The Journey Prize Stories 28 (17 page)

“What did he do with my pelt?” says the girl.

“It's in the rifle locker at the back of the hangar.”

The dog yelps once, thrilled. The girl's fingers shred the flower in her hands. She's standing very close. “What about yours?”

Loyola picks up her watering can. “He burnt mine,” she lies.

The sound the girl makes isn't audible, it's too deep in the lungs. Her pink mouth. She reaches for Loyola's wrist, but Loyola's stepped away.

The next party is four men. They're staying the weekend; they've booked three flights in the bird. They're licensed for a small massacre. When they climb out of the jeep Dino names everyone but Loyola lets the burning wind off the peaks take the sounds.

Dino introduces the girl alongside Loyola and Riley, while Stein moves luggage into the cabins. Stein's been loitering after the girl. Him and the old dog always at the edge of sight, ready to disappear. He doesn't come to sit at dinner or around the hearth in the great room when the sun steps behind the mountains.

Through the plate glass, the valley is a thick fur of pines, piebald with broadleaves and slit by the river. Loyola serves beer, coffee, whisky. The sun appears again, then moves behind the next peak. Every poplar for miles is a steeple with leaves like lit windows.

The girl sits off in one of the solitary armchairs, cornered beneath six antlered heads. Their expressions vary: some have
artful, alert ears and lifted chins, but the elder faces are dull as barn mares. Their dusty eyeballs. The girl keeps her bottle full between her bare knees. She is silent. She may be listening. That's fine, the men don't want her to speak. They just like an audience sometimes, until they don't. At that point Loyola gets tired. “Are you tired?” she asks the girl, standing.

They climb the open stairs together. The men are watching. The girl murmurs, “What about the one with glasses?”

The men are talking about pilot licences. One of them's an air traffic controller. One is building a floatplane in his garage.

“It's his credit card on file,” is the only thing Loyola knows about him.

“Which cabin?”

Loyola bites her smile.

“I bet he thinks I'm your daughter.”

“Probably.”

The men are laughing.

“He'll like that,” the girl says.

The men are still laughing.

The girl jostles her shoulder against Loyola's. At the top of the stairs, the row of doors. Loyola in one, the girl in hers. At the end of the gallery is Dino's. Beneath them in his armchair Dino is telling about flying through last year's whiteout, two bears dead in the cage.

The girl says, “So it's elk tomorrow.”

“Or something.”

“Can I go with them?”

Loyola shrugs. She asked, once.

“I could walk,” the girl says.

Loyola leans her shoulder against the frame. “There's a
trailhead past the river. Up Sawback. We could drive part of it, walk the rest.”

“You want to come?” says the girl.

“I want to see his body.”

The girl blinks. If she were the least bit human her wet eyes would be full of pity.

When Dino comes upstairs it's late, black in the valley and in the house. Loyola's been sitting in the glow of her little lamp. She's fingered the bark off the twig the girl gave her. He isn't drunk enough to stumble. He's led the guests to their cabins. She cracks her door when he's close. Then she widens it.

She never sees his broad face any more, she never touches his grey hair that's too long. He's always had gundog eyes and she puts her nose to the collar of his shirt so he can't look at her. He smells like he's always smelled. He never stopped smelling this way, but he stopped letting her get close enough to know it. It's painful, how familiar he is. Her memories are accurate, even if they're used ragged.

“What?” he says. She stays close under his chin, out of sight.

She kisses his throat. With his hands inside her shirt his mouth becomes less inhospitable. She is steady and silent. She used to voice eagerness. Then she learned to conceal herself in the underbrush, let him track her down. Lately, she's been waiting months, seasons, this dry summer at least.

The girl's little stick, lost on the bedspread, jabs her. She'd rescue it from snapping under them, but her hands are busy. She arranges them, moves on him. He grips to slow her down but she refuses. He comes loudly, even though next door the girl is or is not listening.

Loyola pulls away as he takes in air. She could lay herself down beside him like she used to and let all his circling mongrel thoughts thicken the air. Instead she brushes away the snapped halves of the twig. In her bathroom she runs water like she's killing his scent, clearing the mess. But she doesn't step under the jet. She stands lock-kneed on the tile with him all over her.

Outside, there are bodies under the trees. Split hooves and missing skulls, bones jawed open by opportunists. She's found them deep in underbrush or at the foot of high places. She walks whole days. She finds a few every season. Never any antlers. She can't tell. She couldn't say for sure. Who else would come all this way but their guests, their dogs.

