South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

  Outside, a tall man pruning the bushes laid down the clippers, wiped his brow, and sauntered over to her window. “Welcome.” He introduced himself as Ben Erickson, camp manager. He had tousled brown hair and, to her surprise, a missing incisor. She had seen plenty of missing teeth in eastern Oregon and other rural areas but never in California. Mary had to hold back tears because he was so friendly despite her being red-eyed and dishevelled—even her nose felt swollen. He filled her propane tanks and then she went inside and signed the register, handed over her credit card. She bought a bag of peanuts and two frozen dinners, not a great nutritional start, but a start.

  Apparently she’d arrived at a lucky time. Any earlier and he wouldn’t have had a space for her, but a spot right on the river had just opened up. He was putting her next to a Sundance. He warned her that the couple that owned the Sundance was here due to their twenty-four-year-old lad who’d been in a skateboarding accident and was now in a coma in hospital. “You seem like a respectful sort of person,” Ben said.

  Mary backed into the spot assigned her and did the hook-ups quietly. She set up her awning, laid out the patio mat and a couple of folding chairs. Over the next few days the couple from the Sundance came and went, driving an old Dodge. Sometimes a girl, the girlfriend of the skateboarder, Mary learned, went with them.

  Mary was outside cleaning her binoculars when the couple dropped by. “We’ll look after our Nicky, no matter what,” the mother told Mary. “If only God will let him live.” She had especially big eyes—a thyroid problem, Mary guessed—and the boy’s father, a small-boned man, wept quietly, his eyes spilling tears. Mary said she understood. They got in their car and drove away. A blue heron flew down the wide river, the colour a seasoned sage green, the current strong and steady. The fisherman who was out with his rod when she first arrived and on other afternoons, a fat, freckled man fly-casting from the shore, tried again. Every afternoon the man nodded at Mary and she would raise her hand, give a cautious wave back.

  By then Mary knew that the girlfriend was named Tammy. The girl, Mary noticed, would pace around the Sundance and sometimes farther afield, but always within one section of the camp, as though confined by an invisible fence. Sometimes, when the parents weren’t there, she turned the TV up loud.

  One day she stopped by Mary’s and asked, “How long you going to stay?”

  “Dunno,” said Mary. “This is a nice place.”

  “We might be here forever.” Tammy looked like a waif, thin with bony little fingers. She had tattoos of rose vines up both arms.

  “Have a seat. Want a beer?” Mary handed her a Miller from the cooler.

  Tammy sat on the camper step. “I was gonna leave him. Just before the accident.”

  “Oh, no. Now you’re stuck.”

  “Looks that way.” Tammy’s stringy yellow hair had a fading ruby stripe running through it. “I sort of thought it was him,” she said. She meant the man she was waiting for, the one who wanted something better than Yuba City, the man who would take her to Frisco. Now, she wasn’t sure which way to pray. “About him. You know. Nicky. Should he get better? Or, uh, the other. He might be, well, in bad shape.” She’d given up her job at a restaurant called Weatherbee’s and moved out of the apartment she and Nicky shared with another twosome.

  In Mary’s world, there weren’t many available men, though occasionally she had fantasies that one would come along who would find her compact, nearly sixty body, with its easygoing, ample boobs, appealing. “Listen.” She took aim at the girl. “If you don’t love this guy enough, get out now.” The words sounded harsh, and hearing them, Mary felt her cheeks redden.

  “You think?” Tammy ducked her head, glanced over at the empty Sundance, the faded plaid curtains at the slider window tied back tidily. The cottonwood trees shifted overhead; raucous cries of mating green herons competed with the fast, wide river coursing beneath a slight wind. The fat man cast his line again. “They’re nice to me,” Tammy said of her boyfriend’s parents.

