The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  Race day. Hell. Is he late?

  His brother will have been up for hours in his apartment on Muskrat Street. He will have eaten exactly the right quantity of pasta at exactly the right time, will have put himself through a physiologically correct pre-race warm-up. Henry wonders if he’ll see Dan flash by in the crowd, with Lazenby — Henry’s been trying not to think about the older man — running possessively at his side.

  Out in the street, Henry’s herded along by the crush of pedestrians moving toward Banff Avenue, which is cordoned off with metal fencing. A great roar, a massive cheer, comes from the south — from down where he guesses the river must be. He tries to hurry, but it’s difficult to make headway through the crowd. Just as he reaches the fencing, a herd of runners appears and is soon funnelling past, people of all ages and sizes with numbers on their chests, some grinning at friends, others with a straitened, inward-looking gaze.

  He watches for twenty minutes, and he sees guys who might be Dan, either red-headed or with a similar gait, but who turn out not to be when he gets a good look. Finally his hunger gets the better of him, and he buys a coffee and sandwich from a café down one of the side streets. He walks farther and farther from the crowd, until he’s at the river, where he turns onto a paved trail that takes him to a creek. The blare of the loudspeaker, the cheering, and a pounding bass (he’s not sure where exactly the music’s coming from) recede to an undifferentiated roar.

  The water in the creek is not deep, maybe two or three feet, but it’s clear, and the sandy bottom, stippled by the current, is studded with dark rocks. Henry sits on a bench, a screen of large spruce behind him, and devours the sandwich, washing it down with scalding slurps of coffee. This feeling of anxious tension, not knowing what to do with himself as he waits for Dan, reminds him of all the times Dan begged off chores so he could train. He’d wander around the house in his running gear, a towel around his shoulders like he’d just come out of the boxing ring. And their mother, overruling Henry’s objections, sending him to cheer Dan on in her stead while she kept the greenhouse going — ordering him to shower Dan with praise whether he came first, third, or last.

  The final race of Dan’s high school running career ended in the field behind their school, the place where Henry had experienced so much misery because he wasn’t interested in games and yet was forced to play. He would rather have been anywhere else on a beautiful May day. Several groups of kids milled around — jocks tossing a football back and forth between them, a gang of cool guys making obnoxious jokes, getting threatening looks from a gym teacher. A gaggle of girls clustered together near the finish line, a thick strip of white paint in grass that was just beginning to show green.

  Henry hung around for what seemed like hours, leaning against the chain-link fence, reading a pocketbook. When the runners started coming in, Henry moved over by the girls, his book shoved into the back pocket of his jeans. Dan wasn’t first or eighth or twentieth. After the guy Henry thought must be the last runner jogged across the white stripe, Henry saw Dan’s thatch of red hair a block away. He was running very oddly. Almost jumping, dragging one leg (they found out later he’d fractured a bone in his foot). The girls gave out a chorus of sympathetic oohs and ohs, and mobbed Dan when he hobbled across the finish line.

  Henry dutifully elbowed his way through the crowd to get to his brother. He practically had to shout to be heard. “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  Dan took off his shoes, a girl on either side of him for support, wrangled on some sweats another girl handed to him, cast off his socks and runners, put on fresh socks, and tied a bag of ice that seemed to have materialized from nowhere to his injured foot.

  He handed his shoes and socks to Henry.

  “Take these home, would you, Hank,” Dan said, and then hopped away, draped over a pair of girls who helped him into the driver’s seat of Evelyn Jett’s sedan. A few of his entourage, those that couldn’t fit themselves into the sedan, got into a beat-up hatchback parked behind it. And then they all drove off.

  Henry stood in the empty field, holding his brother’s runners. He had no way to get home. The shoes stank. He had to walk to Main Street to a phone booth because the school was locked. His mother was going to be very annoyed to have to come into town in the old pickup to get him — but she didn’t take it out on Henry, and by the time Dan actually came home, around eleven that night, she was too tired and worried to bawl him out.

