Steel Animals

by SK Dyment

  So, B.F. had taken his own life. All his papers were in order, but as those close to him knew, all of B.F.’s papers were always in order. B.F. was most certainly loaded on alcohol at his time of death. At the time of death, in as far as anyone can prove, Rudy was leading a seminar in New York City.

  As the police continue their search, Rudy calls his pharmacy to arrange for valiums to be brought to his studio loft. The police respect that Rudy is in mourning. They are puzzled at the angle of the bullet, as it seems that B.F. must have shot himself while holding the gun out some distance from himself, and yet still reached the trigger, despite no gunpowder marks on his clothing. The bullet, which should have nearly passed through him at such a close range, has not just lodged but is shattered inside him, making it extremely challenging to determine the distance from which it was fired. A police hypothesis is circulating that B.F. hooked the gun around a branch, and then pulled the trigger in this way, with the gun slightly away from him. The gun would then have immediately fallen to the ground, landing where it was discovered next to the body. The crime photographer, a local newspaper journalist, sold his film to the medical examiner’s office only after they had determined the cause of death was a probable suicide, and has given the newspaper the photographer worked for the scoop. Other evidence of gunpowder around the shot sight are obscured by seven days of decomposition and the clumsy work of local police who not only moved the body but zipper-bagged it before thinking to mark the spot where it had fallen. The local cops who found B.F. are hunters themselves, and are not too fond of B.F., best remembered for threatening one of the locals with a handgun and mistreating a dog not too many seasons past. Local police handled a downed B.F. as similar to a downed white-tailed deer, going about the business of transporting him, weighing him, and identifying him, long before they thought to comb the kill site for signs of foul play. Ballistic experts spend hours with B.F.’s 30.60 rifle, impressed by the bullets that shatter on impact but unable to find a feature that distinguished the fatal bullet from the others. They are surprised that the gun gave off such a weak charge, since the entry point seems to show signs of a bullet discharged from more of a distance than the hooked-branch theory suggested. When forensic experts arrive in the area, they trace every deer path in sight for signs of footprints, or evidence of a second party. Rudy had worn gloves to fire the unregistered 30.60, later dropping it miles away into a river. As a caution, he had hiked out to a sideroad and changed into a pair of mass-produced rubber soles for the last few miles, shoes that called no attention to his tread.

  Later, at home, Rudy mixes a featherweight valium with a hammer of a martini and sucks the olive until he falls asleep and almost chokes. The night before, he had been kept awake by police, and he was in a very sober mood about his inebriation. Having anticipated the conversation for days, he was able to provide a seamless, emotional explanation of his whereabouts and actions during the week of Turner’s disappearance. He took the opportunity to describe B.F.’s life and his character, breaking down in tears during personal anecdotes, such as the way B.F. always said he went hunting to shoot deer instead of his loved ones. Rudy clearly cared much more than the other members of the company who are interviewed before and following Rudy, and who vent their spite for B.F., as well as possessing their own motives for killing B.F. and having much less of an alibi than Rudy. The woman who Rudy dates in New York was anticipating being contacted by the cops and knows what she wants to say. Rudy is one of her livelihoods; besides, he is her friend. They talk for some time while Rudy sweats it out. When the detective re-emerges, he is smiling from ear to ear. “She’s funny…. They don’t make nice girls like that every day,” says the officer. “I would marry her if I was you. Cut out on everything and make a family with that princess in New York.”

  Rudy remembers her mentioning something about getting a start in life at a telephone sex line and makes a mental note to send more than flowers for her kindness in the cover-up. The police are sympathetic, friendly, courteous beyond the call of duty. If there is anything more for them to discuss with him, they will approach his lawyer first. And they did call before visiting him at the office. And B.F.’s death was ruled a suicide.

  Rudy knows he killed B.F. Rudy is not afraid. He pours another drink. Rudy is in the shade.

  16.

