This River Awakens (50 page)

‘Because he’s the principal?’

‘No, Owen. Because he’s a man.’

‘What difference does that make?’

She laughed again. ‘Oh, let’s shut up and fuck. I’m tired of talking.’

‘Promise me something first.’

‘What?’

‘That you won’t use it right away. Hold off. Make it a last recourse.’

‘A last recourse. I love the way you talk.’ She hesitated, thinking, then sighed. ‘All right. But I get to decide when it’s time.’

‘Okay. Look, I know about it now. That something’s happening to me. That makes a difference.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Uh. Well, it should, shouldn’t it?’

She wasn’t convinced.
Knowing doesn’t help, not one fucking bit. It’s like the flu. You know you’re getting it, but you can’t stop it from coming. You trust in knowing way too much, Owen.
She said nothing, pushing it out of her mind as she removed her sweater and her shirt.

Owen did the same. It was hot and dusty, and the sound of their breathing was loud.

‘We start slow,’ Jennifer said.

‘Okay.’

‘Like the usual stuff, I mean.’ She pulled off her panties. ‘Come over here.’

She’d been more nervous than she’d care to admit, and all the things that they always did with each other felt different, because they were all now leading to something else. And they both knew it.

Jennifer had expected … something other than what happened, but her imagination proved no match for the feelings that flooded her when he uncertainly, tenderly slipped inside.
All so easy, so natural. Why did we wait so long? I’m glad we did.
She thought she’d be the one feeling vulnerable, but it didn’t feel like that at all.
He’s helpless, pressed here against me, moving inside me – not fast and eager, but exploring, deliberately exploring. It’s happening – I’m finally swallowing him up, and I’ll make him safe, here, inside me. Safe, that’s what it’s all about. I … I didn’t know.

V

Midnight hours.
Sten lay curled up on the sofa, shivering under the blankets.
One after another after another, endless midnight hours. Get out of my head. There’s not enough room. Not for both of us, and I can’t leave. I’ve got nowhere to go. Get out get out get out wherever you are!

Water dripped steadily from the guttering above the living-room window.
A warm spell. So sudden, a shock to the system, to the ordered brilliance of the human body. I’m sick. Something broke, I feel it rattling inside me. You can’t fix it. No one can. Rattle rattle rattle. I’m cold. I can’t catch up. I’m permafrost. Mammoth steaks, that’s me, surrounded by starving Russians.

The dogs rubbed against the kennel’s walls.
Rustle rustle, rattle rattle. Inside and out, we’ve all come loose. Escape is impossible. Life is what it is. Only Max has got away. I never beat any of you, but you hate me anyway. Why? You all stink of fear. So do I. What’s the difference? We’re all animals of the earth, chained to our natures, trapped inside our own fates. You were the first to walk with us, the first to share heat and food. We’re in step with each other. We’ve always been. I don’t understand.

Water dripped. There was no wind, none at all. The world’s fierce breath was held in check, and Sten’s heart hammered with terror. Outside …
rustle rustle, the chain-link fence recording perfectly the restless beasts and their restless lives.

Another beer? It’s a warm spell. An early spring, maybe. The ice on the river has thinned, stripped of snow and showing its bruises. It’s been a week. Or two. Makes no difference, but the snow’s vanishing, shrinking down to blood-coloured pools. God, I’m thinking clearly. It’s all clear now. I’ve drunk a dozen beers today – all in my head, nowhere else. I don’t know, is anyone out there?

All so clear. The things I’ve done. My games, played to the edge of death. My winter, frozen in place for so long now. Thawing, and there I am, lying in a puddle, revealed at last.

Water dripped, sloshed muddily.

Rattle rattle. Here I am, sick and lucid, lucidly sick, the jester done his dancing, finally at rest. I’ve drunk a dozen beers. I’m blasted. I can’t even get up. Why get up? I’ll only fall down. She’s cleaned up the bed. It’s hers now, smelling of bleach and bath oil. She says nothing. I talk endlessly, here in my head. Drunk. The fantasy is real, in here. She’s done the same. She talks inside, too. What’s she saying?