  HENRY DROPS HIS COFFEE CUP in a garbage bin and takes one of two branches of the path that winds its way into a dense stand of lodgepole pine. In the boggy ground at his feet he sees a mark that isn’t human or canine. He squats down for a closer look and almost laughs out loud. The town of Banff is awful, he can’t stand all those shops full of candy and souvenirs, but you’ve got to love a place where there are bears passing by only a few minutes’ walk from the stores selling bear-shaped trinkets and toffee bear claws. He searches until he finds two more tracks, one a perfect hind print, quite large.

  He turns back grudgingly. It’s quarter to ten, and he’s not sure how long it will take him to walk to the sports grounds where the race finishes. He’s got to be on hand when the frontrunners appear — in case his brother is among them. And maybe he’ll be able to spot Dan’s fans. Maybe they’ll be wearing T-shirts emblazoned with his handsome mug — and Henry will wish he’d gone to the dinosaur museum and no farther.

  He walks along the path by the creek, and then parallel to the surreal greeny-blue of the glacially fed river, before once again getting drawn into the crowd as he makes his way to the bridge that will take him across to the river.

  At the sports grounds, hundreds of people in brightly coloured, pricey-looking hiking clothes are milling around a white beer tent, rending the air with catcalls and raucous laughter; a row of aspen forms a background of applauding yellow leaves at the finish line, where the runners’ path is only about twelve feet wide. The line itself has a flimsy-looking metal frame arching over it, the all-important electronic time clock wired to the top bar.

  Here the crowd is shoulder to shoulder along the fencing, but Henry manages to wedge himself in just yards from the big clock.

  In a few minutes, two men appear, jockeying for first place. Henry tries to resolve the leader’s gait, his frame, into Dan’s, but this fellow is taller, his stride longer — and he looks fresh, like he’s running a fifty-yard dash. The announcer calls out the winning time and the runner’s name to deafening hurrahs while more runners pile in behind him — and there’s a red-haired runner hard on their tail. And it is Dan, driving his legs and pumping his arms feverishly, as if a tide is pushing him back, as if his failing liquefying strength is making the last few yards the longest and hardest he’s ever run, and Henry is yelling now, his voice one with the crowd’s.

  Dan hurls himself, almost falling, across the line. The official announces his time and a couple of the other runners clap him on the back as he staggers to a halt.

  Henry hangs back a second, waiting for a coterie of girls, or the guys he’s sharing an apartment with, to rush up to Dan, but there’s no one. Dan looks stricken, his eyes roving from face to face around him in near panic. Henry’s blood is banging in his ears as he fights his way toward his brother, and when he sees Henry, Dan bends over, taking a few harsh, trawling breaths, hands on his knees. When he straightens up, Henry throws his arms around him and he can smell his brother’s sweat and feel the slick down his back.

  “That was amazing,” Henry says.

  “What was my time?”

  “2:43:16. You were seventeenth.”

  “Okay,” Dan gasps. “That’s okay.”

  He looks over Henry’s shoulder and then at his face. “Where is she?”

  “Tell you later,” Henry says, his words lost in a fresh crescendo of cheers.

  Dan collects his complimentary race day T-shirt from the organizer’s tent and a sports drinks from a stand, and mutters a curt, “Let’s go,” and they cut across the field to the
trail that will take them to the bridge.

  “Are you sure you should walk?” Henry asks. “Don’t you want to sit down for a while?”

  “Gotta cool down slow,” Dan says, his face so windburnt it looks like it’s been scraped with a dull razor. He stops to drink, then tosses the paper cup aside.

  Henry studies him obliquely when they stop at a crosswalk. Dan’s skinnier than ever. And he doesn’t seem what you’d call triumphant as he strips off his wet T-shirt and pitches it into a nearby bin.

  Then Henry sees that he’s wearing it, the little fox bone, an elegant white slash against his tanned chest — but before Henry can say anything it disappears under the orange souvenir T-shirt as Dan pulls it down over his head. And what would Henry say? Did the boner do its work? Did it ward off evil, did it bring you luck, brother of mine?

  When they reach the bridge, Dan braces himself, palms on the balustrade, and looks out over the water. “Goddamn it, why didn’t you bring her,” he says, his voice reedy, strained.

  “She’s working, Dan.”

  “Two hours away,” he says angrily.

