South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

  She bought a red harness that took a while to put on; Darling interpreted Evan’s actions as attempts to strangle her. Evan had to wear gloves. The harness went well with Darling’s brown and black fur. When Evan managed to clip on the leash, she slid open the door. Darling sniffed, then stepped over the threshold.

  The local flock of doves whistled in for a landing in the Jack Russell’s yard and Darling ran for cover, hiding under the bush that hugged the building. Evan took Darling’s instinctive behaviour as a sign that she was cautious by nature. Over the next two days, Evan untangled the leash from the bushes half a dozen times before deciding that Darling was streetwise. Darling ignored the Jack Russell’s obnoxious barking and sat quietly on her side of the fence to drive him crazy, a cocky attitude that made Evan laugh. The next morning she dressed Darling in just a snap-off collar, slid the door open, and said, “Go.” She knew if anything happened to Darling, it would be her fault.

  After lunch Evan went outside to look and found Darling hunkered down behind a cactus over the edge of the wash. When she saw Evan, she streaked away. Evan tracked her. “Please, little one, be careful.” Darling meowed at her, then crouched and wiggled her butt. Her eyes, manic slits, sized Evan up, so scary that Evan cried, “Hey! Cut that out, it’s me!” The eyes refocused, the hunter vanished, and a kitty reappeared.

  She phoned Eric to ask if he would like to come out for a visit. Might be nice to get away, she said.

  “Unlike you,” he pointed out, “I don’t get school holidays.” Eric worked in a land title office in busy Hamilton County, in suburban Indianapolis. He said Cathy’s family was making him do the rounds of Sunday dinners. Cathy’s was a big, close Catholic family. Eric was surrounded.

  Joe next door fell and broke his hip. He’d had one replacement already. An ambulance pulled up to take him to the hospital. “Fallen soldier,” he said to Evan as the paramedics were loading him into the ambulance. Alma moaned and started to cry and didn’t cover her face with her hands. Tears poured over her open lips. “You’ll be all right, woman,” Joe said. “Arden will be here day after tomorrow.” Arden was their son, driving down from Montana.

  “You could have dinner with me,” Evan said to Alma, as they watched the ambulance drive off.

  Alma brightened. “I’ll make my famous casserole.” Evan knew the casserole was a tamale pie, made with beef and canned corn.

  Arden stayed for two days. When they learned that Joe had an infection and would remain in hospital a while, Arden packed up his mother’s things.

  “Why are you taking her away? What about Joe?” Evan asked, seeing him throw suitcases into the back of his battered Dodge Ram.

  “I have a ranch to run,” he said. “And there’s Mother.”

  Alma was wearing her favourite apron, with a print of apples and peaches. The apron was faded from the wash, but it was nicely ironed, and the lace around the edges was very white. Evan admired the apron. Alma stopped crying. “You know Joe married an older woman.”

  “See what I mean,” said Arden. He helped his mother into the passenger seat and strapped her in. She started crying again, long sobs. “Where’s Joe? Where’s Joe?”

  Everyone had heard stories of javelinas eating small dogs, but there wasn’t any mention of them going after cats. Evan forgot to tell Darling about javelinas; she didn’t give it a second thought as she tossed broccoli out the door for them and then carrots to the rabbit (to the chipmunk, really). One afternoon she entered the living room and saw Darling on the other side of the path just as the javelinas approached. It seemed wiser if Darling stayed where she was. Evan stood at the sliding door and called, “Don’t move, stay there!” but Darling must have thought Evan was calling her and dashed out. The boar lowered his head and ran at her. Darling moved in zigzags toward the Jack Russell’s fence and leapt in the air. The Jack Russell was barking aggressively, the javelina was ramming the wire fence, and the other javelinas were milling and squealing. Pandemonium! Evan ran for the broom just as Darling yowled, pinned between the fence and the boar’s brutal snout. Evan slid open the door and ran at him, holding the broom like a spear. The boar stamped his feet and made threatening moves toward her. Evan hollered and the boar backed up, bawled, and scuttled over the edge of the wash, the squealing family following.

