South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

Linda covers her eyes with her hands. The image of a little boy running after a ball and a car, like a nightmare, coming. Linda closes the lid of the laptop, closes her eyes. Her heart begins to race. She thinks she might faint. Anthony is Irene’s only grandchild.

  At five a child is interested in everything, he is past clinging to baby ways, he has stepped up to the plate as a human, yet is still charming if there’s a reward. He knows things but doesn’t know too much. He knows when you’re really fed up or just pretending to be. He has the grace to go along with you, not argue when he knows you’re sad. The embedded kindness in the human heart shows up well in a child of five.

  Back home, she scrubs the kitchen floor on her hands and knees and then goes to the file cabinet and chooses a four-by-six-inch card she’s made—crayon-painted—for a sympathy note to Irene’s daughter. She’s known Irene’s daughter since she was small. She didn’t want a baby, but her boyfriend did and so Anthony was born, and Irene was filled with joy to be given this angel from heaven.

  Anthony—never Tony—was bright-eyed and darling. Linda has a file of pictures Irene e-mailed over the years, and on a shelf nearby, the photo album of her own precious child with his gassy, newborn smile. She has pictures of him until the age of five.

  Irene’s answering machine beep-beeps, won’t let Linda leave a message. Maybe she’s had so many calls it’s filled up. Or Irene has unplugged it. Linda remembers herself unplugging everything—the answering machine, the phone, the radio, the TV, too many reminders of life going on, as though there could possibly be a reason.

  She stands with her palms on the kitchen table and studies the card. She glances at the clock, aware of her little class later in the day. The picture on the card is a path in the woods, a hint of light in the distance.

  Who dies at five?

  The pee arcing into the room from the bassinet made Linda and the little squirt’s father laugh. They were twenty-two years old, both of them, and had married at city hall because the baby was obviously on the way and her husband’s parents, Catholics, wanted them married. “Watch your back,” she said to her new husband. “He’ll be a big pisser pretty soon.” The baby didn’t understand what he’d done but was pleased by their reaction. Her husband’s face glowed with love for his boy. This baby. Created in her body. Created in a moment of lust. Or maybe during make-up sex because they fought a lot, over money, about him spending too much time watching sports with the guys. It might have happened as they snuggled, exhausted from moving into a little house from an apartment, and rolled into lovemaking, his powerful legs spreading hers. The perfect little pisser conceived that night.

  Children bloom everywhere, but there is that one child who is yours, and he is funny and smart, even if he is a pain in the ass at times. Linda’s child had fevers and sweats, but all children did. Daddy ran the bath. “Not too cold,” she pleaded. This happened when the two of them were still speaking. The fever turned out to be nothing, a childhood thing. Children have these episodes all the time, they said at the hospital. Then the child turned pale again, wouldn’t eat meat, wasn’t getting enough iron, hated scrambled eggs. She tried various foods, and he refused them, and then she put him on children’s chewable vitamins.

  It is the nature of the human body to thrive and grow, and surely this one would too, the slight body of her small-boned child.

  She wipes the tears from her cheeks; they appear without warning. She takes out the shoebox she keeps in a bottom drawer, sits on a cushion on the floor, and sifts through clippings, the overhead fan lop-lopping, stirring heat. One day it will fall on her head. In Phoenix, a sleeping three-year-old died of hyperthermia, left in a car in the summer heat while his mom shopped. In Wisconsin, a five-year-old was run over by a tractor driven by his ten-year-old cousin. A bucking horse threw its rider off, and the little girl died from head trauma. That was in Nevada.

  Reading the clippings—children die every day—calms her.

  Back at the table she reads her note: I was very sorry to hear about the loss of your child. Death is terrible when it takes someone so young. I know from experience it will not be easy to get over. She picks up the pen, a Zeb Roller 2000. It’s leaky and smudges the edge of letters—just look at the D in Death. With sympathy and thinking of you. She blows on the ink, wonders if her words are helpful or cruelly honest. Or just cruel.

  She wants to smoke a cigarette; she wants to be pacified by a cigarette. She used to love them, no matter what anyone said. Then she quit, as part of the punishment.

