by Emily Brewes
She seemed unperturbed, continuing to crop and chew and consider this strange not-grass thing she’d come upon. Even when her calves crept closer and started nuzzling around my legs and feet, making sure I was in no way edible, she did nothing but watch. A few end-of-season flies buzzed lazily around her ears as they swivelled, scanning for predator sounds.
But not for me. We humans had been gone long enough that they’d forgotten about us.
Were I craftier, or maybe just more opportunistic, I’d have tried to kill one of them for food. I was desperate enough that I didn’t think my total lack of weapons to be an obstacle. Perhaps I was starved to the point that, to my addled brain, the notion didn’t seem utterly insane. What I did know was that I was so weak that sitting up had become a real chore. There’d be no venison on my menu any time soon.
In time, they moved on. Not one of them so much as glanced back to make sure I wasn’t following. I didn’t even have energy to be insulted.
HOME FOR A REST
OLIVIA FOUND ME the next day, laid up on the floor of a derelict roadside tavern just south of Trout Creek proper. With effort, I remembered going for a rummage in the general store across the street. Certain details stood out. In the back, at the bottom of a mountain of damp, empty cardboard boxes was a case of candy. Hundreds of tiny milk carton–shaped packages of pelletized gum, in grape and orange and cherry. Each white carton bore an image of its flavouring fruit, anthropomorphized with cartoon faces grinning manically.
Back to the tavern, which I remembered more clearly. The inside of the place was all done in dark pine, heavily varnished so that it looked laminated in plastic. Walls, floor, tables, chairs, and bar top were all made of the stuff. It reminded me of the place we sometimes went for Sunday breakfast when Mum went to church. They served stacks of thick pancakes with real maple syrup.
There was nothing in the taps, so I’d helped myself to whatever dregs remained littered along the bar rail. I put a funnel in the mouth of a bottle of Gordon’s that had a couple of shots left in it, filled it with a bit of everything that was left. Then I spent as little time as possible throwing it back. I had passed out from a combination of drink and exhaustion, curled up around one of the bar stools.
Maybe I was attempting suicide, albeit in a delirious and unintentional way. I’d not eaten a thing since … for three or four days, anyway. And that on top of a lifetime of malnourishment. Food scarcity. Starvation. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I just wanted to be done.
She stood, outlined by the light from the open front door: broad-shouldered and lean with a serious, square jaw. She had a pack on her back and a newel post held like a club in her hands. She woke me by nudging my tortured kidneys with the toe of her boot.
“Hey! Get up!”
“Mmpf,” I protested.
“Who are you?” There was a creak of leather gloves shifting grip on varnished wood.
Through happy chance, I managed to lever myself to sit up in one smooth motion. Perhaps too suddenly. She shifted weight to her back foot and held her club at the ready to deal with any funny business. A sharp inhalation when I turned my head indicated she’d seen the brand on my face.
“What d’you want here?”
“Wanna be left alone. Die in peace.”
“I can help you with that.”
When I squinted at her, she clarified, “The dying part.”
Can’t say the exact moment I knew it was her. Something in her voice rang deep bells of familiarity that couldn’t be immediately placed. She reminded me of my mother, only with a far sturdier build. Mum had always been slight, which belied her bullish physical strength.
Maybe it wasn’t until she leaned on one of the stools, and the light fell on her face. There was Olivia, the petulant teenager clothed in the flesh of a middle-aged woman. A trio of deep lines scored her brow, and her mouth was forged into a straight, narrow line.
“If you’re the kind of killer the Underground is making these days, maybe the human race is finally done for.”
After a laugh that led to a solid minute of coughing and throat clearing, I was able to retort, “With people like you leaving, how else could things shake out?”
“People like me?”
“Jesus, Olivia. It’s Jesse. I’m Jesse.”
“Am I supposed to know who that is?”
