It’s a good idea, and she knows it. She’s pumped.
I mean, we shouldn’t have to, she says. But between you and I, we’re dealing with morons here, aren’t we?
That’s when Sheila says that she’s going to be on a desk job for an unspecified time. And just as the weather is getting really nice.
MAY
Mike says: Hell no. It’s not a demotion, Lester. You’re just getting some on-the-job training. They should have – well, anyway. It’ll just get you up the ladder faster.
It’s comforting when he calls her Lester, his old nickname for her when they were kids, when she could forget that she had to do the dishes and mop the floor and fold the laundry, because she was the girl, and they could all be brothers together, she and Mike and Paulie and Al Junior. Though it was better to be the girl when Al Junior wanted to beat on her, and Paulie and Mike would stop him.
But better not to be a girl, when Al Junior tried to do those other things, which again Paulie and Mike stopped him.
Mike is going to have two sons. Jackson, the toddler, and the new baby, about to be born, is going to be a boy too. She doesn’t know about Paul or Al: hasn’t heard from them for years.
Family barbecue is why she’s over at Mike’s. But it turns out it’s Mother’s Day. She should have known: Every freakin’ holiday, it seems, Mike and Jonelle invite everyone over, or go to Jonelle’s family. So Jonelle’s parents are here, and her sister with her hubby and kids, and a couple of aunts and cousins – the whole shebang. It’s not like Mike’s house is that large, either, but he does have a deck and a yard, and the unfinished basement.
And she gets invited to everything, now.
There are too many people, though. She can’t really talk to Mike, he’s barbecuing, and Jonelle is doing things in the kitchen, though the other adults keep saying, hey, what are you doing? Sit down, put your feet up.
Jonelle looks ready to pop. She’s wearing a striped T-shirt dress that hugs her like a sock. Les can’t look at her, at the huge curve of her belly, her breasts, but can’t look away either.
She’s not sure if she’s supposed to help watch Jackson or what. There are a lot of adults around, but nobody seems to be controlling the boy. The older kids have gone to the basement – shame on such a nice day – nothing but an old couch and large-screen TV, where the kids are playing with the Wii, down there. Jackson runs back and forth so quickly. The grandmother is sort of looking after him, but there’s another baby, and the grandmother is carrying that one around.
Its head is a bit wobbly. It locks glances with her for an instant, over the grandmother’s shoulder, like it’s going to say something, and a gob of white goo leaps from its mouth and lands on the back of the grandmother’s dress.
You’ve got something. . . . she says, and the grandmother says, Goodness. Here, can you hold her for a sec while I wipe that off?
The baby’s eyes open wide, as if she’s been given a maximum fine for something she’s going to pretend she knows nothing about. Les holds her carefully a foot away from herself, but in this position her arms start to ache quite quickly.
Oh, there’s my milk-pig, one of the cousins says, and scoops the baby out of Leslie’s grasp.
Okay. That was kind of abrupt.
She looks around and sees that Jackson has got hold of the bread knife that someone has left carelessly on the patio table. Accident waiting to happen. She goes after him. What are these people thinking? But nobody’s paying attention.
She catches him by the shoulders, says, Give me the knife, please, Jackson.
No, he says.
They’re not strict enough with him. She sees that all the time.
She grasps the handle, carefully, mindful of the long, serrated blade, tries to pry his fingers up. Now his face goes red, his eyes bulge, absolutely pig-stupid defiant. He tugs. One of them is going to get a nasty cut.
Give it to me, she says, firmly.
Jackson screams.
She wraps her hands now around his on the handle and squeezes, hard, harder. His face changes. The pitch of his scream changes – the source of the sound moves from his head to his chest. But she feels his fingers loosen, relaxes her hands. The knife clatters to the board floor of the deck.
It has taken only an instant. But now suddenly all the previously oblivious eyes are on her. Conversation chopped off.
Jackson runs to Jonelle, butts his head into her belly, so that Les winces, but Jonelle lifts him to her chest, cuddles him. Jackson’s howls and sobs wreaking havoc on the neighbourhood.