  JACKIE AND VESPA are in New York, and they are intent on having a real experience. They have been having an intense couple’s talks and decided moving there for a time may be the best way to get to know a city. They also have convinced Wanda and Ben to come and join them for a few days so that they can celebrate Ben’s recovery and enjoy the city together. Unfortunately, Jackie’s version of New York involves Olesya, who was thrilled to learn she was coming, and hoped Jackie could stay at her place, now that Olesya is out-of-the-closet and repentant. She even cuts her a key. Jackie and Vespa sit with Ben and Wanda together in a Manhattan café and for a moment, complete peace hovers above them. The New York skies are clear and the day is warm and welcoming. A few hours later, they have ditched their things at Olesya’s apartment on 108th Street and gone apartment hunting as a group.

  The building Olesya lives in is fairly new, and it is, without question, a design of B.F. Turner, although definitely not one of Rudy’s. Jackie does not know who Rudy is, and she is tired of hearing his name. Olesya is with her girlfriend, Alaska. Jackie explains that they are shopping as a group and the girlfriend wants to know who Jackie is. “Jackie is an old friend,” says Olesya, and then, “Hey, why don’t we come shopping with you?”

  The six of them set out on the sidewalk, and Jackie and Vespa find they are continually being bumped to one side by people who will make room for Ben and Wanda because they are a heterosexual pair, and for Olesya and her girlfriend because they are dressed in trendy clothes and look important, but not for Jackie and Vespa, who look like life has knocked them around so why not knock them again since they clearly need a lesson. At least, that is the way Jackie sees things, and because of this, Jackie is getting more and more irritated. Ben also seems to snaps at her, while his lover has made a wonderful bond with Olesya.

  “That’s a nice name, ‘Olesya!’” says Wanda. “What does it mean?”

  “Defender of men,” says Alaska, and they laugh.

  Jackie doesn’t know what the hell is up with them all. She didn’t expect Olesya would want to hang out. Although she told Wanda what she thinks of Olesya, now the two of them sound as if they are prepared to share many personal intimacies, including the entertaining story of Jackie’s miseries in prison. The two women seem to squeal every time they pass a store display that has expensive things they can’t afford, until Olesya’s liberated lesbian girlfriend Alaska makes a noise that means, “On the streets of New York, squealing is taboo unless I protect you with my aura of cool.” Sadly, by mid-afternoon, Jackie is consumed with a heavy, cold, hunting, calculating wraith of resentment. Olesya has become the representative of everything that has oppressed Jackie. She is going to oppress squealing, privileged, middle-class Olesya right back again, and she knows it now. She wants to see Olesya do time. Criminal time. She feels herself changing into an uncaring, emotionless machine. A motorcycle, an automaton, a steel animal. She will perform a series of tasks required to take away her hate, which she has now affixed to Olesya, even though the hate has arisen from her own soul.

  Another passing pedestrian bounces her off the sidewalk while Wanda attempts to lead the group of them into a shoe store. Olesya’s girlfriend is not coming. As Jackie smirkingly predicted, Alaska is gazing longingly down the street and glancing at her phone as an excuse.

  But Jackie has not been listening to the conversation. Jackie has been too busy getting bumped into the gutter on Vespa’s behalf. Now she looks at the retreating back of Olesya’s girlfriend, stalking away in the crowd. “Hot one, huh?” says Olesya, zooming in uncomfortably close to her ear.

  “I think she is stuck up,” Jackie r
eplies.

  “That’s too bad. She’s on the board of several of the big art committees here. She could pull a deal for Vespa’s sculptural work.”

  “Vespa can pull her own deals. Thanks anyway.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you even like me,” Olesya says as she drifts into World of Shoes with Wanda and Ben. Ben is already having his feet sized by a store attendant. Jackie knows he has no intention of buying shoes.

  “It looks like they are going to be a while,” says Jackie.

  “Well, I’m going to get something to drink,” Vespa announces to the group.

  “Look,” cries Wanda, “fetishwear boots!”

  She takes Olesya’s hand as they disappear in the direction of kink at the back of the store. Ben puts his shoes back on and says he will join them for a beer as well. The smell of his feet dissipates through the store. The three leave Olesya and Wanda with the salesperson and cross the street. A chanting is heard a block up; some sort of picket. A ragtag group of protesters are marching in a circle.

