by Lori McNulty
“It is confirmed! There is life on Mars and it is fierce and ferocious and full of love and loneliness. Lori McNulty’s stories are wise and funny and they pound with an energy that is simultaneously physical and philosophical. Get ready to go, boldly, where Canadian fiction has never been before.”
— Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting
“These narratives are fresh and startling. They confirm Lori McNulty as a writer who can roam the universe, crossing boundaries of gender, species, and even mortality, while never straying from her native terrain — that of the human heart.”
— K.D. Miller, author of All Saints
“In Life on Mars we find stoner beauty and deft fables brimming with animal grief and invective. Our characters reach slippery visions about siblings and mothers and those sad swinging doors of home that might kick you out or welcome you inside.”
— Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Knife Party at the Hotel Europa
“Each of these stories moves like a lit fuse racing towards a keg of dynamite. Life on Mars boldly excavates the darkness within to emerge with its characters’ bloodied but still pulsing hearts held high. Lori McNulty leads her teenage stoners and cutters, her conflicted widows, her mentally ill, her sentient squids and many-armed gods to the edge of the cliff and dares them to live. This is ferocious fiction from a new master witness of life on Earth.”
— Zsuzsi Gartner, author of Better Living through Plastic Explosives
Copyright © 2017 by Lori McNulty.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Cover and page design by Kerry Lawlor and Julie Scriver.
Cover images: background image of Shanghai, Pexels.com; octopus, Shutterstock.com
Printed in Canada.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McNulty, Lori, author
Life on Mars / Lori McNulty.
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-86492-888-7 (paperback).—ISBN 978-0-86492-928-0 (epub).—ISBN 978-0-86492-929-7 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS8625.N85L54 2017 C813’.6 C2016-907037-9
C2016-907038-7
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
For Kim
Contents
Evidence of Life on Mars
Battle of the Bow
Fingernecklace
If on a Winter’s Night a Badger
Monsoon Season
WOOF
Last Down
Prey
Gindelle of the Abbey
Polymarpussle Takes a Chance
Two Bucks from Brooklyn
Ticker
Evidence of Life on Mars
Under my cement roof, at the top of the sloped underpass, I watch cars grow fins as they sail out along the flooding highway. Drivers lean on their horns in the heavy rain, as if the sound can open up a space I can soar through.
Blunt on my lips, I inhale a head full of stars.
Dust then darkness. I keep an eye on the intersection where my father’s big rig will swing a wide arc off Albert Road. Ten tons of steel and rubber, its back end doglegging out onto the road. That huge silver grill grinning at me.
Chrome is tooth enamel for big rigs, my father said. As a kid, I used to polish the chrome-plated axle and hubs in the driveway. Got a buck a wheel.
My pocket buzzes. Il Duce again. Mars. Get home. Now.
Fascist. My sister Lizzie is a dead ringer for Mussolini, who was famous for bulging eyes and annexing Albania. She has perfect SATs to go along with Il Duce’s unplucked unibrow and military-grade temper.
Coming home, I text back. Add two kiss symbols to drive her mental.
Floating downhill on my bike, I shred roots and rocks on the trails before kicking up asphalt alongside the same two-storey houses with double-lane driveways and identical lawns buzzed to three-inch pelts. I hop the sidewalk and swing around the huge pile of sawed two-by-fours growing mould beside the old man’s shed.
If nothing changes tonight, I’ll buy a one-way ticket. I’ll buy two.
Carrying my sneakers in on shoehorn fists, I pad down the front hall in wet socks, scattering pebbles and dirt. On my knees, I moisten my fingertips, trying to pick up each fleck. The TV is blasting the news upstairs in my mother’s bedroom. Homicides at six. Natural disasters at eleven. Trauma piling up in my mother’s lap because she’s working overtime again, writing legal briefs to help the corporate drones baffle the court of justice. Plus a pitcher of something bloody to wash her sins down.
