Fauna (23 page)

“Thanks.” He lets go the branch, stepping back to give her room. She surveys leafy ruins. “Wow.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“No, I like it.” Her eye follows a row of planted hubcaps to where it butts up against the bottom end of the flight cage. If the hawk’s in its tree, she can’t see it. Guy clears his throat and moves to stand beside a mound of freshly turned earth. A clean hubcap rises from its centre.

“Well,” he says, hands clasped behind his back, “here’s our fox.”

Staring down at the odd little scene, Edal feels her neck hair lift. She begins a silent count of hubcap headstones, reaching twenty-seven before he speaks again.

“It was my aunt’s thing. Aunt Jan. I don’t know when exactly she got started. She never really did much driving while my uncle Ernie was still alive. He did the pickups, she held down the fort—you know, kept the books, took the calls.” He bends to remove a snail from the hubcap’s rim, sets it down in the grass. “After he died, it was her or nobody—I still had a few years to go before I could get my licence. I took over in the office. Sometimes I went out with her on calls.”

“What about school?”

“What about it?”

“You didn’t go?”

“Off and on. Pretty much off after Ernie was gone. He was the stickler. Aunt Jan didn’t mind so long as I kept on reading.”

“How old were you—when he died, I mean?”

“Thirteen. It was a heart attack, first and last. He wasn’t even doing anything, just walking out to the truck. Nobody saw him drop. Ten minutes later Aunt Jan noticed the truck was still there and went out to see.”

Ten minutes—an eternity to the one who lies dying. A week was the estimate for how long Letty had been dead before the local constable forced open the front door—but how long had she lain alive at the foot of the basement steps, leg jackknifed beneath her? How long between breaking her body and leaving it behind?

“Jesus.” It’s all Edal can manage.

“Yeah, she beat herself up pretty good about it, figured she could’ve given him CPR. The doctor told her, though, it was a big one. He was likely gone before he hit the ground.”

“Jesus.” She hears herself say it again, helpless.

“Better fast than slow, that’s what I figure.” He nudges a tuft of grass with his boot. “With her it was cancer. Stomach, liver, lungs. Took forever.”

Edal opens her mouth and shuts it. She can’t say
Jesus
a third time. Can’t say what she’s thinking either, how sometimes it’s both slow and fast: slow for the one who suffers in secret, the dizzy spells rare to begin with; fast for the one who hasn’t been around to see it coming, the one who takes the late night call. If she says that much, she might not be able to stop herself saying more. About the house and all it harbours. About the bag or box or urn—she can’t remember which one she agreed to—the
container
of ashes she has yet to pick up. Safer to keep the story about him.

“So they raised you, your aunt and uncle?”

“Uh-huh. My dad was Ernie’s little brother. They died when I was a baby, him and my mom.” He looks away. “They got married in a hurry, you know, never got a chance at a honeymoon until I was eleven months old. Niagara Falls. Classic, right? Seven cars and a semi. Everybody but the truck driver died.”

“God, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well.” He glances at her. “Anyway, we’ve got just about everything back here—skunks, raccoons, opossums, rabbits, crows.”

“Foxes.”

He nods. “Foxes. There’s even a couple of deer. Aunt Jan hauled back a doe one time, and I found a fawn.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “They’re not all roadkill.”

“No?”

“Lily buries her birds out here, and there’s a few baby squirrels that fell out of their trees, that kind of thing.” He points down to the far end. “You see that big one, the one with the spokes?”

Edal spots the hubcap in question. Double the size of its neighbours, it arcs up out of a thicket of weeds.

“That’s Brother.” He lets her hang for a few seconds. “My cat.”

Edal hears herself laugh. It’s only a short burst, a twist on an inner release valve, but it’s loud, and anyway, no kind of laughter should follow the mention of a dead pet. “Sorry.” She bites her lip. “You called your cat Brother?”

He nods. “Only child.” He says it plainly, without the slightest hint of self-pity.

“Yeah,” she says after a moment, “me too.”

Stephen should get up. There’s more to be done in the yard, and after that there are dogs in their cages, waiting to be walked.

Edal must have gone; he can no longer hear her and Guy talking through his bedroom window. He wasn’t listening in, exactly, just sitting on the floor, keeping an eye on the kits as they wandered the room. It gave him a twinge—just a small one—to hear his friend tell another his secrets so soon.

He’s given the kits their afternoon feed and gathered them back into their carrier. Now, as they settle into sleep beneath him, he lets himself close his eyes. The power’s been back on for a while now; he could switch on the clock radio and listen to people calling in about their gardens or their kitchens or their kids. Or he could just lie here. It’s not really a nap if you stay on top of the covers. At worst it might be called a snooze.

The fatigue is never very far. He’s come a long way in his recovery, but his heart will never pump the way it ought to. Hard to believe a body could change so profoundly, so fast.

It happened while he was sleeping. They’d leaguered up in the open that night, LAVs and G-Wagens circled around sand flea—bitten bodies on the ground. Stephen woke before dawn, feeling feverish and sore. Afraid he might have rolled over on something venomous in his sleep, he took a soldier’s rapid inventory of his parts. No localized pain or swelling, only this all-over, worrisome ache. By mid-morning he was having trouble breathing. In the chopper back to Kandahar
Air Field he began to rave. The field hospital smelled of raw plywood, antiseptic, blood. Harsh light and clamour. Fear.

