South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

  Stefan flinches. Oh, crap. “Point taken, okay, all right.” He’d made the mistake of showing her the online virtual world, Second Life, and his avatar, a muscular female bouncer in a lesbian bar. He doesn’t date much, so he thought it would be a hoot to hang out with clubbers of the opposite sex. The girls get into such extreme hair-pulling fights, it’s hysterically entertaining. Karen deems Second Life a waste of time. Get a real life, she tells him, as though hers is working so great.

  “Can you get out of it?” He means the hotel booking.

  “Nada. Once you make the last confirming click, you kiss your moolah goodbye.”

  He feels himself relent. “Maybe if you show up in person, they’ll take pity on you.”

  She pays for the lunch at the register and waltzes back to collect her jacket. “You know what? You’re right. Let’s go. And they have such a great bar.”

  Stefan blinks, dismayed. That’s the other thing about her—she’s impulsive. He should have kept his mouth shut.

  Bisbee, a half-hour drive south of Tombstone, is situated ten miles north of the Mexican border. He kicks himself as they drive through a landscape of loss (he makes a note on a pad he keeps in his shirt pocket), a settlement of dented trailers, the fronds of one lone palm tree flailing in the wind; a truck with a flat tire, at the driver’s window a boy in a red T-shirt glowering; dust devils spinning across the road. She drinks a lot and invariably delivers maudlin monologues, critical of herself and her life. Then she will insinuate, in murmurs, her opinions about him, tiptoeing around the idea that he should get out of his dead-end job in the public records office. Yes, he does gripe, and there’s good reason—tedious people surround him. On the other hand, he has a pension to look forward to, and he’s not giving it up.

  Climbing the wide staircase to the posh hotel, built in the heyday of copper mining when grandees escorted lavishly embellished ladies, Stefan glances at Karen. Because she’s blond and has sensitive skin—thin-skinned, she says—her cheeks are red from the wind through the open car window. Before they enter the lobby, she turns to Stefan, places her hand on his arm, her eyes lit. “Just think how incredibly mind-blowing it would have been if Danny was the man I thought he was. It would have been a dream come true.”

  Stefan winces. From the lobby they turn toward the lounge, the decor plush green velvet, cherry wood, and nickel light fixtures. Believing that dreams come true is another annoying trait of hers. Despite her environmental work and all the losses to developers, she really believes in happy endings, believes the world can be a better place.

  They take stools at the black granite bar. She orders a double margarita. Maudlin is on its way. He readies himself for her boozy regrets.

  Back in his Phoenix apartment a week later, the sound of the freeway is a depressing, constant whine. His latest batch of poems has been rejected, this time by the publisher of a small press who ostensibly admires his work but can’t fit the poems into the existing schedule. It’s a blow, when people you trust start stepping sideways. More mail bangs through the slot. He rises from his computer to find a card from her. He opens it eagerly. In the envelope he finds a note and a cheque. The amount is puzzling. It includes the airfare, which he expected, but also a tip for his time. How wonderfully spiteful she is.

  Why not cash it? He had hell to go through. All that listening.

  The note says, in her angular penmanship:

  I will stay away from you now, knowing you think me exhausting to be around.

  I will pick you out of my brain, cell by cell, until you are the stranger you want to be. Giving you what you want, I relieve you from having a relationship with me.

  I banish you.

  Stefan is pierced to the heart. She is so arch, so precise when she’s angry, and so ruthless, a quality he lacks in his poetry. His poetry tends to lie down, take a meandering view, nothing ball-breaking or cruel or overwrought, as her words are. He reads the note again. Okay, he’d made a few honest observations about her character. The day after Tombstone and The Copper Queen, they’d driven down to Nogales and parked at McDonald’s and walked into Mexico, despite the drug wars. Stefan was prattling, nervous. She insisted the restaurant she’d chosen was worth the risk. They’d been seated behind a pillar and she complained until they were reseated, after which the vindictive waiter ignored them. The tortillas were from a package, and the whole day was a bust. His telling her she was demanding was like canned frosting on a crumbling cake.

  Traffic is building up; an ambulance, siren sounding delirious, honks and butts its way through. The sky used to be blue, but now the smog is as bad as LA. He places the note and the folded cheque on the table. The cheque is evidence that at last some attention has been paid to his long-suffering friendship.

