by Lisa Moore
Skin the rabbit, she says in a sing-song voice, the way I have heard her sing it when she is lifting the knitted sweaters over her grandchildren’s heads, on those occasions when they have visited her in the kitchen.
Skin the rabbit, skin the rabbit, she sings. She tosses the carcass in the sink of cold water with the others.
There’s his coddled egg, she says, her chin lifting toward the sideboard.
He never asked for bacon, I say.
I put tea biscuits, she says.
He takes cream, I say.
He don’t mind everybody should hop, Mrs. Hearn says. She sways the cleaver over the chopped onions, potatoes, carrots, turnip, and the pastry rolled out on the counter, all the purple rabbits floating in the sink, legs stretched out as if they were springing through tunnels in the underbrush. It is the feast for the celebration tonight, if his machine works. The mineral tang of blood hits me.
Mrs. Hearn knows I’ve been out with Frank. I’d looked in the door of the foundry and he was lit all around by bright orange fire. He struck the mallet on the table and a fountain of sparks and flankers shot up behind him. He came out to the sidewalk, leaving the storm of embers and clanging metal. He had a horseshoe in his hand, asking me to walk into the field with him.
My mother’s got fourteen youngsters and we were burnt out in the fire. We stayed in the tents down by the lake for six months; my father gone into the logging camps and me at Government House with the aprons and the dinners. All the crystal. Everybody depending on me bringing the dinners laid out nice on the lovely china plates. The horseshoe was still warm from where he had hammered it.
Take it, he’d said. Good luck.
None of your foolishness, I told him.
Mrs. Hearn has taken another rabbit from the pile and — bang — the cleaver. She has teeth askew that don’t fit and she almost always keeps her lips pinched tight in what looks like an effort to hold back whatever she has to say. I put a napkin over his tea biscuits, straight out of the oven, to keep them hot.
You’re in a fine mess, she says. She brings the cleaver down on the back paws. Then she wipes the back of her hand across her brow.
Young girl like you, she says. You won’t be able to hold your position. I know Frank’s mother and I will speak to her on your behalf. But you will have to be the one.
It wasn’t my idea, I say.
To call him to account, she says. You can’t stay here, not with a baby.
I put the tray down on the table and set out the plate, the toast, the silver teapot, the sugar bowl, the pot of jam and the little jug of cream. I tip the little jug of cream into his tea and ask him how much without speaking and he nods; it spills out yellow in the candlelight. I lift the cover off the egg. The sulphurous smell. The smells are too strong. Whatever he has in his soap. Not like soap here.
Sit down, he says. I sit because he is a husk now, just the desire for the machine to work. He’s a shell and the whole thing is playing out on his face. Where did he come from?
* * *
He insists on walking up the hill, digging his forehead into the snow squall, his head butting against the wind, his shoulders. Sometimes he disappears as the snow engulfs him. But by the time the kite is launched and he has entered the abandoned fever hospital where they’ve set up a kind of laboratory, the snow is over and the sky is sodden and grey.
I lift the rusted latch and the hinges creak. The wind nearly takes the storm door out of my hand and it slams behind me. Everything is dusty inside. There are a handful of men there from the government. The two men he brought with him, standing beside him. You can see your breath though they’ve started up the little stove. The floor creaks under my feet.
He’s seated, holding part of the machine to his ear. There’s an empty chair on the other side of the table and I push a shoulder between the men and sit down in front of him.
The receiver is pressed very hard to his ear, his face pinched in fierce concentration. Listening. But his eyes on my eyes. His expression does not change, but he sees me. I will tell Frank tomorrow. I will make him do what I want.
I put the rabbit paw on the table beside his hand. He picks it up. Not looking at it but holding it tight in his raised fist. He goes rigid all over. Then his face softens, ecstatic, his mouth opens; his lips form a slack O. He is awed and soft. His eyes on mine but he can’t see me now. He has already left the island. He is miles beyond us; he has flown out of the room, across the ocean, over the horizon, which is only an illusion. He is circling the Earth. He hands the receiver to the man beside him.