Sleep. They can both sleep. Dreaming of freedom. It’s not what I wanted, not what I ever wanted. I was a kid, once. I knew how to laugh, once. I didn’t dream of this. I never guessed my fate. The boy never guessed his. He used to laugh at me and shake his head. I couldn’t even walk straight, vodka in my Thermos, that stinking switchman with the cataracts I took my ‘coffee breaks’ with, both of us getting soused and laughing at the great joke we were playing. Fooling the bosses, kids behind the school with a bottle in a paper bag. The boy used to laugh.

Water dripped, the only sound from outside. The only sound. Sten went still, held his breath. Nothing. He sighed, wrapping the blanket tighter around himself.

There’s no such thing as freedom. Just a blood-smeared joke. The couplings pushing into place, with a boy in between. Through his pelvis, crushing bone, his guts, front and back, driven together, seeking to join and caring nothing about his screaming and the gushing fluids. Just trying to come together, the way they were meant to.

Water dripping, and silence.

He climbed to his feet, holding the blanket around him. He walked into the hall, the floor cold through his socks. He came to the back door, opened it and stepped through on to the porch.

The kennel door was open. The dogs were gone.

VI

Fisk woke slowly, a kind of climbing struggle as his mind battled with a sense of urgency and the exhaustion that clung on, that told him it wasn’t yet morning, that there were hours left to this night.

He groaned, rolled on to his back, and opened his eyes. The room was still, cast in greys and blacks. The luminescent numbers on the clock read 3 a.m. He tried to think of what had woken him.

The thaw had come. By morning, he knew, the field of mud would be clear, black and depthless and waiting for him once again. Another spring, another season for his torture. It would be his last – he’d let the field embrace him, drag him down into darkness.

The thaw. The river’s ice would show its fissures, undermined by the too-warm water coming from the city, rotting and fraying beneath the sun. It had been a season without end, swinging around again and again, and all he could do was wait.
This is the last one.

He rose from bed and went to the bathroom.

The little ones would be awake in the cellar, still tuned to the outer world’s cycles. Rat would be chewing at the cage door. Moon and Gold would be pacing, that bobbing motion that carried them back and forth, up and around. They’d have heard his footsteps now, and his piss splashing into the toilet. They’d be nervous, twitching with fear. Rat was going wild, so frantic, so thoroughly insane.

His face in the mirror looked ancient, yellowed and cracked like a picture in a photo album from the last century. A face that didn’t belong to the modern age, a face that was winter itself.

But the season has turned.

Fisk wasn’t looking forward to the hours ahead, while he waited for dawn. He still felt a trembling urgency, and wondered at its source.
Heart attack? No. No pain. Nightmare? Can’t remember one.

He left the bathroom and went to the kitchen, still in only his underwear. The rows of cages outside waited in the darkness, blockish and black between the aisles of snow patches, mud and puddles.

Something was wrong. He leaned over the sink and rapped his knuckles on the window. He waited to see the glitter of eyes, waited to hear the rattles and the scraping claws.
Nothing. They’re not there any more.

He walked slowly into the hallway, threw on his winter parka and stepped into his boots. At the back door he flicked on the yard lamps, then went outside. The white light revealed each empty cage – its door back in place, and the thousands of mink tracks scattering everywhere, and among them, down each aisle, the tracks of a person – the boot imprints small, the steps short.

The cold air came up under his parka, making his legs shiver, his crotch tighten. He could feel panic, deep inside him, but he wouldn’t let it out. No point in letting it out. And rage – but that too could wait.

One of those boys. I should call the cops. But what can they do? It’s too late anyway. My beasts are free, racing away through the darkness, flowing across the night. They’ve escaped, each one insane, each one unleashed.

He walked down the first row.
My beasts are free. Out into the thaw. I’m ruined. Wiped out.
The tracks in their thousands were all that remained, claws pinching the mud, darting memories of escape. Not one left. So many would die. On the highway, to dogs and owls, but mostly the highway. They’d run.
Nothing will stop them, run until exhausted, run until dead of burst hearts.

But I still have the ones in my cellar. Enough for me, for now. From now on. That’s the place for my … my anger, my revenge. Nothing more to say, nothing more to do.
He turned around and headed back inside.
My beasts are free. Thank God.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I

Sten wasn’t home and the car was gone. So were the dogs.
Maybe he’s taken them for a run.

