Oslo, Maine

by Marcia Butler

  Claude sat back down and watched the Sibley circus finish up their routine. Edna continued to flap about, laying down her instructions nonstop, while Luc nodded whenever she took a breath. Rinse and repeat. The woman was practically a midget; she had to tilt her head all the way back just to meet Luc’s face, which was turned to the side per usual. The difference in their height had always struck Claude as odd. He wondered where Luc got his six-foot-plus frame, because he recalled the daughter as being a shrimp just like her mother. The husband, whom Claude never met and whom Edna still talked about as if he were the pope about to walk through the front door and shove a wafer down someone’s throat, must have been the culprit. Now, though still spouting some blather as if it made any difference at all, Edna looked to be running out of energy. When he was certain she’d completely blown through her head of steam, Claude walked outside.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, strolling up.

  “Oh, good, Claude. Luc brought this thing home last night and I could barely sleep from the stench. Look at it. Dreadful,” she said, poking at her bun.

  “I told you to bury this thing,” Claude said to Luc.

  Luc bowed his head and clasped his hands behind his back like he was preparing to be handcuffed. He began to shift from foot to foot and if Claude hadn’t known better, he’d call it a jig.

  “What I want to know is how it died,” Edna broke in before Luc could respond. “I mean, this is ghastly. Take a look, Claude. I’m a novice …” She trailed off.

  Claude took a deep breath and held it as he walked to the back of the truck to examine the dead animal. He was in luck. The scavenging and decay were so extensive Claude couldn’t locate the gunshot wound he’d inflicted. Relieved, he let out his breath.

  “No big deal, Edna. It’s the wasting disease—the deer tick that makes them go batty. I found the thing dead about a week ago and asked Luc to take care of it. Guess he forgot. So here we are. But it does stink something mighty. Let’s get ahead of the breeze.”

  He took Edna by the arm and guided her away from the truck. Luc stayed back, apparently not bothered by the smell.

  “That means you, too. Get over here!” Claude yelled.

  “Claude. So harsh.”

  “Seriously, Edna, how’s he supposed to learn?”

  She fumbled with her pearls and looked at her wristwatch. “I’m sorry. I’m not myself at all. I dropped a dozen eggs on the kitchen floor this morning. And I’ve got to get to Shaw’s before all the supposed fresh produce is snapped up. We’re out of ketchup. Claude, you need a haircut. And shouldn’t Luc start his shift?”

  “Take it easy, Edna,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “Luc! Get on your shift!” he barked.

  Edna jumped up to plant a kiss on Luc’s cheek, missing by a mile. Luc gave them both an oversized smile and a stiff wave goodbye. Truly, the man was a mystery, Claude thought as Luc shuffled away.

  Edna grabbed Claude’s upper arm, her red fingernails digging into his bicep. “Claude. If that calf got the tick, where is the cow, the mother? Poor creatures.”

  “Don’t try to understand these dumb animals. It’s a waste of time. They go here and there, willy-nilly, and then one ups and dies. And now look what’s happened. You’ve lost a night’s sleep over it. This is no good, Edna.”

  “You’re right. I can’t seem to relax. My mind’s a jumble. And I’m so worried about him, Claude. You have no idea.”

  “Luc? He’s gonna be fine. You’ll see. C’mon. Let’s get you to the store.”

  Claude looked around the parking area and spied one of his crew sitting in his car reading the newspaper. He ushered Edna into the passenger seat. She smoothed her dress and primly crossed her legs, canting them to the side. Claude noticed she wore only one earring, and her knee protruded from an enormous hole in her stocking. She had on mismatched high heels. He’d never seen Edna this disheveled or more befuddled. “I’ll talk to Luc,” he assured her, patting her hand.

  “You will?”

  “I just said I would.”

  “But, will you … really?”

  The degree of sadness in her face startled Claude. He gently closed the car door and walked over to the driver side. “Jerry, take Edna on her errands. Shop with her. Then take her home and help her unload the groceries.”

  “Sure, boss. Shaw’s?”