Me, I try to stay high all the time. Show up late to advanced physics, cough up all the impossible answers, and bolt whenever someone catches my glassy vibe. Right and wrong are handcuffs, my father told me. Give up on being so good and the whole world opens up for you.
Toe inched inside the kitchen, I peek around the corner to see Lizzie gather up two toppled plastic grocery bags off the floor. A pound of fresh ground beef is flopped upside down, still wrapped in cellophane. She tears at the wrapper with her pinky fingernail, gives the meat a long sniff.
“Hey, Lezzie,” I say, slow-shuffling in.
“You were supposed to be here two hours ago,” she says, and the fleshy pockets below her eyes sag, blown out by too many late nights studying the metaphysics of ancient Greece.
Squinty-eyed smiling, I notice the whites of her eyes look firm, like hard-boiled eggs, as if she’s been trapped in an existential windstorm.
Lizzie turns her back on me. Setting the slopped meat on the counter, she opens the cupboard, grabs a can of chunky tomatoes, turns, and tosses it at me.
I pitch it back like it’s a live grenade. “Chill out, dinner Nazi.”
“And you’re a gassy planet with an asshole for an orbit,” she says and slams the can on the counter. More thrashing as she pulls out a lidded pot and fills it with tap water.
Slamming the pot on the stove, she turns and drops the can back into my hands. “Open it.”
Lizzie dials up the stove heat. She rips the pasta box apart, spilling strands across the counter, still furious.
My shiny head is sitting on my body like a swollen lollipop. I stand and watch the pot lid sweat then quiver over the bubbling pot. Gripping the can opener with two hands, I can’t get the metal teeth to sit right on the thin lip of the can. This I find incredibly funny.
“Shut up, Mars. Mom’s going ballistic over her deadlines.”
Ignoring my snorts, my sister slaps the quarter pound of ground beef into a large mixing bowl, adds some cereal, and rolls the meatballs in her oily palms. She pulls out a pan and sprays. Mesmerizing to watch those cornflake-encrusted brainlings strike a formation on the slippery pan.
“Look, Lezzie,” I say, holding up a soggy, flopping tomato chunk from the can. “I found your heart.”
She smacks me with a plastic spoon. “Weed is wasting you.”
When I grab her wrist, she accidentally elbows the pot handle.
“Sorry, sis, sorry, sorry.”
Holding her wrist, she shrieks, hops back as steaming water pours from the side of the stove. Th
en she grabs the serrated knife from the counter, turns the pointy part to my crotch, and grins.
“First I yank, then I slice,” she says, taking a theatrical grab at my groin.
“You bullshitter.”
Gripping the dishtowel, I slowly twist it and whip it out near her chest. Lizzie howls, dropping the knife.
When we lock arms, whipping each other around do-si-do style, still laughing, Lizzie stops with a sudden jerk. Our mother is standing over us, her cellphone pressed against her chest.
“I’ve got New York on the line,” she hisses. “They think it’s a goddamn home invasion.”
I pick up the serrated knife and lay it back on the counter.
“Call you back,” my mother says into her cell. “Gotta put my kids on lockdown.” Her tone is light, but I can see her mouth twitching before she hangs up.
My sister jolts back, straightens out her rubber knees, touching her stinging jaw after my mother slaps Lizzie hard across the cheek.
“Get out,” my mother orders me, eyeing my slow, sloppy face.
I step in front of my sister. Lizzie shoots me a look that says, It will be worse for me if you stay.
Kicking open the back door, I shove my feet into a pair of muddy boots and hotfoot it through wet woods like some scared, limp deer. What I think, as my face is branch-slapped, is that that I’m too fucked and stupid to stop the shitstorm that’s raining down on my sister.