Guard of What
The sex workers have moved up a block from Henry Street to Livingstone. There are about five or six, and every few weeks a new one shows up or one disappears. They wait, one at a time, to be picked up, on the concrete steps of the grassy traffic island in front of Laurie’s house.
The island, a triangle of mature trees, has recently had some municipal attention. The city has constructed a memorial to Holloway School, a Protestant grade school that was demolished a couple of decades ago when the Catholic and Protestant school systems amalgamated.
A surviving piece of the school’s concrete foundation has been moved by forklift to the centre of the island and encased in brick with a dome-shaped copper cap. It’s a stubby pillar with a crushed gravel walk around it and a couple of park benches and new shrubs sitting in fresh ovals of mulched cedar.
There was nothing the city could do about the ugly brown metal box that provides access to underground telephone cables, a peeling yellow hazard sticker on the front.
In the evenings Laurie sits in her living-room window, across from the traffic island, with her laptop. She Skypes her daughter, Lila, who is doing a summer language course in Montreal.
Lila is twenty-one and there’s no internet in her dorm so she Skypes from nearby sidewalk cafés. They’re in the middle of a heatwave in Montreal, and Lila’s dark hair curls in the humidity and her eyes are big and blue and she moves in languid slow motion through the swelter on the blue-tinged screen, the racket of the city behind her, bursts of static and white noise. Sometimes there is the tinkling of pots and pans in the distance from the protests. Lila keeps telling Laurie to look up the police violence on YouTube.
They ran someone over with a squad car and didn’t stop, Lila says. Hit and run.
Sometimes, because of a technical glitch, Lila’s lips move after she’s spoken, a silent echo that gives everything she says extra significance.
Laurie hasn’t told Lila about the separation. She can’t bring herself to say it. Her daughter seems like an emissary from Laurie’s own youth. Laurie keeps expecting to hear her daughter say some splinter of truth that will reverse everything. Bring her back to being twenty-one, when she first met Gary. They’d been hitchhiking through India. The bleached cotton pirate shirt he wore, the smell of his sandalwood soap, the giant leeches that attached themselves to their ankles and calves during the monsoon. They’d sprinkled them with ordinary table salt and watched them curl away and drop to the floor.
Want to see my dress? I got it at a yard sale, Lila says as she sets her laptop down on the patio table and the picture jiggles and bounces. She holds her arms out and turns to the side and turns back. Laurie’s daughter in a delicate silk dress of colourful scarves, the breeze belling the skirt. Then she saunters forward and the screen fills for an instant with a rippling and snapping red, the tail end of one of the scarves.
How are your classes? Laurie asks. Lila looks away, over her shoulder, for a long moment.
Mom, I have to go, she says. And then her lips say it silently again.
I have to go.
One of the sex workers has something wrong with her right leg. She wears thigh-high boots and at first Laurie thinks one of the heels must have cracked, is maybe hanging on to the sole by a thread of rawhide. The wobble peculiar, as though the problem is so
mething outside the girl and she has to recognize it anew with every step. But it is just the way the girl walks.
Some evenings, when she’s high, the girl wrings her hands as if washing them and turns her head compulsively, left and right, checking for traffic even when there is no traffic. The girl is getting skinnier and skinnier. She has a cellphone and most of the johns drive pickups. They come down Long’s Hill and pass Laurie’s window and slow down and the girl stands and flicks her cellphone shut and hobbles to the truck and speaks to the driver through the window and then she goes around the front and gets in on the passenger side.
At dusk, there is a brief period when the light gets grainy and everything loses its edge and Laurie knows no one can see her from the street. She feels invisible. At the same hour, for some reason, voices on the street become very distinct. Clear and intimate. She has heard one sex worker tell another to be careful.
You be careful tonight.
You too, honey.
