His mother placed a hand on Amy’s shoulder. “Lovely to meet you at last,” she said, and whatever doubt he thought he’d seen in her expression evaporated — who could resist this lemony confection and her shy, dimpling grin?
“Isn’t this nice,” Amy said, a burble at the back of her throat, as if she might break into laughter. It wasn’t clear if she meant meeting Marcie and his mother or the greenhouse itself, which had the dishevelled, after-the-party look of a nursery in July — half the benches were bare and the remaining plants were leggy, overgrown, except for the tropical houseplants, which were a sultry green, the foliage sharp, dangerous-looking.
HIS MOTHER HAD LUNCH READY for the three of them back at the house, cheese and tomato sandwiches made with the first tomatoes of the season, and apple pie.
They ate for a while in silence and then his mother said, “Henry tells me you work in a clothing store. Is it a job you like or is it just a job?”
“Sure, it’s cool,” Amy answered in her light voice, her brow furrowed as she tried to hang onto her sandwich, which was dripping ripe red flesh.
“Yes, but what I meant was, do you really enjoy it, or is it just a way to pay the bills?”
“Oh, I love helping girls choose clothes — and I get a discount on whatever I buy.” There was a tomato seed on her plump lower lip.
His mother levelled her cool blue eyes at Henry. “Seems like too beautiful a day to be inside,” she said. “Let’s save this pie for supper and go into town for ice cream.”
AFTER THEY ATE THEIR CONES, his mother drove them up and down Greely’s few streets, pointing out Henry’s high school, the handsome brick post office, and the butcher shop famous for its spicy sausage. Amy made polite noises in response but you couldn’t call it conversation. Henry couldn’t imagine what they would do for the rest of the day. Supper, and the long evening, loomed ahead.
THE NEXT MORNING, in the dim basement bedroom where he’d lived out his boyhood, he and Amy made love. The hawk on the poster over his bed seemed to be swooping toward them as they grappled, hot and sweaty, in the dip in the centre of the mattress. He tried to shut out the sound of his mother moving around in the kitchen over their heads, and was relieved when he heard the radio come on. Their limbs seemed to skitter off one another; it was awkward but weirdly exciting.
A few minutes later they lay side by side, not touching. Amy had an odd expression on her face, lines of tension around her eyes — and she avoided looking at him.
When Henry came back from the bathroom, she was up and dressed, and he suggested they take a walk down to the river.
HE STEPPED AHEAD OF HER on the path, warning her about tree roots she might trip over, holding back branches so they didn’t snap back in her face. Amy murmured her thanks but didn’t say much else. When they were almost at the Torch, he clambered up the bank, which was high at this point, with a panoramic view downstream. He always thought there was a chance he’d see something rare and wonderful as he came up over the last ridge, an otter maybe, or a bull elk wading in the river shallows, but today the water was purling peacefully around the far bend, where two teal drifted downstream.
“Henry, look,” Amy squealed from somewhere behind him.
He turned toward her voice but at first couldn’t see her. She was beneath a cottonwood, stooped over something in the grass — she beckoned him with both hands, as if every second counted. There was something she wanted to show him, maybe a butterfly, or a glimmering, jewel-like beetle, and he skidded down the riverbank toward her.
She was standing over a recently dead crow, its claws curled up, eyes hazed over. Henry’s heart expanded; he hadn’t had a bird to work on for months, not since before Amy had moved in with him.
“Don’t touch it,” he said.
“As if.” She wrinkled her nose and took a hasty step back, her shoulders pressing up against the cottonwood’s trunk.
“Good work, Amy,” he said, pulling a plastic bag out of his back pocket and scooping the crow into it. They walked back to the house with the bagged bird swinging between them.
ON THE DRIVE BACK TO THE CITY, coddling a small fuchsia on her lap, which his mother had given her as a parting gift, Amy asked, “How do you do it? I mean, how do you get rid of the feathers and stuff?”
“It’s actually pretty straightforward,” he promised. “You’ll see.”
“I will?”
