aren't begging. Dino instructs the tourists without instructing them. They're experienced. They know how to slice a body hung from the ankle bones so the offal balloons from the incision like a fawn's head. The organs slide over themselves to the cement. The drain runs. Dino has the discreet authority of a butler, the woolly presence of an uncle, and the guests don't notice his corrections. Riley finds the stereo and smudges a button with a finger to clatter the steel walls with guitar noise.

The wife is watching close enough that when the men laugh she laughs. Loyola hovers back in the open air. She'll have to get more beer. A smoky breeze sneaks down through the scrub pines from the peaks. The girl's emerged from the lodge. She
steps like she's passing through an herb garden in those battered boots Dino brought her home in. Her hair might be alive. When she got out of the jeep she was wrapped in a scabby fur. Dino said, “You don't want this” and peeled it from her shoulders as she twisted away. She pauses out past the dogs and their switching shadows, watching the hooked game jerk and spin under the lights. The heads hacksawed, lined up on the tool gurney like they might want to watch. The girl cranes.

Loyola crosses the yard, tray dangling, and the girl lets her approach. Loyola does not touch the bare shoulders as she says, “Go to bed. Honestly.”

“Don't you hunt elk?”

“Whatever the licence is for.”

“That's what they wanted, though, right?”

“Bad shot,” says Loyola.

The room they installed her in last night is just a few knocks down from Loyola's own door. These are extra rooms, upstairs, barely used because the guests all prefer the privacy of the cabins. There's a black iron queen with a blue quilt and a slit-eyed bobcat treed over the mantel. Last night Loyola gave the girl a nightgown, a toothbrush, and pointed out the white towels in the ensuite. This morning, when she found the girl in the kitchen before dawn, she handed over spare clothes.

The quilt is rumpled in circles like one of the dogs napped in the centre of the compass rose. The girl goes straight to the window. In the white light of the hangar's mouth, the men stand like fangs.

Dino drives the guests out the next morning, the jeep loaded with racks and meat. Loyola finds the wife's shampoo and
conditioner in the first cabin's steam shower. They smell like flowers she doesn't recognize, invasive exotics, but they're not so expensive the woman will call and ask for them to be mailed. Loyola can take them back to her room. They're for redheads and she's red-haired, though not like the wife with her layers and shades.

She sprays every surface with disinfectant. They left condom wrappers on the bedside table, the wastebasket a foot away. The paying man was smiling as she refilled his coffee four times this morning and as he thanked her for her hospitality in the drive. She drags the bedsheets off the mattress, has to crawl across the king's width to pluck the fitted corners up. His smell hides in the linen like a body in a blind. Chemical cedar. The wife's copper filaments wire the pillowcases like the remains of a gutted radio. Loyola does not seek out the spots where they soaked the sheets through, but still, she can smell what they left rising from the bale in her arms.

The only thing she finds in the brother's cabin is a tip in American singles. She pockets them. This far into the season they're still in the red, and the couple thousand from these three will splinter fast. In the lodge, she pushes the sheets into the laundry, pours bleach, and goes to the kitchen to stack half a dozen roast beef sandwiches.

Now the sun's up, soaking the mountaintops and green-heating the trees. The helicopter gleams on its pat of asphalt. The paint scratches have been polished away. She finds Riley under the hooks in the hangar, sluicing the concrete. He's too lazy to scrub. The air in here is cool with silt, paint, old meat. He throttles the water before taking a sandwich. He eats it with unwashed hands, the creases in his knuckles dark.

“You seen Stein?” she asks.

“Barn, maybe.”

The dogs follow the roast beef on her plate. Down the switchblade trail, dried hot with rusted juniper and pine sap, to the barn. Come upon it from above and it's a witch's house: steep-pitched, stitches of paint on the leeside. There's a paddock where she and Dino used to keep the horses when they ran the place by saddle. But it wasn't a barn, originally. At some point, Dino's forebears lived inside. Dino's been saying they should buy a few auction block nags. He says he misses the whickering at night. But Dino thinks money shows up as soon as you've spent it.

She ducks into the dustpit paddock and as she nears the unlatched doors Stein slides out.

“Morning.” He's a skinny kid, short, the tip of a tattoo starting under his left ear. He's not breathing right. She looks at his greasy lips and guesses where the girl is.

He takes two sandwiches, one in each hand. She says, “Riley's got that west gate yet.”

Stein nods as he works his snake throat. Nods and swallows. Keeps nodding, swallowing.

The doors creak and the girl joins them. Her eyes flick to the trees, the paddock corners, the sharp ears of the dogs, Loyola. She's wearing Loyola's dress: blue with white flowers, pearly-buttoned. Those boots, haydusted now, predictably.