She hears their shoes on the pavement. She hears the doors of the trucks when they climb inside, the tires on the asphalt pulling away.
Then, last week, some kind of sports car, black with a royal-blue racing stripe on the hood and splotches of rust, the ass of it swaying over the road as it screeched down Long Street. It skidded to a stop so the headlights shone down the little lane leading to Tessier Place, and the driver got out and ran after a girl and Laurie ran out onto the street and she could hear the girl screaming and the man was yelling and there was another man’s voice. The two men seemed to have planned an ambush for the girl.
The driver of the sports car had left the door swinging open and the car was running and music thumped out. Laurie had been whipping cream and she’d put the stainless steel bowl and whisk down on the staircase in her rush out the door. She waited with her arms crossed over her chest, trembling all over, in the middle of the street. Then she saw the girl, the red T-shirt she was wearing, run across Livingstone and into a backyard. It was the girl with the wobble. She must have broken through the thick alders on Tessier that hid a little alley between two houses.
The driver trotted back down the lane and got into his car and Laurie approached him and asked him why he’d been chasing the girl. The man said he was a police officer.
You’re a cop? Laurie said. She kept her arms crossed tightly, gripping her elbows, but her voice kept creeping up, getting shrill.
Yes, I am, the man said. I’m with the police. The black leather seats were sunk low and there were blue lights inside and the smell of cologne wafted out. A pungent musk with a hint of something sweet, like coconut, masking something sour. Maybe he’d spilled milk in there. The man was bald and his arms were very big and his neck was thick and ugly and she asked him again.
So, you’re a cop, she said.
Not an actual cop, he said. I’m a security guard. That girl stole something of mine.
Really, Laurie said. A security guard of what? But he was already backing up.
What are you guarding? Laurie screamed. The car squealed all the way back up Long Street, then turned and tore down Long’s Hill, on the other side of the traffic island, and was gone around the corner onto New Gower. When Laurie approached her front door she could hear a metallic rat-a-tatting going on inside. The dog had found the bowl of cream and was nosing it against the radiator, licking it clean. Laurie called the police, but she didn’t have the licence plate.
She called Gary that night but he said, I thought we weren’t going to do this.
Do you have someone there? she asked.
Laurie, he said.
What about counselling? she said.
We’re just seeing where this gets us for now, he said.
* * *
The girls go into the parking lot of the Kirk and do whatever they do in the trucks with the dim cab lights on. Laurie is up there sometimes with the dog, but she never looks in the direction of an idling truck. She is frightened in the dark lot, but the dog needs to go out all the bloody time. He’s just a puppy, two years old. A frisky English setter who nips at her bum when he’s excited, or he jumps up and plants his two front paws on her chest, pinning her against the wall.
Once the front door is open he pulls so hard on the leash she feels like he might tear her arm out of its socket. The rasping and wheezing he makes, straining against the collar, as if she were choking him to death. Beyond the parking lot of the church there is some undeveloped land, a steep hill of saplings that gives way to gravel, and far below that, the dance school’s empty parking lot. Laurie keeps the dog on the leash to cross Livingstone Street, and then Long’s Hill, but when they get to the Kirk she unhooks him and the dog takes off.
His paws barely touch the ground. The dog is mostly white, with black spots, and he’s liquid and silvery under the streetlights. He stops to piss on the grey dumpster at the end of the parking lot, and he pisses on the tulips in the flower bed in front of the community hall, and then he tears around the corner and weaves through the grass and saplings of the steep hill behind the church. She calls to him but he doesn’t come.
One night she is in the parking lot and the dog has found a spot in the long grass and his back is curled up and his tail is raised and he’s straining to shit when a truck engine starts up and the headlights come on. Laurie calls for the dog. She bends and slaps her thighs and begs him to come.
Here, Hunter, now, she says. Come now. The dog staggers forward a step or two, but stays where he is, and the truck moves toward her. It’s after midnight and she turns to walk the length of the lot, a fast pace, the leash draped over her shoulders. The truck pulls up near and crawls beside her, the wheels crunching over the loose gravel, dipping into a few puddles.
