South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

  Galaxy Updraft

  Then, due to faulty neurons, inept parenting, and a psychiatric condition that requires consistent management, it starts again: Roz is lost between the kitchen and the bedroom, afraid to move or duck out of sight because dogs the size of pit bulls whine and snarl in the shadows, and anything can happen next—shrapnel might fall from the sky. The dogs have wide, slavering jaws, strong, able teeth. They are dirt brown with yellow footpads and claws like old ivory. They do not care much for people. You can cloy up to them and perhaps curry their favour, curry them, curry up, eat curry.

  “Don’t go to crazy town, my girl,” Roz says out loud. She makes a fist, knocks herself in the jaw, blinks, and shakes her head. Listens as the dogs scuttle away, back to their invisible hiding places. She looks at her fist. In it she’s crumpled a page from a newspaper. The news is bad.

  She makes it to the bedroom where the newspapers she collects are carefully stacked against the walls. The stacks are ramparts, surrounding and protecting her mattress on the floor in the middle of the room. In a cardboard box at the foot of her bed she stores her favourite news articles, and among these articles is the years-long story of Margaret Drummond and her little grandson, Brian. Once Cousin Duke asked Roz, “What the hell makes you so fanatic about an old woman and some kid?” Duke is ten years her senior, her only relative, forty-six and divorced. Certain mysteries in life are not fathomable, and the mind, the human mind, is one of them, Roz replied, speaking only to herself. What she might have said out loud to Duke was, “The human mind is a swamp o’ misery,” making a play on words and imitating his accent. Did Duke appreciate her humour? She can’t remember; sometimes he is as volatile as a wind off the ocean, letting kites soar, then suddenly letting them down, leaving them up-ended in the sand.

  The latest article, a real shocker, announces that Margaret Drummond is dead. A weekly cleaning woman found the sixty-nine-year-old dead in bed in her little house in Covina. Roz knows the house because she’s driven past it. When she had a driver’s licence she drove out to Covina and cruised by the house to memorize it. She had wanted to see where Margaret Drummond’s grandchild, Brian, was living.

  Roz steps over a section of the neat pile of papers, a section slightly lower than the rest, and down into the nestled safety of her bed, onto rumpled sheets and blankets. Then she hears herself whimpering as she reads the article again. Brian is now eleven years old. He was not found in the house when his grandmother was discovered dead, so where is he? His being missing is so distressing. Margaret Drummond may have died of natural causes, but did she? And if she did, was Brian there to watch her die? After all he’s been through. The newspaper article seems deliberately vague, as though people shouldn’t know the facts just yet. They don’t want Roz to know. Why would they conceal the facts from her?

  Roz has been following the case of Brian Drummond for three years. His story includes a cruel and neglectful grandmother (Margaret Drummond); a dead father (slammed his plane into the mountain outside of Las Vegas); and a mother no one mentions or knows. According to the news report about Brian’s father, “Alcohol may have been involved” in the plane crash. Roz loves that part. Alcohol is a sinner’s vice, and Brian Drummond’s father, a gambler, was no doubt a libertine. “Of course alcohol was involved!” she shouts.

  “Oops, Roz. Oops, Roz.” Her hand rushes to her mouth. “Sh, quiet, quiet as a mouse.” She listens. The apartment is keeping the peace so far. The building is sweating in the heat; she can hear the vibrating rumble of a fan in the old man’s room upstairs. She has to maintain verbal discipline because of him. If he complains again about a shopping cart racketing down the stairs, full of items she considers useful as well as the newspapers, she will be turfed out to live on the street. She has been warned, first by the landlord and then by a woman from Social Services. That time was an accident, she’d worn the wrong shoes, they tripped her up and she lost her grip. And she was in a hurry. The voices talking about “sinful evillers” and buried babies had quickened, working up to a rampage. That was why she had to rush home.

  She breathes and waits. Breathing and waiting is a trick she has learned in order to slow herself down. Out on the street a car door slams, people pound by, a radio plays loud music. She can barely hear the ocean. The reliable white noise of freeway traffic prevails.