  Evan stood huffing and puffing, the glare of the white sun off the gravel like blindness. “Darling?”

  Darling had slipped to the ground, crushed, her middle oozing; just her legs flinched, bent and shocking to see. Evan couldn’t touch her; Darling’s teeth were bared and she growled low in her throat. The Jack Russell continued to bark. Evan looked at Joe and Alma’s empty apartment, drapes closed. Joe would have known what to do. Darling’s legs didn’t stop twitching for a long time. Evan poked the Jack Russell with the broom, to shut it up. The ground turned red around Darling, blood mixed with sunset. A door down along the strip of apartments opened, then closed. A coyote yelped. Darling died.

  Evan flew to Indianapolis to visit her brother. They sat on his porch in an older suburb and drank Jack Daniel’s mixed with orange juice and Southern Comfort, a drink he’d started making when Cathy was first diagnosed.

  “I think Darling was disturbed. You couldn’t pet her.” Evan put down her drink.

  “Stop calling her that name. It was a cat. An SPCA cat.”

  “A humane shelter cat. Yes—but—” Then Evan shut her mouth. Cathy was a human being, a wife, her sister-in-law. Evan had wrapped Darling in a red silk shawl and buried her under the mesquite tree. The woman who worked double shifts, the owner of the Jack Russell, had offered her condolences, handed Evan an overcooked macaroni and cheese casserole, and said she had to run.

  Eric swirled the liquid in his glass. He opened his mouth, poured the drink down his throat, and gargled before swallowing. “Be honest, Sis,” he said. “Who do you miss most, your husband or the cat?” Someone drove up across the street and waved at Eric. Eric waved back. “Asshole,” he muttered.

  Evan remembered Ray, a slightly built man but strong. After he died she’d thought he had the nature of a Siamese cat, high-strung and demanding. His arms were as strong as the trunks of fibrous tropical trees. She remembered the eager, analytical talks they’d had, sitting on the bed across from each other, sometimes with tears in their eyes when what one of them said was too true. Then she remembered the bottles of alcohol tucked all over the house, and the broken crockery. She eyed her brother. “How can you be so mean?”

  Eric rattled ice cubes in response and poured another drink from the pitcher at his feet.

  For what felt like the longest time, her thoughts backfired in all directions as she thought about Eric’s question. She missed how tight Ray could hold her, how safe he made her feel. She missed the hummingbirds that didn’t come to the feeders because Joe was gone and no one filled them with syrup, and she felt sorry for the Mountain Dew birdfeeder that had broken loose in the wind and lay on the ground. She missed the daily life of worry, having her cat. “Darling,” she blurted. “You.”

  The day after she got home, a moving van arrived and took Joe and Alma’s things away. Later Evan was sitting on her sofa, the light a slurp of warm syrup over the wash, when she looked up from a new Arizona bird guide and for a moment believed she saw Alma scampering around, flapping her apron, chasing off the roadrunner.

  She found Joe at Holy Family Center on St. Mary’s Road, in an older section of the hospital, sharing a room with an old man who mistook Evan for someone else. “I can’t find my automobile!” he shouted in an Italian-sounding accent. “I don’t know where my pants are!”

  “I don’t know where they are, either,” said Evan. “I’m sorry.”

  Joe reached out to shake her hand. “I need another three weeks of antibiotic treatment. Could leave tomorrow if Alma was here. Arden’s got her doing tests.”

  “Are you going to Montana?”

  Joe didn’t answer. Instead, his fingers fiddled with some papers. “Aw, naw. Th
e boy’s got enough on his plate, what with Alma and that big ranch. Now here,” he said, looking up, “here’s the stuff I got to get to.” He showed her the list of calls he needed to make—the HMO, home support care, various motels he might be able to stay in. Joe had worked as a railroad detective, and so, he told her, he knew how to get his ducks in a row. “They overmedicated me at first, and this old fool,” he said, slapping his chest, “didn’t know where he was and dialled 911 for help.” Evan watched Joe’s face change colour, flushing to a dark red of embarrassment by the time he finished relating the farcical events during his first days in hospital. He couldn’t find his billfold, and when the credit card company phoned about unusual charges—well, of course, it was Arden in Montana with Alma. “Lost,” he said. “I was just plumb lost.”

