Fauna (36 page)

“What if I went on my hands and knees?”

Kate blinks. A single canine freebie she might be able to explain. A teenage girl down on all fours, not so much. Her hand finds the control panel. She spreads her fingers, pressing
Slower
and
Drain
in one.

Billy ends his session cheerfully enough, slowing to a contented stop then squeezing past Lily to bustle down the ramp. Kate reaches for a towel, but he’s already shaking, loosing an explosive spray.

“Man,” Kate laughs, wiping her face, “he’s fast.” She stoops to blanket him in the towel, rubbing his sturdy legs, the black barrel of his chest.

The sound of running water makes her turn. Lily’s standing in the tank with her hands clasped behind her back. Her vest, her boots and jeans, her man’s pyjama shirt—everything lies in a pile. How did she get down to T-shirt and panties so fast? Pink panties—candy pink against the skim-milk skin of her thighs. Kate lowers her eyes.

Lily’s feet, submerged now past the ankles, are just as Kate imagined them—sweet, ill-used, in need of repair. She leaves the towel draped over Billy’s waterlogged ruff and steps up onto the ramp, checking the seal.

“I closed it,” Lily says.

“Okay.”

They stand face to face for a moment, perhaps a ruler’s length between them. Then Lily kneels and drops forward onto her hands. Kate steps down to stand by the controls. Trains her eyes forward to read the
Pool Rules
Sandi brought in to brighten up the back wall.

“Hey,” Lily says, “you trying to drown me?”

“Sorry.” Kate halts the flow. “You want me to let some out?”

“No, it should be okay.” She holds her chin up to keep her face out of the water. The T-shirt has swollen out around her, lifting to show the shallow dimples at the small of her back.

“Ready?” Kate asks.

“Fuck, yeah.”

Kate starts the belt, Lily setting off like an infant, wobbly but cocksure. She just fits the tank, her toes kissing the back panel with every stride.

“Faster,” she says, and Kate touches the button.
“Faster.”
She’s really moving now. “Yeah,” she pants, “I can feel it. I’m definitely lighter.”

Kate turns to see Billy watching his owner intently through the glass, the towel still hanging around his neck—ready for the sauna, maybe even the ring. When she crosses to the bench, he follows to plant himself beside her and lean. Only then does she see it: the flesh of Lily’s left forearm is marked with an angry cross-hatching. Kate sits forward, elbows on her knees. There’s a pattern to it, inch-long incisions arranged into groups of five. She feels her stomach shrink, steals a look at Lily’s face. She’s straining to keep her head up, her expression one of determination, even eagerness. Or is it fear?

“Okay.” Kate rises. “That’s enough.”

Lily makes no protest, slowing as the belt slows, dropping her chin as the water begins to drain. By the time the belt comes to a stop, she can hang her head without drowning, and she does, the T-shirt clinging to her back, revealing her laboured breath. She rises up on her knees. Gets one foot, then the other, beneath her. Kate fetches another towel, fighting the urge to hold it open like a mother meeting her child at the water’s edge. Lily reaches out to turn the handle, releasing herself from the tank. The wounds on her right arm are similar but brighter, more recent.

Kate stands at the foot of the ramp, holding out the folded towel. When Lily reaches for it, Kate says quietly, “What are those marks?”

Lily stands dripping, the towel pressed to her chest. “What do they look like?”

Kate should just say it.
Come home with me, Lily. Come and stay
. But Lily has asked her a question. “They
look—” She pauses, her mouth suddenly dry. “They look like days.”

The Necropolis closed its gates over an hour ago. Luckily, the iron fence is old-fashioned, a line of painted lances more ornament than obstacle to anyone with a bit of jump. Guy grapples over and drops, landing in a crouch. For a moment he feels vaguely feral—a boy raised up in the jungle, befriended by the wild. He had hints of a similar sensation on the way here—once when he stepped onto the footbridge and felt the valley yawn beneath him, then again as he skirted the rustling pungency of Riverdale Farm.

He’s never really warmed to the graveyard’s official entrance, the quaint little archway with its curlicues of painted wood. It feels more natural entering on the sly. Leaving the street lights behind, he does his best not to tread on any plaques. It’s hard to be sure where the dead actually lie in a crowded old yard like this.

The monument stands in the lee of a big spruce, just steps from the central path. He always stops here first, like checking in with the grieving hosts before walking through to where the true wake’s going on.

Budding rose bushes cluster about the paired columns, simple stone plinths marked with small commemorative plaques. The first supports a bronze, doll-sized family, the son on his father’s shoulders, the mother seated nearby. Guy stands in the path of her unseeing gaze. The bronze parents are young in a way Jan and Ernie never were—Ernie’s back already chronic
by the time Guy was born. Young in the way his first parents must have been.

He’s been to visit their graves plenty of times—all the way out in Mississauga, among a crowd of other dead Howells he never knew. Year after year on the anniversary of the crash. Not since Jan died, though. Not once on his own.

The top of the second column has been left bare. People leave tokens here. Flowers would take up too much room, so most opt for small, smooth stones. One, ideal for skipping, has been etched with rough letters:
LOVE
. Another bears a plump heart in red felt pen. Someone has left a Moosehead bottle cap—the beloved’s favourite beer. Guy finds the card-sized plaques that belong to him and bends to read them in the gloom.

He’s brought the usual offering: a pair of lug nuts polished to a shine. He fingers them in his pocket, then draws them out and places them gently on the monument, side by side.