  The ambulance has made it to an off-ramp. He hates this apartment. The building is so shoddily constructed, the walls are so thin, that he can hear the refrigerator door slam in the apartment above his. He wanders over to look into his own fridge. A head of organic cauliflower he paid too much for still looks okay. He’d bought it because he was worried about not consuming enough fibre. She’d phoned to read him a recipe for cauliflower and sweet-potato soup. Chicken broth and something else. Was it coconut milk?

  He thinks it was coconut milk. But he’ll give her a call. She loves being helpful; she’s easily flattered and eager to share. As he reaches for the phone, a thought nags him: She wouldn’t really banish him, would she? No, he assures himself, no. She’s too loyal. Especially to her suffering.

  Coyote Moon

  One time—it happened in October, two and a half years ago—Lee saved a rooster’s life. The rooster was a bantam called Cuthbert, named after an Anglo-Saxon saint. Lee’s husband, Gregory, was into saints and chickens. Cuthbert lived with his two hens, Irma and Matilda, in a small coop at the bottom of the unfenced yard, below Lee and Gregory’s house in the mountains in the southeast corner of British Columbia. The coop was situated in the open area before the ground sloped and fell into a steep ravine that dropped farther to the creek.

  In saving Cuthbert’s life, Lee didn’t do anything daring like race to rescue him from a pack of dogs, she didn’t swat a vaguely cognizant yearling bear about to go against his fruit-eating nature (that summer had been hot and dry, and huckleberries were scarce), and she didn’t shoo the rooster off the road just as a logging truck went rumbling by. Lee’s saving of the rooster was quieter and, in its own way, dramatic. Gregory said it was miraculous.

  One night, a bear, perhaps desperate with hunger—it was, after all, late in the year and almost time for bears to hibernate—shuffled up from the ravine, sniffed the air and smelled the chickens huddled on their roost, and clawed at the door. Gregory had forgotten to latch it, so the bear shouldered its way inside and broke the roost. It mauled two of the chickens—Irma escaped, as usual—but Matilda and Cuthbert were left wrenched and crumpled on the straw floor. The bear then ate most of the bag of chicken feed and left its signature in the yard: a mound of scat full of plum pits.

  In the morning after Lee left for her teaching job at the school, Gregory went down, as he always did, to check on Cuthbert and the girls. He was shocked, he told Lee, to see the old wooden door off its hinges, the scatter of Cuthbert’s orange and black feathers, and both tiny, unmoving bodies. He barely glanced in before despair overtook him. He ran around the yard and up onto the road calling for Irma, then turned on his heel and waited in his office at the front of the house for Lee. He was inconsolable, and still teary-eyed when Lee came in the door for lunch.

  She marched down the hill to look at the damage and found Cuthbert still throbbing. Matilda was dead, it was true, but poor Cuthbert had existed in a subtle state, hovering between life and death, since the attack. “Gregory,” she shouted. “Gregory!” She made him bring a box and fresh straw, lift the rooster, and carry him up to the house. They decided to put the box on top of the freezer, in its own small room with a swinging door. Lying stricken on the straw, Cuthb
ert looked like a shred of Japanese silk.

  When Lee came home from her classroom that afternoon, Gregory seemed calmer; he’d tried giving Cuthbert water through an eyedropper. She moved her hands slowly into the rooster’s space until she touched him. She placed her hands side by side on his deflated body. Cuthbert looked at her with one bright little eye. Then he closed it. For ten days, twice a day and sometimes more, she put her hands in the box and let them do the work.

  “But did he survive?” This is Sam. He and Lee are sitting in folding chairs in the shade behind the gyro food truck, while Shirley, Sam’s wife, finishes cleaning. It’s February, and the village south of Tucson, where Lee stays for four months in the winter, is hosting its annual week-long arts and crafts festival. It’s her second year of helping out in the gyro truck, and Shirley and Sam have become instant friends, the way people do who are always on the move. From the truck they sell pressed Greek-style minced lamb and beef cooked on a rotating spit, folded into pita bread slathered with tzatziki, shredded lettuce, and cut-up tomatoes. A food truck is a lucrative business, Shirley says. You get your circuit, you stick with it, you show up on time, you’re clean, you serve good food. Shirley, a perky blonde from Phoenix with a ponytail and eyes that mean business, is the truck’s owner. Her husband, Sam, a younger man on his way to being plump, studied biology at university but short-circuited himself two months shy of his degree. Lee likes him for this; he has a destructive edge.