I follow the river marsh to where the scent of rotting leaves and old pine cones wafts through my decomposing palace. Using the light from my cell, I point a low beam toward the fetid ground I’ve trampled, slept on, set fire to. My usual stump is loaded with cigarette butts. Bending over, there’s a whooshing wave in my ears, and for a second I’m ass-dumped. I straighten up. My hair is plastered to my skull like a crazy, wet wig. I grab a crushed beer can from the ground and clear away the curled leaves and candy wrappers.
The rain is spitting horizontal piss. Crouched over, I light up. A few deep inhales, cough, cough. Another few hits and the inchworms begin crawling across my skin. I lift my T-shirt, exposing my rib rack to the wind. Snapping open my father’s penknife, I scrape skin across bone, dissecting the worms three ways. My skin splits so clean, the wound looks like a parted mouth. If the next cut sinks deep enough, it won’t bleed, at least not right away.
The forest starts shuddering like a group of old men at a bus stop. From my guts an acid taste keeps building, backing up in my throat, as the night sky slackens over the bog. In my nostrils, I whiff the fungal stench of rock-bottom. I can picture my mother’s face, her arm pressing Lizzie’s chest against the toilet rim, forcing her hand to pump up and down. My mother empties more spaghetti strands into the bowl. “This is dinner. Stir it.”
Blue-lipped shivering, and my numb fingers are making it hard to get a tight seal over the blunt. Inhale and hold. My throat is thermal, like I’m a human incinerator, spilling sharp, dead flowers all the way to my lungs. Looking down, something spongy is growing between my toes. A floppy stump fungus I bash away with my heel. Bash, bash, and the leafy plants look up with their hungry mouths. The stub of my joint I toss. Chew away the bile backing up my throat with the pack of mint gum in my pocket. Then I tilt back and pitch my father’s knife as far as I can into the ravine.
In the kitchen, the white countertops are blotched red. There’s a sharp stench like fat dripping over hot barbecue coals. A jagged lemon wedge sits next to a glass pitcher drained of Bloody Mary mix, the fog of tomato juice and pepper still clinging to the sides. In the singed pan, the meatballs are tiny black orbs.
I grab my backpack and load up on fridge food, then follow the red droplets to my mother’s room.
She’s hunched over her binders when I crack the door. A celery stalk flowers between her teeth when she turns and looks at me. Her eyes seem as if they’ve been smudged with Vaseline.
“You have to stop it,” I tell her, shaking my head.
She looks down at her papers, then takes a gulping sip from her tall glass that sets tears running.
“Where is your sister?” she asks, like she’s been away for weeks and can’t find her car keys.
I shake my head. “Lizzie doesn’t deserve this.”
My mother’s body lies crooked on the bed. I don’t remember a time when she ever sat up perfectly straight. Her spine twists, her hip sits too high. She wore a brace to straighten her back as a kid. Clamped in, seven days a week. Robot kid.
Her mouth opens and shuts like it’s on a spring-clip. “Nothing good ever happens anymore.”
I should have gone to Shiner’s place and blazed one by the cracked window in his basement. Coaxed Lizzie to come. She barely tolerates Shiner. Hates his mangy beard and bad manners, plus the guy is about as subtle as an oil spill when it comes to girls, but she’ll partake with us when the mood strikes.
“Your father left us,” my mother cries.
Here it is. The story. Begins and ends with my father cruising down “God knows what interstate,” leaving her high and dry. It all went downhill fast, she tells me, again, beginning with his first departure.
To me, the story made sense. All those months on the oil patch when he came home wrecked and sore. Decided to get his Class 1. Local jobs were scarce and all had shit pay, so he ended up steering north, hauling logs over gravel so rough it shook the teeth loose in his head. Came home with a bulging neck that forced him to shift gears, and persuaded my mother to take out a second mortgage to lease his own big rig. He had a plan. Go long-hauling across the US border as an independent, specializing in dangerous goods.