  “I know the feeling.” She told Joe what had happened to Darling.

  Joe’s long face waggled as he sighed. “Javelinas will go after anything. They will eat McDonald’s burger wrappers and the flowers from a Christmas cactus. They appreciate the pansies folks from Wisconsin plant for them.”

  The comment made her smile; winter visitors loved their pansies.

  Evan examined the baffled fellow in the next bed, his face twisted in a grimace. A man of Joe’s intelligence and conversational style would lose his mind if he stayed much longer. She had that spare bedroom, an extra pillow, and some blankets, and it would be easy enough to rent a bed. She could handle the IV; she had her first-aid certificate. She pictured Joe propped on her oversized sofa in the living room, watching the hummingbirds. She shifted her gaze to Joe. His eyes were the soft glistening green of a cactus after a rain. She heard his voice telling stories. She pictured the Mountain Dew bottle repaired and filled with seed. Maybe, just maybe, the Gila woodpecker would drop by for some exercise.

  Miami

  “At least leave me something,” she’d whined, and when he did break it off, Sheryl convinced herself she was grateful for the red truck, a slightly used Blazer. Then she lost it on black ice. The truck swooped away from under her in a ripple of space and time and veered from the expected track. A new universe gaped with glory for one moment, then slammed shut the next. The truck staggered uncertainly and pitched off the road onto its side, like a wounded horse that needed to be shot. She came out of the accident bruised, one eye blackened. She came out looking like a woman who’d been beaten, or like one who’d fallen, battered by nothing but getting out of bed.

  At the time of the accident, she’d bled like a stuck pig. Scalp wounds, she knew, had the capacity to startle. The ambulance guys put her in the back with the gurney. One drove and the other sat facing her, alert and watching. She’d worked in a health clinic long enough to know it wasn’t because she was so lovely that he studied her; he was waiting to see if her pupils dilated, indicating shock. Her face, no doubt, was streaked with brownish, drying blood. His attention was calming. “They teach you this, don’t they?” she said, and then his gaze turned wary and he reached for her wrist to check her pulse. “I’m fine,” she said, “just mad as hell. The car was all I had left.” Such a curious, true confession—blood and loss caused even a normally private person to spill all sorts of things. “All I had left.” Her eyes stung with tears due to her voice talking in the vacuum of the ambulance and a kind man observing her.

  He said, “You didn’t hurt anyone. You kept control, so you didn’t hit another car or smash into someone’s house. I don’t think you’re badly hurt. A truck’s only a hunk of steel.”

  She stared at him as though he’d missed the point, but he hadn’t. Thinking about how she might have run over a kid throwing snowballs, or plowed into another vehicle, killing someone’s mother, made her cry.

  Bruised, she thought she looked more interesting, a person with an emotionally complex life. Her buddies at the health clinic made a case for guardian angels and loved the drama. “You didn’t crash into the telephone pole,” one of the nurses said. “You could have smacked it head on, been trapped inside.” Because Sheryl hadn’t hit anything head-on and the electrical system still worked, she’d simply scrambled through the sunroof onto the tarmac. They jabbered on about what might have transpired, instead of the rather prosaic events that did. A miracle, other staff exclaimed, wearing their pink and blue teddy bear cottons. “Huh. More like punished,” Sheryl had said, thinking of the totalled vehicle. Then she figured she’d leave well enough alone. Trying for another woman’s husband, even if that man was her own ex-husband, was bad karma.

  She cut her curly hair short, tinted it with blond highlights. Brunette with blond streaks felt good for a day. Then she was back to where she’d started, wondering if her life mattered. She wondered if you could matter when no one loved you.