“Morning,” she smiles.

Stein closes his eyes against them both, chewing.

Loyola has never seen him embarrassed. She tips the last of the sandwiches toward the girl. “Roast beef.”

The sandwich is opened like a book. The girl eats one slice of bread while looking down at the old dog, who supplicates
forward on his elbows. The younger dog crouches likewise, at an hour-hand angle but just back. The girl tilts her hand, and the meat and cheese hit the ground, slick as livers in the pine needles. The girl eats the other slice of bread—margarine, lettuce. The dogs stare, arrested in half-launch. The old one's saliva droplets the dust six inches from the meat.

Loyola scratches her forehead, sweeps crumbs from the plate. The dogs don't blink, watching the girl's eyes for release.

Stein swallows one last time, wipes his hands on his pockets. “That's cruel,” he says. Then he crosses the paddock, hoofs the bluff's hairpins up to the hangar. The girl turns her face to track him. The old dog passes a twitch to the younger one.

“Blow away in a stiff wind,” Loyola says.

“I like them like that.”

Loyola snorts.

“All wrist and ankle.” The girl rocks to her toes, swings her arms to stretch, and starts for the trail up.

Her first step, the dogs lunge. The old dog for the meat and the young dog for the old. The old dog twists to run and fight at once, drops the meat, pisses on the ground. He thrashes on his spine in the dirt with the younger on his throat. The younger is snarling and doesn't let go until Loyola boots him off. White fur pink, black fur oiled wet. The old dog spiders into the pines. The younger, wet-muzzled, snaps the meat and it's gone.

Dino comes back after three. He drove the tourists all the way to the airport instead of just to town, which is all they're supposed to get with the package. He almost always does that, unless he can't stand the people, and there aren't many people he can't stand.

He's brought back groceries and two tanks of fuel. They usually tip him in hundreds. Loyola shelves cans while he opens a beer and eats the sausage she's sliced for him.

“I was thinking she'd be good on front desk. Answer the phone, greet them, get them settled.”

“What desk,” Loyola says from the pantry.

“You know what I'm saying.”

“Sure,” Loyola agrees, pulling her bag of salt forward on the shelf, tucking a new one behind it. “Pretty smile.”

Dino is silent and Loyola takes the cans off the counter. She ferries two loads before Dino says, “You think she's got much else?”

Loyola lifts her eyebrows at the vinegar. He was supposed to be picking up the repaired sump pump the night he brought her home. No report on where he found her. Gas station, truck stop, diner, ditch. Barelegged with blades for calves. Veins like spring rivulets down the backs of her brown hands. Right now, the girl's asleep in the sunlight by the pool, the younger dog in sprawl nearby. She's obviously healthy. Fast blood. Curved hamstrings like she was built for flight. She would've asked him for a light or a phone call. Dino would've had to offer more. He offered Loyola a meal, which she declined, and when his came she ate half of it with grimed fingers. She remembers onion rings, a screwdriver. He drove a rusted-out Ford back then.

He says, “She mention family to you?”

“Not to me.”

“We could give her a hand,” he says.

“Of course,” she says.

He watches her for a while, swirling his bottle. She plucks four tomatoes from the basket. He turns on the radio. She
halves them, quarters them. She flicks a burner on. Why did she start cutting these? He looks out the side door to the hangar. He goes outside. Loyola twists the stove off again.

The girl picks herself up off the stone terrace when Loyola steps out into the sun. Sleeping on the rock's left red scars on the flats of her arms and thighs. The urns alongside the pool are just nameless grocery store annuals, whatever was on sale. Up here the sun is so close it thins the air dry. The stalks give up their dead easily: Loyola plucks browned florets and tucks them to decompose in their own roots. She tips water into them.

The girl trails after her. Her hair is clean now: the colour of woods before foliage. She points her face at everything in turn. Loyola pulls a limp clump, and they leave her fingers sticky and purpled. The girl snaps off something and rattles the roots doing it. She doesn't look at it, just drops the golden head on the stone. Loyola moves on to the next. The girl murders another.

“I brought you this,” she says.

Loyola looks over her shoulder. The girl opens her palm. A twig. A rough-barked stick thick as a finger bone and grey with witch's beard.

“Magic powers,” the girl promises. One eyebrow up, smirking.

Loyola takes it.

“You should use it,” the girl advises. She pulls a plant whole from the soil, roots dripping mud.

“Thank you,” says Loyola. She slides it into her breast pocket.

The girl follows her back to the faucet. The younger dog's
sucked up some new scent trail and whips back and forth in the lodge's shadow, rushing their legs. His fur is wet.