Western Taxidermy

by Barb Howard

  “Which one is Alice?” I ask as Adrian, holding two ropes, leads the donkeys toward me. From this angle, I can’t tell the male from the female. They are both the size of Great Danes, with thin leather halters and tiny, sharp black hooves. Adrian points to the brown donkey with a yellow tag attached to a fluorescent necklace. The tag reminds me of Adrian’s business card. Alice lowers herself onto her forelegs.

  “No, no, no,” Adrian says, pulling up on the rope. Alice rolls on her back in the dusty pavement, wriggles her white-lined ears.

  “She keeps doing that.”

  “What’s the yellow tag for?”

  “To keep the flies away. Nitro didn’t come with one. Guess the flies don’t like him.”

  Nitro, a grey-and-white male, stands passively while Alice finishes her roll and stands to nibble at the hem of Adrian’s shorts.

  “Nitro seems better behaved,” I offer as Adrian swats at Alice’s black lips.

  “The guy who dropped them off said Nitro was unpredictable. But I can’t see it. Here, hold these ropes and I’ll get your root beer.”

  Adrian steps into the door at the back of the drive-thru. I hear the gurgling sound of his pop dispenser. The gritty ropes lay slack in my hand. Alice walks closer to me and nudges her nose in my palm. The hair on the back of my neck bristles. Alice nudges insistently. I pat her once between her shoulders, where two dark lines of hair form a cross. Dust poofs around my hand, under my nails.

  Nitro whistles through his nose for a moment, then raises his nostrils in the air, sniffs. He takes deeper sniffs, exposing his thick yellowed teeth. I touch him under his jaw where the bone is stiff, sharp. Like an ankle bone. He flicks his wispy black tail, eyes me. Alice walks away, pulls on her rope until I let her lead me to the wooden leg of Adrian’s huge “Buckaroo Drive-Thru” sign. She cocks her head sideways and begins to gnaw on the wood. Nitro whistles again.

  My uncle used to whistle when we were driving for hamburgers. It was a full, strong whistle that didn’t need any accompaniment, but sometimes he’d ask me to whistle along with him. Once, when I was a teenager, he told me his first wife left him because she hated his whistling. I wanted to know specifics, what exactly had she said, what songs didn’t she like, was whistling outside the car acceptable? Finally, he said it wasn’t the whistling, it was just bad sex. He whistled a bit more, then stopped to raise his eyebrows and say, “Don’t tell your parents I used the ‘s’ word.”

  My parents had me late in life and devoted themselves to teaching me etiquette. The movement of your soup spoon should always be away from you, corn niblets must be taken off the cob with your dinner knife, never dip your napkin in a finger bowl. Even back then, I realized some of the things they taught me were obsolete: when to use a footed wineglass, which side of a lady a man should walk on, how to properly tuck up the hand portion of a long glove during a formal dinner (and thereby leave the arm flesh modestly covered).

  Adrian takes the ropes back and hands me a plastic mug of root beer.

  “Did you know, if you don’t trim their hooves they keep growing, out and up, like a big soup spoon?”

  “A gravy ladle?”

  “Exactly.” Adrian picks yellow crust from the corner of Alice’s eye, wipes his fingers on his shorts. “That’s why I need you at the opening tomorrow. You know that kind of stuff.”

  I look down at the root beer, say, “Okay. Just the grand opening.”

  When I arrive for the opening, Alice and Nitro are nuzzling a bale of hay. Adrian has removed Alice’s fluorescent collar and tied red bandannas around both the donkeys’ necks. Adrian wears high-heeled cowboy boots and a giant silver belt buckle engraved “BUCKAROO.” His cowboy boots are wide, but from the way his insteps are pushing at the leather I can tell they’re not wide enough. He turns around to check the donkeys’ halters and ropes and I get a good view of his Wranglers. They make his backside look like a cheese platter.

  “C’mon in,” Adrian motions to the door.

  I step in before I realize how close together we’ll be.

  “Shut the door, bad manners to see the kitchen, eh?” he says. Adrian pushes a three-legged milking stool at me. “Have a seat. Put in one of those cassettes.”

