by Robert Chafe
He looked to the darkness beyond the limits of the park and sent out a deep breath with a curse rumbling somewhere in it.
“We’ve talked about this.”
But we hadn’t. I’d mentioned it, scared and sober, and he had changed the topic. We hadn’t talked about it, not really, and the booze was telling me that now was the time. He had a stupid little grin, not yet set on its intent, and so I charged ahead. I played the scenario out for him, how we’d tell our parents, how I didn’t personally expect a commitment, but would demand some form of one for the child. The child: I was careful not to be gender specific, in case he’d had a preference and I doomed my argument before it was even heard. I told him how he could fall in love with whoever he wanted, have a life that did or didn’t include me. But together, by this one act, this one decision, we could do something magical. It was simple and I wanted him to see that. I told him all the reasons I thought he’d make a great father. I did the tally, qualities listed bullet form, to show I had given it thought, that this wasn’t at all arbitrary. He grinned unabated, full of doubts and questions, and so I took his hand and put it on my stomach.
Scott started the van, flashed the headlights across the lawn to us. He wanted to leave and he wanted to drive. Emily was still pacing the parking lot with a lit cigarette. Geoff pulled his hand from me, I fought it and he won and he giggled and rolled me over, kissed me hard on the mouth. Scott leaned on the horn and we could hear Emily curse him and slam the front door as she got in. Geoff said: let’s go. He hopped up and to his feet, extended his arm to help me. Looking up at him, the park light burning him orange against the black sky. That stupid grin, his outstretched hand. And I saw finally, his doubts weren’t about his worth. They were about mine.
He said he was going back down the road to the campgrounds for help. Geoff’s been gone for twenty minutes and all I feel is abandoned. Scott stands over the moose with the big kit knife from the back of the van, her eyes watching him. Her breath is a flutter. She’s weak, tired, and trying to calm him, trying to say it’s all right. Scott insisted it be him, but with the act before him he stalls. Emily and I stand well back. We could go behind the van or start walking like Geoff, but for a sense of having to share this with Scott, be present for it. Emily is crying.
“Scott?”
His hand has started shaking and we can see him trying to grip the knife tighter. The moon has risen and the trees are tipped grey against the sky, a light wind in their upper reaches.
Geoff should be here, is what I think. He had been hunting that time with his father, hadn’t he? This would be easier for him. He could have had the deed done long ago, and in a way that left none of us feeling bad about it. Geoff should be here.
I take the knife from Scott and push him out of my way. I land one knee on the moose’s snout and brace my foot against her collarbone. She doesn’t try to fight me, she has no energy left. I stab down into her throat but don’t break through the thick fur, pull back and try again. More noises from her, different noises. I stab. She grunts her approval: do it, she says, fucking do it. I pull back and stab again. The knife finally makes some progress through the fur and flesh and lands in something softer. A gush of blood looks black in the dim light, my hands covered in an instant. I saw at her, her breath growing wetter and wetter, my arms giving in to it, the decision made, body taking over. She starts a low shake, the blood loss sending her into tiny seizures. I keep working at her neck, the wind in the trees, blood seeping through the knees of my jeans.
The flow eventually stops and she’s completely still. I relent with the sawing and sit back on the pavement. Somewhere behind me Emily is still crying. Scott, I assume, is with her. I don’t look back at them. I stand up and back away from the moose. Hold the knife out from myself, call Scott’s name, ask him it take it from me. And when he doesn’t I throw it in the woods.
Theresa arrives before the RCMP. Travel mugs of cold tea, blankets. She confirms for them that she was driving the van, that Scott drove her car over when she had called him. The cops are so focused on the mess and the story they never think to speak to us. We set off back up the road towards the park.
The headlights of Theresa’s Honda eventually pick up the stripes in his sweater, all of us commenting blandly on the ground he’s covered. Theresa pulls over and Geoff squints in through the window as if wondering who it might be. Like it could be anyone else. Theresa tells him to get in, and he has to think about it. It takes him a second to make up his mind and hop in beside me, but in that second I do the tally, things I’ve failed to recognize about him until now: he’s an asshole; he’s weak. His walk for help was actually a coward’s walk away from everything. The dried blood on my hands is black in the seeping dashboard light. I flex my fingers, the cracks of white at the knuckles where the skin sits clean. I want Geoff to see it. I’m amazed with what I’ve done without him, and I want him to be too.
A MANDATORY EVACUATION
THE smoke had descended overnight. With a turn in the wind from the south, the town had woken up to the unnatural orange of a sun burning its way through haze. The breeze, as light as it was, had distributed smoke evenly through the valley, so that when Roger first looked out his window the morning announced itself as a catastrophe, the warning sign of a world in flux. He turned on the television, and the news, all assembled and punched in from far away, left everything to the imagination. Royal comings and goings and government scandals dominated, and after a half-hour of flicking back and forth he was no better informed about what was going on outside his own window. He went into the kitchen, and Boat, Wanda, and Carm were on his heels, their claws clicking on the dusty unfinished sub floor. He huffed his way through moving the two big bags of dog food to get to the basement door—Boat and his bad kidneys, that one bag of special food had cost more than Roger wished to pay. There was a roughly cut hole where the door handle had never been, and he had a faint memory that the third step down had become split and unstable. He braced himself with hand on knee, descended sideways, reached for the pull-string light at the bottom and realized how much of his height he had lost since he’d last been down there. His eyes squinted over his glasses to cut the gloom. The air was musty but smoke free. For the first time that day Roger couldn’t smell smoke.