I felt a moment of cold dread that I was wrong. Maybe this wasn’t my sister. Wishful thinking and starvation just made it look like it could be her. Or maybe there was nobody with me at all. At least then I could stop worrying about being beaten to death.
“They took my papers,” I mumbled. “How can I prove who I am?”
“Jesse Vanderchuck has a scar from appendix surgery that looks like a snake swallowing an elephant,” she said.
My hands went to town, stripping away layers of stolen clothing to expose the very scar. When I looked up to see if she saw it, too, there were tears in her eyes.
“Jesse. You got old.”
I pulled my shirts back down and my coat closed.
“So did you. And you’re still a pain.”
“Shut up, jerk,” she said, reaching a hand down to help me from the floor.
I grabbed it. She pulled, nearly falling backward. I guess she expected me to be heavier.
“I was sick with a cough for a couple of months. Best diet program there is.”
“That why they banished you?”
Reminded of Asa, all I could do was nod. Thinking of him reminded me of death, which reminded me of Doggo, who was the reason why I was trying to drink the tavern dry of whatever I could find. Without a word, I stumbled shakily behind the bar and went pawing through the bottles for any dregs. Finding the shelves empty of all but broken glass, I headed for the overstock in back.
Olivia followed me, having left her pack and her weapon back in the bar. She watched me for a few minutes as I snuffled like a bear looking for honey.
Incisive as ever, she asked, “You lose someone?”
A single dry bark of a laugh leapt out of me. I started pushing bottles harder than I needed to, and they fell to the ground. Some broke.
“Fuck, Jesse. Getting sick wasn’t your fault. And they wanted you to just sneak off and die quietly. Fuck them!” She tried to put her hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off. “Hey, geez! You okay?”
I started yelling, punctuating my chant of defiance by smashing bottles. “I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!” What I meant was up to interpretation, but it was what came out when I tried to convey everything that had happened and how I felt about it.
“Jesse, quit it!”
My hangover, combined with grief and anger and whatever else, made me start retching. Bent double, hands on my knees, I dry heaved hard enough to wrench my back. Urine leaked from my bladder, clamming the crotch of my jeans, but I couldn’t stop it. Nor could I stop Olivia from reaching over and rubbing my back between the shoulder blades.
Retches became hiccups. I knew crying would release the tension, but I couldn’t find the valve to turn on the flow. My knees wobbled, then gave way. I crashed, shins first, onto a brick floor covered in broken glass.
“Ow” was all I said.
“Fuck sake! C’mere.” Olivia got a shoulder under my nearest arm and lifted me up. It hurt too much to put weight on my legs, so I ended up doing a kind of tiptoe shuffle to stay alongside her. She brought me back to the bar and dumped me in a booth.
“Always such a mess,” she admonished, shaking her head. “Stay put. I’ll be right back.”
Lack of food and loss of blood caught up with me, and I started shuddering from shock. When Olivia returned, she dug in her pack and fished out one of those thin foil blankets people used to keep in their cars in case of a winter breakdown. She unfurled it over my juddering shoulders, then set to work on my legs. I guess I passed out, because I can’t recall feeling her dig out chunks of glass from my flesh. Nor can I remember the part where I sat up and screamed, full-thro
ated, when she poured disinfectant down my mangled shins. She made sure to tell me all about it afterward, since part of my reaction involved kicking out, which clocked her full on the chin. Wouldn’t let me forget it, either.
I do remember coming back to my senses on a wave of cooking aroma. Steamy air and the hot smell of a pot on the boil brought a flood of saliva to my mouth. It disappeared into thirsty flesh, like the first rains in a desert. On the table near my head was a tall plastic cup of water. I downed it in one long swallow, then spent the next minute forcing my body to keep it down. Olivia must’ve heard me moving around, because she came moseying out of the kitchen to check on me.
“Sit up if you want, but don’t try standing yet. Have something to eat first.” She bustled back into the kitchen and proceeded to clank and cuss.
It had to be delirium talking when I wondered aloud, “How did I find you?”