  “Yep.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re going to need help changing the diapers.” Mary thought back. Her mother had come down with senility as though it was a cold that would pass. Some sputtering attempts at finding words, asking which way to the bathroom, and a peculiar incident, the cans of tamales hidden under her bed. Then it seemed to blow over. Mrs. Garrity recovered, so Mary thought, until she asked about the tamales. “I ate tamales when I was pregnant with you. I ate them cold out of the can; I was addicted to the texture of the cornmeal and the slippery red grease. The social worker caught me. I said, ‘Protein,’ and she said nothing, just backed out of the house. The house was a rental in Florida. I can’t remember the name of the town. I didn’t think loving tamales was that strange, but you never know what other people think. She had a clipboard in her hand, and I never saw her again.”

  Mrs. Garrity wasn’t her biological mother—Mary was adopted—nor had Mrs. Garrity ever lived in Florida, so far as Mary knew. Mary had the camper parked in the driveway when she found the cans and heard the story about the tamales. She brought her clothes into the house and moved into her old room, painted an enthusiastic, oppressive gold, like being buried inside a bouquet of slightly old, store-bought chrysanthemums.

  It was a slow death, Mary staring into eyes that would suddenly change from calm blue pools with no glimmer to brown swirling tide pools crazy with anger. Mrs. Garrity would strike out and try to hit Mary. Mary had to slap her once to get her to calm down. The old cat would slither out from under the couch and join in, yowling. Then, within seconds of the outrage and destructive behaviour, Mrs. Garrity would cry out and sink to a chair, feeble and confused. Bowel incontinence would follow. Mary looked sideways at Tammy and thought about Nicky. “Diapers,” she said.

  “Oh, shit. I never thought about that part. You sure?”

  “No.”

  “Omigod.” Tammy sucked the beer down, placed the empty on Mary’s step. “I can’t do that. I just can’t. I was leaving him anyway. He wouldn’t get a job. He was just, like, into skating.”

  Mary stood. “Find a trucker without a wife living in the cab. Stay away from ones with dogs. There’s a truckers’ rest stop a few miles north. Most of them are gentle men. Bound to be a Weatherbee’s down the road.”

  The girl squinted at Mary and wobbled in her blocky sandals. “But he loves me,” she said.

  “A problem,” said Mary.

  Later, Mary wandered around the park, carrying her binoculars. Sometimes she thought her binoculars were a cover for snooping around in other people’s business. Here, however, she was simply taken with the mating green herons.

  The new arrivals on Mary’s other side were drinking all afternoon, beer and glasses of white Zinfandel. They showed up on a Friday and set out a green golf rug, three chairs, two tables, and a palm tree the height of their rig, with lights on it. “We’re on a long weekend away, just the two of us,” explained the man with a white goatee. “She likes to get out. We live ’bout thirty miles toward town, but this here, this here is wilderness, so we like it.”

  Mary eyed the electric palm tree.

  “Pretty, in’t it? She chose it.”

  “There’s a whole river right here, with real birds and trees,” Mary said.

  He shrugged.

  Their dog was a Chihuahua named Princess. The dog’s name was sewn in pink and purple sequins on a small canvas-back chair.

  “Isn’t she just a love?” the woman said to Mary.

  “Chair is cute all right. Have a good one.”

  In the trees above the get-away couple, the green herons, usually elusive birds, were making primitive, ecstatic jumps at each other. Leaves rustled, marking their excitement.

  Mary overheard the man say, “Are you still cranky?” The country station played “Livin’ Our Love Song”—again, third time in an hour, by Mary’s reckoning. A woodpecker drummed on a pole, and a cormorant flew above the river in the other directio
n. Over by the laundry shack, in the tree, House finches were mating. The male stiffened his wings, lunged, pinned the female. Princess snoozed in her chair.

  Mary walked past a row of campers to the clubhouse, a blocky stucco building separate from the office. Dee Erickson, who managed the place with Ben, told her that owls nested in a big hole in a valley oak and starlings were higher up. Dee was on the lawn, throwing plastic bones to their black Labs. She glanced at the oak and said to Mary, “I thought of poisoning those damn starlings. You seen the screech owls yet?”

  “Nah,” said Mary. The owls would be Western screech owls, a bird she’d never seen—a lifer for her list if she saw one. She said, “Came to check last night but missed them. Most people don’t know starlings are invasive, but you do.”