When she comes back he's gone. He's draped her pelt over the quilt, fur down, a skin waiting to wrap her. She's always been free to go.

At breakfast the men are mouthy over coffee. The one in glasses is grinning his stupid secret away. The girl doused him with herself. He must think he split her open. Dino is all anecdotes and wisdom. He smiles at Loyola when she refills his mug. She walks back and forth, bringing hot things and removing what's finished.

In the kitchen she fills a cooler with sausages, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bread. Dino comes in. He strokes her waist. He puts his nose to the back of her neck and breathes against her vertebrae. He kisses her skin.

She stays still until he goes. Then her knees sag. Her mouth opens. She folds against the cabinets, forehead to the wood, battered in the chop.

In his room, she does not touch anything or inhale. This
room, the master, built when they first conceived of this life. Not horses but helicopters. Rifles and racks for tourists. They sold twelve strong mares too cheap at auction. They didn't need all the extra acres of conifers. Loyola slept in this wide bed. She crept from it every morning to percolate the coffee. He's left it immaculate.

The spare key for the gun locker is jumbled with some others—the generator shed, the jeep—in a drawer.

The girl comes with her to the locker, a chain-link partition at the back of the hangar. Loyola skims the black barrels. The girl goes straight for her pelt, stuffed into an empty shelf. It has no arms or buttons, no collar. It's short-haired, rough, built on summer. In this light it's the colour of dead leaves. Its underside is wet-white with grease, like he peeled it off her an hour ago. The girl folds it to her chest, bends her face down to rub against it.

Stein and the dogs stare at them when they come out into the yard. The side door hangs open. The sun's been up for an hour, but the light's still choked pink. The valley's hazy with forest fires. Later, in the worst of it, they'll all wake bleeding from the nose, desiccated, and Loyola will wash bloody sheets every morning.

Stein's mouth moves as he calls to them. The old dog wags low, once.

As Loyola turns the engine the girl rolls her neck to look at the lodge, the cabins, the flowers lining the pool. She doesn't see Stein where he stands. “Slaughterhouse,” she mutters, leaning back into her seat.

Down the valley, across the river, to the trailhead. The path is dry, scraping along at the spine of the Sawback peaks, a
root-bound stepladder climb between aspen stands. It's not quiet. There's a roar. The red stags don't bugle like birds, they make a meat eater's sound of want.

One of them sounds, miles off.

Close, an answer from a larger set of lungs, a fuller-maned throat.

The girl's grin widens. Loyola keeps climbing. The girl bounds ahead, hair sweating to her skin.

Loyola keeps her eyes on the cliffs, and the bottoms of the cliffs, for his branched antlers. He'll be his own gravemarker. They found him where he grazed. And the shot, if it hit, hit the hollow behind his shoulder blade. He tipped starboard, overcorrected, and then toppled. His landslide body. His feet at gallop down the shale. She'll find his corpse at the bottom splayed by petty birds. Or else he walked away.

When they reach a bluff, a scoop neck between peaks yawning east over the foothills, they stop. The girl picks at her buttons. The borrowed jeans come off, the wet shirt. She's stout, naked. Her sunburnt clavicle. She holds up her fur and flaps it. In the smoke it's roan red, speckled down the haunches, paler in the belly. She turns into it, smiling as she shivers its fatty lining over her shoulders. The forelegs ribbon down between her breasts. Loyola reaches to pull the girl's hair out from under the pelt and smoothes the lock down over one shoulder.

A stag roars eastward. Loyola jerks. That was his voice. The one who fell, or didn't. There he is.

Beside her, the yearling doe with her long neck and soft muzzle flicks her ears and stamps her four fresh legs. She's taller than a thoroughbred, black eyes already distant with
alien concerns. She steps into the trees, crackling dead sticks, branches brushing her flanks and waving in her wake. She moves slowly, but she's gone.

The road back to the lodge is rutted with smoke. The dirt widens into the drive before the rippled skin of the hangar. Loyola comes around and the young dog runs the older right under her wheels. His body is a jolt. She stops. Kills the engine. The younger wheels away, shouting.

The old dog is dying as she gets to him. His feet scrabble but it's just his broken back finishing off. She touches his swivelling ears, then carries him to the hangar. She has to check. She heaves him up to hang and slits him to drip. The younger is hiding. There are a hundred places. The woods, or under the veranda. She follows the smell of him down the trail, into the old barn, and finds him in the box stall, backed up under the feed trough, growling like a meatgrinder. He is wet-mouthed and serrated. His throat tears rabid threats. He'll chase her bleeding through the woods. He'll find her by her screams. He'll pulp her soft face and pull open her throat. He'll drag her down and dye his muzzle in her rib cage. Has he ever killed anything? It doesn't matter.