  “Hello? Planet Sam to Planet Lee. Did Cuthbert survive?”

  “Of course he survived. Didn’t I say that Gregory used the word ‘miraculous’? Would I have said ‘miracle’ if Cuthbert had died?” Sam has heard about Gregory’s death but hasn’t heard Cuthbert’s full story, far more graphic: After the first day he struggled to his feet, his neck so bent his comb touched the bottom of the box, and stood for a moment before sinking like a balloon leaking air. A thick, bloody mucous hung from his beak. “His neck is broken,” Gregory had said. “No, it is not,” she’d said, sounding annoyed. They took turns feeding him a soupy gruel of ground chicken mash and water. “He’s going to die,” Gregory had said. “No, he’s not,” she’d said, adamant. Cuthbert came to recognize her voice as she soothed him, and he blinked as though sending her messages from afar. After eight days, he lifted his head a little and took a halting step. Two days later he raised his head above the top of the box.

  “He survived,” she says again to Sam.

  It’s warm and sunny—she wears cotton pants and a pair of running shoes—but in the days before the festival, vendors just arriving worried that a rainy streak wouldn’t let up. Now everything is so thirsty you’d never know weather had been a concern. Lee smells the heat and dust and dryness. Her skin is always crying for cream or sunscreen in this climate; her hands are parched, the backs patchy with spreading freckles and whitish spots she’d rather not think about. People stroll by, talking and laughing, stuffing food into their mouths, mariachi music in the background from the Mexican restaurant in another lane. The festival draws huge crowds and takes place in a village two thousand miles south of the village where Lee saved Cuthbert and where Gregory, she believes, despite what others say, killed himself.

  “What happened to Irma?” Sam wants to know. He has big brown eyes and unruly hair.

  “What are you saying?” Lee thinks about the astonishment on Gregory’s face the day that Cuthbert wobbled to his feet and stayed there. Gregory had been diligent in feeding Cuthbert mash and water with a baby spoon and eyedropper, yet repeatedly he told Lee she was wasting her time. The day Cuthbert stood up, Gregory smelled of quinine and bergamot and he’d been wearing the same shirt for three days; he hadn’t won the contract he expected, after all. And soon after that, as though (she’d thought at the time) the blow to his career was the last straw, he took a noticeable number of pills, a combination of Aspirin, Tylenol, and maybe a dozen Benadryl, the drugs that she’d assumed killed him. The autopsy uncovered the fact that he had kidney cancer, advanced and undiagnosed. His death wasn’t ruled a suicide. He would have been in great pain. Why hadn’t he told her? Why had she been so oblivious?

  The trumpet in the mariachi band blares its solo.

  “You said Irma escaped.”

  “Oh, Irma.” Gregory’s death remains sad and confusing; Lee just can’t figure why she didn’t have some wifely insight that he was so ill. “Irma escaped from that bear twice,” she says. Irma was such a survivor that when the bear came again, the chicken ran to the house and threw herself against the sliding glass door, just as the ambulance was on its way for Gregory. Lee, distracted when she spotted Irma frantic against the glass, had slid the door open to let her in and then forgot about her. Irma pooped all over the living room before hunkering down beside a basket of straw flowers. Only a serene clucking led Lee to her the next day, after Gregory was pronounced dead and the whole spinning house came to a stop.

  “Christ, Irma was saved. Why not Gregory?” Had she noticed anything wrong, anything that stood out? No, she had not.

  “We don’t get choices,” Sam says. “What about Cuthbert?”

  “What?”

  “What about Cuthbert when the bear came back?”

  “Oh, he ran into the bush and came out when I called him. He knew me. He seemed so grateful to see me, it made me cry.” Cuthbert had followed Lee back to the chicken coop, repaired by a neighbour. Irma was already inside, so Cuthbert was happy. “So there they are, Cuthbert and Irma, and here I am, Lee alone.”

