The Journey Prize Stories 28 (8 page)

“Mr. Miller. Good morning.”

Kyle's fantasy falls away as soon as he opens the door and sees Szandor Zabados, head of the local ILA chapter, standing there with his cigarette pinched daintily between thumb and forefinger, shoulders hunched into his thick khaki coat,
eyes gleaming oily crow-black under a thinning fringe of copper-pipe hair. Kyle has seen Szandor berate his fair share of stevedores, but that's just the tip of it. Rumours have him deeply involved in trafficking, graft, and pedophilia, and they're the kind of rumours everyone knows are true. Zabados keeps one can of Diet Pepsi per day in the staff refrigerator, and Kyle can remember the day some rookie decided to drink it and ended up getting a pink slip and a six-foot-five, 270-pound escort to the parking lot, who made it crystal clear that any further appearance at the wharf would result in a dislocated jaw and the distinct possibility of an indelicately removed testicle.

“Szandor?” Kyle says, feigning surprise, trying to channel his old performer's instincts. “Surprised to see you on my porch on a Saturday morning. Can I do for you?”

Zabados takes a drag of his cigarette and looks long ways down the street, in the direction of the ocean.

“You want to come in?” says Kyle, stepping slightly to the side, hoping to hell the answer is no.

“I got a bit of a problem, Miller,” Zabados says. “Maybe you can help me.”

“Sure.”

“You were on 17 yesterday, yeah?”

“That's right.”

Zabados looks him in the eye, a barrel of smouldering ash clinging to the tip of his butt.

“I know it is. I know you were on 17.”

Kyle manages a curious frown. “What's the problem?”

“You see anything unusual on your shift?”

“No…can't say I did.”

“Can't say? Or…?”

Kyle tries to summon saliva into his mouth, which suddenly feels coated with cement.

“I honestly don't know what you're getting at. Sorry to disappoint. Yesterday was a pretty standard shift.”

Zabados chucks his smoke onto the worn planks of Kyle's porch, not far from the dark smears left from the raccoon's marauding. He shoves his hands deep into his pockets, looks back down the road, presenting Kyle with a gnarled cauliflower ear veined through with red blood vessels.

“All right, Miller,” he says. “Just remember. The union's here to take care of you. I know you like your days off to spend with your daughter.”

Kyle says nothing.

“Be sure to let me know if you hear anything on the wharf, yeah?”

“Okay, Szandor. Will do.”

“Me, I'm gonna go get some lunch. Great little Korean place up near Fairmount,” he says. “You like Korean?”

For a minute Kyle is confused, thinks his trollish foreman might actually be asking him out for a meal.

“I love it,” Zabados says. “Even that kimchi. Smells like an old sock. You gotta watch the spice, though. You're not careful, it can wreak havoc on your insides.”

The implication jabs a stinger at Kyle's brain, prodding for the name that's suddenly shaking inside him like a trembling kitten:
Soo-bin
.

Like, Korean, Kyle?

Zabados turns to go but stops and twists his head around, demon-style, at the bottom of Kyle's steps.

“Anything pops into your head, anyone call you with something to talk about, you remember—the union takes care of you.” He fishes in his pocket, pulls out a flattened pack of Kools, draws one out, and starts tapping it on the inside of his wrist. “Remember that.”

“Will do, Szandor.”

“See you at work.”

Kyle watches Szandor Zabados get into his big black Escalade, shut the door, and drive off in the opposite direction of Fairmount, most likely back to the wharf, to retrieve his cold Pepsi from its voodooed shelf in the staff fridge. He thinks about what's in his own closet, about Abby and her oatmeal, the other bowl cold and congealing beside her. He thinks about Andy Dufresne, keeping his eye on the warm place with no memory. And he thinks about Krista, because he's always thinking about her.

“Where are you going, Daddy?”

The question scuttles back and forth across the dome of his skull, mewling. Abby had known something was weird, of course: Saturdays were their together day, the one put aside to forget bank accounts and old music and dead mothers and the clawing of steamer exhaust in the back of your throat. When he'd taken Abby next door to Mrs. Coover's to plead the favour of watching her for a couple hours, his daughter had been smart or scared enough not to mention Soo-bin. He'd told Abby that he was going to help the girl get home, and she'd accepted that. But she'd still required some answer for his absence, a good reason for his leaving her with the neighbour on a Saturday evening.