The path carries on from there to turn a sharp right angle, but Guy cuts the corner, walking overland again. At the mouth of a narrow cutaway he stoops to search out the hidden sign. Every year it retreats deeper into the hedge; those who know it’s there can still read it, but only just.
VALLEY SCATTERING AREA
.
Having found it, he stands for a moment, staring down the cutaway’s length. The last in a row of houses abuts its western bank. Light spills from an uncurtained study. What must it be like to live there, knowing the dust on your bookshelves—in your lungs, for that matter—is laced with human ash?

He walks downhill, neighbourhood to the left of him, trees to the right. It’s a comfort, this small forest let stand when the land might have been sold for plots. Maybe the decision was a practical one, the grade too steep to keep hold of coffins, or even urns.

Slabs and standing stones dot the descent. Loose rows of embedded plaques, the odd tree planted and tended in somebody’s name. When Uncle Ernie died, Aunt Jan chose one that was already growing: a strong-looking pine at the edge of the little wood.

“Good view of the intersection,” she said. “He’d want to keep up on the new models coming off the line.”

Guy nodded. “It smells nice, too.”

She didn’t scatter her husband so much as tip him out, tilting the lined box and shaking the contents in a rough circle around the base of the tree. “That way, when we want him, we’ll know where to look.”

Eight years later, not long after he turned twenty-one, Guy fed ashes to the pine’s roots again—so he’d know where to find her too.

It’s a good place to sit, better than any bench or pew. A carpet of needles beneath him, the steadying trunk at his back. He’ll come away fragrant, his clothing sticky in places with pitch.

After a time, he becomes aware of a small irritation—a
pebble digging into his behind. He feels for it, examines it in the deepening dark. It’s lighter than stone, almost porous, and so pale it appears to glow. Could it be? A knuckle, maybe, relic of the finger Ernie broke when his wrench slipped—or else one of Jan’s twisted, arthritic toes. He closes it between his palms.

Normally he talks to them only inwardly, but here, where their mixed molecules lie all around him, it makes sense to voice his thoughts aloud.

“So,” he says, letting his breath out with the word, “there’s this girl.”

The air is weighted, shot through with telling scent. The coyote rarely strays this far—it lies beyond the true home range. Needs must. The young are cutting their teeth, pouncing on every grasshopper that comes their way. Soon—this night or the next—they will begin to demand real meat.

The coyote has no pack to help her provide; here among the humans, it pays to keep to the family core. Only now, even the mate is gone. When he didn’t return from last night’s hunt, she braved the late morning and nosed out the most recent of his trails. It ended in a scent-scene of mayhem. A drag mark led her into the nearby brush, where she came upon a redolent patch of his blood. His body was nowhere to be found.

She’s been on edge ever since, tempted to seek out a new den site and move the vulnerable pups. As soon as the daylight ebbed, she set out in search of food. So far she’s had
a squirrel—all gristle and tail—and a few mice gleaned from the roadside grass. Not a scrap of carrion along the shoulder. She crouched until there was relative quiet then bolted to the other side.

Having squeezed under the curled hem of a fence, she trots upcountry toward the cover of the trees. The atmosphere troubles her. Nowhere else has she come across a death-scent this dry. The earth breathes bone with every touch of her paws; even the grass smells wrong, like clumps of indigestible hair. Traces of fire, too, the cool grey silt it leaves behind.

As she enters the trees, the night grows fresher, more easily understood. Moving without sound through the closing flowers, the damp, receptive moss, she doesn’t get wind of the human until she’s almost upon him. He sits alone with his back against a tree, eyes closed, trusting his surrounds. She watches him for a time before continuing on.

At the crest of the hill, she enters a disturbing scene. The trees stand lonely, surrounded by oddly shaped stones—some her own height, many taller. She hastens her pace. The smell of death runs deeper here, laced with a poisonous strain.

It’s a relief to wriggle through the barred gate; now nothing but a narrow road and a pretty little fence lies between her and the reason she’s come. Already she can smell the barns.

She leaps the fence. Making her way to the nearest wooden wall, she sniffs along the foundation, seeking the loose board, the crumbling corner, that will allow her in. The cracks leak a mouth-watering mixture of chicken and pig—geese too, but why struggle for a meal when a helpless one roosts nearby? She can hear them, squawking and squabbling in their unease. Her scent has wound its way inside even if the rest of her can’t.

The second barn is even more trying, one corner smelling sweetly of rabbits, others heady with goats and sheep—this year’s crop among them, rickety-legged kids and lambs. The coyote scratches helplessly at the fragrant base of the door.

The larger creatures have been left out overnight. The dark, heavy-boned horses turn head-on to her as she pads softly past. The donkey follows suit, its long ears switching, reminding her of the rabbits beyond her reach.

In a corral of its own, the cow is lying down. It meets the coyote’s gaze through the fence rails, then rolls and heaves up onto its feet. What looked to be part of its blotched body is in fact the soft body of a calf. The mother nudges it until it scrambles to a stand. Not a hope. Maybe if the coyote belonged to a pack, but even then she’d risk getting kicked to death. This is the kind of meat you find, not the kind you fight for. The cow holds her in its brown eye until she turns.

Nothing left but to slope away down to the pond. She might come upon a raccoon feeling for its dinner, or even a sleek muskrat slipping from its lodge. She hasn’t had muskrat since the mate brought her one whole, back when this year’s litter was new. The gift was fresh when he dropped it on the den floor before her. Still tender, still ever so slightly warm.

I
t was summer—no school bus coming to ferry Edal to and fro, nothing to break up the days. Weeks had passed since she’d lost the many-toed kitten, proving herself unworthy of Jim Dale’s trust. She told herself she was only out walking, sick of the woods, seeing what else she might see. Redwings in the cattail ditches, deer tracks where the shoulder turned soft. A couple of trucks passed, one midnight blue, the other grey where it wasn’t lacy with rust—a young woman in the showpiece, an old guy in the junker. Nobody she knew.