“Well, technically I found you. And it wasn’t exactly hard.”
I waved away her disparaging comments. My arm felt heavy and kind of numb.
“S’not what I meant,” I said. “We came looking for you. Didn’t think we’d find you, though. Maybe dead, maybe long gone … seemed like maybe a fairy tale I’d told myself.”
My sister returned with a steaming bowl of hot food. She set it on the table, then spent some time methodically peering into my eyes and feeling my forehead.
“Who’s we?” she asked.
Instead of the knot of emotion lodged in my throat that I expected, I felt kind of loose. Uninhibited. I replied, “Me ’n’ Doggo.” Then a pause for consideration. “You dope me?” I asked.
“White willow extract for the pain,” she explained, sitting down across from me. “It’s alcohol based. I put it in your water. You have a dog? Where is he?”
“Dead,” I said flatly and dug in to my soup.
Neither of us said anything while I slurped at the first food I’d had in days. Olivia just watched me eat until the bowl was empty.
“More?”
I nodded. Felt like if I’d opened my mouth, I’d have just burped up everything I’d eaten. Olivia took my bowl back to the kitchen and came back with two. This time, she ate with me.
“You always wanted a dog,” she said at last. “I remember that big fight you had with Dad about it. You said you wanted a friend, and he said it was a waste of food.”
Her words conjured the ghost of that memory. Dad was especially put out because he’d found out that it took me so long to come back from gathering fuel because I’d been at the library reading. He felt my time was better spent working at home and forbade me from going back.
“Can we talk about something else?” I could feel the near edge of a comedown from the painkiller she’d given me. Kind of cold and thin, like a wedge of ice.
“Well, what else is there to talk about? Seen any good movies lately?”
She had me there.
“Maybe we could just talk about you for a bit. I’m not ready to talk about … about him.”
Olivia shook her head, the slimmest hint of a smile crooking the iron bar of her mouth.“Sure thing. Whaddaya want to know?”
We sat and ate and talked. I asked her about her trip north, which turned out to be not all that different from mine. The road was better, and there were more signs of life. It had been spring, so she got more of a soaking than I did. Leastways, she always had fresh water to drink.
“You ever find Dad?”
“Ask me about that later,” was all she said about that. “What about Mum? How’d she feel about you leaving?”
“Mum passed away couple years back,” I told her. I didn’t expect much of an outpouring of grief, considering the two of them got on like oil and water. Even so, I swore I saw Olivia thumb a tear from her eye.
The conversation moved on. Olivia mentioned hooking up with a guy from Temiskaming who’d become some kind of nomadic wild man. He got hooked back and stayed long enough for them to have a couple kids together. When I asked if I’d get to meet them, Olivia said they were gone.
The sun was low when she helped me limp outside to relieve myself. She’d offered to bring me a mixing bowl to use as a bedpan, but I insisted. “I’m not an invalid.”
Olivia only shrugged and rolled her eyes.
We spent a moment while we were out there, just watching the sunset and bathing in the twilight. Perhaps not the brightest idea, given that all the most dangerous creatures clock in that time of day. At least, they used to.
“We’ll stay here tonight,” she said. “I took a peek upstairs while I was making supper. There’s a weather-tight patch right at the top of the stairs. Just the one entrance — easy to block off. Not that I’ve seen a cougar for ages. Folk down the road keep bandits in check, too.”
“Sounds good.” I replied. “Then what?”
Olivia stared off, squinting into the scarlet-stained sky. An early night breeze lifted some strands of hair that had come loose from the heavy plait that hung down her back. For that moment, she was nothing at all like the little sister I’d known. She was an Amazon: something wildly beautiful and deadly from a faraway land. She turned to me and gave me a closed-lip smile before she said, “Then we go home.”