The truth would have meant nothing to her. Wharton State Forest, just north of Atlantic City, isn't somewhere she knows. In fact, it's far enough in the wrong direction that Kyle hopes it's a place she'll never end up. He tries not to pressure Abby, to be patient and careful with her. But he's definitely pointing her outside the state—across the river, maybe. Or even farther, to a more civil country. If he has any say in the matter, the whole south shore of New Jersey will exist outside her universe, just not something she'll have to live with, not the way he does.

The Korean girl—North Korean, is Kyle's guess, almost a ghost to begin with—shifts in the driver's seat, staring out the window at the strip malls and industrial parks running along the edge of the turnpike. The cabin smells of stale coffee and sweat and Cheetos and Armor All, which together Kyle processes as the reek of his own helplessness and guilt.

Wharton is big, big enough for someone to get lost in. To go unnoticed. But also a place, maybe, where someone small but resourceful might find a way to survive. It's only the beginning of November. Kyle's leaving Soo-bin with Abby's Barbie parka from last season—a bit tight but warm—some plaid galoshes, a pair of track pants, and an old sweater of Krista's that's big enough for her to wrap around herself like a blanket. To eat, a bunch of bananas, a couple packages of Fig Newtons, and a thermos of instant hot chocolate. It's a far cry from a proper wilderness-survival kit, but surely better than what Szandor Zabados has planned for her.

He couldn't bring himself to call the cops. One way or the other, they'd just bring it back to Zabados. If Kyle was honest with himself, he's already, technically, kidnapped the girl. What else might they say he'd done? What horrible
mix of tar and feathers and bird shit could they smear all over him? The orphanage appears in his head again, rows of metal-frame beds and hard-edged shadows, but this time it's Abby standing there, dressed in a grey smock, surrounded by faceless orphans. Her mother dead. Her father convicted. Maybe dead, too.

He's trying. Trying so hard. With the Chef Boyardee and the oatmeal and the thrift store dolls. Processed shit, material shit—the kind of shit he used to rage against. It's all he can afford now, though. You make sacrifices. Kyle wants Abby to have a good life with him, and a decent shot at a better one down the road. He can't shatter that chance. Not for anyone. Not after what he promised.

In the hospital, Krista's just lying there. The oxygen mask makes it hard for Kyle to hear her and there's a noise in his head like a thousand bands slamming through a frenzied breakdown, all shredded vocal cords and shrill guitar and relentless kick-drum hammering. He's squeezing Kris's hand, hard, but his other hand is up on her forearm, wrapped around the blue ring of barbed wire tattooed on her bicep, not squeezing as tightly there because he can sense that her flesh is fragile. Abby is with the nurses. There will be a little more time for mother and daughter to be in the same room—they've promised her that—but the doctors don't like having the baby in the ICU. Kris has already had one kidney fail. They've stopped telling him she'll get better.

She's made it clear that she needs him to listen carefully. It's hard for her to talk now, so Kyle leans in and puts his ear over the cup of the oxygen mask.

“You have to promise,” she whispers, a cracked cymbal rasp, shattered and terrified and brave, so brave. “You'll take care of her.”

“I will,” Kyle says, shaking. “I promise.” He can't imagine how he'll do this without Krista. He can't believe what's happening. He can't believe he can't save her. The bands explode in his head into a final pummelling unison and he recognizes the opening bars of “Last Light,” first song proper on Converge's
You Fail Me
, his favourite track on the record, which he's been listening to a lot lately.

“Always,” Kyle says, his voice breaking.
Our daughter
.

“It's going to mean giving up some things,” Kris says.

“I know,” he says, blood clanging in his ears, a righteous screaming wounded animal roar. “I know.”

He turns onto a road that winds up through wooded slopes. The trees are thick on either side. The lake is just up around the bend about two hundred yards. He pulls over into a clearing, kills the engine and the headlights. The air is crisp and clean and there's a faint scent of wood smoke on the wind and a burbling brook nearby. He climbs out, his breath steaming in the cold, and opens the back door. He unbuckles her seatbelt and steps back and—hating himself for it—waves his hand.

“C'mon, Soo-bin.”

She climbs out into the night, boots crunching on the browning leaves.

He squats and looks her in the eyes—big eyes, dark as tea in a black cup. There are fortunes there, tellings beyond what he has talent to read. This, finally, is his problem: What else
can he do for her? How does she fit? How is she at all comprehensible? The truth
—I want to save her, she reminds me of my daughter, but I can't, I can't risk it because she is not my daughter—
is too banal, too horrible for Kyle to contemplate. Justice? Where? In what universe does she get handed over to anyone else, anyone good, and not draw all kinds of attention, some politician using her as a campaign platform, some cynical commentator preaching the girl as a harbinger of moral decay? How does that not all boil down to himself and to Abby?

