Steel Animals

by SK Dyment

  “I cannot move my hand,” she tells him.

  “That’s all right, a spring or a mechanism inside it has been damaged by the force of the fall. But they’re both all right,” he tells her, and he takes her hands in his own.

  “Who are you?” Wanda asks him, suddenly confused.

  “I am the man who found you on the Schilthorn when you were just a little girl. After you ran away from your parents. Do you have to always run away?”

  “I told them I was running. They wouldn’t listen to me. They left my cat behind at the chalet that they rented, and then we were all going to the Schilthorn, but I wanted to find the cat. I still want to find that cat.”

  “You lost your first hand that day,” says Gus.

  “Yes, but I was given this hand. It’s as heavy, as heavy as a club. How did you find me?”

  “I don’t know,” says Gus. “Everyone was looking for you, and I was very good on skis. I think that I found you because I was as lost as you were, because I was not much more than a boy myself. I picked you up, and somehow, we made it back to a ski cabin. Slowly, you began to become warm in my arms. Doctors came, and after a while, I heard you were not dead.”

  “What did you do, to put the breath back into me? Because I feel snow all around me, and I am afraid of walking on.”

  “I did this,” says Gus, and he put his lips against Wanda and breathes his minty breath into her mouth.

  He places his lips a second time on hers and she feels the tenderness of the young boy who saved her in the snow. Around her, the blizzard is slowly beginning to subside.

  “I am not going to freeze and die?” she asks him.

  “Not today. Today I think you will live.”

  Gus takes her hand, and together they walk to a pharmacy for bandages. Wanda finds she is limping, and Gus buys her a cane. He dresses her wounds. They walk hand in hand through the park, talking like two children who, having met by coincidence, decide in opposition to the rules of the adult world to become faithful and lifelong friends.

  The next morning, they will go to a clinic. Wanda has torn some ligaments. They will heal.

  Olesya begins to houseclean, opening the patio doors now that there is no baby planning to crawl out. The baby is somewhere with Vespa, and because everyone trusts Vespa, because everyone even knows her credit card number and has access to her bank statements, no one is worried that the baby is not okay. The welfare of Arnica has not even occurred to protective Gus, who has rented a room a floor below the one where Ben and Swan are making love, so as to make illicit love with Wanda. It is painted by a local muralist, and has images of young, slender men with bodies like Swan and feet like Mercury chasing each other around the walls.

  33.

  OLESYA SIGNED THE FORMS, listened to a small speech, and then the patronizing bail officer told her to behave herself. Soon, she is in her apartment again, pouring a coffee for herself and looking around a space that no longer holds relevance for her.

  Olesya wonders why she punctuates every new thought and topic with, “According to my therapist,” instead of according to herself. No matter. She is free, despite her mild depression.

  In comparison, Arnica Montana is happier than a neon pink rooster-poodle. The wind buffets against her, and she is blinking her eyes in a way that makes everything seem like a movie filmed through sun-dappled lids. She feels safe in the car seat of Vespa’s new station wagon, and when Vespa pulls onto the I-87 and then the New York State Route 17, Arnica is delighted to be on a country trip.

  Two days earlier, Jackie had not returned to their pop-out couch, which had caused Vespa to go looking for her at the studio, where they sometimes shared a mattress on the floor. She noticed new tire tracks on the floor, a visiting motorcycle that had come and gone, and a spark plug that had been replaced. The old one was lying in their garbage, and Vespa could not identify it, only that it had been changed at their shared garage. She drank some gin that her brother kept to splash on cuts and fell asleep on the mattress feeling wounded. She slept dreamlessly until dawn. She had not seen Jackie since, although she suspected she was with Mimi, who rode in on the night of Olesya’s welcoming party and demanded to see Jackie’s Flying Squirrel, but only if Jackie would come riding on her real Squirrel first. It made Vespa extremely jealous, but Vespa had not actually been there. Vespa had been making love in the storage room with Shinny.