“It’s a license to make money,” he had told her, when he returned from his first run, eyes on high beam, fast-running mouth. He laid down a two-inch stack of photos on the kitchen table and spread them out for us. There was a classic chrome-and-vinyl roadside diner with an old couple dunking caramels into their sea of gravy. Mountain lakes full of fly fishermen. A white clapboard church with a blue neon Jesus and a huge red glowing crucifix that spelled out Jesus Saves. It was fucking beautiful.
I was transfixed by the heavy roar of the semis that tore past us on the Trans-Canada. How they kicked up dust and spit rocks as they sped by. I always got the trucker to pull the horn, and when I looked into the cab, his face seemed to belong to another age, like he’d be at home towing a wagon through open grasslands.
I remember the phone kept ringing. Fists were slamming. My mother was pulling the hair away from her face and wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
“You can’t get views like this sitting behind some desk,” my father insisted, pointing to his mountain scenes and highway sunsets.
“You can’t raise two kids and run a law practice on your own,” she shot back.
“Three weeks, then back here for two,” he replied, tapping the table. “What else do you want?”
“Help with bills. School events.”
“Give it time.”
“We gave it five years. What about me?”
“Call it quits, then, Marcella,” he told her, rising abruptly. “Do it.”
I watched them grind each other down, until my father finally dropped a tissue box in front of her and headed toward the front door with his coat in his hands.
“Forget the desk drones. This is living. Right, son?” he said to me, winking on his way out.
Lizzie was away at some brain camp. I took my father’s side as he loaded up his thermos with coffee and hugged me goodbye. Freedom is an instinct, right? You move toward it all your life. He was from people who could straighten a bent chassis in their driveway, using nothing but leather straps and a pair of scissor jacks. Third-generation truckers: part cowboys, part astronauts. Not order-takers. Not professional bullshitters. Couldn’t she just let him be? He was making a living. Paying back the loans. No one was starving.
Lizzie was already golden. Her March on Rome would take her to the top of any kingdom, and everyone knew it. It was her graduating year anyway. School was an o
ptional excursion for me, but I always managed to pull the grades, almost as good as my sister’s unbroken row of As, despite being a year behind her. My mother told me we were touched by brilliance beyond our muddled class, that nothing was going to hold us back. I knew she meant our father. All his drifting and downshifting in eighth gear.
“Lizzie doesn’t need this bullshit,” I shout at my mother from the doorway. “She’s better than any of us put together.” In a family of disappointments, stoners, and crooks, Mussolini looks like a fluffy white kitten.
Surrounded by her binders and papers, lying on her back, my mother looks like a cargo ship run aground. More tears as she turns on her side and begins kneading the small of her back with her fist.
I close her door tight, leave her bulldozed by her Bloody Marys and grief.
After a few hits outside, I can picture the stretch of the Bitterroot River where rough waters bend like a soggy elbow, rippling up along the mountain base. In another snapshot, my father’s wearing his favourite yellow-and-black Mack baseball cap with the bulldog on it, his curly hair flying out as he leans over the front end, mouth pressed to the rig like’s he’s about to make her a promise. Feel the fifteen hundred pounds of torque twisting up through my chest, the growing rage when my father has to pull the air horn to ward off some jerk ready to cut him off on the I-20.
“You have to do the miles, Mars. Nothing good happens until you do the miles.”
He offered to take me along with him during summers, but it never happened. He still closes his annual email to me the same way: “It’s such a lonely road when you’re not on it, Mars.”
After a few more hits outside, I go back inside the house and pound down the plywood steps to the basement with my backpack, clearing my throat so Lizzie knows it’s me.
My sister is flopped on the split leather couch, reading. She draws an armful of cat to her chest, the pair either purring or quivering, I can’t tell which.
She hasn’t eaten. I can see her hair is tangled and wet from the shower. Absently, she looks over at me. Dropping my backpack on the cement floor, I approach with a stupid smile, my words too dammed up and demented to speak right away. I keep touching the place on my rib so it stings.