Elouise began preparing to make breakfast for her and Jennifer. It was Sunday, and Dr Roulston would be by before noon. She wondered if she’d be the only one there to meet him, since Jennifer was sure to head out – the day was clear, bright and warm. She’d want to be with Owen. It had come slowly, but Elouise could now see the change that had come to her daughter. The anger was still there, of course, but Jennifer had found friends that mattered, and they’d given her a safe place, a refuge, where she found strength, maybe even faith.

Elouise remembered Sundays as a child. She remembered a church, where they sang hymns and listened to an old man reading from the Bible. The sun would come down through the windows, stained by the glass into rainbow streams. A cloth on the altar, candles throwing out wavering light, some of them flickering dangerously through the morning – she had watched those ones, holding her breath when it seemed they would go out. She’d lose track of the old man’s words – only the candles mattered, and the fear that they’d go out. She couldn’t recall if they ever did.

She stood in front of the sink.
I’ll have to walk. At least a mile on the highway. I’ll be able to make the eleven o’clock service. I’ll wear the blue dress – it’s the only one that still fits, which is funny, because it used to be the only one I couldn’t wear any more. Not for years. I’ll leave Jennifer a note, and another one for the doctor.

She returned the egg carton to the refrigerator and went upstairs to the bedroom.

They’d stopped going to church after the war. With her brother’s death, a candle had gone out in the family, the fragile illusion of faith had been shattered. The men who came back cussed, smoked and drank. Some of them had spilled blood in churches, after all, and they were all more in this world and less in the other. Most of them believed in one thing – chance, the unguessable twist of fate. There were those who tried to go back, to the old ways, and some seemed to succeed – at least to all outward appearances, but so many others stood stiffly at the pews, fidgeting, their eyes turned inward, bringing with them memories of hell.

Things changed. For everyone. It was harder to believe in God, and there were riches in the world now, so many temptations easily served.

She looked at herself in the mirror. The dress carried her back ten, fifteen years, but the face that she saw looked old, pulled down by hard years.

The front door banged open downstairs and she heard Sten’s boots clump into the living room. ‘Elouise!’ he called harshly. ‘Where the hell are you?’

As she stepped into the hallway, she heard music from a record come on in Jennifer’s room. Elouise hesitated, then went downstairs.

Sten had moved to the kitchen, tracking mud all over the floor. He looked sober, but exhausted and shaken. He was spooning ground coffee into the percolator. ‘Someone sprung them,’ he said, not turning. ‘My dogs. They’ve run off.’ He slammed the percolator down on an element and turned the heat on. Elouise went over and removed it, shaking it in answer to his glare –
no water.
He sighed and sat down as she went to the sink.

‘Car’s in the ditch,’ he said, massaging his temples. ‘Slid off a section road. I looked everywhere. Had to walk back. Think I broke the rad. And an axle. They’ve run off. I’ve got to call the farmers around here, tell them they can shoot if they have to.’ He paused and looked over at her. ‘That’s nice,’ he said sourly. ‘Getting dressed up for Roulston, eh?’

She shook her head and took from her purse a pen and notepad. She wrote down
Church
and showed it to him.

His face twitched as he read it, then he sat back, looking away. ‘A fuckin’ waste of time. What are you going to do, walk?’

She nodded.

‘Fuckin’ waste of time. I’m heading out again. After some goddamned breakfast, which I see I’m going to have to make on my own. This is what it’s come to. Well, you go pray, dear. Go sing your hymns. Go, get out of my sight.’

*   *   *

Her path along the west side of the highway was rutted and muddy. There were dead animals everywhere, at least a dozen within sight – on the highway itself, flattened and smeared by tyres – and on the shoulders and in the ditch on her right. All the same kind of animals, small, their bodies longer than a cat’s, their fur a thick, dark brown. Weasels, or mink – she didn’t really know the difference. She stepped over them, walked around them, feeling fear, a growing sense of dread, as if she were in some way gathering each one to her, collecting something from each tiny, motionless body, assuming a burden that she couldn’t identify.