No gas, no cell. Arlene will walk back toward Priddis even if it kills her, hills and all. She has been down this road many times before and has seen a great deal of wildlife—a black bear with her cubs, mule deer, even moose—but never a fox, never a red fox. It raced across the road right in front of her car and continued into the field to her right just before the car coasted to a halt. She has also dodged plenty of roadkill, mostly skunks and deer. Crows signal these deaths from the air before zeroing in on the entrails.
Bonnie Tyler’s “It’s a Heartache” was on the radio just when Arlene drove past the turn to Priddis, and it seemed so appropriate, resonating in her chest, until Bif Naked came on proclaiming that she loves herself. Now Bif’s lines are stuck in her head, in sync with each foot step. Occasionally a magpie interrupts while smaller birds sing a chorus, but otherwise Arlene is totally alone, she thinks.
It is never boring terrain. Going west, from certain hilltops, you can see spectacular vistas of hills and dales, called the High Country, with the backdrop of snow-topped Rocky Mountains. It is thick with spruce and pine. The odd log house nestles deep in the trees, built with the idea of seclusion before the developers arrived. New homes are popping up in parcelled country estates, just down from the private golf course and near the ranches that have spread out for one hundred years or more.
She is closer to someone’s house than to the gas pumps at the general store. She could go up the dark tree-lined lane, but who knows what or who is at the end? And she would feel compelled to explain (this is her Achilles heel) why she is out here in the first place, at this time of the morning. So keep walking, she resolves.
Jenna is not missing to everyone. Her friends have assured Arlene that she is in a safe place and just needs a little space. Have faith, don’t worry, they all say, but to Arlene this is laughable, though she is mostly in tears.
It started when Jenna and her friend Rachel took the weekend job at The Steak Pit against Arlene’s better judgment. Still she drove Jenna to Bragg Creek on a Friday and picked her up from Rachel’s on a Sunday afternoon, making it her routine until the disappearance.
It was a long shadowy lane, like the one Arlene has just bypassed. Rachel’s mother, Gail, a svelte woman with long auburn hair, maybe ten years younger, would step out in front of their cedar bungalow whenever Arlene arrived for Jenna.
“She’ll be out in a few minutes,” Gail would advise, always polite but never inviting Arlene inside. Now Gail has disappeared. It is official, not like Jenna’s unknown whereabouts. The police have reported Gail missing. Gail’s husband, Rachel’s stepfather, is missing too.
The truth is that the rift between Arlene and Jenna started before Jenna took that job. It started with tattoos. Okay, it started just before tattoos with the divorce and the strain it put on a young girl to understand the failure of two good parents. Jenna—a sensible girl, they always said—began to immerse herself in the television show Miami Ink. She taped it every week and reran episodes featuring her favourite tattoo artist, Kat Von D, who coincidently ran away from home at fifteen. She followed Kat over to LA Ink and became obsessed with having a half sleeve portrait, à la Kat, tattooed on her arm. Arlene, hoping to dispel the appeal, did some checking and discovered Kat’s real name—Katherine von Drachenberg—a name that hinted at respectability if not nobility, as if the formal name would make a difference. In fact it may have kyboshed her intentions. In Arlene’s youth jailbirds and addicts and sailors and bikers had tattoos. Now it is respectable, an art form.
A raven glides like some shadow puppet in the forefront of a rising sun. Suddenly there is a ruckus, a cawing and screeching that foreshadows an intruder. “Take another look at me now,” she whispers with Bif’s voice still rolling through her head. Come to think of it, Bif Naked is covered in tattoos, inked as she transformed herself from Beth to Bif.
Dappled horses commune in a small cluster near the fence. Nearby bushes rustle and a hint of rusty red slips through brush. Arlene walks a little faster, leaves out the rhythm but remembers to take a good last look.
Arlene has tattoos now too. Three of them. Three black dots with a bluish tinge, unlike the hint of brown in any of her moles. They are compass points for her left breast, guides for ionic beams aimed toward rogue cells. Bif Naked probably has these mini tattoos as well as her Egyptian Eye and her various deities. Arlene wonders if the techs could spot them amidst all the other ink.
She has heard that Kat Von D wears the faces and names of a parent, a former husband, and her lovers. Arlene’s body, however, is not for display. Her life, thus far, is confidential, though some of it has slipped out for Jenna to see, like glimpses of a fox on a morning drive.
Jenna walked alongside her through the hospital maze as Arlene was wheeled to various places and stages of prep before surgery, intent on supporting her mother. She stood beside Arlene’s hospital bed, in the aftermath, but kept her distance just the same. Arlene ached to hold hands, to be hugged as she might have been by a mother or father or husband, if she still had one. Instead Jenna pushed to clear things up, as if she might never have another chance. Why the marriage in the first place? Was it all a sham?