  Claude nodded, then leaned in and lowered his voice. “And make sure she’s all settled in. Maybe suggest she take a nap.”

  Edna fussed with her hair, then completely unraveled her bun and rested her head on the side window as Jerry drove away. Luc was inside waiting for Claude, and he walked him back to his office.

  “What in Christ’s name happened up there?” Claude asked, sitting on the desk.

  “Mrs. Kimbrough. She messed me up.”

  “Whoa. What does the Saint have to do with this? Wait. Go back to yesterday. Nice and slow.”

  “I found the baby. Just where you said.”

  “Good. Then what?”

  “Well, see, I took my rifle with me. I tried for some rabbits … that’s not so bad, is it?”

  Claude sighed, because he’d probably do the same thing. “Fine. And?”

  “Mrs. Kimbrough heard the shots. She came up on her motorbike. With Pierre.”

  “My son?”

  “Oh no …,” Luc whimpered, covering his mouth.

  “Jesus. What?”

  “He cried.”

  “Why!?”

  “He saw the baby. All torn up.”

  Claude jumped off the desk and pushed Luc into a wall, pinning him by the shoulders. He didn’t want to hurt him, just scare him a little.

  “So, Edna knows about that moose calf. The Saint knows about that moose calf. And now my son? This is a huge problem, Luc. People talk. And I don’t like any talk about animals, alive or dead. Why is that?”

  Luc began to quiver—his shaking. Claude released him and sat back down.

  “Take a stab,” Claude prodded.

  “The business?”

  “Bingo. And what kind of business do I run?”

  “Trapping?”

  “Uh-huh. And what’s special about that?”

  “It’s not legal?”

  “Right. But why in the name of Satan didn’t you bury that thing yesterday like I ordered?”

  “I wanted to show you,” Luc whispered, aiming the words toward the floor.

  “Show me what?”

  “My idea?”

  “God help me. More?”

  “I remembered what you said once.”

  “This better be good.”

  “You told me to take chances.”

  “Lordy.”

  Luc finally lifted his head and, oddly, leveled his eyes directly at Claude. “I figured if I brought the baby back to the shed, we could use the skin. Like we do with the other animals. I wanted to show you. I can think of things, too. I’m not so dumb.”

  Luc’s mouth pouted, on the verge, holding back an emotion Claude did not want any part of. He could smell the man’s distress and it wasn’t pleasant.

  “Listen to me. I’m not your parent, but I’m trying to help. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t need your ideas. At least not yet. Maybe soon. But when I give an order, you’re to do it. So, here’s a new order: get that moose calf over to the dump right now.”

  “Not bury it—?”

  “Stop. Do exactly as I say. I want you back in less than an hour. I’ll cover for you. Go.”

  Claude punched Luc’s time card and walked the eleven minutes to the other side of the March to do some wood-chip loading, the very job he’d started on right out of high school. As he eased back into the rhythm of muscle memory, Claude considered the possibility that he’d not fully understood Luc’s limitations. Further, for some reason, Luc seemed to be suddenly growing a set of balls. And ironically, that very morning before Claude left for work, Celine had called him a person of staggerin
g limitations and also questioned the state of his “manhood”—code for testicles. Apparently, his self-professed confidence was about as real as a spider’s dick. He couldn’t think ahead, and she only had to point to their house—the holy grail of impulsivity—to prove her point. Finally, all he could muster with regard to “her” son’s memory loss was to be a bro-friend. In other words, leave all the heavy lifting to her, and more recently, the Saint. Then she sobbed for a while, after which she begged him to run to the store for milk, which he did. He’d left the house in a lousy mood because it seemed that the hallelujah-kumbaya the three of them had achieved the night before had not stuck. And he still needed a haircut.

  While thinking that his life had become some kind of perfected shit show, Claude had relaxed his vigilance. Something in the machinery bucked, and he staggered back. He shoved his goggles up and wiped his face of sweat. The din in the March suddenly felt unbearable, and he frantically searched his pockets for earplugs but found none. As if to punish him for giving his last pair to Luc the previous day, the noise now doubled in volume. Claude backed up against a wall and slid down to a sitting position. His head dropped to his knees. The drill in his ears, the wide tremor of his hands, and the way he couldn’t catch his breath, well, this was exactly what had happened to him the day of Pierre’s accident.