  “I know more than I look like I know.” Dee had a big laugh. “I used to teach biology at the college near Santa Barbara. Ben had some big ideas about real estate.”

  Trailing spider webs floated between the valley oak and the sycamore. Ben and Dee had two grown girls, one married with a baby, one at university. To keep the one girl in school, they’d sold everything and put off Ben’s dental work.

  In the bushes Mary spotted a pair of Bullock’s orioles, their bodies the colour of oranges, their eyes rimmed in black to go with their black throats.

  “Here’s a true story,” Dee said, patting one of the dogs. “I was meeting Ben in Vancouver, staying at The Sylvia, by the water. You know the place?”

  Mary nodded. The Sylvia, on English Bay, was a quaint old hotel with tiny rooms and windows that opened to real air. She’d stayed there once with a friend, when she had friends, before the Alzheimer’s took hold of her mother. Funny how that went; people got tired of you complaining about how your mother told the same stories over and over again, as you yourself went on and on. Mary nodded at Dee again.

  “So Ben’s conference was over the next day. And there I was, in the room, a day early. A gull flew in the open window, and sat on the table and watched me eat dinner. A hot dog, something simple. I said to it, ‘Ben won’t believe this, so please come back in the morning.’ I phoned Ben, said the bird would see him in the morning. In the morning it came back, sat at the table in the same place. Ben opened the door and just started laughing.”

  “I think you’re a bird psychic.” Mary laughed.

  “She is.” Ben walked up, smiling, and patted one of the Labs.

  The three of them followed the dogs down the trail to the river.

  “You want to hear my theory about how birds find their way?” Ben asked.

  “He should have been the biologist, instead of an engineer,” Dee said, watching the Labs splashing in the river, pouncing in and out.

  “Here’s my theory.” Ben rubbed his palms together. “Birds have a different schema of seeing. They analyze everything through colour. They have fluorescent sight, so to birds the female is striking, whereas all we see is plainness. Same with mountains. Birds see the colour deep inside the rocks of deserts and mountains. They see blazes of deep colour that translate into a map of light in their brains, and that light leads them where they need to go.”

  “Home,” Dee said. She took his arm.

  “Anywhere you are, hon,” he said. “I made mistakes,” he told Mary. “I lost the house. I lost everything we had.”

  “Yeah, but, hey, unlike a house, trailers don’t take much time to clean so I have energy to burn.” Dee laughed. “We could go fuck our brains out right about now, but bingo starts at seven.”

  “Bingo is my burden,” Ben said. “The one thing about this job I hate. I make ’em wait ’til 7:06.”

  “They’re not bad people,” Dee said. “Wanna come play?”

  Mary shook her head no. She had played plenty of bingo when Mrs. Garrity could still play.

  She watched Dee and Ben strolling away. Dee’s head touched Ben’s shoulder, moved back and touched him again, like nuzzling. The dogs shook themselves, a spiral head-to-toe shimmy that efficiently removed water from their coats. Then Mary was alone on the lawn, standing so still it felt like meditation. She glanced at the hole where the screech owls nested. Not a chance in hell she would see them, not with her luck. A gull landed on the trail to the beach—she identified it, tentatively, as a ring-billed; gulls were hard to positively ID because they passed through so many phases to maturity. The gull waddled toward her, its yellow eye bright, acquisitive, as though Mary might have a sausage roll in her hand, or the last chewy bite of a hot-dog bun.

  The gull came to within two feet of her.

  Mary asked, “Were you once in Vancouver?”

  The bird muttered something and glided away.

  Mary turned around and saw the girl, Tammy, walking up the road, a duffle bag slung over her shoulder. There was only one road in, and the same road out. Mary gulped air. Her eyes smarted. If she raised her arms, she might fly.

  Dee appeared from the back door of the clubhouse to pick up a dog toy. Her gaze followed Mary’s. “Young to be so burdened.”

  “Maybe not,” Mary said. “Maybe not burdened anymore.”