  She needs to talk to Jackie. She wishes Jackie would enter the modern world and carry a phone or a pager. Her eyes mist. She would not like a Jackie that carries a pager. She likes the Jackie that mends socks and cuts mittens out of her sweaters. So, if Jackie is so resourceful, if Jackie is such a called-upon and hotshot mechanic, why had twelve thousand dollars passed through Vespa’s bank account. And what about the two thousand British pounds still sitting there? Why is Vespa using it to buy Shinny’s roses when she doesn’t even know where it came from in the first place? Who is the anonymous donor that had dropped the money into to Olesya’s bail fund, just at the time when it would look best to the press? Why is Jackie always broke one day, and going to a pricey sushi restaurant the very next? And Ben too?

  Both of them were now ordering parts and making unimaginable expenses that a few days before they had been complaining they could never afford.

  Vespa is beginning to suspect Jackie has not only robbed something again but that she has involved Ben in the process. But why be so suspicious? Is she a suspicious woman by nature? Why doubt the ones she loves? Is she just losing her mind?

  She parks the car in a small, pretty little town by the Hudson River intending to buy some strawberry formula for the baby and a carrot juice or perhaps even a caffeinated drink for herself. She realizes she has parked in front of a bank, and without covering her face, she walks in and demands a small envelope of ten thousand dollars in small unmarked bills from the teller.

  Her adrenaline is raging, but the ease of it surprises her. The teller replies that this is ridiculous, and asks her why everything has to be small. Could she not make do with some larger notes? Vespa, a reasonable woman who has already been questioning the order of things, admits that she could probably break the larger notes at some other bank. The teller hands her an envelope as if she has already prepared it for such a robbery, which she probably has. As Vespa leaves, she remembers that she forgot to tell the teller she had a gun. It would have been a lie anyway, and it is wrong to tell a lie, even to a stranger. Telling the truth is a better, or the best policy, as her mother had always said. Then you can remember what you told people the second time they ask. As she is thinking these things, she is met by the familiar face of Mimi, waiting for her on the sidewalk outside the bank.

  “Mimi!” says Vespa, remembering that she had not stopped to rob a bank, but to buy a soft drink and some formula for the baby in the car. Mimi says, “Now you are lucky we caught you when we did.”

  “I stopped here to buy a soda pop. I must have feathers in my head.”

  So, Mimi is not with Jackie; how wrong of her to be so suspicious.

  “Hey, I’m not a mind reader,” says Mimi, “but I saw everything, and there is no way you are going to walk out of this parking lot let alone drive out of town without our help.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “I want half the cut,” says Mimi, cutting to the quick, “on the condition that you get off Scott Squirrel free.”

  “Well, not if we stand here chatting about it on the sidewalk I won’t,” she comments.

  “I can take care of it,” says Mimi, and her eyes bore into Vespa’s own.

  It’s best to be direct, or that’s what my mother always said, Vespa thinks to herself. Shrugging, she digs into the envelope and hands Vim what seems to add up to a solid five thousand dollars.

  “Good enough,” says Mimi.

  Her superior tone irks Vespa. She still thinks Mimi is having an affair with Jackie,
but it isn’t the time nor the place to talk. And no one can be two places at once.

  “Help!” cries a young woman, and she runs out of the bank. It is the teller. Vespa, feeling intuitively friendly towards the woman, takes a step over to her to see what is wrong.

  “Oh, it’s you! You’re still here.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re just leaving,” says Vespa in a resigned way, remembering that it is because of her.

  The teller runs back into the bank.

  “I forgot to pick up an iced coffee,” Vespa tells Arnica in her shoulder-check mirror as she heads back out to State 17, “and a strawberry formula for you,” she shouts into the back of the car.

  Arnica laughs and blinks her eyes.

  The Scott Flying Squirrel speeds behind her with what Vespa at first perceives to be a troubled exhaust system and dirty fuel lines. She quickly realizes it is only a mist of evil and supernatural vapours. It blurs past her station wagon and disappears, leaving the held-up bank to find help on its own.