  When Claude had first arrived at the hospital, he looked right and left, frantic with the hope that Pierre would run up and grab him by the legs as he usually did. Instead, at the end of a hallway he saw a cluster of doctors and nurses. Hugging the wall was a stretcher with a small body lying beneath a sheet. Pierre’s sneakers hung at the end, pigeon-toed like always. When the sneakers began to twitch, a nurse stroked Pierre’s arm and the doctors leaned over his face. He then noticed the sneakers jiggle faster, as if a flame had been lit and Pierre was flinching from the heat. That’s when he heard his boy moan loudly.

  Claude had seen all this as he walked down the corridor with Edna. It seemed an endless trip during which an unimaginable future poured into his mind. If Pierre died now, he wouldn’t meet his first girlfriend, whom he’d love with an almost painful urgency. And he’d not marry a woman whom he’d try very hard to make happy but would fail many times. And then, he’d never get to experience that drop-to-his-knees relief when this wife decided to hang on in spite of all the agonies in their marriage. She’d love Pierre no matter what. Claude was certain of this. That is, if his boy lived.

  He stopped short of Pierre’s sneakers and stared. Edna took his arm. He thought she needed the support, but in fact her grip was surprisingly strong. He closed his eyes. She slid her hand down to his, then squeezed and pushed him a few inches forward. His hands began to shake. His breath went shallow. The siren started between his ears. When he opened his eyes, the space now seemed very large and too bright. He noticed a stripe on the white wall, a baby-blue color, and he wondered what that color was meant to make people like him feel. Ordinary people. People who didn’t want to be there but were, due to circumstances beyond their control. Or maybe circumstances they themselves had caused. Then Claude saw the blood, thick and congealed, covering every last strand on Pierre’s head. His left eye was shut. No color in the natural world came close to his boy’s painted eyelid. Claude sank to his knees and Edna went down with him.

  “Will he die?” Claude asked no one in particular, surprised that he could even speak.

  “No, not at all. We’ve got him lightly sedated so we can run tests and determine where he’s damaged. It looks worse than it is.” Someone said this, but Claude didn’t know who.

  “But his legs,” Claude whimpered from a crouched position.

  “That’s just a sympathetic reaction, Mr. Roy. It’s normal when the brain has been jostled.”

  He got through the next hours in an embarrassing trance, almost speechless, and was grateful that Edna took over. With an almost psychic ability to predict when Pierre needed help, she paged the nurses. When he needed to ask a question, Claude immediately ceded to Edna, because he had lost his voice. And just as her authority was evident to everyone in the room, his own weakness appalled him. But Pierre was released that day with a purple eye and a knock to his head. They promised that he’d be just fine.

  Claude sat on the floor of the March, waiting for the buzzing to subside and his heart to stop pounding. He clasped his fingers together, willing his hands to settle. He glanced up to see Luc’s boots scuffing toward him. Claude now remembered that at the hospital he’d concentrated only on those boots, afraid of what he might do if he looked into Luc’s eyes. While Claude walked the eleven minutes back to his office, he repeated the truest words he knew:

  I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there.

  WHEN THE LARGE human with black fur appeared with his metal container at the place where crows and buzzards scavenged on dead things, the moose had been waiting. The area smelled of death well past its time, and her calf had already reached that same state days earlier. Now, the large human with black fur pulled her calf out of the metal container. He flung him by the back legs and her calf separated, midair, into two pieces. The head landed in one direction, still visible to the moose. The rest, somewhere beyond. There was nothing more to be done. Even in this dismembered state, her calf would rise. The moose turned away.