She puts the skinner into him under the edge of his skull and he shakes down to the hay, eyes straining at her. She carries him soaking hot back to the hangar to heave him up beside the other. Her mouth is dry. She is panting. She splits his belly, lets his lungs, bowel, stomach slop on the shop floor, cuts off his paws and peels his fur face. She flaps his bloody pelt off his body. His dog body. Nothing but dog.

T
he bright industrial lights hung in neat rows on the ceiling. And afterwards the sadness settled in Raymond, in his body. It went all over. Heavy. He couldn't lift his arms or his head and couldn't see his opponent's face or understand what he was doing in the ring. He couldn't think out there. Couldn't move his feet fast enough, couldn't move out of the way when a punch came. The punches landed in the middle of his face. Quick, hard, sudden. He saw it coming and he was trained to see it coming but he stood there like some fool just waiting for it. But it wasn't him. It was the sadness. The heaviness of it. All over his body. In the review tapes you'd see the punch in slow motion, how it waved through his nose, his cheekbones, his temples, his ears, his hair like he was ocean. And when it was over he could see nothing but black light. He had to get out of it and he knew it for some time. He was just there for someone to punch through, a body to pass on the way to some victory belt. He had become what they call a trial horse. He said he'd quit if it ever got to be like that, and
it got to be like that. It wasn't the best way to go out but to go out was all he wanted.

So that's why he got into the nail thing. It wasn't something he wanted to do. The nail thing. He was scooping out ice-cream flavours at the mall and when that shift was over he was stir-frying bland bean sprouts and cabbage. His sister was the one who got him into the nails. She lived in a big house with her unemployed husband and four small children. They could afford for her husband to be at home because her business did so well. She owned Bird Spa and Salon. The slogan was “Nails! Cheap! Cheap!” It was catchy. She said Raymond didn't have to go to school or nothing. He just had to listen to what she told him to do. It was just like it was in the ring. She'd yell at him like he was in the corner and he'd just go out and do it.

His sister didn't want him living where he was, in a mouldy, cold basement with just one window. When he got the place he thought he would be able to see sky once in a while, but the floor wasn't down low enough and all he saw were shoes and boots and heels. Feet. No glimpse of sun or sky at all. He was feeling sorry for himself, as if he was the only one who ever lost a thing in the world, but that wasn't true. It was his sister who came to get him. She was real dramatic about it. She had a key to his apartment and kicked open the door and beat him on the chest, saying even if he didn't want better for himself, she did. She brought up their dead parents. She always did that when she was desperate to make a meaningful point. She said they didn't leave Laos, a bombed-out country, in a war no one ever heard of, on a raft made of bamboo to have him scooping out ice cream or frying cabbages with old
grease oil. So he joined her at Bird Spa and Salon just to get her to calm down about it all. Not long after that, he was answering the phones and saying, “Hello, Bird and Spa Salon. We do nails. Cheap! Cheap!”

At first he mopped the floor, filled the bottles with nail polish remover, cuticle oil, or whatever it was that was running low. He cut hand towels into neat little squares to save everyone time. He turned on the switch to keep the waxing oil hot. When all that got to be easy for him to do, she asked him to sit in and watch whenever the girls did manicures and pedicures or waxed an eyebrow or upper lip. It amazed him to see people transform so instantaneously. They came in looking sad and tired and exhausted but left giggling and happy and refreshed. He thought of the injuries he'd caused in the ring when he was younger, just starting out. There was the guy who didn't wake up until a year later or the guy who lost his confidence, stopped training, and ate doughnuts all day and let himself lose his shape and lost his whole career. He thought of seeing only the black light and waiting for the black dots to disappear. Waiting for the bell to ring so he knew they were into the next round. Boxing was just sad and tired and exhausted, the way he knew it.

When one of the girls who had worked there quit on his sister because she had a bad cough that wasn't going away, and his sister could do nothing to help her, he was given his own station. The first thing he did was put the plastic basket of supplies and lotions to the left of him. She didn't like that. “What the fuck, Raymond. You going southpaw on me now. You a right-hand. All your supplies go on the right. Fuck! Maybe you shoulda thought of that when you were boxing.
You know how fucking southpaws are hard to fight—they do everything backwards. It's too late, isn't it. To go southpaw now.” Raymond didn't say anything. He just moved the basket to his right. It was easier to do.