  Her little boy used to snuff out their cigarettes with a rock he kept in his pocket, going from her ashtray to his dad’s muttering, “Tut, tut, tut”—where in the world did he learn that? He grew into a playful child, despite the ongoing battles between his parents. He’d call from the bedroom, “Can you guys keep it down out there? I’m trying to think,” and one particularly bad night he came twirling out of his room, dancing to music in his head, turning and bowing and flipping his top hat from Halloween. That show had shut them up.

  She opens the refrigerator, leans in. The cool air feels good. She retrieves a no-name cola. She sits at the table on the chair with the tasselled pillow, gulps from the can. The cola fizzles into her throat and into her nose. Her colleagues and friends from those days are gone. You leave the child’s father, leave the block, leave everything behind, as though the loss will stay behind.

  The days and months when she had a child who slowly died are gone. He was five; he was sixty-four months and three days old. It wasn’t neglect, just medical ignorance about side effects, of how the kidneys could just give up.

  No one said life would be fair.

  She wonders if Irene was drinking while babysitting, wonders if Irene fell asleep. Then she wonders why she has such a heartless streak to imagine such a fault in a friend.

  You always think it’s your fault. It stays your fault. Time has passed, yet God is still far away. If Irene had so much as one drink, she will blame herself.

  Delphinium throws himself against the outside of the door.

  She opens the bottom drawer again, pulls from it her child’s baby blanket. She lays herself on the couch, on top of the soft wool blanket, aware of her bare arms and how wool irritates her, how it itches and sets up reactions on the inside of her that make her want to curl her nails and go at it.

  Why, for all this suffering, hasn’t she become a better person?

  Delphinium thuds against the door again, gives up.

  She sets the carton of apple juice on the table and lines up the little glasses they like. The children are thirsty after school; they need sugar. They’re on time, and noisy as they step over the crushed fence onto her patio. They’ve found a mourning dove on the ground, in the empty lot. The girl holds the fledgling in both hands, so that the dove’s blank little head pokes out. “Oh, my gosh,” Linda says. “That’s him. I know that bird.”

  She will kill Delphinium the next time she sees him.

  One of the twins says, “I bet Del—your cat—I bet your cat got it.”

  “Naw.” His brother shakes his head. “It’s right here. It’s not dead, either.”

  Linda blinks. The child is right. The bird isn’t dead—it is right here staring at her. She runs inside and hurries back out with a deep, stainless steel cooking pot and some dishtowels. The little girl places the dove inside and lets go. Linda reaches in, works her fingers gently over the fledgling’s body. Then she lays a dishtowel over the pot. The smallest twin opens the door so she can take the bird inside, away from the exuberant noise of the children chattering when they start colouring. The baby is in shock; it needs quiet. It will be in shock for a time, she knows from experience. But the little thing has all its feathers and two good legs. It has a strong heartbeat, and it has her. It has a chance.

  Darling

  Evan’s cat was named Darlene when she got her from the Humane Society of Southern Arizona, but Evan called her Darling. Over the phone she told Darling’s story to her brother.
Her brother’s name was Eric, so growing up they had been Evan and Eric, like twin boys instead of brother and sister.

  Darling was a tabby with black markings on the tips of her ears, giving her a lynx-like look, and she had a high rump and a stubby, corkscrewed tail. Thankfully, the tail was covered in a ball of fur. The shelter people said she looked like a Manx, and the comment made Evan feel proud, as though Darling’s interesting appearance was her doing. Darling had been returned because she was “too busy” at night. Also, the previous owner had had a baby.

  “Cat would probably maul that baby given a chance,” Evan’s brother said, on the phone from Indianapolis.

  She hadn’t thought of the possibility. “Domestic cats don’t maul things.” Then she looked at the bandages on her arms. From the beginning, Darling stalked her. Evan would be lying in bed, listening to soft movements in the room. Turning her head, she would see Darling crouched on the headboard staring crookedly down on her, yellow eyes rapt and spellbound like nothing domesticated. Sometimes the cat pounced, claws out. Evan would throw Darling off the bed like she was a rat attacking. “That’s morbid,” she said to Eric, thinking of a cat mauling a baby. “That’s a morbid thing to say.”

  “I’m feeling morbid,” her brother said. Recently Eric’s wife, Cathy, had died of cancer. He’d been by her side, in and out of hospitals for a year.