  I stick a generic-looking tape in the player and quickly turn down the volume. Country twang for children, hardly dinner music. Adrian motions for me to turn it up. And up. Until the drive-thru throbs with ukuleles and giddy-ups.

  Adrian heats up the grill and slices buns. Every time he turns from the little bit of counter on the right to the gas grill on the left, his belt buckle catches in the middle on the serving window. After reattaching the belt several times, he yanks on the buckle and zips the entire belt off his jeans.

  “Can you find a place for this?” he shouts, handing me the belt and buckle while he lays a few burgers and frozen corn dogs on the grill and looks for his first customer.

  Through the front window, I see two boys speed up to the drive-thru on their bikes. They stand up on the pedals and slam on their brakes just under the service ledge. Ball caps, untucked shirts, baggy jeans. How did they get by their parents in those clothes? I lean forward, listen.

  “Yeehah, buckaroos!” Adrian yells. “What’ll it be?”

  “Are those real donkeys?” one boy asks.

  “You bet your ass,” Adrian laughs, and turns to give me a wink.

  “Well they’re fucking,” the boy says, “and I’ll have a corn dog.”

  Adrian squeezes by me and out of the drive-thru. I peer around the open door. A circle of children on bikes, skateboards, rollerblades, forms around the donkeys and Adrian. Alice bucks, kicks out her hind legs. Nitro’s hooves claw on the pavement as he jerks back a few steps, then lurches forward to mount her again. Alice bucks, Nitro bites at the sides of her lower neck. Alice swings her head from side to side, bares her big teeth and thin tongue. Adrian waves his hands and prances around the donkeys. He reaches for Alice’s halter, gets nipped on the arm by Nitro. The cassette clicks to an end and I hear Alice and Nitro braying like rusty water pumps, Adrian yelling, “Get off her, she doesn’t want it.” I touch my face, feel the rising flush in my cheeks, sense a sweaty dampness in my navy pumps.

  “My corn dog?” the kid at the window complains.

  I hurry to the grill, lift off a corn dog, wrap a Kleenex around the base of the stick to serve as a napkin, and hand it to him with a smile. My mother’s smile. The same smile she gave my uncle whenever he gave her bottom a friendly pat or tried to massage her shoulders. The close-lipped smile that said, “You are barely tolerable.” I swore I would never use that smile, but in fact, I have found it very useful in my day-to-day business.

  “Would you like some root beer?” I ask as the boy hands me his money and squeals around the corner to watch the donkeys.

  I look out the door again. Nitro has dismounted. Adrian leads Alice out of the circle of spectators, talks to her, gently touches the bite marks on her neck. Alice pauses, urinates on the pavement. The glistening pool spreads under her hooves, under the soles of Adrian’s cowboy boots, and drives the crowd towards the order window.

  Adrian has big sweat circles and grease spots on his shirt. He has come close to frying his stomach several times, especially during the rush of business after the donkey event. But now, in the early afternoon, the customers have thinned. We have not discussed the donkeys. At my own suggestion, I have been keeping track of the number of customers, what they ordered, their approximate age (a wild guess there), and their comments. Occasionally, at Adrian’s request, I hand him a bag of buns or a tomato. Sometimes I take a basket of cut potatoes out of the fryer.

  “I should be going,” I say. “I have to work tonight.”

  “I’m sorry if the donkeys offended you.” Adrian quickly pulls hot dog links out of a box. “I didn’t want that.”

  “I didn’t pay any attention.” I set my clipboard down on a bag of onions. “Here’s the numbers, they should help with your orders in the future. You’l
l want to put napkins on your list. And perhaps some red relish as an alternative to green.”

  “Good idea.”

  Alice, tied up on the other side of the lot, gnaws at the Buckaroo sign. Nitro, standing in the shade of the giant Stetson and tied to the condiment counter, shuffles slightly towards me as I step out of the doorway. His sides expand like bellows, he whistles, then throws back his head and brays and brays and brays.

  “Forgot my purse,” I say as I reach back into the drive-thru. Adrian, now cutting hot dog links, nods but does not look. I grab his belt from under the stool and hurry to my car.