All around her, from the vantage of the deck, she can see the rows of houses with their thrusting decks, their flagrant, new-leafed trees, their tall board fences, their glittery, staring windows. Their shining little cars.
APRIL
When she’s moved to the suburban beat of Sedona Hills, on the hilly south side of the city, she can’t believe her luck. To be out of traffic, to be released from the endless circuit of writing out parking tickets and clipping them under wipers; checking complaints of uninsured cars, of noise, of garbage, which, in the downtown area were usually moves in some sort of inter-neighbour aggression; of hustling along the street people and vagabond kids that sprouted palely in the business area and park once the temperatures rose above freezing, and who were high on something, fresh air at the least, and verbally or even physically punchy. To be released from the layers of dust and grit that seemed to blow down from the surrounding hills all year round and form a tar-like slurry in the downtown streets and sidewalks.
To be assigned a vehicle! And to shuck the heavy padded waterproof navy coat, which never fit, too tight in the upper sleeves, so that her arms stuck out like a penguin’s flippers.
She had to buy the uniform out of her salary, a deduction each paycheque, but she doesn’t mind. She wishes she’d had a uniform all of her life – it saves hard decisions every day. She likes the beige shirt, crisp as new twenties, and the tan pants, which are ample, not girly. You’re lucky, with your colouring, with your auburn hair, one of the other officers says, you can wear beige and tan. But she doesn’t care about that appearance stuff – only that she’s neat and appropriate, that she doesn’t have to worry anymore about that.
She likes the anonymity, which some of the others complain about. She’s not out here to make friends. She wants to do a good job; she wants to help make the city a good place for people to live and do business. But she doesn’t need to make friends.
The uniform helps her do her job, which isn’t about making people like her.
She’s not completely sure what she is supposed to do, though, once she’s moved up to the Sedona Hills jurisdiction. Watering days, she knew, and animal control, though that was usually handled by the special branch. Parking, though here there are broad streets and large backyards and she hasn’t seen anything yet like a stale-dated license plate, or only on a vintage Mustang up on blocks in a driveway. Some kid rebuilding it maybe. She hadn’t been sure if that was an infraction, but when she came back the next week the wheels were off, so moot point.
She’s worried about her productivity. If she isn’t pulling notices and fines, she’s not going to keep this sweet beat – she knows that. Even though Larry, the other officer assigned to this neighbourhood, says, wait a month; things get going in spring. Use your time to familiarize yourself with the layout.
She knows she has to do more than coast, though. If you aren’t moving forward, the current is taking you backwards. That’s something she read in a book of Mike’s, one of many that he’s intended to read but probably hasn’t. I’ve skimmed it, he always says. He never liked reading.
Mike’s working hard, though. He’s two years younger than her, manager at one of the big box electronics stores. When she’d run into him, looking for a computer – well, she knew he worked there, just hadn’t seen him in a while – she had been impressed. Good haircut, his skin cleared up, suit jacket and tie. Yup.
Dad would be proud of you, s
he’d said, and then regretted it, because Mike had made a face, and she’d remembered then that was why they hadn’t talked for a few years, their arguments over how they each thought about their father, the arguments that had bubbled out and surprised her, when they had been taking care of their father’s stuff, after he had died.
Well, disagreements. Basically, Mike had turned out to have a lot of grudges against their dad, which wasn’t fair. Yeah, he was strict. But he’d had to raise four kids after their mother abandoned them. And yeah he drank a little too much, the last few years, but he had lost his job too young for retirement, too old to get another one. And then Gran had died. And Paul and Al Junior had vanished, too – Al was in jail, last she heard, but Paul just never contacted them.
Mike had wanted to rehash everything, to try to find their mother. Get the real story, he said. But that was just stupid. It was over. What their dad had said was true. It had to be.
So she hadn’t talked to Mike for five years and then she had gone into that store, maybe to see him, maybe not.
And then almost said the wrong thing. But how was she to know? People were funny. In any instant you could do or say something that seemed okay, and it would turn out that someone nailed you for it. How could anyone ever know?