And does Soo-bin even end up any better off? In what scenario is she most likely to be free, really free, for as long as possible?

Kyle can give her the chance to run. To adapt. It's the best act of mercy he can manage.

He's cycling through all this, tattooed arms perched on burning thighs, when she turns and goes. Just starts walking toward the trees, as if she's saving him the trouble of anguishing over it. There's purpose in her walk as she strides away in Abby's plaid boots and Barbie parka. A certain grace. He supposes she understands that she might as well get comfortable. Kyle watches and listens, half expecting the girl to dissolve into the evening mist before his eyes.

At the edge of the trees, though, she stops. For a second Kyle wonders if he's got it wrong—if she'll turn around and run back at him and make him say it out loud, needing to understand his tone even if she doesn't know the English words:
I'm leaving you here
.

Instead, she pulls off the parka and lets it fall down around her ankles in a marshmallowy pink heap. He's about to protest, when he sees it: the bushy striped tail hanging unmistakably
from the base of her spine, protruding just above the hem of her track pants. For a distended second, it wavers like a lazy pendulum—then, answering his disbelief, twitches, a quick flick, as if to cast a spell. Soo-bin turns and gives him a curious look, black eyes rimmed with coal-dark smudge. Kyle opens his mouth to speak—say,
What are you?
say,
I used to be better—
but before he can utter a word she's darted off into the trees, the crackle of broken twigs prickling his ears, the grey spirit of a split moon hovering over the treeline.

Kyle squats there on the wet, rotting leaves, taking in the dense weave of branches from behind a blur of tears. Krista's voice murmuring something soft, something about Andy Dufresne and the warm place, he hauls himself up to get back into the truck and crank some hardcore as loud as it will go—loud enough to blot out the cracking in her voice, the smell of her sickness, the flick of the cargo girl's tail, and whatever other echoes haven't fled him yet, even though he knows the music will never work that way again.

A
t 5 a.m., Lara and I are on the beach in Port Moody. The morning mist is sea salt and oil slick. Cold waves slap the shore. It's a groggy, rubber-boot clomp to the beat-up aluminum boat at the end of the dock. Lara volunteers with Nature's Little Helpers. Spawning season means it's time for an egg take in Mossom Creek.

“Triple Americano, black. Right?” Lara thrusts a travel mug at me. “It's good to see you.” Behind her, a block of beige beach condos disappears into the fog.

“Do we have to kill the fish?” My hands warm around the mug. I won't tell her I've spent every day since I got home drinking decaf. Playing video games. Running a pale, thin elf warrior around a shimmery forest on her horse, killing monsters with a bow. Good versus evil is such a comfort sometimes.

“Oh God, no,” Lara says. “Well, somebody does. We'll do other jobs.” She worked with Nature's Little Helpers all summer, planting eelgrass along the shoreline, tramping
around in the muck like a kid. She wrote me letters about it, each one an invitation to come back to the city. I'd intended to write her back.

The salmon enhancement crew are pony-tailed retirees who probably urban pole to the grocery store. Wheatgrass drinkers. Gulf Island beachfront owners. They hug Lara like old friends and look deep into my eyes when we shake hands. Weird. Seven of us crawl in, hunched over our hot drinks. Smell of boat gas and fish guts.

A woman with a grass-fed complexion and long white hair takes my hand in both of hers.

“Carmen, I'm Diane. Thanks for coming out with us.” She turns to Lara. “We'll meet the gals from Alouette Correctional at the river. It's a small crew today.”

“That's fine, Carmen can do the work of ten inmates.” Lara grins at me, flexes a lean bicep.

“Inmates?” I look at Lara, who looks at Diane.

“Didn't Lara tell you? They send us volunteers during spawning season.” Diane is still holding my hand. She squeezes a little before she gives it back.

Up the Burrard Inlet in a tin can. Past freighters and trawlers and pleasure craft. Most years Vancouver stays green, but there's fresh powder on the mountaintops. When I left Prince George three weeks ago, snow was already dusting the downtown streets.

“How was the honey farm?” Lara asks. I have to lean in to hear her over the thrum of the outboard.

“It was hard labour. Heavy lifting. Sweeping dead bees into the drain every night,” I say. Her eyes narrow.

“I thought they didn't hurt the bees.”

“They were at the end of their productive cycle,” I say, mimicking the beekeeper's gruff monotone. “Probably true, but it felt like killing off my co-workers.”

“That's awful.” Lara lowers her voice. “But you're clean now, right?”