  “I’m sorry. Of course,” Evan said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Relieved. Guilty for feeling relieved. Lonely. Like shit.”

  Evan survived another day of substitute teaching. The door to her two-bedroom apartment opened onto the kitchen. She peeked in cautiously; Darling had once leapt at her from the top of the refrigerator. She put her bags on the counter and tiptoed into the bedroom. “Darling?” Darling was under the bed. Evan lay on the floor on her stomach and stretched out her hand. She whispered, “You are my darling, you want to be my darling,” and Darling put a paw out toward Evan’s fingers. Evan cooed “my darling,” again and Darling allowed her paw to be touched. Evan, who had been spat at by a boy in the class earlier in the day, cried at the soft touch of the cat’s paw.

  Evan remembered reaching for the frying pan for effect during a fight, before her husband, Ray, had taken the Malibu and driven two hundred miles away from her, and then crashed the car against a rock face outside Gila Bend. He was a drunk, an alcoholic, chronically self-absorbed, and full of self-pity, none of which, she’d realized, was curable. She thanked God they’d had no children, but that meant she might not ever have any. They didn’t have much love, either. They occasionally fell together into sex and wrestled on the bed. Their social inadequacies bonded them, as well as the need to analyze their mothers, their fathers, their brothers and sisters. They talked endlessly about the differences in Anglo and Mexican families but mostly about what made each of them so different, in attempts to put together the reasons why they had so few friends. Evan felt socially inept; she never said the right thing, laughed when others didn’t, repeated things twice or three times if people seemed to like what she’d said. Then, invariably, she regretted saying anything. She jumped into conversations at the wrong moment so that people stopped speaking and gave her looks bordering on disdain. Ray was worse off; he couldn’t hold a job. He was sure people were watching him and judging his every move. On the shop floor, always on the alert for criticism, he would burst out, blame another mechanic for what he felt was a slight.

  After he died, people were curious about whether Ray’s death was a suicide or whether alcohol was to blame, as though the two—the dark fury in him that caused him to drink—could be separated. Evan moved to north-central Tucson from the southeast side, to start a new life. The people she’d known in the southeast schools drifted away, as though she’d moved to the moon. Being a substitute teacher kept her an outsider in the staff room anyway, yet made her privy to the secrets in teachers’ desk drawers, or their lax classroom discipline.

  Her new apartment was on the bottom floor of a two-storey building, with a sliding glass door that opened to the small patio. The apartments, all in a row, looked out onto a deep wash, a run-off for water during heavy rains. Because the wash was left in its natural state, Evan was thrilled to realize that animals lived in it and passed through it. Javelinas trotted up from the wash and onto the pathway around the complex three or four times a week toward the end of the day. Javelinas, Evan read, belonged to the collared peccary family. Tough-hided and tough-minded, they moved in family groups. Evan heard they liked broccoli, so she tossed pieces of broccoli out for them. She was fascinated by them, took photos and sent cards to her husband’s family (who weren’t speaking to her), the principals of schools she subbed for, and her brother.

  On a branch of the mesquite tree outside the next apartment, a quart-sized Mountain Dew bottle hung upside down. Up close, Evan saw that it had a wood dowel for a perch and holes where birds could get the seeds out. The neighbour from the apartment trundled out to hang a refilled hummingbird feeder, the red plastic kind with fake yellow flowers. The hummingbirds were hovering around, waiting. “Oh, you will love the birds! And the pop bottles are Joe’s invention. He’s married to an older woman, you know.” Alma Carpenter said she was eighty-four years old.

  Evan said, “I have a cat.”

  “Don’t let it get at the birds. Except the roadrunner, an evil thing, the cat can have that damned thing. That evil roadrunner scrunched itself down small in that bush over there, and jumped out faster than lightning and swallowed a verdin, a sweet little yellow bird that was just coming down from the feeder. Just swooping down after a feed and, whack, was swallowed by that evil thing. Somebody down the way”—Evan looked along the row of apartments in the direction Alma indicated—“is a stupid fool, and feeds that damned thing hamburger.”

  “My cat stays inside. I had to promise the humane shelter. They don’t want cats to get hurt by coyotes. And they love birds too, of course.”