So she had accidentally-on-purpose bumped into Mike again, and he had invited her over, to meet his wife, his son. So, okay. An agreement to disagree, they’d had to settle for that. Because Mike was still bitter: He wanted to sit in the evenings with a beer and talk about how Dad had beat on them and how Gran had ratted them out all the time, knowing Dad would beat the crap out of them. Even though she gave them lots of affection, did the extras like buying them the clothes they wanted, not just the cheapest, and baking cookies and birthday cakes.
Of course, you didn’t get beat on so much, Mike had said one night, because you were the girl. That’s when she had said: We will have to agree to disagree, Mike. Because her blood just boiled when he said that crap.
Anyway, it’s nice to go to Mike’s, to have family. Their dad never got to see grandkids. In some way, maybe, she’s doing it for him.
Mike is all about rising in his work, which of course he should. And about improving himself, improving his life. Which is good, but he should read those books. They’re really interesting: They make you see that if you don’t work the hardest, be the strongest, you’ll get beaten down. That’s just the way it is. It’s nature.
She needs to work harder. To figure out her new neighbourhood, to figure out how, in these clean open streets, she can make her work stand out.
There it is on the map she studies every evening, the little squiggle that is the lane, dangling from the adjoining street like a loose thread. She has never driven down it, though she has passed the opening a few times, off the side street. On the map she can see that it’s backed by the kinds of houses with complex, spreading roof structures, and pools.
She can see, too, on the map, thanks to those Google photographs, what the lane contains: parked cars. And that’s a problem. She knows very well, from her previous assignment, that there is no parking in lanes. Fire trucks and ambulances can’t get through if there’s parking. And that’s what parking bylaws are all about: access.
So someone, Larry maybe, or her predecessor, didn’t notice, or turned a blind eye. But a rule is a rule.
She’ll go on a Saturday, on her own time. She’ll take an extra booklet with her, because on a Saturday, she knows this from visiting Mike in his neighbourhood, there are going to be a shitload of cars.
She’s going to make a splash, this week.
She parks her vehicle in the lane, but has to walk along Calvin Street, which has no parking, to approach each residence’s front door.
Twenty-three houses. None with a garage in front, or a driveway. Because there is no access from the street, due to some anomaly in the construction of this subdivision. Twenty-three houses, along this stretch of Calvin Street, where the back lane access is the only parking available to the residents. Twenty-three houses that are obviously exempt from the bylaw prohibiting parking in alleyways and access lanes. Of which the residents are very aware. And that is why the twenty-three tickets resulted in a shit-storm of angry phone calls and drop-ins.
She pressed her uniform the night before, though it’s made of some resilient fibre that pretty well conforms to its original shape even after being pummelled in a top-loading washer. She takes along the stack of letters in their municipal letterhead envelopes. They are all the same, addressed to Dear Homeowner, printed out multiply, signed individually. They all contain the apology, which Sheila in HR helped her write.
She had thought they would be mailed. But no.
She parks her car – her own car, not the city vehicle – in the lane. She walks to the upper end of the pertinent section of Calvin Street. She walks up the first set of steps. Rings the doorbell. Waits.
Her collar is tight and abrasive under her chin. Focus on that. Not the constriction in her chest, the wobbly feeling in her knees, like their hydraulics have been broached. Not the sensation that a plug has been pulled in her gut.
The sky is the colour of an empty blue bowl, and the bushes and trees almost purple, swollen with the expectation of leaf. She tries again.
THE FLOWERS OF THE DRY INTERIOR
IN LATE MAY THE LIGHT IS JUST RIGHT: the sun a little to the north, the ceiling high and clear, still, tempered by moisture in the air. A cool bluish light. In the morning, as she walks, the shadows fall to the southwest, purple, velvet-textured.
She walks across rangeland, high above the river. The hills here are folded and scoured by wind. They are like stiff batter: time their cook. Only the north-facing gullies support trees. The path she walks along is an old cattle path. It winds through her property and the next and next. She follows it, ignores the Private Property signs, bends and straddles to pass through where the barbed wire is stretched by decades of opening to admit foot travellers. (One of her cousins owns this land: He does not mind her crossing it, she thinks.)