His sister had him practise on some plastic hand dummy. Thing was, it wasn't attached to anything. It was severed at the wrist and stood straight up like it was high-fiving. The plastic hand could be moved around for a better angle to paint a heart or put on dots. His sister watched him without saying a word. Then, she picked up the plastic hand and waved it in his face and said, “But hands come with fucking bodies! You can't be turning them three hundred and sixty degrees to draw a fucking heart! And is that what this is supposed to be, Raymond—a fucking heart? Looks to me like a stinking blob of disgusting shit.” She plopped the plastic hand down and held out her own hands. She wanted him to practise on her. For someone who did manicures all the time for other people, his sister sure didn't have the best nails. They were too long and yellowed at the tips. Her skin was dry and flaking. It was like watching a dentist with tartar-stained teeth preaching about flossing and brushing often. “Watch your fucking face! I know what you're thinking about these nails. If I paint them, the polish remover I use on clients will just fuck them up. And I ain't going to use that gel shit on myself. It's fucking expensive.” He started to cut her nails, when she added, “And you have to talk to me like I'm your client. Most of the time they won't talk to you because they think you don't know how to speak English, which is fine because it's exhausting to make conversation. I don't care about their kids or husbands or boyfriends or what the fuck they're doing this weekend. If you don't want to talk
to a client because you're tired or not interested, just turn to me and speak Lao. They'll think we're talking about them and that'll shut them right the fuck up.” For cheap nails, Raymond had to do and remember so much.

Most who came in were patient with his mistakes. Many came in with chipped polish on their nails and he would remove it. The clients liked that this big, burly former boxer was handling their female hands. He thought they might be uncomfortable with a man handling them this way, but they only thought it was wonderful to be touched by that kind of muscle in so gentle a manner. Raymond was good with the endless repetition and assessing what needed to be done. It reminded him of sparring at the gym, having to think quick, act, respond, handle the situation, anticipate what was coming. No one client was the same, but there were some basic things everyone needed. He removed polish, cut nails, applied cuticle oil, and pushed skin away from the nails, to give it a clean look and shape. Some nails had no shape. They came out straight and flat on the nail bed and he had to round them with a file. The file moved around the corners of the nail and he had to work the file at a forty-five degree angle, deciding where on the nail it should begin to bend. It was very subtle, the bend. He wore a mask at first to cover his nose and mouth and he wore gloves too, but he couldn't get a proper grip and couldn't converse with his clients so after a few days he removed them and exposed himself to those tiny shards of nail dust that entered and scratched at his lungs.

There were so many colours. He couldn't get his head around it all and remember them so he just told his clients to pick a colour once they walked through the door: Shrimp
Sunday, Funny Cool, Double Personality Blue, Alter Ego Pink. The names and colours went on along and all around the walls. Because he was a man and because it was so unusual to see a man doing nails, the clients gave him large tips, twenty- or thirty-dollar tips, while the girls in the spa got two- or three-dollar tips. They told him the tips were to buy something nice for his little lady, take her out on a date or simply because they enjoyed a good flirting. His sister, one to always notice things, said, “Fuck! Shit! I don't get those kinds of tips. It's because you're a fucking man, isn't it? Men. Even in a business I own myself and built up myself, we are still paying them more. And these are women who are doing this. They should know!” And she'd mumble something while he counted his tips, which added up to more than what his sister charged for mani-pedis.

It was the toes he despised the most. After only a few weeks of working on them, he got warts on his hands and had to take a few days off. His sister said, “Shit! I ain't gonna let anyone see that ugly shit while you're working on them. Plus, it might be contagious. I don't fucking know. I told you to wear gloves!” Raymond didn't like arguing or talking back to his sister. She'd always taken care of things and of him. Even though it wasn't the greatest place to be working, it was a chance to be with family. She talked tough and was for real tough, but she had a good heart. It was possible to be both.