  Late that night, when I get home from supervising my staff at a cocktail event, I slip into my VIXEN shirt. My feet are cramped and swollen from standing in leather pumps, so I sit on the edge of the bed and massage them with both hands. It’s time for my weekly pedicure but, for once, I can’t motivate myself. Instead, I check the sock in my lingerie drawer and readjust the Mickey Mouse watch on my bedside table. The BUCKAROO belt dangles on the closet doorknob.

  I fold back the comforter, lie on the bed, and wiggle my long, rough toes towards the ceiling. Flexing my feet, I stretch my calves and thighs before moving my legs in a bicycle motion. When my legs tire, I pause, pull my underwear to my toes. With a punch of my feet, I donkey-kick the underwear into the air, watch them land on the tapestried seat of the Chippendale chair. Adrian’s pants, perhaps his Wranglers, perhaps his greenish suit pants, will hang nicely over the elegant arm of that chair.

  STILL MAKING TIME

  Labour Day weekend. Scott stops on the bluff above the canoe club. He dismounts, leans his bike against the metal arm of the bench seat. After unbuckling and removing his helmet, hanging it on the handlebars, he pulls his cell phone out of the back pocket of his cycling jacket.

  He unlocks the screen. Pauses.

  No, he won’t call her.

  Nadia is staying at her parents’ house, helping them pack before they move into a condo. One step before the grave, her father keeps saying. Her mother thwacks him on the back, then kisses him, then says moving is the smart thing to do at their age. Nadia’s kids are spread throughout the house. The two youngest are upstairs taking turns playing on the computer. The two oldest—teenagers—are in the basement with her and have found a stack of warped vinyl records. She can hear them guffawing their way through each album cover.

  Nadia kneels, opens a cardboard box full of outdoor gear from her job at the canoe club. She had boxed the gear up twenty years ago on the pretence that she might use it again. But even back then she knew she was done paddling; she was storing Scott away.

  She takes out her fluorescent pink ball cap and her navy cagoule rain jacket. Nadia didn’t mind paddling in the rain. The kids she taught didn’t mind either. And Scott didn’t mind. When they went for a paddle after work, he let the rain run over his head and face, down his neck. He’d be in his soaking T-shirt and shorts, water dripping off his elbow with the recovery part of each stroke, and he’d be smiling like the sun shone for him each day.

  Nadia hears her cell phone ringing, supposes it is her husband calling from Vancouver. Catching a flight today, joining them for the weekend to help with the move. Then everyone back to Vancouver for work and the start of school—the end of the summer, the start of the rain. She stops that line of thought. She knows better than to compare the routine of twenty years of marriage to the heat of a summer fling.

  Nadia doesn’t go for her phone. She’ll check her messages later. She pulls on her pink ball cap. Thinks about what Scott would look like now. He would have a middle-age crinkle in the corner of his eye, but he had that even when he was young, when he worked at the patrol hut. He would be slim, coordinated, like he was when she saw him on the bike path above the reservoir ten years ago. She only had Garth and Todd then, and Todd had just started school, and she was cranky with them for tugging her arms, for being impatient. Scott would be the kind of middle-aged man who still hopped on his bike every day, every season, to ride to work; who could still sit cross-legged while helping a kid with a bowline knot and be awed by an osprey snatching a northern pike from the water. His skin would be more leathered now, but he would still have an expression that announced he was not a cynic. Happy, the way he looked when she saw him on the bike path. But he had always looked like that.

  Scott sits on the bench, looks across to the patrol hut, shakes his head. He shouldn’t have stopped here. It makes him feel like some rube who can’t move on, like he wishes he was still twenty-four and working on the patrol and rescue boat. Pathetic. Because for all his first-responder courses, and water rescue training, and experience in jet boats and sailboats, for coming all the way from Muskoka, the job hadn’t required much more than putting around the reservoir. The patrol boat was the only jet boat allowed on the water, so there was some status attached to being in it, but driving slowly with that powerful engine always seemed like a waste. Sometimes he towed a canoe or sailboat back to shore. Mostly he drove around telling people not to swim in the water. He met Nadia on a Friday, which meant regatta day for all the canoe and sailboat camps on the water. He and Eddy—he was always on a shift with Eddy—spotted a group of kids standing in their canoes. One kid at the stern of each canoe, right up on the gunwales, bending their knees, swinging their arms, bobbing a crooked track across the reservoir. A swimming incident waiting to happen, Eddy figured.