  She reads the second article, the most exciting and puzzling part of the story. The grandmother (Margaret Drummond) didn’t know she had a grandson, yet she was the boy’s only relative. Something bizarre must have gone wrong in that family. Roz speculates that the key can be found in the fact that Margaret Drummond, a reading specialist, announced to the world that her son was dyslexic. She was quoted as saying: “My son is dyslexic. I haven’t seen him for years.” What does being dyslexic have to do with anything?

  Roz had cried out when she first read it. Some mothers were genuinely ungrateful and abandoned their children due to minor problems. And then to be given the gift of a little boy you did not know existed, a little boy related to you by blood—should you not be filled with joy and thank the Lord? Apparently Margaret Drummond was not filled with joy. The eight-year-old had been living with her for one week when he ran away. Of course he was found by the police and brought back.

  In the next article, Margaret Drummond is quoted as saying that “the boy” cried a lot. Calling her grandson “the boy” indicates an obvious emotional chasm between them. Roz’s own grandmother had lost interest in her too, when she couldn’t settle down at school. She was cute and smart one minute, a pariah the next. Margaret Drummond said about her grandchild, “He lacks socialization.”

  Lacks socialization. Roz dog-paddles her fingers through the articles in the box and finds the only photo of Brian she has. It’s blurry, taken when he was first discovered alone in an apartment in Las Vegas. The boy looks like her—hard to pin down, moving fast.

  She clambers over the barrier, stands up, and turns in circles. Margaret Drummond is dead. The boy is missing. The reporter wrote that the boy, Brian, has been diagnosed with ADHD. “Of course he’s diagnosed!” Roz shouts. “We’ve all been diagnosed!” In Roz’s experience, an ADHD diagnosis is only the cover-up for other, more implicative diagnoses that they are keeping to themselves until further testing.

  The man upstairs rap-rap-raps the floor with his cane and she shouts back, “Shut up yourself!” Then she tones it down.

  Brian is missing. She has to do something. A boy without a mother, as she herself is without a mother, a boy without a father or a grandmother, as she herself is without a father or a grandmother, needs someone to look for him and find him, someone who cares. Two policemen took Roz’s driver’s licence away on a bad day. But she still has the car.

  From the shopping cart in the living room, she takes pairs of shoes and lines them up on the floor. “Are you the ones?” She points to and queries each pair. “You?” Some respond. Some are silent. This behaviour is common; some shoe owners are dead, and their stories are lost. Some have simply moved on. Some shoes are tattletales. Some comedians. Some are boisterous and proclaim outlandishly good times. Some are mousy and want people to feel sorry for them. People feeling sorry for Roz is preferable to them feeling afraid of her. Pity is useful. When people pity you, they feel superior.

  She chooses a pair of leather sandals with curled straps. She feels sorry for them. She walks to the front door, turns the handle. The door opens onto a corridor that feels like it belongs to an old ship. “No, no,” she says and steps back inside. The problem is the shoes. They’re too flimsy and they’ve not reminded her to bring the car keys. She’s distressed

  by the decision, if it was her decision, to wear such scatter-brained shoes.

  She chooses again. A pair of Clarks, black and scuffed on the sides as though the owner’s feet rubbed each other. The shoes were made for someone older than Roz, but as she walks back and forth, back and forth between the living room and kitchen, the shoes give her confidence and strength.
“Yes.”

  She walks the shoes into the bedroom and picks up the article and a map of Redondo Beach, where she lives, and a map of Covina, where Margaret Drummond’s house is. On the newspaper page an ad jumps to attention: The Electronic Circus. Bring your kids! Demonstration today! The game is in a mall in the vicinity of Margaret Drummond’s house. A boy whose life is a circus would go there, drawn to a truth that a virtual reality game might reveal to him.Now she understands exactly where she must go. To the mall. Her heart sinks. She and the shoes both know she will need a break after the terrors of the crowds and brassy music they have in that place. She phones Duke and asks if she can stop by. He says, “Don’t expect much, the usual drill. I might not be here, but, hey, bring a lobster.” Because she lives five blocks from the ocean, Duke thinks that lobsters are as common as cockroaches.