He picked at a wart on his hand. “You ain't gonna quit on me now because of this, are you? You know people come in just to see you. They love seeing a former boxer painting nails at the salon! They all ask for you. And those tips you get. They're something special. Never seen anything like that.”
But it wasn't the warts he was worried about. Warts weren't so bad as mumbling nonsense and bad headaches and black lights or being dead. Warts went away eventually. That didn't bother him. It was the smell of feet. It was like it got into the pores of his nostrils and grew there, like a follicle of hair. It was becoming a growing part of him, the smell. He could never forget what he did for his living because it was always there. Not even when he was cooking or eating would the smell go away. It got to be that he was beginning to taste the smell of feet at the back of his throat. It smelled sour, a little like bleach. It also got to be that he didn't enjoy food either, which made him lose a little weight and this made his sister tell him it was a good idea since it made him look good and that meant more clients coming in to see him. But it was not the women. He blamed this smell on the men. Most women took care of themselves. Their toes were clean and taken care of to begin with, years of salon and spa visits. It was the men who came in, who had never had a pedicure their whole lives and wore heavy socks and leather boots year-round. Ones who had been too embarrassed to show their untreated toes to a female pedicurist. As a man, Raymond knew not to mention or speak or acknowledge the mess, the years of neglect and abandon just because the feet had been out of sight. The layers of skin he had to slough off like cutting a slice of butter. His sister would say, “You know why the skin there is yellow? Well, the fucking guy pees in the fucking shower! That's why. Disgusting fucking hell!”

Well, they were not all disgusting. There were some favourite clients like Miss Emily. He didn't have much to do when she came in. Her cuticles were already peeled back and her nail
bed was long and thin and smoothed. The skin on her hands and feet felt like a baby's. She would always do him the courtesy of removing her nail polish so he could start on the filing and paraffin wax and then lay down the three layers of polish. The first layer was to protect the nail from the polish, then there was the polish colour itself, and the last layer was to help from chipping and to keep it shiny. His sister—and sisters do know their brothers well—watched him closely and said, “What, you think you got a chance with that Miss Emily there? She's rich and educated. None of the things we are or are ever gonna be. Don't you be dreaming, little brother. Keep your dreams small so life don't ever hurt you and spit you out with your innards all hanging out for all to see. It just ain't ever gonna happen. Keep your dreams small. The size of a grain of rice. And cook that shit up and swallow it every night, then shit that fucking thing out in the morning. It ain't ever gonna happen. If there's something I know in this life, it's rich women. And that woman ain't for you.” But even when someone talked him down like that, Raymond just kept at it. When he didn't see Miss Emily, he painted and shaped all his clients' feet like Miss Emily's. If he could get the nails looking like hers, anyone could be like Miss Emily. And like everything else in this life that could be true, his sister, the older one, the one who had been around longer and knew better, as much as he hated it, he knew she was right.

One day, Miss Emily was seen at the door of the store with a distinguished man. He wore a three-piece suit and had polished black shoes and despite the smell of feet, Raymond could smell the man's cologne. It was not one of those drugstore scents. Raymond would know about them. He had tried them
all. Miss Emily stood at the doorway with this man and in his smell she disappeared as if a dark cloud moved in and covered up all that was bright and good about her when she was alone.

His sister saw his face fall, the way it fell in the ring when he knew he was losing. After, on the drive home to his same old place, she said, “Raymond. Didn't I tell you. You've got to not have dreams. That woman ain't gonna love a man who does nails. Just ain't gonna happen. You're given a place in this life and you just do your best in it. Fucking give it up. I hate when you get like this. Plenty of girls for you! They want to get with you all the time, but you don't let yourself see it. Like the girls at the shop. They're all wet for you.”

Those girls were married or serious with someone. What his sister didn't know was what they talked about behind her back when she went out for a smoke or when she had to go out and get supplies. How they tried to get pregnant but none ever caught on because of the chemicals. How their coughs started and didn't ever stop. Even if this dream about a Miss Emily was not his to have, he thought it was nice to have it anyway. He knew it was naive and not real worldly like his sister was, but this little dream was his, and it was decent. This idea that someone like Miss Emily could love him. Raymond, not one to speak up to his sister but this one time, said, “Well, you know, maybe Miss Emily ain't ever gonna be with a man like me but I want to dream it anyway. It's a nice feeling and I ain't had one of those things to myself in a long time. I know I don't got a chance in hell and faced with that I wanna have that thought anyway. It's to get by. It's to get to the next hour, the next day. Don't you go reminding me what dreams a man like me ought to have. That I can dream at all means something
to me.” And his sister looked away from his face. His face looked like hers but beaten and beaten up. A crooked nose, a busted eyebrow with the hair not meeting in the same place. Although her face was treated to facials and creams and anti-wrinkle serums and was smooth and glowing, she felt like Raymond's face, beaten and busted, and she just didn't want to look at that face hoping. Hope was a terrible thing for her—it meant it wasn't there for you, whatever you were hoping for.