Some avoid the possibility of death. They tiptoe around it, claim it as a rare occurrence, but Jenna faced the prospect head on and revealed an urgent need to define their relationship, to clarify her own life thus far, in case Arlene’s was coming to an end. Her persistence was admirable, could even make a mother proud, but Arlene was crushed by the timing.
She has just come over the rise and must stop to claim more air. Her heart pulses in a peculiar way. She waits for it to settle, and then she sees the murder of crows, further along, pecking and scrabbling over something in the ditch. She braces herself to walk by the guts of a fawn or the bloodied fur of a wandering cat. There’s no smell of skunk. She usually drives by with windows closed, keeping all scents at bay. It is an unfamiliar odour, putrid, growing stronger with each step. She covers her mouth and nose with her hand.
At first she sees red, like the tail of the fox she might be trailing. But the tail is going nowhere, tucked in a green garbage bag, a deliberate sign of human folly. She holds her breath. The crows, cocky and belligerent, disregard her as a spoiler, as someone to be feared. They work on an opening further down in the bag and as she sees the target she immediately understands. A hand has worked itself out, pointing painted nails toward the road. And on the wrist is a bracelet of silver-and-blue knots, inked to last a lifetime, allowing verification before becoming a bag of bones.
Arlene runs now, looking for hidden faces along the way. Runs harder than she can ever remember running, even as a child. Runs downhill, off balance, head before feet. No songs play in her head. Just, oh god, oh god, oh god.
Her lungs will surely burst. Her senses are so blunted she has not heard the Harley idling in her path.
“Good morning. Are you okay?”
She cannot speak.
“You don’t seem the type to be out for a run.”
She nods and begins to walk again. Not that she would have a chance in hell to get away.
He adjusts his bandana. “Can I help you?” He sounds exasperated. “Can I give you a ride? Look, I’m a nice guy.”
“How would I know?”
He shrugs and then revs his motor.
“Okay. I need to get to Priddis.” She is not ready to tell him why.
She has never liked motorcycles—the noise, the dust, the weaving in and out of traffic—yet she clings to his leather jacket like a child to an adored father, partly out of fear and partly resignation. They arrive in the time it would take to brush her teeth; her teeth are clamped tight, her ears are ringing, and her body feels unbendable as though someone will have to pry her off the seat, but somehow she manages to swing her leg over and put both feet on the ground.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” He revs the motor b
ut remains in place.
The general store is in darkness, but still she tries to open the door, pulling at it more than once, then peers in through the window. She tries the door again, against all logic, then turns and smiles at her stranger, as though nothing is amiss.
He nods back.
She runs along the boardwalk hoping to see a light in another window, but it is too early. And there isn’t a phone booth in sight. She waves at her stranger as if she has accomplished her task but he has turned off the motor and is leaning on his bike, not taken in by her ruse.
“Need any help?” He smiles as if she is an amusement. Cocky like the crows.
“I need a phone.”
“Here. Use mine.” He pulls his cell out of an inside pocket.
“Okay. Thanks.” She now has a rationale. If she calls 911 the RCMP will find her, no matter what. She presses the key pad with her thumb and turns her back for privacy. She knows he is watching but she looks at him again to read off his licence plate for the dispatcher, just in case.
She reveals her message as she hands his cellphone back. “There’s a dead body back there.” She feels a sudden urge to come clean: to inform and explain and rationalize. She swings from secrecy to a flood of personal babble. “I was going to find my daughter Jenna because I don’t know where she is and I ran out of gas and I’m afraid for her and now for me and I am wondering who you really are and … and if you have any tattoos?” The last part tells her how crazy she must sound, how crazy she must be. “Don’t answer that.”
He no longer seems amused. “You’re kidding, right?”
She shakes her head. It occurs to her that he might have family too. Maybe even a daughter. Maybe she is paranoid. “The police are on their way,” she says.
The patrol car arrives and as the two men show their badges she feels a wave of guilt and a compulsion to confess. She can explain how the divorce and the cancer and the disagreements may have led to her daughter’s split, perhaps all brought on by her own ineptitude. She can admit to impulsively following a dream that led onto this road, before sunrise, with hardly any gas in the car, only to find a dead body. And maybe she has implicated a man because of her anxieties and fears.
She shows her ID and then tells them about her find. Then she waits while her stranger has his turn to talk. She wonders what he is saying. They all look toward her, and she imagines some kind of collusion going on, like in some movie about corrupt cops in an American backwater. Still she is relieved to climb into the back seat of the car and wield control as she guides them to the spot. The Harley follows, apparently free to roam.
She covers her mouth and nose again, and the stranger covers his with his bandana. They check each other’s eyes. The police have no choice but to move in closer and call backup and an ambulance, not that the body can be saved. They have put orange pylons on part of the road and staked yellow tape to create a perimeter around the body. She overhears fragments of a call. “Missing … auburn hair … wrist tattoo … foul play.”