He slept through much of the flight out. Landstuhl Regional Medical Center may have been a U.S. Army facility on German soil, but the doctors who came to listen to his chest were Canadian as often as not. It was there that he learned what had happened to him. Apparently certain viruses had it in for the human heart; the infection began with inflammation but progressed quickly to where the red muscle had to struggle and stretch. Myocarditis. The pathogen was out of his system now, but the damage—
the considerable, lasting damage—
was done.

His transfer back to Canada posed a further problem. Any number of civilian hospitals were equipped to facilitate rehabilitation, but the perceived wisdom held that injured personnel tended to recover best close to home. Stephen had two—the one he’d grown up in and the one where his unit was based. Neither appealed.

Notwithstanding Mica’s Monthly Mandala group email, he’d had little contact with his parents since he was foolish enough to visit during his pre-deployment leave. They’d allowed him into the scented sanctuary of their home—and it was
theirs
now, though he’d moved out less than a year before—but the welcome was nowhere near warm. A working dog, no matter how well trained, still bears the wild, ancestral taint; every step Stephen took put a ripple through the woolly flock. Ariel in particular maintained a buffer of physical distance—a peck on the cheek at the airport and nothing more. Maybe she would have hugged him if he’d changed out of uniform before boarding the flight.

He’d felt easier at CFB Shilo, but six months’ training with his unit had done little to make Manitoba feel like home. Besides, why locate himself close to the base when he doubted he’d ever serve again?

One of the nurses on his ward had worked for a time in the cardiac rehab centre at St. Mike’s in downtown Toronto. She’d liked it there, but she liked it fine at Landstuhl too. Hardly a rave review, but Stephen clung to it. Toronto was the largest city in Canada; logically, it would offer the most chances to belong.

He was still an in-patient at St. Mike’s when he learned he no longer met the universality of service standards. It came as no surprise: a body that suffered palpitations and shortness of breath while shuffling from hospital bed to hospital bathroom could scarcely be expected to “deploy on short notice to any geographical location, in any climate” and “perform with minimal medical support.”
Illness or injury incurred in theatre
. The phrase never failed to bring a grim smile to his lips. He saw himself clad in doublet and tights, stabbed in the chest with a trick dagger but dropping to the boards for real.

After six weeks, the in-patient became an out-patient. A basement bachelor apartment not far from St. Mike’s, checkups every week, then every month. It turned out a bewildering array of services awaited the soldier no longer fit to serve. He might have taken advantage of the Canadian Forces’ Vocational Rehabilitation Program if only he’d had a clue what he wanted to be. He could read the frustration in the eyes of those assigned to guide him; in some it bordered on disgust. Either way, it did little to help him decide.

Once the official medical release came through, he was in line for further rehabilitation under the aegis of Veterans
Affairs. So many levels of assistance—financial, medical, psychosocial, vocational—yet nothing could seem to put right what had gone wrong in his chest. No matter how many counselling sessions and job placement workshops he attended, no matter how his physical condition improved, he remained quietly sick at heart.

What energy he had, he spent on reconnaissance of his new hometown. He walked until the exhaustion kicked in, then boarded the nearest subway, streetcar or bus. It was incredible how much he saw: single houses that could hold an entire Kandahar village, goats and all; a man—old, or perhaps only weathered—squatting to relieve himself off the edge of a curb; women wearing the hijab, even the full-body burka. Women wearing as little as the late fall weather would allow.

It’s hard to say what made him pause one frosty morning and watch the red-haired man at his work. Tow trucks had never held much interest for him before. It might have been the wreck, a mangled silver Mini with a streak of what could only be blood down the driver’s-side door. Or it might have been the way Guy met his gaze and straightened. The way he nodded hello.

“Disgusting to make, delicious to eat.” Aunt Jan never made meat loaf without saying it, so Guy says it too, bursting a yolk in each fist and working the goo into the mix. Maybe that’s why Edal didn’t stay—not everybody wants a meal mushed up by a mechanic’s hands. He doubts it. More likely it was a simple case of too much information. Did he have to tell her about every dead relative he had?

Then again, maybe it was the pet cemetery that threw her. Or maybe she just had other plans.

He digs into the pinkish mass, squeezing fat ribbons of meat between his fingers. As he mashes and scoops, evening light falls across his forearm, illuminating a silvery scar. He lifts his hand free of the bowl and turns it. The mark curves like a third of a bracelet. No forgetting what the body knows.

Brother was long, built more like a fish than a cat—not the sluggish, muddy things Guy and Uncle Ernie used to drag up from the Don, but the kind men set their hooks for on TV. He had the white underbelly of a fish, the dark ridge of spine, the black and silver stripes best suited to underwater light. Glimpsed weaving between tires or slipping deep into a forest of weeds, Brother glinted, sometimes even flashed.

He was a short-haired domestic tabby, or so the lady at the shelter said. Uncle Ernie had been dead three months when Guy and his aunt crossed the bridge to look over the animals that had no homes. About time, Aunt Jan figured, for the pair of them to start taking an interest again.

“Dogs are a lot of work,” she told him. “What we could really use around the place is a champion mouser.”

There were dozens of caged cats, some calling out to them, others speaking with their eyes alone. Only one stretched a paw through the bars to bat Guy’s shoulder as he passed.

When the lady opened the cage door and lifted the tabby down, Guy saw the full extent of him, a size somewhat at odds with his still-kittenish face.