Under the stairs, and under a stack of mildewed books and photo albums, he found his old FM radio. The antenna was broken, and the dials clogged with a yellow gum of dust. He put it under his arm and started his way back up. Boat and the girls were still at the lip of the stairs, their short legs in a tap dance of indecision. He put the radio on the kitchen table and after a few minutes of fighting he got the local CBC breaking through the static. A parade of warnings was delivered by the tired voice of someone long since simply repeating themselves: stay inside, keep the windows closed, wait for further instruction. Don’t panic.
It was three days since he’d been at the grocery store, leaning too heavily on his wobbled wheel cart, reaching as best he could over the stack of tomatoes to the ripest at the back. There, in the produce section, he had first heard of the fire, a conversation between a girl restocking oranges into a pyramid and a broad-shouldered man with a cart full of disposable diapers. The man told the girl a fire had been raging for a week but was thought to be “under control” and “of so little threat as to have been not newsworthy.” The man said his brother was a firefighter and that for the first two days of the blaze they had not bothered to take much action at all, with the distance from town and the forecast calling for rain. But everything had changed, he said, with a sudden swoop of dry southerly wind and clear skies, and now a wall of flame was apparently being pushed in the direction of the town. There was still some question as to who or what had started it. Some, by kneejerk reaction, blamed the young people and their drugs, a careless campfire. Others, the man with the cart full of diapers included, had put their money on a dry lightning storm. The forest was parched and needed rain, not like when Roger was a boy. He could reme
mber he and his brothers knee deep in damp moss, the stickiness of trees being generous with their water. Now the world had changed and the forests felt constantly under threat: the long yellowed grass of the community parks and the bark of the neighbour’s trees peeling in dehydration. Roger had many questions for the girl stocking oranges and the man with the cart, but he never asked them. He found some ripe tomatoes and went searching for chicken stock.
The instruction to remain calm had the opposite effect. Roger went to the window again, and again, to each side of the house and scanned the now blue blur of the mountain horizon, looking for any sign of the blaze itself. He didn’t know the exact level of the current threat, and he didn’t know anyone in the neighbourhood well enough to ask. He had never met most of them, would never have any of these people in his house, owing much to the awkwardness of having to explain the house itself. Old yet unfinished, abandoned yet inhabited. Hardly a home to most, but all it had ever been missing was flooring, paint, moldings, accoutrements. It was fully furnished, all of it delicately antique now. There was certainly a place to sit and entertain had he the gumption to do so. The questions were what he dreaded—how had he come to live so, and for so long—and in avoiding the questions he had come to avoid anyone who might be tempted to ask them. Once there had been people he might have grown to trust, eventually let in. But then over time they were gone, and then there were new faces and new cars. The racket of their riding lawn mowers, the liquor-soaked laughter of backyard parties. The world over time becoming bigger and brighter and more frightening. And their pets. No one respected their animals anymore, they made them wear boots for God’s sake.
Roger stood in his undraped window and watched his neighbours to the south packing their car, a nameless middle-aged couple with a teenaged daughter whose sneakers were inexplicably high-heeled. Down the road at another house a U-Haul moving van stuck its silver tongue into a garage. The town was emptying, all movement in the street focused on getting out. Roger watched it happen, his view hampered by the haze and the shade of his untended trees. The departing cars sucked the smoke back in curls into the red of their tail lights. “Get gone,” Roger said aloud, but it did nothing to curb his sudden stitch of panic at being left behind.
He busied himself around the house as best he could. He arranged things and rearranged. Cleaning often seemed pointless. The unpainted drywall had long ago taken its grime and refused to give it up, and the wooden floors were dusty, but so worn there were at least no more splinters. Occasionally he would look at the house, a sad time capsule, and see it with the clarity of new eyes, and feel something close to shame. More often than not his little house reminded him, with a strange flush of pride, of the pictures he’d seen in books of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures. Arm and legs punching out through yet-to-be hewn stone, bodies-to-be in violent confrontation with becoming. This house was a picture of interrupted beauty. Roger slept on the floor some nights still, the rough wood on his cheek reminding him of what he had made, and what had made him.
Back in the day when this wasn’t a neighbourhood but a plot of worn land, divided and sold in an estate sale, Roger had sunk his savings into what would become this house. The nearest neighbour was around the bend, where the town started for real. This land was on the edge of things once, and the house he built here was a labour of love. He was nineteen, a boy. He learned his trade, an apprentice plumber with Mack Fillier, on the other side of town. He saved his money, unlike the rest of the boys on the payroll, kept himself in on Friday nights, never liked the taste of alcohol anyway. He had his eye on the long view, saw a wife and family as part of his future as certainly as death and burial.