The dog lollops ahead of or behind her, scooting under the barbed wire, leaving tufts of buff hair for the songbird’s nests. Mourning cloak butterflies, scattered like fall leaves along the shaded sections of the path, sipping the dew that has not yet evaporated, drinking the soil’s moisture, now rise, fluttering weakly when she disturbs them.
She’s a ground-watcher, a noter of what is at the feet. Her landmarks are horizontal: deadfalls, a large granite egg, half-buried in the earth. (The granite egg of sufficient size that a woman could be curled up inside, ready to hatch.) The flora: pasture sage, rabbit brush, antelope bush.
It’s the season of yellow and creamy flowers, along the path. Wishy-washy colours, she has always thought. Insipid. Cinquefoil and wild strawberries, now, where the ground is boggy, decorated with cow pats. Milk vetch, Thompson’s paintbrush, the pale cousin of the plant they used to call Indian paintbrush. Lemonweed. Alumroot, an astringent bitter herb her grandmother ground up and used to treat cancer. It didn’t work. Curious that the notion seems to persist: Root out the cancer with dreadful poisons. The nastier, the more efficacious. Near a stand of aspens, a glade of false Solomon’s seal. She’s never been able to discover which is false: the Solomon, or the seal, or the plant.
Field locoweed, poisoner of cattle. Death camas, little cones of delicate starry cream-coloured blooms.
An anthill, heaped segments of pine needle, black and burnt umber, and when she looks closer, the ants themselves, the black abdomen and rusty-orange thorax and head, moving on the surface. The anthill alive. If she were to give it a poke with her walking stick, they’d all boil out, smelling acrid, metallic. Formic acid. As a child, she had believed that if you buried a dead bird in an anthill, the ants would strip it to the bone. You’d have a nice bird skeleton. Had her cousins told her that?
The Saskatoon bushes, beaded with hard green berries, unripe. From a tall bush, warning chirps, and she sees the hummingbird, pe
rched, then darting past her, swoops so quick she can’t follow it. A buzz, a whir, at her eye, her ear. It’s a routine: This fellow attacks her in this spot every time she comes by. He’s comic, a miniature Messerschmitt. Comedy located in scale. Tragedy, too. The size or duration of something, but always in proportion to something else. Our expectations. Our sense of the construction of the world. A child’s sense of a year. Her dog’s lifespan. Hers. The age of the trees, the soil, the hills. The infinite. Beginnings are not recognizable as beginnings, except afterward. Endings not recognized before they arrive.
IN EARLY APRIL she begins to make this walk, when the ice has thawed from the deer paths, the snow has retreated to pockets on the north cheeks of boulders and slopes. Winter clings at this elevation, three thousand feet. Then the metallic glint of buttercups among the desiccated grass, the funeral-bouquet scent of the mission bells. The sky washed, threaded with the scree, scree of kestrels. The exposed granite and limestone shelves, lichen feeding on raw stone.
Everything new to the dog, in its second spring.
She didn’t remember later whether she had tripped over a root or vine or whether the machinery of her brain had hiccupped, short-circuited its gyroscope function. She had left the main path because the dog had left her: something else – chipmunk, marmot, grouse – pulling him away. The one drawing the other, all connected, a chain. Then the disconnect, herself suddenly prone, several feet lower than the path, head lower than her heels. Her hands had met some rocky edge and her palms were torn open, burning and throbbing. Iron taste of blood.
She had fallen partway into a large old rosebush, which had broken her fall. She heard her clothes tear as she extricated herself on hands and knees. Back down the path, the dog appearing suddenly at her heel: He’d missed the whole thing. One knee not right: a catch, a dislocation, that sent her limping.
On the road she had met her cousin Sim in his pickup truck. He had braked too suddenly, the flattening of shock on his face through the open window. Holy moly, Lilah. What’d you do?
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