Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club

by Megan Gail Coles

  Olive gathers up the things she will need; fills her pockets with paper napkins and candies before heading out into the elements. Iris’s boots will take some getting used to. The heft of them weighs Olive down, each step landing harder than the one before. But they are dry. Olive wiggles her toes again, which now wiggle just as toes should. She zips her coat and steps out onto the curb. She takes a long gaze down each sidewalk to scan for obstacles. She can’t go back to her apartment without the rent.

  She’d had hardly any money to speak of since she got fired from the bar. It was a yucky dive frequented by dancers who couldn’t afford to drink at the peeler bar across the street, but easy enough money if you weren’t scared of drunk people on drugs. Olive was, of course, but could mask her fear with jokes and swears, a lifetime of practice made perfect. Besides, being a cashier at Marie’s Mini Mart was just as dangerous, and she had hated the sticky stink of Mary Brown’s chicken grease on her clothes.

  She sometimes cleaned Airbnbs in the summertime. This was her favourite job. She had loved every minute in the beautiful apartments. She would clean with the windows wide open, sometimes with views of the harbour, the sounds of boats and birds a comfort. There were often leftover fancy snacks from specialty stores, half-drunk bottles of white wine and imported beer. She would finish off the mystery cheese and tinned nuts as she tidied, collect up the soft fruit in a plastic bag and walk home with a little buzz in the afternoon sun. She had been saving to take her Traffic Control Person certification before Christmas. Olive would like to work outdoors in the summer.

  Olive would usually rather be outside than inside.

  Then everything had come loose. After, she had burned through her savings so quickly that it felt retroactively humiliating to have felt such pride over five hundred and fifty-three dollars. Olive’s heart aches thinking about it. And her legs ache from the hard hostess bench. She wants to brush her teeth really bad.

  She will ask Iris for a loan again after she finds her paycheque.

  It is cold and wet and snowy outside. Typical day after storm stuff. The exact time eludes Olive, but it is before noon because The Hazel opens for lunch at noon and it is still closed. And it is Tuesday. And Tuesday mornings under these conditions are pretty dead.

  Atlantic Place will be virtually deserted, which is a blessing as John’s spicy soup is making a racket in Olive’s gullet. John rarely takes into account the state of her diet. He brings out what he would want for himself and she eats it with an undiscerning hunger. Though, more often than not, the rich food does not agree with her nearly shocked-through system. The creams have not been properly introduced to Olive’s guts. Like everything in her life, it is just thrust upon her, full-throttle assault, a foreign food bomb waiting to go off.

  Olive does not have access to the proper defences to deal with the fallout. St. John’s has notoriously few public bathrooms. This dignity is not a thing those in charge concern themselves with, so Olive stays handy to reliable spots. Atlantic Place is where she will go today. This will save her self-esteem. And her paper napkins. Out of the corner of her gaze she spots a small woman moving toward her from a distance with unmistakable determination and assurance.

  And unmistakable dogs.

  The dogs always give her away. It looks like they’re wearing coats. Olive squints to discern the matching argyle coats or sweaters or scarves across the lot for what seems a long time as all three come into view, until their destination occurs to her and she is startled from her stare. They are headed for The Hazel. They mean to go to the restaurant. Which will cease to exist if they reach it in its current state of affairs. Olive must alert the kitchen or there will be no more soup and safe sleeping. She ducks her head back into the dining room. It is just as she left it.

  Yet untouched by the fast-moving disaster.

  So Olive, whose basic nature and learned behaviour has made her an expert in using so few words, must now find the right words to alert the louse and Iris. She must yell out. But this seems far beyond any stretch of imagination she can span, so instead she searches the room, eyes darting from the wet bar to the wine bar, antlers hung high overhead, along the length of the stemware rack wearing its glassware fringe, and each idea forming seems too much or not nearly enough. But she must must do something. This is not fair, she thinks as she grabs up her licked-clean soup bowl.

  And fires it at the wall.

  * * *

  John has been letting that sketchy girl nap inside the door again.

  George puts it together the moment she’s through the entry. You would think he was trying to provoke divorce. Except he would likely claim this was her doing as well. Nothing is ever John’s fault. He will claim her past overreactions have made it impossible to confide in her for fear of retribution. But she always finds him out. He leaves clues around like a reckless bugger.

  The dog blanket they keep in the car lies limp on the bench in front of the hostess station. There is a weirdly familiar odour. And the candy tray has been cleaned out. Again. Likely because misses is on drugs. That’s a thing, right? Drug addicts need candy to curb their drug cravings. Meth-heads with pockmarks and poor teeth. Humans ageing so rapidly as to shock ex-lovers into committed lifelong sobriety upon sight. Yes, for sure, they mentioned it on Breaking Bad. And that was obviously a well-researched program.

  No one wants to eat Sweet Sesame Duck surrounded by opioid addicts.