  “It’s bingo time,” Dee said. “You sure you won’t come?”

  “No,” Mary said. “Actually, I’m not sure at all.”

  She followed Dee inside and found a chair in the back row. Someone bumped past her, slid a warm paw across her shoulders on the way to a seat beside her.

  Mary noticed the man’s big freckled hands and his face glistening in the humid air. “You catch anything?”

  “Not yet.” He bumped her arm with his elbow. “I don’t usually do this. But get ready, girl. You’re sitting next to the big-boy winner!”

  “Hell, no,” Mary said. “This night’s mine.”

  On the dais, Ben made a trumpet sound out of the corner of his mouth, like the start of a horse race, or a rooster with a warbled crow. Someone laughed. Ben opened his mouth, showed his missing tooth. “You retired, easygoing RV folk ready for a good time?” He used an accent Mary hadn’t heard before—the cost of being partly an entertainer for a living, she supposed. Dee shrugged as though Ben was out of her control. The ladies in front tittered. Beer tops popped. The air from the Sacramento River was sweet.

  Little Dove

  Delphinium is not a happy cat. Partly, Linda thinks, he must hate his name. She’s tried calling him Del, but when she does he won’t even turn his head in her direction. She inherited the cat when she rented the single wide trailer west of Tucson. Delphinium is a short-haired tabby with a restless orange tail. He’s twitchy. Right now he’s twitchy because the mourning doves that nest on the roof of the trailer next door have at least one fledgling and the fledgling is in the mesquite tree staring at Delphinium, and Delphinium, she sees, is plotting.

  “You!” She slides open the window and gives a shout. The cat’s eyes widen. The dove puffs its body up, as though it’s big. “God.” Linda slams the window shut. She hurries to the door, flings herself out, and jumps off the porch, but by the time she makes it over the wire fence (the part the javelinas, a species of wild pig that roams the Sonoran desert, have wrecked) and into the vacant lot, Delphinium is long gone and the baby bird is now staring at her.

  “Cats can climb trees,” she tells the dove. “Where’s your brother?” Doves are prolific in southern Arizona. Usually they lay two eggs at a time, but the parents of this silly thing gazing saucer-eyed at her from the tree may be exhausted; they’ve had a pair of fledglings already this season. Maybe this one is on its own.

  The finches and siskins have scattered from her feeder; she’s scared them. They’re hiding in the thickets of brush, waiting. She doesn’t worry about Delphinium catching one of them; when birds know where a cat lives, they will tease it by diving low or gang up on it, chittering as though they’re laughing.

  Three children from her church will be over after school for an art lesson. Linda teaches Crayon Crazy! on her covered porch. She bought a heavy steel table and keeps the crayons, paper, and other tools in a
locked box under it. She teaches the children to make layers of colour so that their work looks jewel-like, sometimes like an oil painting. The two boys in her class are seven-year-old twins, and the girl is nine. Today she’ll be showing them how to texture, using woodcarving tools she bought at a second-hand store. The tools are well used, not especially sharp. She runs her hand over the oilcloth on the table, brushing off dirt. The slightest wind coats everything with a fine grey powder.

  After lunch, she drives her car over to the bagel shop and parks out front. She feels like a criminal, sitting with her computer in her lap, but the bagel shop is also tainted—it moved into town under the guise of an independent business, but turns out to be part of a chain, a sly one. Linda doesn’t like their bagels, but occasionally, out of courtesy for the Internet access, she buys something.

  It’s an intensely white April day, not bright, just an eye-aching white, the beginning of summer. By mid-May it will be scorching, and in June even hotter, the land drier. The monsoons start in July. By September it’s fall, and in late December, the birds start mating. Linda’s had to relearn the seasons; the prairies, where she’s from, function on an entirely different schedule.

  She sits in her Hyundai and scrolls through videos and jokes people feel they just have to share, and then her fingers stop, because her old friend Irene has sent a message. At first she thinks it’s a mistake. She must have read it wrong. She looks again. There it is: “Anthony was hit by a car, they say he didn’t suffer. Bawling my head off.”