Nice night, the man says. Laurie doesn’t look at him.
Leave me alone, she says.
Are you looking for a bit of company? he asks. Then the dog comes out of nowhere, whacking her hard against the back of her knees so she stumbles. He barks and growls and snaps at the truck and the man moves off, pulling on to Long’s Hill and up to Parade Street.
* * *
There is a service for the unveiling of the memorial on the little traffic island. They’ve blocked off Livingstone Street for two hours and put out a hundred folding chairs on the asphalt and a school band is playing and Laurie can hear them from the bath.
The music vibrates through the cast-iron tub and she can feel it in her bum and the soles of her feet and across her shoulders. They’re playing songs from musicals, “Over the Rainbow” and “Singin’ in the Rain.”
Her bathroom window was smashed by her twelve-year-old son, Carl, and his friend Neil, and now there is just a piece of plywood over the broken pane. Laurie got an estimate to replace it but the men are so busy. It could take all summer.
Apparently, Carl and Neil had been playing video games all afternoon in Carl’s bedroom, American soldiers blowing up Iraqi army barracks, shooting machine guns at anything that moved, splats of pixelated blood and smoke. They’d reached a fine pitch of agitation and revved-up boredom and they exploded out of the room and, crashing into the walls and bannister, they crammed themselves into the tiny bathroom, slamming the door behind them against imaginary assailants.
Carl told Neil, in the bathroom, that he had watched his parents swimming in a river once and his father had squirted water in his mother’s face.
Laurie heard the story from Carl, and then from Neil’s mother, and from Lila, who’d been babysitting and who’d managed to get a version of it out of her brother. Lila had been in the kitchen and heard the bathroom door slam and had been about to go up and send Neil home.
What happened was Carl had taken a mouthful of water from the bathroom tap and squirted it in Neil’s face. That was how the fight had started, Lila told her.
Carl had been saying how his parents had gone under a waterfall, and his father had dipped below the surf
ace and was gone and when he popped back up his cheeks bulged with the water. His mother, with the waterfall hammering down on the top of her head, thick white foam hugging her shoulders like a fur coat. Then Carl had turned on the tap and put his face under and came up snorting with supressed giggles and just let Neil have it right in the face
And it was true. There had been a waterfall, last summer, and some kids high up on the cliff on dirt bikes, and Laurie had put a hand above her eyes to see the older teenagers up there, revving the engines of their bikes, the sun behind them.
She couldn’t make out who they were or if they were going to fly over the edge of the cliffs on the bikes, the bikes falling away from their bodies as they plummeted to the pool below, and Gary’s hands were on her shoulders and one of his legs between hers and poor little Carl was on the bank watching them through the haze of the waterfall. The roar of the white foam, deafening, and Carl had been huddled and shivering under a wet towel.
Gary had dipped under the water, and Laurie, who is in the bath, dips her head under, and when she comes up the band outside has moved on to an ABBA hit, and Gary came up and shook his head and water drops flew out in sparkling fans, his cheeks bulging, and he’d squirted a stream of water over Laurie’s upturned face, upturned to receive it, laughing, her mouth open, and all the golden sinking sunlight making little rainbows in the mist.
Where is Gary right now? Laurie thinks. Where is he?
Carl had said to Neil in the cramped little bathroom: Like this, my dad sprayed it over Mom’s face like this. And Carl squirted water in Neil’s face and Neil was instantly enraged and he grabbed two fistfuls of Carl’s shirt, near Carl’s neck, and Neil slammed him into the window, once, and then again, and the window smashed and Carl was halfway through and falling but Neil had him. Had him by the shirt, and he dragged Carl back into the bathroom and Laurie can picture the sex worker stopping in the centre of the street, the girl with the strange hobble, and looking up at the boys, astonished and wringing her hands and wringing her hands.