  “Rae works and she goes home and rests. That’s all she has strength for. She’s getting there but —”

  “But she didn’t want to come.” Dan turns away from the river, his almost nonexistent buttocks against the concrete railing. His legs seem to be trembling.

  “C’mon, Dan,” Henry says. “l thought you needed to keep moving.” Henry wonders where Muskrat Street is — it’s possible Dan is too out of it to lead them there.

  “Yeah,” Dan says and he lurches into a stiff-legged walk, Henry just a little behind him — so he can grab Dan if he strays into traffic. They turn down an alley and walk for another two blocks in silence, Henry increasingly worried that Dan’s slack face, a kind of looseness around his lips, means he’s about to pass out.

  He’s relieved when they arrive at Dan’s old decaying Civic in a grocery store parking lot and Dan is finally sitting down, slouched behind the wheel. It seems like all his stuff is crammed into the back seat — backpack, suitcase, sleeping bag, and three or four grocery bags crammed with stuff.

  “Seventeenth,” Henry says, “that’s not so shabby.”

  Dan stares straight ahead, looking like he’s about to cry, and then laughs, an abortive croaking sound. “I finished way ahead of the guys I’ve been sharing that shit-hole with.”

  “Will that piss them off?”

  “Yeah, but I won’t be seeing them again.” He jabs his thumb over his shoulder. “I couldn’t stand another day with four twenty-year-olds.”

  “Where’s Lazenby?”

  “Ohio,” Dan says, his face stony, and Henry doesn’t ask for details.

  Dan wrenches around in his seat and fumbles two foil packets out of his backpack, rips them opens, and sucks down the contents. “Sports gel. If you eat this stuff soon enough you won’t feel as bad later.”

  Lazenby’s gone but he’s left behind this life-saving tip, Henry thinks wearily.

  “Mom is making some changes,” he says into the silence that follows.

  “Selling up. I figured,” Dan says, drumming his fingers on the wheel.

  “No, not selling, not yet anyway — she’s going on a trip to Australia. To see that cousin of hers. What’s his name? Do you remember, Dan?”

  Dan shakes his head.

  “Anyway, while she’s gone,” Henry presses on, “Marcie’s going to live in the house and run the business.”

  Dan hasn’t looked at him since they got into the car. Marcie and I are … the words form in his mind but he doesn’t say them. “I’ll probably be doing a fair bit of the work because I don’t think Marcie’s going to be able to get a babysitter.”

  Dan raises an eyebrow. “Marcie has a baby?”

  “Yup,” Henry says.

  The raw stubble along his jaw makes Dan look smudged, indefinite. He twists around again, shoves some things out of the way on the back seat, comes up with a couple of bottles of water, and passes one to Henry.

  “So how’s it been, living in Banff?” Henry asks, cracking the lid off his bottle.

  “I don’t get this place.” Dan glugs down half his water and a litany of complaints follows: too many itinerant workers, too many tourists every day of the damn year, too many junky shops, and the places that sell things you actually need charge ludicrously high prices. And there’s nowhere for people to live so they end up sharing. Guys sleeping on air mattresses in small apartments, like the one he was in.

  As Dan talks, Henry sees that his mother was right. Dan was always popular, but Henry’s mistake was in thinking that meant Dan had a lot of friends. Dan’s always surrounded himself with easy connections — team players, jocks who love basketball, volleyball, squash, whatever — and they do love Dan, or at least his deft moves, his bravado on the court. But now Dan’s immersed himself in running, and it’s every man for himself, and the loneliness that’s always been lurking under the surface has swept over him.

  “So what’s next, Dan?” Henry asks, letting his hand bounce lightly off his brother’s still-damp shoulder.

  At his touch, Dan turns and looks at Henry. “Hank,” he says, his blue eyes connecting with Henry’s and then veering away.

  “Next,” Dan says after a moment, “that would be the great city of Vancouver.” He wraps his hands around the wheel.

  “Why Vancouver?”

  “I’ve got a friend who works in a big IT company there. They’ve got a job opening and I’m perfect for it.”

  “When will you go?” Henry’s mouth is dry and he spills some water into it.

  “Well,” Dan frowns, staring out the windshield, “there’s no time like the present.”