  Anybody can stand and watch the players through the glass storefront of the Electronic Circus. “They look pretty dumb,” a teenaged boy says. He has a nose ring and orange hair. Roz thought Kool-Aid hair was a thing of the past, but if snarling dirt dogs appear in her consciousness and then escape through her eyes into the real world, then time might be shearing a little, caught in a galaxy updraft. “If you’re not fast, a pterodactyl swoops down and grabs you up and drops you. It’s like you fall, like, from a plane.” The helmeted players stoop, bob, and weave.

  Roz feels she should say something to the orange-haired kid. “I’m afraid of heights.”

  “Oh, you gotta do it.”

  A woman wearing gold loopy earrings, chewing bubble gum, catches Roz’s eye. “He’s chicken,” she says of the little brown-haired boy beside her. Pop. The boy murmurs something and steps behind the woman. “Don’t be silly.” Pop. “You can do it.”

  “Too bad the game is about shooting people,” Roz says.

  “Yeah, but it’s great.” Pop.

  With this kind of mother loose in a mall, no wonder America is going to hell in a handbasket, a term Margaret Drummond would have used. For all her faults, Margaret Drummond would not have been caught dead chewing gum in public.

  Roz looks more carefully at the brown-haired, elusive-eyed boy. An idea occurs to her. Could he be Brian? Could he be Brian who was kidnapped, perhaps by the woman he is with, who would be a terrible mother? The boy has dark eyes and an implacability that Roz recognizes. She turns to him. “Wanna play?”

  The woman who’s pretending to be his mother pokes his arm. “Go on.”

  Mostly Roz feels ridiculous in the sweaty helmet, shooting at figures she can’t tell apart on a three-tiered screen. The attendant may have forgotten to mention the colour of her character. She might spend the entire game shooting at herself.

  The attendant helps her get out of the gear. Because Roz wants to be a good sport, she asks, “Who won?” Half the time she closed her eyes and fired blind, the rat-tat-tat of gunshots drilling into her skull.

  “He creamed you.”

  Everyone is gone. The gum-chewing woman. The kid with the orange hair. Brian. New people look in at her through the shiny window, and meaner kids point fingers at her. She remembers those days in the hospital and feels sick to her stomach. She barely makes it to the parking lot, where she throws up. Dirt-coloured dogs circle.

  She drives around and around familiar blocks, unable to find Duke’s house. Getting lost means she either took too many pills or forgot entirely. Sometimes the meds make her fuzzy; sometimes they make her clear as light from the sun itself. “Dumb fuck,” she suddenly utters and instantly regrets the words. The black shoes would not want her to use that language.

  Duke’s house is white stucco with green window trim. She parks in front, relieved, and breathes deeply. She sees barbecue smoke idling up through the pepper tree in his backyard. She walks across the lawn and through the green latched gate that Duke had to show her how to open and close.

  The gate leads to the yard, where on this hot day Duke is likely having himself a cookout with a few cans of cold beer. She is so relieved to see him hunkered in his favourite chair near the grill that tears swell and spill. She wipes her face. Duke does not like crybabies. Roz knows this about Duke and so do his two teenaged daughters, who live with their mother. Duke was in the military and hence does not suffer cowards or the weak-minded.

  She sits at the picnic table. Duke stabs one of the three steaks on the grill with his barbecue fork and throws it in the fire. Grey smoke fills the air. Roz is amazed.

  “Stephanie didn’t come at first call,” he says.

  Roz has a slump-stomach feeling. “I didn’t know the girls were here.”

  “Just Stephanie.”

  The girls don’t like their father, and despite his having parental rights, sometimes they refuse to come to see him, and when they do bother to visit, sometimes they ignore him. There isn’t much he can do. He has a record of domestic violence, so he is being watched as Roz is being watched. A Chinet plate holding a steak and baked potato in foil appears in front of her like magic. Roz takes a bite out of the potato, holding it in her hands. She can’t help it; potatoes are a trustworthy food, good in times of need and good for an empty stomach. She chews and swallows and takes another bite.

