Savage Love

by Douglas Glover

  Savage Love

  Also by Douglas Glover

  FICTION

  The Mad River

  Precious

  Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon

  The South Will Rise at Noon

  A Guide to Animal Behaviour

  The Life and Times of Captain N.

  16 Categories of Desire

  Elle

  Bad News of the Heart

  NON-FICTION

  Notes Home from a Prodigal Son

  The Enamoured Knight

  Attack of the Copula Spiders

  Copyright © 2013 by Douglas Glover.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright,

  visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Dust jacket and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Dust jacket image: “Wolf vomit from my eyeballs,” copyright © 2009

  by Meagan Jenigen, www.thelostfur.com.

  Endpaper design by StroomArt.

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Printed in Canada.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Glover, Douglas, 1948-, author

  Savage love / Douglas Glover.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-901-3 (bound). ISBN 978-0-86492-779-8 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8563.L64S29 2013 C813’.54 C2013-902182-5

  C2013-902183-3

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage, and Culture.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For my sons, Jacob and Jonah, stout fellows.

  “Stout fellow, the highest honour that can be

  bestowed on man or beast.”

  — P.C. Wren, Beau Geste

  PRELUDE

  Dancers at the Dawn

  Moonlight illuminates the dancers and the whitewashed concrete bird bath by the standpipe, the coiled green garden hose, the liquid amber gum tree, and the tree nursery under the chicken-wire frame that keeps out rabbits and deer.

  Phoenix Prill, the girl from hospice, says insomnia is a symptom of a morbid and excessive fear of death.

  I say, “How could any fear of death be excessive? What would be the sense of a tempered fear of death? Perhaps, like everyone else, I should look forward to death and sleep well? Do you sleep well?” I ask her.

  “No,” she says.

  Phoenix Prill has a tiny, iridescent mole on the inside of her thigh. It reminds me of an astronomical black hole, or perhaps the universe as it existed just before the Big Bang. It makes no sense, I believe, to say something existed just before the Big Bang, before the beginning of time. But Phoenix Prill invites paradox, and of course, the throw of language is deceptive. It’s much better for describing things that don’t exist than for pinning down reality.

  No one else sees them. They come in the bowels of the night when I am sleepless — gibbering, howling beasts dancing on the lawn. One, a female, is dressed like a human in a white Communion frock burst at the seams. She writhes and twists in attitudes of erotic abandon, offering her backside to the males.

  FUGUES

  Tristiana

  1869, Lost River Range, Idaho Territory

  Against the winter he had scrupled not to lay in a sufficiency before the snow dropped. The snow surprised him. Snow choked the passes, interred the arid creek beds and dry washes under a mortuary sheet, muffled the canyons to the pine tips, buried his traps, buried his hut, his pole barn, his stock. He started by killing the lambs, stuffing their skins in the cracks between the sappy logs. Then he kilt the ewes, one by one, then he kilt the ram, then he kilt the ox and the riding mule, which was starving also. Then he kilt his wife. And then his dog, regretting of the dog more than the rest because it was a pure Tennessee Plott hound. Then he resigned himself to death, composed his body beneath a pile of frozen sheepskins in a corner, and waited. He wasn’t defeated, he told himself, only indignant at the sudden wolfishness in the weather, which had descended without warning in the prospectus of his westward dreams. Yet it was imperative to die because of his losses and the embarrassment of curious bones lying about, of which the spring thaws would require an explanation.

  Blue Girl

  But he did not die, despite the wishing of it in the anguish of the famine pangs. One day he woke to splinters of hot sunlight piercing the log crevices. He had been dreaming of the cornfield where he stood with Hood’s Texians in the storm of lead that in the dream resembled winter sleet whispering among the cornstalks, corpses gathering like drifts in the lees and gullies. He crawled to the door, which, for several hours, resisted his efforts to swing open he was that weakened and without purchase on the material world. Then he lay on the doorsill, half in, half out, absorbing the heat from the sun, water drops pocking down from the overhang, his tongue catching the drops. All the time regretting his furious, implacable and unthinking desire to live, which under the circumstances seemed to issue from an instinctive malevolence, a spirit of meanness.

  The next morning, he crawled to the door again and licked mud. Dry, warm westerlies whistled up the valley like dragon’s breath, eating snow. Along the mountainsides branches sprang back and reared, released from the burden. He sat with his back to the wall and tried to plumb the blinding, gleaming white world stretched before him. He saw something moving in the gleam, a dark, silhouetted thing struggling afoot in the treacherous element, then pitching forward and struggling up again, finally swaying upright, rooted in the snow. Thar’s food, he thought, smacking his scabbed lips.