  At the clinic, besides working the desk on-call, she ran a counselling group. She thought it was ironic that she, of all people, was hired to give advice to girls. She’d made a mess of things with her marriage, another mess of things with her divorce, and foolishly played around with the same man afterwards. She’d put a lot of work into him; he no longer said, “I seen.” She hadn’t really wanted him back, not to live with, but she was flattered by the idea that he still wanted her. Desired her sexually.

  The teenaged girls in her group, from abusive situations, wore their spangled jeans tight and their tops so short their baby fat showed. They had tats and nose rings and acne and smelled like cheap vanilla. Some were farm girls who had chosen the wrong boyfriends; others needed to escape fathers or step­fathers. They thought she had it together after the accident (they respected her new hairstyle). For a while, they showed up on time, they stopped texting long enough to listen to her spiel about birth control. One of them admitted, “But I want a baby. I want someone to love me.” Sheryl said, “I know the feeling.” By then her bruises were fading to a tainted green.

  A girlfriend talked her into a six-night “exotic” Caribbean cruise, for single baby boomers over forty. She asked a neighbour’s little girl to come by every day to look after her hamster, Harry. The child was thrilled by the offer of money; it was her first real job, and Harry was so cute. Harry, a Golden, was cute. Most people Sheryl knew didn’t believe someone like her would have a hamster—a hamster was a child’s pet. “You don’t think I’m the hamster type?” she’d ask, chewing gum with her mouth open. Sheryl had always had hamsters, and while she was married, they’d had a ferret. When she shops for groceries, Harry rides in her shirt pocket, a ball of warmth against her heart, like having a secret love.

  Her seatmate on the connector between Dallas and Miami was a boy of about ten, travelling alone, stretched out on the two seats, his left arm in a sling. When she’d leaned in to claim her seat on the aisle, he’d given her the once-over, taken his feet down, pulled himself tighter toward the window. She murmured, “You’ll be all right.” People said she had a way with children.

  She ordered a double gin and tonic. He’d been visiting a grandmother. His mother was a waitress at a resort in South Bay or North Beach, he wasn’t sure. He lived at the resort, and he got to go out on big boats. Sheryl wondered what else his mother did at the resort besides waitress if she and the boy lived there. She thought about a child not sure of his whereabouts in Miami—north, south; maybe children didn’t care. It was the mother who mattered to a little boy, being close to the mother. In answer to Sheryl’s question about his looks, he said he was a mix of many things.

  “Oh,” she said. “People must think you speak Spanish.”

  His father was black, his mother Norwegian. His father played football and had been famous. The child himself wasn’t big for his age. He had once flown first class because his father had paid for the ticket. “Oh,” Sheryl said again. They would have catered to him, the light brown child in first class, they would have fed him macaroni and cheese and cut up his steak, served him extra portions of cake.

  This trip in coach, he’d come all the way from his grandma’s in Spokane, and because his flights were all “short haul,” h
e’d had nothing to eat but peanuts and cookies. Grandma, the white one or the black one (Sheryl didn’t ask), may not have known about short-haul flights and the fiscal fly-and-starve policy. She wondered why more fights didn’t break out on planes—people with low blood sugar or, for that matter, smokers at the end of their ropes. She rummaged in her carry-on and came up with a granola bar, told him it was high in protein and had good carbs. He took it, doubtful, tore the paper off with his teeth and his free hand, gobbled it in four bites, and then thanked her.

  “What happened?” She gestured toward the sling.

  He shrugged, turned to the window.

  She said, “I was in an accident. Totalled my car. Got out with a few bruises.”

  He looked at her with admiration. “Skateboard,” he said.

  “I loved that truck. It had sentimental value.” But she hadn’t deserved it, not really; she’d pressured him into buying it. She’d lied to everyone about how it had come to be hers. “I think I’m a liar. Are you a liar?”

  The boy considered. His eyes were green with flecks of gold. His lashes were long and curled upwards. “Mom says to only tell white lies.”

  Another hour and they would land. She opened the second gin, added tonic. Every day during the affair, she’d lied by omission; she’d cracked jokes with his new wife.