  “You’ll know,” Marcie said to Henry yesterday. And now he does. He isn’t going to try to make Dan come home — because Dan doesn’t have a home any more. Henry can see Dan running along the streets of Vancouver, wearing skimpy shorts and not much else. Maybe he’ll stop running when he reaches the sea.

  HENRY’S CONVINCED DAN that he should have a shower in Henry’s hotel room and change his skanky clothes before hitting the highway. When Dan comes out of the bathroom, he’s dressed in clean jeans and a green corduroy shirt Henry remembers Rae giving him one Christmas.

  He looks doesn’t look restored, exactly, but he can walk a straight line.

  “You been lifting weights?” Dan asks, looking Henry up and down quizzically.

  Henry smiles. “Yeah, I kind of have,” he says.

  “How much you up to?”

  “Ten pounds,” Henry says, thinking that Luisa might weigh a bit more than that now.

  “That’s not much,” Dan scoffs.

  “I’ll increase it slowly. You know me, Dan,” he says. “I like to go nowhere fast.”

  When Henry asks Dan if he wants to grab something to eat before he goes, Dan says, “I’ll get something somewhere down the road.”

  HENRY WALKS DAN OUT of the hotel and to his car. They stand leaning on opposite sides of it, as if Henry might be going to hop into the passenger seat.

  “So that asshole Gerald’s going to be a dad, eh?” Dan says.

  Henry shakes his head. “They split up.”

  “Marcie’s going it alone?” Dan leans an elbow on the roof of the car.

  “Not exactly,” Henry says. “I’m helping her out.”

  Dan frowns. “Is there a story you’re not telling me?”

  Henry laughs. “More than one, Dan.”

  “So am I an uncle?”

  “I’m sure Marcie would be okay with that,” Henry says, knowing she wouldn’t be, not yet anyway.

  “Stranger and stranger,” Dan intones, and they both laugh, because that’s what their mother used to say when they were small and in trouble over some misdeed and she couldn’t get a straight answer out of either of them.

  Henry is on the verge of telling Dan about the night the phone rang just after midnight and Marcie’s sister asked him to come to the hos
pital, saying she couldn’t stay, one of her kids had come down that morning with some awful flu and she didn’t want to give it to Marcie. Henry wants to tell Dan how terrifying it was when he got to the hospital, how it had taken all his strength, his willpower, to stay in that room as Marcie panted and moaned, in the throes of the fiercest pain, when all he could do was let her grip his hand so hard his fingers went numb.

  Instead, he walks around the car and hugs his brother. “Hope that boner keeps working for you,” Henry says.

  Dan grins and feels for it under his shirt. “Wolverine power,” he says, giving Henry a soft punch on the arm, and then he ducks into his car.

  As the Civic disappears around a corner, Henry’s seeing Dan running under a cascade of cherry blossoms, and he’s hoping Dan will stop — and look up into the pink, perfumed sky.

  Twenty-Nine

  HENRY LEAVES BANFF half an hour or so after dawn. The mountain ahead of him, on the far side of the Trans-Canada, is a salty blue. Although the snow that fell in the night has mostly melted, there’s still white stuff up there, frosting a band of conifers, the trees that draw the line between alpine forest and barren rock face. He can understand that, if you lived here, you might want to go up as far as you could; you might want to know what it’s like where the trees end and sheer ascent begins.

  As for Henry, in just about three hours he’ll arrive in Drumheller, and do what he’s wanted to do for years: get lost among the displays at the famous Tyrrell Museum, among the monster bones and dinosaur reconstructions he’s only ever had a tantalizing glimpse of online — and he’s going to spend as much time there as he wants, even if it means crashing in a cheap hotel room tonight. He’ll be home tomorrow, two days earlier than he or anyone else thought he would be.

  A LITTLE BEFORE ELEVEN, he’s descending into the badlands, the oily hills cut by gullies, the layers of sedimentary rock, striated grey tinged with pink, looking like a textbook illustration of the progress of geological time. In the town there seems to be a plaster dinosaur, oddly diminutive and Disney-like, on every corner. He follows the signs to the museum, and a half-mile off the road that winds along the river valley, there it is, a low building so discreetly fitted into the hills that it seems too modest to contain the immense wonders he’s been dreaming of.