Fauna (18 page)

Not glue traps, though, Annie said, they could never do that. What are you supposed to do when one of them is stuck there, squeaking its little head off—squash it with a frying pan? She pulled a sick, fearful face, and for a moment she was no longer a beauty. Snow White, Edal thought the first time they met, and she can’t help but believe Annie’s apple-blossom skin and thick black curls have something to do with the abandoned sounds—happy and unhappy—she plugs her ears not to hear.

She can see them now, falling together into bed. Maybe Annie pushes James down onto the duvet, or maybe they don’t even make it that far, but stay where the music plays in their little living room, him easing her down on the sofa, or lower, the blood-red rug Edal’s glimpsed through their open door.

Turning on her side, Edal draws her knees up and hugs them. It’s pathetic. She’s crying now, wetting her pillow with tears and even a thin stream of snot, because a common house mouse has forsaken her home for another.

In the beginning, she told herself she watched it with the eye of a naturalist. She’d known it was there for some time,
but had never actually spotted it until her first day home on leave. It left the shadow beneath the refrigerator boldly, sniffing the air only briefly before darting across the kitchen floor. It expected her to be at work, not lying useless in the adjacent room. She’d been awake for an hour, trying to think of something—anything—she wanted to do.

Warmth was what she felt. She could call it delight, but gratitude would be closer to the truth. She lay dead still for what remained of the morning, watching the little creature whisker its way over her kitchen floor.

Here among the trees, the leaf litter lies thick and driven through with shoots. Fallen branches hide grubs. There are mice, and there are ground nests brimming with eggs. On lucky nights, the odd nestling, bird or squirrel, drops from the thin cover above.

The skunk snuffles. Scenting a cache of grubs, he halts, listening hard for their soft-bodied sound. In the distance, a human yelp, followed by the bark of a dog. The ground slopes down from here to the field where they gather—the dogs gambolling like puppies, returning time and again to feed from their masters’ hands.

The skunk has no master. He relies on his own curved claws.

Turning an ear to the ground, he discerns the subtle music and digs. The night is generous—not only grubs writhing in the sudden air, but there, slipping out from beneath a rotten limb, a snake. As a rule, the skunk doesn’t hurry. He must act
quickly now, though, before the bright-sided slither plays tricks with his eyes. A lunge, a single bite to the head, and the snake lies still. So smooth to the nose’s touch, the scent still delicate, no time to panic and release its stink. It’s a good length—his own measure and more. The chewing will take some time.

He’s a fine hunter, young but able, no trace of the blind kitten he once was. The memory lives in his senses: the massed, many-hearted comfort of the den; the return of the mother’s pungent coat and sweet-smelling teats. Soon she brought them more than milk—the first leggy mouthful of spider, the first pretty pink worm. Eventually she led them to the source of all things good and wriggling, the wide-open night of the world. The skunk remembers in the red hollow behind his eyes the striped, winding column he and his siblings made as they followed the lovely brush of her tail. They were adept at raising their own tails by then, though the glands that would afford them special standing had yet to swell with their precious yellow oil.

It’s the best kind of weapon to have—the kind that rarely comes into play. Here where the humans live packed so close, the only cats to be found are skunk-sized and smart enough to give him a wide berth. On occasion the call of an owl lifts his hackles, but it’s rare to feel the silent-feathered wind of a swoop. Foxes are only a problem when famine gets the better of their good sense. There was one, not long after the skunk left the living column to hunt alone. All bone and mange, it stalked him with a dull-eyed desperation he’d never encountered before. It ignored all warnings. Taking the initial blast head-on, it recoiled but held its ground. The skunk fired
again into its blinded face, again and again, and still the snapping jaws came on. Only when he loosed the last doubled jet he could muster did it finally turn tail and run.

Hunger comes to them all. The skunk has known frozen nights devoid of a single scrap, stark contrast to this scene of bounty, this scaled and tender feast. The snake is half gone. The skunk works the next fine-boned section back between his teeth, chews and swallows, then stills his noisy jaws.

Panting. Rustle in the undergrowth, the thud of heavy paws.

The skunk wheels, letting the raw remnant of his quarry drop. The dog is tall, long-nosed and dark, its coat no thicker than a newborn’s but slick with an unnatural sheen. It lets out a whine—a submissive signal belied by the pointed intent of its ears. Looking to its tail for clarification, the skunk finds only a mute black stump. Best to be on the safe side. He sends a gentle message to begin with, standing terribly still.

Beyond, in the meadowy open, a human calls. The dog pays no heed. Steps forward when any sensible creature would step back.

The skunk stamps his feet. The dog whimpers and crouches low. The skunk arches his back and chatters, the dog inching, beetling close. The skunk growls, an utterance the dog doubles and returns. The human bellows again, and still the dog remains deaf to all but its own dim purpose. Up comes the black and white signal of the skunk’s tail, the tip still limp, a slim and final chance.

The dog reads it wrong. As it lunges, the skunk twists his hindquarters round, his tail stiff to the limit now, pointing up through the darkened canopy to the sky. The dog leaps back when the spray hits, a single round more than enough.
It wants its human now. Blind and howling, it crashes away.

After a moment, the skunk lowers his tail. He draws a deep, rich breath, finding the little wood altered, the very air his own. Dropping his snout, he noses out what’s left of the snake.

Kate wakes to a smell, the animal base of her brain dragging her up out of a dream. Silhouetted down the end of the bed, the cats lie like a pair of Chinatown lions, noses lifting to the message wafting their way.

Pushing back the quilt, Kate crosses to the window and brings it down. It’s a coolish night, and she finds herself wondering if Lily’s warm enough. Is it possible she really sleeps out there, among the twigs and trash of the urban woods? At least she has Billy with her. Thank God for the devotion of dogs.