He’d met her on the job, her parents’ kitchen sink backed up with bacon grease and hair, and he and Mack Fillier up to their elbows in it, great dark stains on the laps of his coveralls. She’d let them in, her father off to work and her mother unaccounted for. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen hugging the doorframe. She was younger than him, and there was an innocent yearning about her, her body begging for something her head could barely understand. Mack spent the hour on his back, from the waist up in the cupboard under the sink, while Roger made small talk and handed in wrenches as required. Now and then Mack would call him under with him, the comedy of two men head to head under her sink not lost on her. Mack cleared the clog, showed her the mess retrieved, slopped it with his hand. Her nose wrinkled, the broad pink band of her gums above her teeth. She was beautiful and peculiar. She took Mack’s invoice for her father and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a palm tree. Florida, they had been to Florida. Roger was noticing things about her, collecting them, filing them for further analysis. When they were leaving she told Roger her name was Laura. He’d never asked, and because he never asked he took her offering as a sign.
Roger and Laura set to falling in love with each other, the way you do when other options are scant: quickly, unbound by complications. He took her for a drive into the hills in his father’s car, the night unfolding before him like a well-laid plan. He had kissed her on that first date, and things were pretty much settled then. The money he had been saving he was suddenly saving for her.
It was a full two days after the smoke had descended into the valley when a man came to Roger’s door to tell him the neighbourhood was being evacuated for real. The man was a fireman, and young, and seemed to expect Roger to have more information than he already had. He never once used the word fire, and dropped the news of the official evacuation like it was expected and inevitable. Roger finally interrupted him with a “no thank you” and went to close the door before too much smoke crawled into the house, but the young fireman put his hand to the handle. The fireman lowered his voice, which made him seem much more grave. He told Roger the situation could easily turn dangerous and very quickly. He asked Roger if he owned a car or a vehicle of any kind, and Roger huffed a laugh as if that would be the most ridiculous thing in the world for him to own. The fireman was careful in his words then, trying to impart the severity without inducing panic. Roger thanked him again, and when the man didn’t remove his hand from the door, Roger told him he most definitely would not be leaving his house and his valuables unattended on the off chance that the wind changed for the worst or the valley went another day without rain. The fireman kept talking but Roger wasn’t listening. He had become too preoccupied with his own word: valuables. What did he have of value beside this house itself? The dogs certainly, but what else? Roger had always had three dogs, always Norwich Terriers, each one growing and dying in its time, a new puppy bought to replace the old ones. Boat was now the eldest. Pushing fifteen, the dog had outlived all those who had come before, but even little Boat was slowing down, and like his master showing less and less inclination to leave the house at all, spending most of his day curled in the bum-worn folds of Roger’s red couch. The young fireman took off his helmet, and Roger saw the true colour of his skin along his brow line, everything below the uniform smudge of grime and hard work. He told Roger that if he didn’t come now they couldn’t guarantee him future assistance should things go the hard way. They stared at each other for a second, and as though finally convinced Roger had heard him, the fireman took his hand away from the handle. Roger gave him a two-fingered salute off his brow, cracked an unconvincing smile and let the door fall closed.
In the days since the haze had set in, his walks with the dogs had become quieter and stranger. The number of cars was noticeably less. His evening walks were darker for lack of porchlights and the descending gloom of a smoky sky. He would have to wash his face some nights, the tar on the breeze palpable and sticking to everything it touched. It was unsettling but he was sure this too would pass. His neighbours would come skulking back to town, embarrassed, and he looked forward to being seen about his regular routine, unshaken and undisrupted. But for all of that, he couldn’t help but be spooked at the thought of being so very alone in the world suddenly. He accidentally stepped short on the sidewa
lk one night and felt his ankle turn and for the first time he let his imagination carry him down the dark road of what would happen if he’d fallen. But he pushed back at the thought with a reinforced courage. He made his walks later at night. Got up on his high stepladder to clean the eave troughs. He began tackling fate head-on by tempting it.
He went walking one afternoon, eyes trained on the black pavement, the weather-worn cracks. It was so quiet now he could hear his own breath, the clink of the metal dogs’ leashes. There was no distance anymore between clouds and the ground, a continuous wall of white. His lungs felt heavy, but he chocked that up to age as well. He heard a familiar rumble and hum which he hadn’t heard in days, and when he managed to wrangle the dogs enough to earn a twist of his neck he saw a car driving towards him, bundles and bags and cases tied to its roof. He stopped walking, surprised to feel a strange pluck of relief. The car slowed and cut a comically wide circle into the other lane to clear him and the dogs and only then did Roger realize he’d taken to walking in the middle of the street. He hustled the dogs back to the sidewalk, Carm resisting to smell a patch of black something on the asphalt. The car slowed ahead of him, ground its gears into reverse and backed up. Behind the windowed reflection of mottled trees Roger saw the disbelieving glare of two women staring out at him. The lady in the driver’s seat was leaning forward to see him around her passenger. They lowered their window.
“Sir?”
It was the first time he’d heard a voice in days. Roger didn’t know quite what to do with himself so he yanked on the leashes and told the dogs to sit. The dogs ignored him.
“Sir, are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Sit, Carm, sit.”
“Sir, you’re not supposed to be here.”