“Three months clean.” Saying it like that makes it seem like I've been dirty.

“I knew you'd do it,” Lara says. The first hug in a long time is always all chins and elbows.

To everyone except Lara, my trip up north just looked like a weird working holiday. A detox centre would have made it official. So instead I bottled honey, swept and hosed the sticky cement floors clean at Sunny Valley Apiary. The beekeeper wasn't sure about me, half-blood city girl with skinny arms and gaunt cheeks. Shaking and sweating for the first few weeks, until the last of the meth had burned from my lymph. Crying over dead bees. Not surprisingly, there weren't a lot of other people who wanted the job, so I got to stay.

We watch an otter skim along the water, belly up. Something in his paws—looks like a plastic baby toy. He dips under, leaving his loot at the surface. Farther up the inlet it's crab traps and prawn traps and fish nets. Then only water, shore, sky.

Alouette Correctional Centre is on the South Alouette River in Maple Ridge. Lara tells me they just built a new maximum security wing, with little windows in each cell, above the bunks. The windows look out onto medium security, so the women can see how good their well-behaved cell sisters have it. If the maximum security inmates behave, they can join in
on community projects: horticulture or doggie daycare or this one, salmon enhancement.

As we approach the dock, Diane points to a tall First Nations woman smoking a cigarette on the shore. Just her and a grim-faced prison guard.

“I'd expected more, but maybe it's just as well,” Diane says. “This is the first time we've had a violent offender.”
Violent offender
gets finger quotes. The boat bumps against the dock as our wake catches up with us.

“I'm sure it's no biggie,” Lara says. “Right, Carmen?”

“Sure.” It's annoying to be included in this conversation, like I know anything about violent offenders. I suspect Lara's invited me on this trip as some kind of teachable moment—the ghost of Christmas future—and that's not fair. It's not like I was street hustling. And I stopped using on my own volition. A detox centre would have been cushier, but it might not have been punishment enough. Some mistakes have to be beaten out.

Diane gives the guard the two-handed squeeze. “This is Lucy,” the guard says to us, nodding at her charge.

“Lucky,” the woman says, stomping out a cigarette. She's wearing a numbered sweatsuit; powder-blue prison casual.

Diane hands her a jar with some water in the bottom. “I'll get you to keep your butts in there today, can't have the fish eating them.” She turns back to us without waiting for an answer. “Let's go, everyone.” Behind her, Lucky digs three butts out of the sand and drops them in the jar.

Climb from the boat to the back of a fisheries pickup, and knock through the brush. Compared to the Coho, our trip upstream is efficient. After a lifetime in the ocean, they swim
all the way back to the stream they were born in. I think about those nature shows with the bear in the river, gorging on fish that practically leap into his paws as they battle the current. Life's a bitch. Lara says the hatcheries have a much higher success rate than the fish who fend for themselves. She talks percentages as Lucky grips the tailgate with one hand, smokes with the other.

“This your job?” she asks me.

“Volunteer.”

“I used to work downtown,” she offers. “They call me Lucky 'cause I got busted around the time all my girlfriends went to the pig farm.” Throws her head back and cackles. She's referring to a local farmer who was convicted of killing six women. Newspapers with photographs of missing women from the Downtown Eastside set the number closer to fifty.

“That is lucky,” I say, wondering what's so funny.

She looks me over: black hair, pale skin. “You're not an Indian.”

“Métis.”

“Half-bloods,” she snorts. “You guys are the real nobodies.”

I shrug—I'm not getting into this with a
violent offender
. Lara frowns. The truck slips through skunk-cabbage bogs, dark soil seasoned with pine needles. We duck to avoid the slap of low-hanging branches.

It's all wild rose and blackberry at the site, but no blooms this time of year. The last berries scavenged by bears. It doesn't look like the day is going to overcome its fishbowl start; there's a film over everything. The yellow rain gear Diane passes out is a relief. She points to the river—a couple of the Mossom Creek guys are already stringing barrier nets at either end.

“This is Station 1. If you want to work in the river, put on the hip waders,” Diane says. “Station 2”—she puts a bucket and some plastic bags on the picnic table—“eggs and milt.”

A volunteer emerges from the bushes with a decapitated Coho. He pulls out a knife and sits at the table. One slit, and carnelian-coloured eggs spill out of her belly.

“Sushi,” Lucky says and elbows me. “No, really, that's brain food right there.” I move to the other side of the table, next to Lara.

“It's true,” Diane says, “want some?”

“Nah, my brain's already wasted.” Lucky laughs again. Everything's a big joke. She points to the fish bonkers Diane's unloaded from the truck. “I'll kill 'em.”