She turns back to the bed to find Smoke and Fire watching her in the gloom. “Skunk,” she tells them—as if they didn’t know. Climbing back under the covers, she takes care not to prod their soft bellies with her feet.

It’ll take a while for the room to clear. In the meantime, she reaches across the empty half of the bed to Lou-Lou’s nightstand. Drawing open its little drawer, she feels inside. A paperback, a hardcover, a pair of the drugstore reading glasses Lou-Lou wore. In one corner, the bottle of massage oil, still greasy around the cork. In another, the second, smaller bottle her fingers seek.

She sits back against both pillows, twists off the cap and holds the bottle to her nose. Suddenly the skunk is gone.
She’s in a darkened garden in France. Forget France—she’s in her own back garden, not last summer but the summer before, when Lou-Lou was still around to make things thrive.

Upending the bottle against her finger, Kate touches the scent to her upper lip.
Lavender moustache
. Lou-Lou’s helpful hints.

She returns the little bottle to the drawer and wriggles down, her skull rediscovering its own impression, reminding her where she was before the reek of a passing creature found its way to her nose. She was in the kitchen with Lou-Lou. Not a sex dream—the kind that started up like some kind of cruel joke on the night of the funeral and haunted her for months. Not a nightmare either. There have been fewer of those—always coming home to find her lying in the hallway; always touching her hand to find it cold.

Tonight’s dream was nothing so dramatic. It was the kind of scene you live without a thought: Lou-Lou making pancakes while Kate sits at the kitchen table reading out crossword clues. The waking mind forgets, but the mind of the night sees the glow around the woman at the stove. It knows a delight akin to affliction upon hearing her murmur answers to the most baffling of clues.
Ocelot. Kingpin. Rapt
.

Maybe it was because Kate was so much younger that it never occurred to her to consider an end. It wasn’t that she treated Lou-Lou badly. She was good to her, wasn’t she? Of course she was. In every way but one.

For more than a year, Lou-Lou was Kate’s housemate as far as Mummy and Daddy were concerned. Even that was too much for Daddy.
Housemate, never mind housemate. What about mate?
One Sunday dinner when Kate went on a little
too long about the herb bed Lou-Lou was putting in, Daddy forgot the manners that were so important to him and pointed at her with his fork.

“Always you are talking about this housemate.” The fork quivered in his hand. “Will housemate look after you the way I look after Mummy?”

Yes, Kate said inside, and no. Not like you look after Mummy. Not at all.

“That’s the way they do things nowadays, Vic.” Mummy never called him Vikram. As far as Kate knew, no one did. “Young people like to have a bit of freedom before they settle down.”

“Freedom.” Daddy waved the fork before withdrawing it. “Nothing but freedom in this country.” He shook his head. “And look what you get.”

He fell into a peevish silence—no need to utter aloud what the three of them already knew. Kate’s unspoken love was the gravest of her transgressions, but it was far from the first. She’d let her father down in countless ways, not least of them being her choice of career.

Daddy had been top of his class in dentistry school back home. Too bad nobody told him teeth were so different in Canada that his training wouldn’t count. Okay, so he would work nights for Mr. Malcolm Dysart, Denturist, and attend classes during the day. Simple. Or not so simple. Not when the red-haired girl behind the counter at the Country Style Donuts met his gaze and held it every time he came in. Not when he found himself walking into City Hall holding that same girl’s hand, having already posted the letter that would break his parents’ hearts. He wouldn’t talk about the one his
parents sent him in return; Kate knew only what Mummy told her—that the envelope was blue, and that Daddy never replied.

But Daddy’s story wasn’t about the old life in India; it was about the new country, and the way things happened here. It wasn’t so easy to say no to extra hours when Mr. Dysart started staying home with shooting pains in his legs. Or when he tired of leaving his bed altogether and offered to sell the business to his one and only employee for half of what it was worth. Who could say no then, with one fat-cheeked baby at home and the red-haired girl already swelling up with another? Nobody, that’s who.

Things might have been different if that first baby had lived long enough to become a man. Mummy wanted to call their son after his father, but Daddy wouldn’t hear of it.
He’s stuck with Prabhu. Don’t burden him with Vikram too
. So Mummy settled for the next best thing.

Victor Prabhu was born stubborn like his father. Worse, he was born without an ounce of fear. Kate can remember Mummy laughing about the way he would climb down out of his high chair in seconds, or run full tilt for the nearest road the moment she let go of his hand. In grade one, he knocked himself out cold twice, once by dropping straight down onto the crown of his head from the monkey bars, then again when he lost control of his bike while riding it down the slide. In grade two, he rode that same bike out into the street and disappeared under the wheels of a U-Haul truck.

If Vic Junior had kept to the sidewalk like he’d promised, Daddy would’ve made him a gift of his precious dental tools. As it was, Kate inherited the tiny mirror, the various picks and probes.

She was in high school before she realized none of the other kids knew a bicuspid from an incisor. Career day at the end of grade twelve confused her. The aptitude test was too hard. She began by trying to check the boxes that felt true, but the process made her anxious, so she erased all her choices and started again. The second round of responses was designed to add up to what she already knew, that she would spend her working life with her hands in other people’s mouths. Or, as Daddy put it, she would be busy fixing smiles.

When the bell went, her test was nowhere near complete. Half an aptitude, if that. Mr. Talbot stopped her at the door. “Stay behind a minute, will you, Kate?” He waited until they were alone in the classroom before he held up her test. “What gives?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what happened here?”

She didn’t want to cry, didn’t even know she would until she was a snot-nosed mess. She told him everything—the lost grandparents in Goa and her father’s little tools and Victor not looking both ways before he flew from the curb.