  “What is that all about?” Jackie asks their server.

  “What’s what all about?”

  “A big noise down the block.”

  “It’s a shopping protest. Big corporations pay street people to march around waving signs with corporate logos on them, demanding to purchase their products. It’s a marketing stunt. At the end of the protest, the marchers are paid twenty dollars each.”

  “Sounds offensive to democracy,” Jackie says.

  The server has no idea. A pitcher arrives and Jackie downs several pints in the blink of an eye. The three of them look around and realize they have emptied the jug. They order a second.

  Outside, cars are blaring their horns. Jackie feels a buzz go through her body, and lets the world around her become irrelevant, far away. She realizes she has not had breakfast. She gets up a little unsteadily and walks to the counter, looks at a menu of food. Perhaps this is why hate is unravelling itself inside her psyche. But hate, which is in control, doesn’t need nourishment. Hate just needs to perform the action that will send Olesya to the torment her cowardly unwillingness to step up and testify on Jackie’s behalf subjected Jackie to. Hate wants Olesya behind bars, receiving months of insensitive, jolly messages from the same people who could spring her—cold-hearted well-wishers enjoying their free lives, while she grovels for their help. Because this is what Olesya did to Jackie. And now, Jackie smiles robotically, sees the server, and needs nothing. To cover her tracks, so no one can see her coiling to strike, she orders a plate she doesn’t intend to eat.

  Ben smiles at her. He is enjoying being back out in the world with his mental health and well-being returned to him. He tops off Vespa’s glass, then his own, and the two siblings explode into peels of hilarity. It is good to hear them laughing together like this, when a few months ago all Vespa could do was sit by Ben’s bed and crack jokes into a silent room. Jackie snaps her fingers and another pitcher arrives, her steaming lunch arriving with it. “Nudle s tvarohem!” Vespa cries in delight, and Ben takes her hand. They begin to browse a menu that suddenly carries a version of every dish they imagine their departed mother ever cooked for them as kids.

  “Time to take action,” says Jackie, and she gets up from the table. She weaves across the street, presumably to tell Olesya and Wanda where they are. Instead, she turns into a subway station, sees a series of lockers, and gets hit on for change by a drunk. “Whaddya call a gay lawyer with indigestion?” the man asks her. Jackie quickly runs out of the station, hurries back up the steps, and turns into the door of a gallery, thinking it is the door to the World of Shoes. Jackie walks to a display case labelled “Canadian artifacts,” brimming with “found” items. The “found” items look to Jackie like stolen ones, acquired from another culture under the guise of artifact collection. They include toy dolls, hand-carved talismans, hand-knapped spearheads, hide scrapers, bones carved for fishing or fleshing, arrowheads, and the fragments of handles from various tools.

  “How much are these?” Jackie asks, when an irritated-looking man in a blue sweater appears from behind a divider.

  “All of these were dug up by Canadians,” says the man.

  “From graves?” asks Jackie.

  “Who knows?” says the man. “Some can be dated from grave sites because they were found with bones and other archeological items.”

  “How much for real human bones?” Jackie asks.

  The man brings his hands together and smiles. “It depends on how much you are willing to pay.”

  Jackie sees that the hide scraper is priced at almost four hundred dollars. She laughs in a grim way and retreats to the shoe store for a breath of leathery air. It is clear now that on certain days that the people of New York are willing to sell their mothers at a marked-down price.

  In the back of the shoe store, Wanda and Olesya have completely commanded the attention of the owner. “An erotic treat,” says Wanda, “all this black leather. Yes. Just yes.”

  They are surrounded by opened boxes of pumps—buckled, velvet, vinyl, cut-aways— ballet slippers, zapatillas, high-heeled penny loafers, and embroidered mules. The salesperson is placing a boot with sixty eyelets on Wanda’s foot, while Wanda is extending her leg in a way that will piss Ben off endlessly. At the front, Olesya has piled her things, including her purse and her trendy tangerine spring jacket, in a place where anyone could take them away. Jackie does, and no one notices. Olesya is modelling a pair of sandals in a foot mirror with her back to the door when Jackie slips back out.