“Station 3, eh?” Diane glances at the guard, who shrugs.

Lucky sees this. “Come on, better the clubs than the knives, right?”

“It's no problem, Lucky,” Diane says. “Lara?”

“Where do you want to be?” Lara asks me.

“As far away from Lucky as possible,” I say, quiet. She nods. We pull on the hip waders.

“All right, Fishing Bear, show 'em how it's done,” Lucky calls.

Diane, unsurprisingly, looks horrified. Half of me is horrified too, the other half kinda wants to laugh.

A few steps in and the river is pushing me around, a downstream shove over polished rocks. Now I'm in the way of progress. Around me, the Coho are boiling. Their panic is tangible but so is their resolve. Green ghosts shoot forward to snap at my calves, then scoot away. Encased in rubber, I still shrink from the contact.

A net proves useless; it bends and pulls when I dip into the current. I slip a little and swear under my breath. Sweat collects along my backbone.

“How do you do this?” I call to Lara, but she's too far away and the river drowns me out. Shouldn't have had that coffee; my heart is pounding. Tweaked. A feeling I've been trying to avoid. My legs stiffen and the force of the river increases, so I bend my knees. This can't be as bad as handling a hive full of bees for the first time, when they seem terrifying, before you realize that you're the Godzilla. I look down. The water is full of fish and all I have to do is reach in and grab one. Inhale, plunge a hand into the river, and connect five fingers with a solid body. It fights and escapes. I swing the net around, tie it onto my back, and try again, with both hands this time. I've never seen Coho teeth, not sure how much damage they'd do. Lara watches for a sec, then she ditches her net and gets in there next to me.

Got one this time, right at the base of the tail. Heave and he's in my arms. I was not expecting this: hook-faced, black-lipped, red-bellied sea monster. One eye missing, ripped fins, torn skin. He's winding me—fights with more strength than seems possible from a body already half decomposed.

I hang on, restraining a Mossom Creek Coho at the unforeseen end to his homecoming. Whispering hollow assurance: Lara's percentages, chances of increased fry survival. Don't be afraid. Do not fear that woman on the shore, your executioner. You won't meet death in your own river, what you were hoping for, I admit. But your DNA will be preserved, and that's what it's all about, really.

I don't know if he hears me. He stops fighting. Diane and
the others are waiting on the shore with clubs and knives. Salmon enhancement. Nature's Little Calipers. I think about the bees at the end of their
productive life cycle
, but there's no time to think, really, before the river shoves me back toward Lucky. “C'mon, Fishing Bear!” She waves the fish bonker over her head and whoops like an Indian in a John Wayne Western. Diane and the crew look at their feet.

“What a comedian,” Lara says. But I'm laughing. I'm not sure if it's okay to laugh, but shit, I'm up to my thighs in pissed-off salmon.

“You're good at this,” Lucky says when I give her the fish.

“I'll add it to my resumé,” I say.

“We'll go fishing when I get out,” she says. “Could be five to ten still though, eh?” And again, even though I'm not quite sure it's okay, we share a laugh like a cigarette. Me in the river, her on the shore.

Lara gets the next one, a female. Flushed and grinning, she hands it off to Diane. Now some of the Station 2 volunteers are thinking that this fishing by hand is looking very primal and authentic, so they wade in with us. We pull salmon out of the river for hours. On the shore, humans cut eggs out of bellies, and squirt fish sperm into plastic bags, until it's time for hot drinks and peanut butter sandwiches.

“Don't you find this all a bit weird?” I ask Lucky over a hot chocolate, like we're chatting at Starbucks or something.

“What, the egg take? Like she says, it's better for the fish.” Lucky nods her head at Lara, who looks vindicated. “It's still weird though.”

After lunch, some of the volunteers gather around Diane. She dissects a Coho for those who have never seen a fish from
the inside. Lara and I have both seen a fish from the inside, but we join in anyway. Diane cuts the organs out one by one and piles them in a bloody clump: a purple heart, a liver, a swim bladder. When she cuts into the face, we all cringe a little. She gives Lara an eyeball and Lara balances it on the tip of her finger. Through the lens, Lara and I see the world upside down. River in the sky. Diane's bloody knife. The blackberry canes where Lucky's been hidden, since nobody wants to see the fish meet their end. She's still working away, fish after fish, soft thud against flesh. She says something I can't make out, and laughs. I can't see her, but through the fish eye, I think I see Lucky's upside-down laughter run down to the ground like honey. Absorb near the tree roots.