  “Thank the Lord,” said Alma. She took a carrot out of her apron pocket and placed it under the tree. “This is for the rabbit.”

  The Jack Russell in the fenced yard on the other side of Evan’s apartment began to bark.

  “That dog could use a muzzle,” Alma said. She shook a finger at him. The Jack Russell barked harder. She glanced at Evan. “I have cookies in the oven, why don’t you come in?”

  Evan was delighted.

  While eating oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips she found out that Joe and Alma had been married for sixty-two years, that he was three days younger than Alma, and that twelve years ago they started feeding carrots to the rabbits. “In the beginning,” Joe said, “those dang things were so dumb they didn’t know what was good for them.”

  Joe was a big man with dry lips. He was wearing a blue shirt that matched his eyes and red suspenders. His long face was blotched from sun and wind, Evan guessed, or just old age. “Alma here had to teach those rabbits the colour orange. Then they caught on, them and the squirrels and that there chipmunk.” He walked to the sliding door and pointed out to Evan a big-eyed desert rabbit, hunched under the mesquite tree, eating the carrot. Next he pointed at a chipmunk waiting in the brush. “That little feller is a regular clown,” Joe said. “They do this most every night. Like a regular TV show. That chipmunk will come out—” and Evan saw that the chipmunk did come out, he darted from under the brush, raced toward the rabbit. The rabbit jumped straight up, just as Joe said it would, and the chipmunk snatched the carrot. The rabbit landed and hopped around in a slow circle, looking for his carrot, puzzled. The chipmunk, meanwhile, had run back to the brush, where it snickered.

  Evan bought a pair of binoculars and a birder’s book and started ticking off birds: the tiny verdin with the little red shoulder patch, the evil roadrunner, the Costa’s hummingbird, the Gambel’s quail, and the swarms of mourning doves—“their wings sound beautiful when they take off or land,” she wrote in small letters along the margin. A Gila woodpecker, red spot on his crown, figured o
ut how to grasp the perch of the Mountain Dew bottle with his claws and do pull-ups to get his bill into the seeds. He clung upside down—toning his little abs—and flung seeds out recklessly. This exercise gave the impression of being hard for him; he didn’t stay at it long. Evan wondered if he did it for the amusement of the mourning doves and the white-crowned sparrows below, happily squabbling and gobbling.

  She phoned her brother to share the tales about mishaps in the wash that Joe had regaled her with. During monsoon season, rivers of water could come roaring along and overflow the washes. One year, a dumb Minnesota snowbird in an SUV figured he’d beat the water and was carried away, landing in mud two miles from where he’d started, upside down, with a broken collarbone. It happened frequently enough that, Evan remarked to her brother, a person just had to wonder about the intelligence of some people.

  She explained the same thing to Darling. “You stay away if you see water whooshing in the wash.” Darling, pressed to the sliding door, eyed the birds, her jaws jittering.

  The next day, Evan planned to run into Alma as she was tossing the birdseed to tell her she loved Joe’s stories. Alma, tiny chin twitching, murmured shyly, “You know Joe is married to an older woman.”

  “Oh, yes, I do know that,” said Evan.

  Feeling sleep deprived, Evan had the idea of making a nice nest for Darling in the spare room; the room had Evan’s desk and computer, the litter box, and not much else in it. She arranged a nice set-up—Darling’s treats, water and food, a cozy cat bed, even a radio turned to a station that played soothing music—said goodnight, and eased the door closed. Over several nights, Darling threw litter out of the box, spilled her water bowl, and batted her dry food around the floor; in the mornings the room looked like ten cats lived in it, and none of them with any manners.

  Eventually she gave up trying to keep Darling confined at night. One night Evan rubbed her feet together under the sheets and instantly knew she’d made a mistake. A moment later, Darling pounced and grabbed a foot with her claws. “Ouch!” Evan yelled and kicked her feet in the air. She reached down and batted at the cat. Darling thumped to the floor. Evan heard her growling from under the bed and was afraid to get up. She squinted at the clock: 2:38 AM. While she waited for her heart to slow down, willing herself not to have to pee, she realized that she would have to renege on her promise to the humane shelter; she would have to introduce Darling to the outdoors.