  This kind of thing is definitely going to have to stop now, George thinks as she carefully folds the blanket away from herself. She will have Nan wash it separate from the linens before she puts it back in the car. She had a list going for him somewhere behind the bar.

  George shuffles papers to one side trying to locate it before she forgets to add the task, careful to circle separate in sharpie. Nan would wash table napkins with bathroom towels to conserve time and water. It’s not even his fault, really. They do things differently over there. It’s not like he lets randoms nap in the porch. George knows this because she had accused him of doing so first off. Had fired him in fact.

  This was before John confessed his private humanitarian project. George had felt ungenerous but whatever, she was still right. Poor people sleeping in doorways is not appetizing. It does not encourage hunger or the right kind of patrons: namely, any human that still has disposable income in this economy. It does not allow them the freedom to spend said income on soft cheese wrapped in prosciutto while drinking ten-dollar pints of craft brew from Ontario.

  In fact, it makes them feel guilty and reconsider their spending habits. They go somewhere cheaper to discuss cooking meals as a family and donating non-perishables to the food bank. This year they will turn over leaves and be better people without telling anyone. But they won’t. They never do. When they do occasionally support something, in even an indirect way, they take a photo of it for visible proof and post it immediately on Instagram so they can enjoy the full scale of their benevolence.

  Some people do nice things just to be nice, but not George’s people.

  Sometimes they don’t do nice things at all. They think they will and then forget. They’re the kind of people that can forget without consequence. They don’t know the fear that George knows.

  Her mother grew up piss poor. But she had looks.

  And so does George.

  Beauty can make up a lot of lost ground quick.

  But it can’t make up for the contagion of beggary. This poor outlook, while not really looking so poor for George, makes spending two hundred dollars on a whim Wednesday dinner feel distasteful for some.

  Her surname does not make h
er oblivious to the world, like John would think.

  She knows the socialists are up the hill protesting with their children on their shoulders. She caught a whiff of the citrus scent in the air. Fantastic optimism always has a certain pungency. Throngs of SunnyD liberals hoping for an egalitarian utopian future imagined in the prologue to some science fiction book. George dated a sci-fi fan during her undergrad. She excused the D&D and Star Trek nonsense because he was so handsome.

  His beauty had a wide footprint.

  And she agrees with her rusty neighbours to some extent. But she agrees from her nicer house in her staunchly red dress. George has no desire to live surrounded by swarms of illiterate skeets either. She teems with envy every time a recruitment event lands her at a speaking engagement in the Halifax library.

  That’s a far stretch from letting alcoholics sleep in the porch.

  Besides, she had never known John to concern himself with the plight of the underclass. John had never served in a soup kitchen or even donated time to charity. In fact, she has heard him suggest homeless people should get a job, like it was the easiest thing. Put them in the dish pit, he’d say at parties.

  And truthfully, she preferred him that way. It was virtually the only subject in which he afforded her the position of good cop. Now, he is all the time shaping himself as some kind of community activist, which is not to say that she does not like it. John looks great on TV. She likes it. She does. But it was her thing. Not John’s thing.

  He could not tolerate any of it five minutes ago and now he is out of pocket preparing snow crab, crème fraîche, fennel consommé to fight poverty on a weeknight. He is giving television interviews in his whites discussing the need for a multi-layered approach with concrete and measurable community action. He is feeding some skinny girl out the front door and swiping sweaters from George’s closet.

  George is pretty sure she didn’t marry this guy. Which is to say that she likes him well enough but finds the shift perplexing. She had attempted to discuss the change once in an inquisitive tone and he’d been hurt. Or was it insulted? Something got his back up. Regardless, a marred expression had darkened his face before he’d stated that of course he cared about poor people.

  I thought you knew me, John said. You of all people should know me better than that.

  Following it up with, come on, Georgina, you’re the only person who truly does.

  Playing the Georgina card, placing it down on the table with a toothless bay grannie’s level of certainty, the kind that takes twenty years of card games in the church basement to curate, the kind that attests, without flash, that this hand is over, give up, give in. And she did. John knows the trumps are in her kitty and he’s not afraid to call for them. John will play a blind hand. He’ll suss out every trump she’s got.

  You know me better than that, don’t you?

  So she can’t rightly inquire again as to his motivation even though she has a lingering feeling that John’s newfound love of humanity is questionable.

  Gretchen and Mol are both investigating the blanket area with some interest. It smells like them. And someone else. Their intrigue is tangible. The poms on their tails signalling their excitement. George wishes men had tails that worked in such a manner. Or, at least, visible tails. To wag their indecent thoughts. George envisions a world where men have tails that wag of conquest until it turns frantic. And she takes back her wish almost immediately. No one needs to see that. Revolting.

  The weird smell is revolting too, and the girls are not acting very dignified.

  Sometimes George barks act dignified at them when they behave improperly. Goosing people on the street, right in the ass. Or worse. Men and women alike spinning around to meet George’s eyes. Responding, you act dignified! George apologizing, sorry, sorry, the dogs. My dogs did it. Men letting their eyes drip all over her, saying, sure, sure they did.