WRESTLING WITH KING NUTKIN
WHILE WE WALKED, I began a new story. Olivia interrupted way more than Doggo used to, so the whole endeavour was frustrating. She poked and prodded and tested. I struggled to keep hold of my patience and to keep my train of thought on its rails. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve said she was nearly as starved for companionship as I was.
“So, there was once a king who ruled over all the squirrels in the wood,” I said.
“Squirrels? You’ve been aboveground for five minutes in the past three decades. When was the last time you even saw a squirrel?”
“Yesterday,” I lied. “So, this king was lonely because he had no wife, no children, and no family. He gathered his advisers and told them of his plight.
“‘Whomsoever remedies my loneliness shall find himself a duke with a castle and a parcel of land to accompany his title.’ The advisers took their leave of the king and went about discovering a solution to their ruler’s problem.”
We huffed along in relative silence for a few steps before Olivia demanded, “So what happened next?”
“I’m getting to it. Just let me think — jeez!”
She threw up her hands. “Pardon me, my liege. Whenever you’re ready.”
It wasn’t until we’d stopped for a midday rest that I continued.
In the kingdom lived a terrible beast with long matted hair and horns as curved and sharp as scimitars. He heard about the king’s lament and so took himself to the palace. “I am good company as any. Let us be friends and spare His Majesty this torment.”
When he arrived at the palace gate, the beast was halted by the guard. “You’ll go no farther, cur. Begone, back to whatever cesspit you crawled from!”
The beast stood his ground. “I am here to befriend the king and be remedy to his loneliness. I’ll not leave until the king himself should turn me away.”
You must understand that the beast smelled to high heaven, in addition to being frightfully ugly. And here he stood in the full sunshine. The heat began raising his stink to an extraordinary reek that pervaded the air and assaulted the senses. So the guards wanted rid of him but realized they could not force the creature to move, short of killing him. After a short parley between them, one of the guards summoned a page to relay the situation to the king. “Let His Majesty decide,” he explained to the beast.
In a moment, the page returned with his reply. “The king insists that the beast be permitted audience, as any subject of the realm is entitled.”
The guards shrugged and allowed the beast to pass.
“THIS ALL SEEMS UNLIKELY,” said Olivia, chewing a crispy bit of roast squirrel. “Why would the king want some smelly ass critter up in his throne room?”
I sighed. Squirrel felt a bit too close to rat
in my book, so I was munching some pemmican from Olivia’s supply.
“It’s a fairy tale. They’re supposed to be like that.”
“Why?”
I took a moment to formulate an answer and to concoct the story’s end. The pemmican was slightly sweet, but the cold venison fat gave it a texture like eating lip balm full of jerky. At least it’s not rodent based, I assured myself.
“These kind of stories used to teach lessons. Exaggeration or unbelievable things made the lessons obvious and memorable,” I explained.
“Is that what you use them for? To teach something?”
Her question hit some kind of nerve, and it made me a bit pissed off.
“Can I finish?” I snapped.
Olivia shrugged. “Make it quick. We should get going.”
The beast arrived in the king’s presence and made his obeisance.
“Stand, creature. Tell me what has brought you here.”
“My liege, I come to remedy your loneliness. Let me be your friend, and you’ll want for no other company.”
The king stroked his beard of white, which came to a point from the end of his chin.
“And how should that be? What does your friendship offer that nobody else’s does?”
“I cannot say, sire. Only that I know it to be true.”
I STOPPED AGAIN because Olivia had begun to gather her things and kick over the fire.
“Where are you going?”
She looked up from her puttering. “I thought you were done.”
“Well, I’m not!”
“Okay, so just tell me how it ends. We’ve gotta make tracks before dark.”
I got so mad I couldn’t think straight. Whatever path I’d mapped to reach the ending fell out of mind. “Forget it,” I muttered. “Let’s just go.”
“What’s your problem?”
After gulping a deep breath, I found a hard knot caught in my throat. To distract myself into letting go whatever emotions were tied up in it, I pushed my thumb into one of the cuts on my leg.