“I can — we can — prepare the bird next weekend,” he said.
When they got back to the apartment, he carried the crow into the basement, to an old fridge that was down there, and put it in the empty freezer.
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, it was cooler, and looked like it might rain. When he brought the crow up from the laundry sink where he’d had it thawing overnight, Henry was giddy. Amy had curled the ends of her long dark hair that morning, and put on makeup. She’d prepared for this as if it were a date.
“This’ll make a nice broth,” he joked, laying the bird down on the plastic sheet he’d spread across the kitchen table. Her eyes widened as he cut off the wings with a pair of heavy scissors.
AMY LASTED UNTIL a scurf of fine crow down was scattered across the kitchen counter like black snow, then she made a dash for the bedroom. Henry stood there with the stripped bird in his gloved hands — he supposed the slippery, skinless, wingless thing did look far from pretty. The old bear skull looked down on him from the top of the cupboards, its weathered snout sporting — as all the skulls up there did — a pair of sunglasses. Not long after she first moved in, Amy had come home from a secondhand shopping expedition with several pairs. She’d climbed onto a kitchen chair and placed sunglasses on each of them, then stepped down, and fitted the elk and moose skulls on the sideboard with large, oversized Ray-Bans. The moose looked like a bone collector’s version of an ad for beer. When Henry had stared at them in silence, she’d shrugged, disappointed, and gone off to have a shower. He didn’t think she’d meant to leave the glasses on the skulls; it was a harmless prank, that’s all, and she’d get back on the chair in a few minutes, or later in the day, or the next morning, and take the glasses off. He’d freed the elk and moose from their dark lenses that day, but somehow the other glasses had stayed where they were.
Henry lowered first the carcass, then the wings, into the old enamel soup pot full of boiling water, turned the ring down to a steady simmer, and ripped off his latex gloves. He poured two big mugfuls of coffee and went to find Amy.
He lured her out of the bedroom, where she was watching some talk show, sat her down on the couch, and handed her a mug. Getting his notebook out, he began outlining how you assemble a bird out of a bewildering heap of bones. He opened his bird-building guide to the sequencing page.
“See,” he said. “You do a bit here and a bit there, then make the major connections. It’s all very methodical, and once the bones have been cleaned, totally — totally hygienic.”
Amy’s head, eyes narrowed, veered toward the kitchen, and she sniffed. “Is that the crow?”
Henry made a show of passing his nose over his coffee cup, taking refuge in its halo of rich aroma. “Mm,” he said.
A few minutes later, Amy leapt up, spilling her coffee as she grabbed for the phone next to it on the coffee table, and cried, “How can you stand the stink!” And she ran into the bathroom with the phone.
Henry was sopping up the spilled coffee when she reappeared.
“I’m going out,” she said defiantly. She was going to walk downtown to a café to meet a friend, and she’d be back, “oh, sometime,” she muttered with a toss of her dark hair. And then she stomped into the bedroom. Moments later she came out wearing a pink sundress. She paced from room to room, hunting for her purse and her keys, a hand over her nose to protect her from the smell of the crow, which was now a smothering, rancid fug.
Henry bit his lip. Maybe he should have rendered the bird somewhere with more ventilation. Like outside, or back on the farm. He refilled his mug with coffee and tried to kee
p his attention on an article about snakes he was reading in National Geographic. He scrutinized a python skeleton and read that its jaws worked like flexible hinges, allowing it to swallow prey four times the diameter of its mouth.
On her way out the door, Amy called over her shoulder, “You should go out too, Henry. The air in here is probably mega-toxic.”
She was gone a long time, three, then four hours. He didn’t use her absence as an opportunity to finish his work on the crow, which was ready to come out of the water quite soon (it must have been a young bird), though he did open all the windows even wider and switch on the stove fan. And the smell, he thought, was much improved. But he didn’t clear the whole crow mess up, so that when she came into the house Amy might have seen something that resembled what she probably imagined (if she’d imagined anything): a tidy assortment of bones, still slimy but at least on their way to looking like a skeleton in a display at a school science fair.