  Nadia was their instructor, gunwale-bobbing her own canoe. When they pulled the motorboat beside her, she crossed her arms and continued to stand with a foot on either gunwale. She was all lean legs in short shorts, sporting a Neoprene PFD as opposed to the heavy Mae West lifejackets the kids had to wear, and a fluorescent pink ball cap—all the instructors wore a hat that kids could easily spot on the water—and black hair tied in a low ponytail. Eddy gave her the lecture on swimming in the reservoir—how there was a by-law against it since it was the city’s drinking water, and how, anyway, the water was glacially cold. Downright dangerous, especially if a kid conked his head on the canoe on the way in. Nadia looked around, said she didn’t see anyone swimming. Nadia wasn’t the type to be intimidated by guys like Eddy, with cut-off shirts and fire-hydrant arms.

  Eddy was mad. Scott said they should relax the rule. It was summer; it wasn’t that big a deal if kids fell in. Eddy said the water could be seriously fouled because there were so many of them; worse, gunwale-bobbing would become a habit. Scott said he’d bike by the canoe club on his way home and talk with her. Eddy raised his eyebrows, said okay, he got the drift.

  When Scott got to the canoe club, Nadia was working on a pile of life jackets, moving them from a heap on the ground to the pegs on the wall. Scott asked if he could have a canoe lesson. She said she only taught kids. He said, if you give me lesson I’ll keep Eddy off your case all summer. She said she’d rather trade for a water ski behind the patrol boat, but since that would cost them both their jobs, she’d teach him the canoe strokes—the J, the draws and sweeps, the braces—in exchange for help with hanging the jackets.

  He remembers the tone of her arm, the quietness of her laugh.

  Scott looks at the cell phone in his hand. Of course he won’t call her. He only has her parents’ home phone number, memorable even though he hasn’t dialed it in twenty years. She lived with her parents that summer. Surely they’ve moved. Maybe they’ve died.

  Scott has seen Nadia only twice in the twenty years since that summer. Once when he was riding his bike to work, he saw her walking with kids near the canoe club. Even though she’d cut her hair he knew her right away—she came up on her toes with each step, light, ready to spring, the same way she walked down the dock—with or without a canoe on her shoulders. He stopped his bike. She introduced her kids. He can’t remember their names; there were two, and one looked more like her than the other. She was in town visiting her parents. The kids complained about being cold; the bigger one asked if their dad was going to the movie with them that night. That was about it.

 
A few years later, he saw her at the Stampede. He was with his crew from the fire hall. They were all going to the chuckwagon races, then to Dusty’s, where the guys would always try and fix him up with a woman they just happened to know and who just happened to be there. Nadia was at the Stampede water ride, climbing into the front seat of a fake hollowed-out log. A little jean skirt, same great legs, shifting to one side as she hoisted her youngest child onto the log ahead of her. It seemed like she had four kids with her, a range of ages. That surprised him. Four kids now. Scott had tugged the brim of his cowboy hat down and walked by. He had not married or had children and that day at the Stampede he had somehow felt less the man for it. He was in his forties now, wiser, and well past that feeling.

  Nadia pulls her old white Converse sneakers out of the box. With their rubber toes and the little holes at the arches that allowed the water to drain out, they were the ideal canoeing shoe. She wore them every day at work and on the night paddles with Scott. She remembers the soft dip and gurgle as she and Scott paddled up to the river mouth at the head of the reservoir, and then the gentle pull of the current after they tied their canoes together under the footbridge, lay down beside a low campfire on the riverbank, listened for the kroo-oo of an owl.

  Inside one of the runners, wrapped in a fuzzy hair elastic, is a stack of cards, one card for each paddling certification. The courses were taught by the commodore of the canoe club. He was a garrulous, big-bellied Brit who, like Scott, was in a perpetual good mood. He and his wife owned a convenience store. They worked the same shifts at the store so they could be together. That season, the commodore had hardly been out at all in his own canoe. When he came down one night during the last week of summer, Scott, who was there waiting for Nadia to finish work, asked if he needed a hand carrying his cedar strip down to the dock. The commodore said thank you, thank you, but he’d been carrying a canoe for longer than Scott had been alive.