  ALL THE LOONS

  CARS BACKED OUT OF PARKING SPOTS ON either side of Room 222 at the Loon Motel. Celine flopped onto her back and glanced at the clock—twenty minutes left till checkout time. Her feet always cramped after an orgasm, so she flexed her toes while trying to remember what was on the grocery list she’d forgotten when leaving the house earlier that morning. Milk. Obviously. Bread. No-brainer. Not much else came to mind. She’d swing by Shaw’s on her way home, and hopefully walking the aisles would prompt her. As a fallback, readymade dinners in the gourmet section would do fine for that evening. Especially if in the moment of shopping, the thought of cooking dinner felt as improbable as it did right now. Meat, casseroles, the oven. Plates, forks, the dishwasher. Paper-towel squares standing in for napkins. All of it, a drudgery. Anyway, who was she fooling? Celine hadn’t prepared more than a handful of meals in the last month. In fact, all household tasks she used to perform as a matter of rote, and even enjoyed, she now shirked. Celine felt a failure as a homemaker, an identity she’d always taken pride in. And as a wife, she was nothing more than a cruel harpy.

  Earlier that morning and before either of them had coffee, Celine had gone after Claude’s manhood. She laughed at and then derided the size of his penis, which in truth she quite admired. But oh, how she wanted him to suffer for everything that had gone wrong. Which was not an easy thing to accomplish, because Claude was the least repentant person in the state of Maine. He’d make the hardest cider out of rotten apples and remain cold sober. Plead the fifth. Innocent as a lifer on death row. Introspection was just another word for “are you kidding me?” In other words, Claude was all good, all day long. But that morning, as she’d shoved him into every dark corner of their marriage, Celine could tell he was at some sort of brink. Still, that didn’t stop her from nailing him in the only place he’d hurt. His dick.

  The walls at the Loon were no better than two sheets of cardboard glued together. She listened to the couple who’d just arrived next door discuss a puppy that had gone missing. And while they worried about Kelly the Labrador, Celine wondered where in hell her brand-new Dyson vacuum cleaner had gone to. The previous night, intending to take advantage of a rare surge of energy and clean the house, she’d searched every closet. AWOL. So, she rimmed the perimeter of each room collecting any dust bunny bigger than a golf ball. Claude trailed behind, pointing out those she’d missed. Meanwhile, Pierre, after losing a coin toss to Claude, busied himself with five loads of laundry. And Pierre being Pierre, his color sorting was intuitive, his choice of water temperature spot-on. And folding, a wonder of origami precision. Now, rhythmic moaning from next door had supplanted any concern for poor
Kelly, and Celine doubted she’d make it to Shaw’s. And though she suddenly remembered where the Dyson was (the garage, for some reason), how in the world was she going to convince Claude that his dick was just fine?

  Water began to flow in the bathroom with characteristic sputtering, the Loon’s pressure notoriously unpredictable at peak morning use. First a trickle, then intermittent pulses, and finally a middling stream. She would have liked to join Jim for a quick rinse, but showering separately (when he mentally eased himself back to Sandra-land) was just one of the many rules he insisted on. Such as, the first and third Tuesday of each month. Two hours. Max. Pay in cash. Only. No phone calls. Ever. If either of them couldn’t make it, wait fifteen minutes, then leave. And, park in the back. Always.

  Jim walked out of the bathroom naked, with a towel draped around his shoulders. He stepped into boxers and drew up the blackouts to let some light in.

  “Why aren’t you dressed? Time’s almost up.”

  “Let’s stay another hour,” she suggested. The Loon was that kind of motel—pleased to accommodate those renting by the hour.

  “Why? What for?” he asked.

  “Why not?”

  “A dozen reasons, starting with rules.”

  “So overraaaaated,” she said, howling a yawn.

  “Do you hear yourself? I mean about the rules.”

  “You sound like Claude.”

  “Don’t be like this, Celine,” he warned, poking his legs into jeans and gathering up his keys and wallet off the nightstand.

  “Now you really sound like him,” she said, turning away and scrunching the covers up to her chin. “Claude’s rigid. Don’t be like that.”

  “That’s a cheap shot.”

  “I don’t care. Please.”