  Shirley steps down from the truck, mop in hand. It’s not that she likes to do everything related to sanitation and hygiene, but she does it because Sam is so bad at it. “It was fate,” she says to Lee. She takes the band out of her ponytail and shakes her hair.

  Shirley won’t use the word death or dying or dead, so Lee says, “What was fate?”

  “That Gregory moved on.” She taps her toe against the front tire of Lee’s new Schwinn cruiser that leans against the trunk of a mesquite tree.

  “Yeah, moved on,” Lee says. She likes them because they don’t mind listening to her theories about what happened to Gregory. They don’t think she should have “moved on” from her loss. She stands, stretches her back. “See you later.”

  She dingles the bell on the handlebar and rides away past the food stalls—the Indian fry bread and taco trucks, the pizza stand with red-and-white striped umbrellas out front, the corndog and cotton candy trucks—and turns onto the lane where she rents the apartment above a fine arts gallery. Her landlord, Derek, and his partner play opera in the mornings while they dust and tidy, open boxes that arrived in yesterday’s delivery, and set the new paintings and ceramics in place before opening the store. Passionate arias wake her every morning, and she lies in bed listening, Mr. PurrBunny asleep at her feet, realizing she is far from home, and this realization causes feelings both satisfied and unsettling.

  From her canvas chair on the gallery’s flat roof that serves as a deck, Lee has long views, over the freeway and, in the distance, the rocky orange mountains to the west, as well as the makeshift campground in the bare yard below where three vendors stay. She hears the sizzle of burgers on a portable grill. Shirley says Derek lets these particular long-time vendors set up their booths in front of his store, and camp out back, because Derek’s store doesn’t sell photographs of the Grand Canyon or beaded jewellery boxes or antique postcards. (“Cynical,” Sam says of Shirley.) The vendors—one of them a Bavarian photographer who wears a green alpine hat with a feather—live in vans or tent trailers and pull small U-Hauls for their wares. They’re set up adjacent to the ravine, called a wash, a natural catchment for rain during Arizona’s monsoons in July and August. Across the wash, she can see lights from a restaurant, the bookstore, and other galleries. A male Gambel’s quail calls his harem with a cry that sounds like Chi-cago, Chi-cago. From her vantage point Lee watches the Bavarian photographer throw something to his yippy little dog. She remembers this dog from last year.

  S
he hears the squeak of the door downstairs. Derek appears from under the line of the roof and, limping slightly, moseys over to the campers. Cooking meat this late in the evening will bring the coyotes closer, she knows he’ll tell them. Last week a coyote killed the restaurant cat; the screeches were terrible. She didn’t mind that the cat was dead; it was an aggressive black male that would climb the stairs, jump onto the balcony, and hiss through the window at her own Mr. PurrBunny.

  A month or so ago, Lee hurried into the kitchen to make a quick sandwich and saw a huge rat, the size of a squirrel, panting in a corner. When she shrieked, Mr. PurrBunny leapt to the counter and from there to the top of the fridge, where he, the coward, watched Lee scramble around, find her gum boots, plaid jacket, and fur-lined gloves in order to corral the thing and not get bitten. Wearing those items from home, her Canadian clothes she calls them, made her feel brave. She herded the rat into the spare room that stored boxes she would repack when she left and shut the door. She used a strategy of boxes laid side by side six inches from the wall to create an alley. The box at the end, long enough to hold a table lamp, was open. Using a broom, she herded the rat along the makeshift passageway. Once he scooted into the box, she screwed up her courage, flipped it upright. She heard him scrabbling around in the bottom. She taped the top shut with duct tape. Muttering curses, she dragged it downstairs and knocked on the gallery’s back door. Derek answered. Behind him she could see the supplies in the mailroom. “I found a rat in the apartment,” she said. She set the box down on its side and waited to see his reaction.

  “Is it in there?” Derek pointed and Lee nodded. He stepped out from the doorway and stomped on the middle. The box moved, kind of rocked, scuffling on the gravel. Derek stepped hard again and dented another section. They could see where the rat made a bulge. Derek took aim, brought his heavy shoe down a third time, and the bulge flattened out. Lee felt a stir of admiration; she hadn’t known Derek harboured such anger, such merciless violence just waiting to erupt; it was impossible to guess the depths of another’s pent-up rage.