  As if in any reality George would shove her hand in their ass on a busy downtown street, implying that she was a sexual predator using her dogs as a cover.

  Gretchen and Mol want to search out the rank smell. They are pulling on their leads. Circling the doorway. Barking a little for the sport of it. Their confidence in their doggy prowess is amusing and unearned. They cower and yelp when the neighbour’s cat makes physical contact. The dogs whimper and whine as George removes their tidy sweaters. They lick and pull at the clumps between their paw pads. The girls hate salted sidewalks, they hobble along in their dainty way. But now they too are revived, full curly coats now ablaze and unsheathed.

  John prefers the dogs buck wild, messy, fussed. This is not a species-specific preference. It bleeds through the animal kingdom. If John had his way, everyone, man, woman, dog, otherwise, would be in a constant state of bedhead. Post-coitus would be the only blowout available in salons across the land. Not that hair alone is sufficient, the full-focus picture would have to capture a fine glaze of sweat, shiny across the upper lip, soaked through the torso, and then the flush. A glow. Or a fog. Call it what you like. And George can’t even stay mad when she thinks of him this way. Kissing her eyelids as she rambles about renovations, food inspectors and the rising cost of protein. Her body in repose but her mind humming. Fully lit up.

  John had been a surprise.

  George had married the right guy the first time. The lawyer guy with the straight-striped suit and the gleaming brown oxfords. She had followed all the rules, had fashioned herself correctly, waited patiently for her ring and then planned accordingly with a keen eye and level head. She had not bridezilla’d, not even once, not even a little bit. There had been chalkboard doors, beeswax candles, patterned fabric triangle banners, hundreds of tiny paper cranes, full flocks. There were umbrellas and rubbers, big-top tents and baby-blue cotton candy, a fish taco truck, a sweet shop. Andrew had worn a polka-dot bowtie, her in fitted antique lace, it had been precious and heartwarming. They were featured in a free local lifestyle magazine as an example of how to live your life in style. They had celebrated their union through the streets of downtown behind a bagpiper.

  They had been a parade.

  George had actually started her victory lap the moment Andrew slid the pink-gold princess-cut over her finger. She had rejoiced. She was done standing broadside women in dresses she did not fancy. She had paid her bridesmaid tax each time she had received a notice of assessment. She had watched the sisters-of bicker over running order and stepped in only when threats of physical violence against fake eyelashes and hair extensions were issued. In those moments, George was happy to have no sisters, no siblings. She was not bothered. Everyone accused of wanting their own way. Of course everyone wanted their own way. What other way would you want? Someone else’s way? That’s preposterous.

  There’d be no inside the clothing rubbing-up of Princess Georgina of Circular Road.

  George would eventually learn to quickly tell what kind of fellow you were according to how you addressed her. Clear patterns emerged early on regarding intentions and perceptions of her based on chosen title. This carried on into adulthood through Andrew, who preferred Gina, to John, living strictly on Georgina, to her father, proclaiming their shared name repeatedly and with great significance. The serving staff at the restaurant rarely called her anything. Or at least not to her face.

  She is sure they have a slew of stupid shitty names for her they dole out freely behind her back. She often wonders if John participates, hopes he doesn’t, though thinks he probably does. John is the biggest kid of them all. The great irony of her second attempt is enough to wind her when it comes flashing through the daily grind of shit surefire shot
her way.

  John is her towering man-child.

  George is still up front unaccompanied steering this bloody battleship as it rockets toward the sun. The call from CRA this morning verifies. It is undeniable. And George had thought that they had gotten through, her and John.

  She had thought the worst of it was over.

  The endless ultrasounds, injections, legs over her head, hoping. It had not been sexy for Andrew and it was still not sexy for John. But he was her real guy so she believed it would be different. Andrew had been her starter marriage. The conception troubles were a blessing dressed up as a curse because if all had gone the way of the stork, she would now have children, a boy and a girl ideally, with that bastard. Andrew was her woman dues and now she was fully paid up. Overpaid. The universe owed her John. Beautiful John and his beautiful offspring.

  Sometimes, though, sometimes George secretly grieved the first wedding photos. Never the first husband but the photos. Once, in a fit of drunken mourning, she had posted a profile picture of just her and Miranda in their wedding gear, Miranda clasping her pearls, young, gorgeous. But that was short-lived. Miranda demanding she remove all those photos because that raging asshole Andrew means nothing. It never happened, Miranda said. You were never married before.

  Andrew is dead to us.

  And so it was, because John was her real man, George had felt certain they would make a real baby. This time she would get her way because her way and John’s way were the same way. He told her so the night of her divorce dinner. She and Miranda had ordered bottle after bottle of champagne in the finest dining room in town and then drank with the staff after service. There was a handsome sous-chef Miranda thought looked very capable of rebounding. She had leaned in nudging her cousin’s sticky summer skin and whispered to George, what about that guy? That guy over there.