She has worked it out. “I know who this is,” she says but no one seems to hear her. She raises her voice. “Excuse me. I think I know who this is.” But it does not seem a mystery to anyone, not the police or the stranger or the crows who watch from the branches of skeletal poplars.
“They know who it is,” the stranger says, his calm contrasting with her panic.
New fears form in her mind. “We have to find my daughter,” she cries.
“We’ll get to you,” says an officer with barely a look in her direction. Traffic is beginning to pass in the remaining single lane, and people are staring like scavengers of doom.
Arlene finally has the chance to explain that her daughter, Jenna, is a friend of Rachel, who is most likely the daughter of the woman now lying in the ditch. A dispatch is sent to Bragg Creek requesting the girls’ location.
Arlene is in tears when a leather arm embraces and consoles her. She offers no resistance.
“I have two,” he says.
“What?”
“Tattoos.”
She looks up, embarrassed.
He takes off his jacket and begins to pull off his shirt.
“Oh, please don’t,” she says.
“See, I have these hearts, one above the other, looking to embrace.”
The hearts lay sideways, the points facing opposite directions and forming tails that curve round toward each other.
“And this is a wandering bear.”
He has a tattoo on each upper arm, all in black. Not half sleeves but they stretch over his biceps just the same. They are nicely done, she thinks.
“I’m sorry.” She begins to apologize but is interrupted.
“Okay Brent, could you help this lady get some gas?” It is obvious that Brent is no stranger to the police, and now, for her, he has a name. He pulls his shirt back on and slides into his jacket.
Arlene is on the road again, listening to Nirvana on the radio. Something draws her in. It’s inexplicable—her and Kurt Cobain. Jenna is back in school and has admitted to Arlene that her life is not so bad, especially when she considers Rachel’s plight. Arlene has allowed that tattoos are not so bad either. Rachel’s mother, Gail, is gone forever. Arlene is still here, out for a drive on the same road that Gail’s body was dumped.
The leaves of the poplars and willows have unfurled, though they are still the size of pennies, and the hills are in variegated shades of green. Kurt is also gone forever, but his voice is still on air as she reaches the crest of the steepest hill and stops to take in the rolling land and peaked mountains. She turns off the ignition but still hears his voice over and over and over in her head. She can’t decide if his lyrics are simple-minded, drug-addled or profound, or maybe all three, but she agrees, this is all we are. She wonders what inks and designs he chose to have injected into his skin. And she wonders if Brent will happen along on his Harley.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my fellow writers Lori Hahnel, Betty Jane Hegerat, and Astrid Blodgett for their advice and encouragement. Thank you to all the small literary magazines, be they print or online, for providing a venue for short story writers. Thank you to Inanna Publications for valuing a woman’s point of view, and to Luciana Ricciutelli for her editing skills. And thank you to old acquaintances and new for just being you, and sometimes revealing a germ of a story.
“Burnt Sienna.” Pottersfield Portfolio 22.3 (2003). Winner, Compact Fiction Contest, Winter/Spring 2003.
“Flight 2100.” The Windsor Review 39. 2 (April 2007).
“Gourmet Cooking.” The Broken City 12 (Summer 2013).Web.
“Hair Matters.” The Steel Chisel (November 2014). Web.
“Here’s Looking at You.” Turk’s Head Review (Winter 2013). Web.
“Life in Cars.” FreeFall 24.3 (Fall 2014).
“Lila.” The Nashwaak Review 28/29.1 (Summer/Fall 2012).
“Marrying Stationery.” The Toronto Quarterly 6 (2010).
“No Regrets.” Frostwriting 6 (April 2011). Web.
“Rockin’ Around the Royal Bank of Canada.” Qwerty 26 (Spring 2011).
“Rosemary.” Turk’s Head Review (November 2015). Web.
“Shifting.” Raven Chronicles 17.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2012).
“Silvia.”Words, Pauses, Noises (December 7, 2014). Web.
“Special Occasions.” The Nashwaak Review 26/27.1 (Summer/Fall 2011).
“Svea.” Femmuary (February 2016). Web.
“Tattoos.” The Nashwaak Review 34/35 (Summer/Fall 2015).
“The Guardian.” Room of One’s Own 17.3 (September 1994).
“Transforming Doctor Zhivago.” The Antigonish Review, 163 (Fall 2010).
Photo : Neil Speers Photography
Barbara Biles is a Calgary writer. She attended the University of Alberta and taught primary school until her own
daughter and son were born. She explored fiction writing in extension courses and local writing groups. Her short fiction has appeared in Canada, the U.S, the UK, and Sweden, in various literary magazines including, FreeFall, The Nashwaak Review, The Antigonish Review, The Windsor Review,The Broken City, Turk’s Head Review, Femmuary and others. Dear Hearts is her debut collection of short fiction.
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