  “Now, what were the chances of running into that woman in a sleepy little town?” Vespa asks the baby.

  She drives through the rolling landscape with the money sliding back and forth on the seat at her side. Freed by the background gurgles of the baby, a buried memory surfaces, and she turns it over in her mind, checking for its veracity in the same way she stared at her balance slip after Jackie had deposited that extra two thousand pounds. It may be something to tell Ben. She glances back at Arnica and they exchange smiles.

  Vespa feels herself at Arnica’s age and remembers vividly riding like the wind with her mother on a large motorcycle, her little legs straddling the gas tank. She is held in front, inside her mother’s jacket and between her mother’s arms, while her mother’s large gloved hands grip the steering. Together, with her mother, they were running away. From what? From whom? Where was Ben? When was her mother not running away? Would Ben even know? Was she even allowed to tell? The questions trouble her all the way back to Olesya’s.

  She parks the station wagon, takes the baby out of the car seat, and stops by a convenience store for iced coffee and strawberry formula. Moments later, she lets herself in through Olesya’s door. Olesya is extended, naked, on the comfortable rug in front of the television. She fights a moment of shock, feeling her personal space invaded by a stranger with no clothes.

  “Olesya, what are you doing here?”

  “Come sit down,” says Olesya, patting the couch.

  Finally, Vespa smiles and the room becomes more relaxed. She is, in fact, a little ashamed of her original reaction; it is, after all, Olesya’s place. Arnica begins to cry.

  “Hush!” Vespa gives Arnica the new bottle full of formula.

  “Look,” says Olesya, “there’s a robbery on the news! And look at her getup!”

  A bank video plays and then replays on the screen. There is even an outdoor camera. The caught-in-the-act videos shows a woman in riding leathers and forties-style clothing pulling away on old Condor 500cc motorcycle with a baby between her thighs, auburn hair flowing out from an old-style leather biking helmet and aviator-type goggles.

  “Wow! With two videos, they should have no trouble finding anyone who robbed that bank,” says Olesya. “What was she thinking?”

  “She looks exactly like my mother,” says Vespa.

  “Well, technically she looks a little young to be your mother, don’t you think? But the bike and the leathers do look to be from another era!” says Olesya. She flips the channels, adding, “I hope she just vanishes, just like I’d like to do.” To Olesya’s dismay, the same woman is on three different news stations.

  The next day, the fantastic goggles and flowing hair are featured in several newspapers. Swan brings them to Ben with his morning coffee. He clips the photos out and puts them in the pocket over his heart where they are safe. It is his mother, it is Vespa’s mother, it is Mommy. No one else has a Condor 500; no one else has that auburn hair.

  He and Swan have finished tumbling. There is nothing left but to go out into the world and discover new sensations, and then to unite again in secret. They have worn each other smooth, and for now, they are no longer touching each other’s surfaces. Try as they may, they slip away from each other like two round stones. Ben presses his hand against Swan’s, and Swan sets off in happy flight. Ben re-examines the newspaper clipping. There is a roar of an engine on the street. Wanda pulls up beside him on the Triumph. She is carrying a cane and has a bandage over her eye.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I fell down,” says Wanda, and she drops her eyes. “It seems I fell down pretty hard.”

  34.

  RUDY THOUGHT THE EMAIL was from Natalia. And he couldn’t understand why she would have hurt him in this way. He knew that Camelia had visited New York, and that they had met, but he thought the two women had had a pleasant time. He had not considered that they were plotting to extort him.

  Natalia had written a quick note he read as “Matriarchal deer slaps,“ causing him to wonder if his anagram coding method was the brightest way for the two of them to exchange ideas. He soon translated it to read, “Camelia parties hard,” and he relaxed, dipping his hand-carved fishing lure in and out of a nearby stream. It was impossible to imagine that the two of them had somehow turned against him. He composed a letter and then sent it to Natalia, begging her to investigate the source of his threat-to-disclose email. Then he added in the most direct terms, with tears welling in his eyes, that Natalia must tell him if she no longer loved him and wished to break off their plans for a future.