Instead, he waited until she came into the kitchen looking for him, her face alight again, her mouth open and smiling, the shoulders of her dress damp because it had started to rain. And while she stood by chattering about her girlfriend’s new boyfriend, he got out the sieve, carried the pot to the sink, and dumped the crow bones into it. She reeled back with a hand over her mouth, gave him a horrified look, and fled to the bathroom. He didn’t think she’d actually thrown up, but he heard the tap running for a long time.
THE NEXT WEEKEND, he took her to dinner and a movie. He was sure by then that she’d recovered from the trauma of the crow. She had thrown up, in fact, but he’d said he was sorry, several times, in different words, and in every room of the apartment — and he’d bought her roses.
After they talked for a few minutes about the show, a thriller with an absurd plot, he went to get her a coke from the fridge. He was just pouring it into a glass when she came up behind him, put her hands on his hips, and then slipped them into the pockets of his jeans. One hand jingled his loose change, while the other tickled the inside of his leg, not quite touching his cock. He laughed and spun around toward her. He pressed his hips against her, his whole body surging toward the dark cleft inside her jeans.
In the bedroom, he undressed her, and when she shivered, her bare skin against the cold sheets, he lay on top of her and she clung to him.
“You’re so warm,” Amy murmured, and opened her legs wider. Usually she wanted a lot of kissing, a lot of whispering and stroking, but that night he was pulled in by her.
The next morning, he woke to find her dressing. She was wearing a bra and panties and rummaging around in the top drawer of the dresser. She pulled something out, shrieked, and dropped it.
“Shit, shit, shit.” She was hopping around the bedroom holding one foot with both hands. “What is that!?”
There was a heavy fist of bone on the floor that he sometimes used as a paperweight. He wasn’t sure how the thing had ended up in the dresser drawer.
“Oh,” he said, “sorry, it’s a cow’s patella, I’ve had it since I was a boy —”
“I don’t care what it is,” she said, hanging on to the edge of the dresser and rubbing one foot with her hand. “That’s it, anyway,” she declared, placing her hurt foot down gingerly.
“What’s it?” he yawned.
“I’m going.” She was clawing underwear, socks, pantyhose, out of the drawers and tossing them in a pile on the floor. “I can’t take living with all these dead things. And the smell.”
“Smell?”
“That crow smell.”
“What?” He struggled to sit up, to free himself from the sheets.
“It’s like the smell of something dead. I mean something that was always dead.”
“Always dead?” She wasn’t making any sense.
“And you have never taken me dancing,” she said.
“We’ve gone dancing a lot,” Henry objected.
“Always my idea, and I have to drag you out, and you say you want to learn, but you don’t really. Your idea of a good time is walking — very slowly,” and here she did what was no doubt a good imitation of him moseying along, looking keenly at the ground at his feet.
After a friend came by to pick her up, and they drove away — it had all been arranged for days apparently — Henry went and opened the door to his bird room, the spare room where he stored his best articulations, which Amy had always insisted he keep closed.
Then he got into the shower. He knew he was going to be miserable later, but at that moment, all he felt was relief. As the warm steam rose around him he could smell her, the pungent scent of last night’s sex. He soaped his groin roughly until the smell was gone.
NOW HE LOOKS UP at the sunglasses, grey with dust, which he’s left on the bear, the two white-tail deer, the two wolves, like some kind of punishment or reminder. But of what? Amy, he heard from one of her girlfriends who came into Ed’s the other day, has moved to Calgary, is working in a high-end clothing store, and is involved with a very cool dude, a realtor or something like that. Henry sells tires, and explains to Ed’s customers all the things, large and small, that have gone haywire in their cars. He likes birds and bones and skulls and that isn’t going to change.
He pulls his chair to the cupboard, steps up, lifts the sunglasses off the bear and other skulls, and dumps them into the bin under the sink. Then he rinses out a cloth and gently scuffs the dust off the rough, worn white of the skulls. It is good to be able to look at them again. Good that they can see the nothing that all skulls see, and that he can see them not seeing it.