  “I drove by Margaret Drummond’s house. There was a police car out front. Unmarked. They’re probably waiting for her killer to come back.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  There was a time when Roz needed reteaching about the basics. Now she needs to recall the basics of communication that others appreciate. “Is everything all right?”

  “You ought to know, because you know everything about everything.”

  “No, no.” Roz, astounded, places the remains of the potato carefully back on the plate. “Wow, no. I don’t know where Brian Drummond is, nobody does.”

  Duke puts down his knife after cutting up his steak in bite-sized pieces. “I got this terrible headache. You never think. Maybe I just want to be left in peace, maybe I don’t want to have to listen.”

  “Thank you for the food.” Roz scrambles up from the table, averting her eyes. She takes a deep breath and ambles back through the gate, latching it securely, goes around to the front of the house and opens the heavy front door. She says hello to Stephanie, who’s smoking a joint in the bathroom with the fan on. Stephanie nods. Roz would like to talk to Stephanie, but, as the driver of a car, she should not have marijuana smoke clinging to her clothes. She stops at the threshold of Duke’s bedroom. A plan has concocted itself without much thought, and here she is, ready to put it into action. She enters with the intent to steal a pair of his shoes—not black, she’s never going to wear black shoes again, might as well call the dogs. She takes the polished brown ones. These may be the shoes he wears to church. His feet are nearly the same size as hers; she doesn’t need an extra pair of his socks for padding.

  Roz shuts the bedroom door behind her, waves at Stephanie, heads down the front walk in her new shoes. It doesn’t pay to be unkind to anyone, she thinks as she drives away. Near home, she finds the right dumpster for the failed Clarks.

  It’s sundown by the time Roz finds a place to park the car, steps carefully through traffic, and reaches the Redondo Beach pier. Duke’s shoes, she notices, are savvy about the hazards of traffic. The surf on either side of the pier has a quiet rhythm, as though slowing down after a hard day. Lights flick on in houses along the strand. Brown pelicans flap by in single file.

  The man at the end of the pier is a black man with a soft face. His name is Henry. Henry is an expert about shrapnel, how it falls out of the sky like fireworks, like the Fourth of July, then buries pieces of metal, communication devices, into your skin, contraptions that make you suffer when you least expect it. Roz is not sure about the facts of shrapnel camp, but she doesn’t mention her doubts to Henry because she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. Crazy town is more her style. Henry wears a greasy sort of cowboy hat, rim rolled up. As she approaches, she sees familiar gear—his rags and extra poles and, tonight, a dead
fish in his orange plastic bucket.

  She calls, “Hello?” Henry tips his hat and says, “Good evening,” formally, as though they’ve never met. He seems to like a safe distance between himself and other people. She allows him space. “The day started with dogs. Have I ever told you about the dogs?”

  His face crinkles. “Everybody know about dogs.” She sees him catch the meaning of her words. He takes a closer look at her. “Oh, you mean them. Ain’t nobody who is ever lived a life don’t know about them.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Dang I am. I may be old but I still knows a thing or two.”

  “I have trouble with those dogs sometimes,” she says. “And the shoes.”

  He laughs, showing the gap where a tooth is missing. “Troublemakers, those dang shoes. You spend the day in shrapnel camp?”

  Roz nods. However anybody wants to define it, today has not been a good day. Her chest muscles relax and loosen as her lungs open up to the air, salty and spicy with an underlying anxiety of fish. “It kind of took me over. I played a game with a boy in disguise at Electronic Circus and then he disappeared. Why did he disappear like that unless he was hiding? The woman who was acting like she was his mother chewed gum. The real Brian doesn’t have a mother. Do you think it was the real Brian?”

  Henry takes off his hat, fingers it. “I can’t rightly say. You always a gal with real stories to tell.”

  “I kind of am.” The compliment makes her feel bashful. Her hair has been hugging her scalp too tightly the whole drive back. She runs both hands up her neck, pulls strands through her fingers. She looks at Henry, who is waiting for something more. “Gunshots were everywhere. I guess exactly like shrapnel camp. You know a lot about that.”

  “I does.” Henry places his hat back on his head, adjusts it. “That shrapnel, it tell you what to do. Some men’s minds get stuck there, can’t never get out.”