  “You must come back,” Natalia responded from an Internet café. “How could I possibly love you if you are not here with me. I am not a detective, but I will investigate the threat you received, as you have requested me to do. This isn’t my job, but you are busy eating pine nuts and berries, and psyching out the local wildlife with your endless poetry and staring.

  “‘I have lost friends,’” she concluded, “‘some by death … others through sheer inability to cross the street.’”

  Rudy did not recognize the quote was Woolf. He thought Natalia was more Dorothy Parker, and he was more Kerouac and Thoreau.

  Later in the day, Camelia sends him a note, saying, “Rudy, come back to New York!” which Rudy encrypted before he had even opens it, thinking he was unencrypting a response from his beloved.

  He reads, “Codebreak murky, town coy!” and presumes Camelia is having a good time. He now feels a little uncertain as to what a “coy town” has to do with him.

  Is she just bragging? He wonders if Natalia’s warnings were correct, and Camelia, who has just offered a multi-million dollar package to lawyers handling the Condo Owner’s lawsuit, is partying to the point of being unfit for her position.

  Is this happening while the lawyer is preparing documents for Alaska to consider, so that she can sign the right papers, the lawyer can be paid, and the Condo Owners can have more money dropped in their laps than they had ever dared imagine?

  Preparing a small pack, Rudy hikes the treacherous trail he came in on back out of the heart of the Adirondacks to the place where he has parked his car. He drives it up the New York State route 8 to a nearby town and continues driving until he reaches a survivalist-oriented gun shop. Stopping, he buys a hundred dollars in blasting caps, a case of firecrackers, ten boxes of fire-starters, and three hundred energy bars in designer camo-colours. The cashier takes little notice of him. By sunset, he is back at a temporary camp inside the park boundaries, along a remote deer trail where he is certain to be undisturbed. He sleeps dreamlessly, and before the sky has time to gather clouds and strike him dead, Rudy packs camp and moves on.

  By sunset the next day, he is back in his treetop heaven and has set twenty-four traps around the only place where he has ever felt truly safe, all marked in ways only Rudy can identify. The traps are nothing like the little no
ose-snares he has set for squirrels in the past, or the elaborate commitments he has driven others to make in the boardroom. They are tin cans full of explosives that will be activated by a footfall. There is a message waiting for Rudy, but he already knows what it says.

  The account has been traced. Natalia is no monkey, and she has not betrayed Rudy nor sat on her hands wondering what to do. The account belongs to one Didactic Motor Company, and it is under the trust of a series of lawyers and the minimum handful of shareholders required to give it the same corporate protectionism Turner enjoyed for decades. In other words, there is no one who is responsible or in charge.

  Undeterred, Natalia went to Didactic Motor Company to see the individuals involved and met a hostile and grubby woman with tattoos on her arms who only said her name was Jackie before ducking back under a welder’s helmet to patch a Norton Monocoque with the sudden flare of an arc. A friendly man about Rudy’s age emerged from the back, and Natalia had noticed he had scar tissue that ran down his neck and disappeared into his jumpsuit. He told her that if she was certain the alternator on her Harley was broken, then he doubted she could have driven it right over to his shop. Before he had a chance to ask her what year and type of Harley, she ran back out into the street.

  “His shop,” was the key word Natalia was looking for. She quickly ran down the street and hopped into the first taxi she could wave. If it was of any assistance to Rudy, the man that she spoke with was called Ben.

  35.

  RUDY NOW FEELS CERTAIN his blackmailer is the boyfriend who first taught him love and loyalty, Ben. He is in a fit again, a rage of heartbreak and fury. Natalia receives a notice from Rudy to take a poem by hand to Didactic Motor Company.