As he climbs down from the chair, he almost kicks over the radio with his foot. Shit, he’s probably missed the program about songbirds. He turns up the volume — he’s just caught the end of it, and a biologist is on, talking about songbirds and the complex mathematics of their singing.
“We used to believe,” the biologist is saying, his voice full of the excitement of discovery, “that the young birds couldn’t learn new songs after their fiftieth day of life, but recent experiments, conducted under natural conditions, have found that the males do learn after they leave their fathers — they are even able to learn from other unrelated males.”
Henry looks around the kitchen, which is a big kitchen for an apartment in an old house, and sees all the rooms in the apartment filling up with skeletons — a pine marten, a badger, a fox. Nothing exotic, nothing from elsewhere. Elsewhere is for other people. If he moves the table out, he thinks he could even assemble a bear in here.
He envisions himself tucked inside the skeleton, putting the last of the bear’s ribs in place. And, looking out from between those curved bones, he wouldn’t feel caught, or imprisoned. He’d feel exhilarated. At home, and free.
Seven
A WEEK AFTER THE STORM, he comes in after his morning coffee break to find Ed telling his favourite winter-tires-saved-the-day story. New winter tires, a sudden storm, a blind curve, a cliff …
“You see,” he’s saying, “if I’d had those cheap radials on I’d have gone over the edge. I would have been,” and here he claps his hands together loudly, “kaput.” The customer is a small, compact woman with square shoulders and a crest of short blonde hair. Henry can see her car in the lot. A red Sunfire.
“Actually,” she says, “I was hoping to talk to someone who works for you. A tall guy with dark hair?” Henry knows that voice, its off-key rasp.
Ed smiles and points behind her.
She turns and looks up at Henry. “Ah, there you are. My knight in a shining Honda.”
“Nissan,” he smiles.
“Ed here has pretty much sold me on winter tires,” she says. “What do you think?”
“Ed knows his tires.” Henry doesn’t look at his boss, who is standing with hands clasped over his blue-vested paunch.
“Show her the Coopers,” Ed says, then shuffles down the hall to his office and shuts the door.
“So,” Henry says, trying not to stare at her creamy white skin, the small vee in her top lip, “y
ou got to your party safely?”
“Oh, yeah. But I got stuck again on the way home, about three blocks from my place. Had to walk through these gi-normous drifts —”
“Good thing you had your moon boots on,” Henry quips.
She grins, showing off that perfect dentition.
Henry steers her toward the tire display. “So these are the tires Ed is recommending. They’d be good, and these,” he says, “would be even better. Either tire will keep you from skidding into the river.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll go for those.” She points at the more expensive tire. “When can you put them on?”
Henry steps behind the counter and clicks through his appointment schedule though he knows they’re booked solid for the rest of the week.
“Bring your car by tomorrow at noon and we can put them on while you wait.” He’ll have to bribe one of the mechanics to work on his lunch hour.
“Good.” Her eyes are a silvery blue.
After he has taken her name, Deirdre, and her contact information, he walks her to the door and opens it for her. She smells of tropical fruit, and something else, some other, almost acrid scent.
She pauses there, as he holds the door open, and into that pause, gazing at her upturned face — his voice lowered, to prevent Ed, who has a nose for what he calls “developments,” from hearing him — Henry presents, almost formally, a request to take her out for dinner sometime.
“Maybe next Friday?” he suggests.
“Yes, please,” she says. “But next Friday’s no good. Why not tonight?”
“Oh.” He swallows. “Sure. Sure sure sure,” he says, as if the word is stuck in his throat. They agree on seven, and then she’s behind the wheel of her Sunfire and driving away.
ALL AFTERNOON, Henry keeps having to stop and scroll up the screen again, to reread the inventory he’s just checked. He’s trying to think where to take Deirdre, running through the meals he’s had with Dan at different restaurants, and dismissing each one. Half an hour before he leaves for the day, Henry opens his email.
The Afterlife of Birds Page 6