  “It’s time,” says Jackie, “to do it. To do the thing I came here to do.”

  She walks for a block and approaches a bank teller, demanding money in a hoarse European accent from beneath the scarves and tangerine spring jacket that she has removed from Olesya’s things. She tells the bank teller she has a gun. Even though she is behind bulletproof glass, the woman gives her a fat envelope full of hundred-dollar bills in a sympathetic way, as if she has been looking forward to a diversion.

  “Thank you,” Jackie says in her thick, put-on accent. She turns on her heel and dives into the traffic, crossing a street jostling with hundreds of people waving signs. Jackie places the money in the subway station locker, rolls Olesya’s tangerine jacket into a ball and forces it into the purse with Olesya’s scarves. An alarm is going off at the bank when she re-emerges, but no one seems to be paying any attention. She looks around the street, holding the jacket-stuffed purse under her arm and carrying Olesya’s wallet, a fat address book, and a small pepper spray in her left hand. Slipping on gloves, the tangerine jacket, and throwing the hood back up over her hair, she covers her face in scarves and pops on the pricey sunglasses she found earlier in Olesya’s pocket.

  “Grave robber!” she screams at the hypertensive man with the “Canadian” art. “Expect to see more of me, until the day you stop robbing graves! I am Olesya! The avenger!” Unable to bring herself to point the thing, she fires a short blast of the spray uncertainly over his head and he falls to the floor, hacking and pleading for mercy. Jackie coughs in an accented way, keeping the scarves close to her nostrils, and she steps back out, rolling Olesya’s things back into a ball. She walks calmly into the street. People are beginning to shout about a bank robbery, but inside the shoe store the atmosphere is innocently unaware. An air conditioner hums over the door. The salesperson and Wanda are hidden behind piles of tissue paper. Hapless Olesya is somewhere in the back with the kink. Jackie dumps the tangerine spring jacket back where she found it.

  “Hey!” says Jackie, and she wades into the store. “People are wondering about you.”

  She realizes Wanda is allowing the salesperson to lace every one of the sixty-plus eyelets on a set of boots she has pulled from a top shelf. Wanda is also reclining in such a way that the shoe salesperson can see up Wanda’s minidress to the overheated underwear squirming inches from his face where she is seated
in the now sweat-slippery try-on chair. Jackie grimaces. She has known Wanda so long. She wants to be a good friend to Ben, but the moment is ideal. She claps her hands together.

  “Olesya, why don’t you step out onto the street with me, and these two can close the shop for a moment or two while they decide what they want to do.”

  “What they want to do?”

  “Well, it is obvious what they want to do, and I think they need some privacy. I am certain Wanda will see the Pilsner umbrellas when she feels she is done with here.”

  “Understood!” says Olesya, “We’ll stall Ben. I’ll be back in half an hour to buy the things I have set aside.”

  “I’m sure we won’t need a whole half an hour.”

  The salesperson ties Wanda’s boots more energetically. They are four hundred dollars, and Wanda is not going anywhere. Jackie helps Olesya into her tangerine coat, spinning the sign on the door.

  “Okay, just snap the lock, like this?” she asks them.

  “Perfect,” calls the shoe salesperson with a growl.

  A second later, she is in the street with Olesya.

  “Oh, look Olesya, a gallery….”

  Jackie hears many male voices talking in serious tones on the inside. They step in, and the man in the blue sweater, who is now sitting next to a water dispenser, is drinking cup after paper cup of spring water and blowing his nose with paper towels. His rescuers have turned on the air conditioner and opened the windows, and he is being comforted by a young woman with fashionable, intelligent-looking, non-corrective glasses. He looks up at Olesya and shouts, “You!” before falling back into his chair.

  “What does he mean? Does he know her?” Jackie asks the young woman.