  He wormed his way over the drifts, not trusting to put a foot down lest he anchor there and die, the impulse that kept him from dying so thin that like the crust of snow it barely held him up. When he got close, he could see it was a girl, just breasted, in nothing but a filthy smock, rusty stains down the front and a shit-tail from sickness down the back, bare arms and legs. Unthinkable where she came from, how she had come. He thought, when he thought, there was no one less than fifty miles away in these mountains, save for Indians. She was blue from the cold, deep-dyed blue that looked like it would never come out. Dead blue eyes, lacking brows and lashes, like slate bolts, yellow hair, and pox craters like a star constellation on her cheeks and brow.

  He dragged her down beside him. “Lie on the crust,” he said, though she seemed not to hear. He jerked his head this way and that, thinking there must be others, that she had strayed from a party nearby, but he saw no one. Her tracks walked away over the rise and disappeared. He touched her blue hand. It seemed solid, seemed to suck the heat right out of him. He tried to worm backwards, dragging her by the shoulders, but her feet held solid in the snow. He spent two hours digging and trying not to die till they came free. Bare feet, swollen and black with frost. Black to the ankles, where they turned blue by grades, hard as bricks. He glanced at her eyes wondering if she had an inkling of her condition, saw outright terror there, abject, infinite. “D’ye feel anythi
n’?” he asked. She shook her head once, side to side. “Yer won’t last long,” he said. “I got nothin’ for ye. Are ye frightened of me?” he asked. She nodded. “Ye should be,” he said. “Ye should be.” He touched her flank. “I might breakfast of ye come mornin’.”

  The Hunt

  She struggled wanly on the journey home but had not much fight after he struck her and let him drag her through the door, where she shamelessly let go and wet the packed earth floor. He said, “Ye might have done that ere we come inside. Ye had plenty of time.” He piled his wife’s last clothing and her wool coat over the girl, then crawled under with her and dragged sheepskins over their heads and fell unconscious until her shrieks bore him to the surface again. She was suffering the return of blood to her extremities like fire in the veins, like being consumed in the fire, writhing and clutching at herself till he clubbed her with an axe butt to subdue the noise. Then he could not sleep again but sat up shivering in the mule blanket, with bleared eyes eyeing the limp convexity of her form beneath the sheepskins in the trickle of moonlight that filtered through the walls.

  Again the sun woke him, which in and of itself kept him alive a few more hours. He went out and ate mud. The girl did not stir, perhaps already dead. He found a stone and lounged in the morning light beside the door honing the axe blade, stopping every few passes to rest, but resolute, patient. He sharpened his butcher knife. The work warmed him. Then he was suddenly alert, cocking an ear for a sound he had not yet heard but sensed in the gelid stillness. Presently he heard it closer, the frenzied, high-pitched whimper and yip of a pack working its prey, wolves hunting beyond the rise. He crawled inside and unwrapped his Sharps rifle, pocketed a dozen linen cartridges and priming caps, then wrapped the rifle again in oilcloth and canvas and went out into the sunlight with it. The pack was closing. He could tell from the rising excitement of their mutual conversation.

  He set out over the drifts, squirming along the worm trail he had left the day before and thence following the girl’s track, dragging the rifle on a line tied to his belt. He like to have died there, crawling, the snow melting against his clothes, soaking him to the skin. He licked snow to wet his lips, blew on his red hands. Said to himself, Don’t die, fuckwit. You survived the cornfield for this? Then he caught sight of the racked, plunging form of the elk, black and urgent against the brilliant, dazzled snow, tongue full out, eyeballs rolling white out of their sockets, dogs hanging off its hinders, ripping the tendons like bits of string, others circling, snapping and plunging themselves through the snow crust, floundering exhausted. All alike frenzied, half dead from winter rations, from the chase, all expressing alike the dumb, obstinate, ineluctable, violent will to stay alive.

  He unlimbered the Sharps, tamped the canvas over a mound of snow in front of his face for a rest, cracked the breech, inserted a cartridge and fitted a cap over the nipple, rested the barrel on the canvas, flipped the rear sight up, and took cognizance of the distance and windage as best he could. He had not sighted in the gun since the snow fell and had no trust in his aim but squeezed off a round that by luck took a wolf in the rear near the spine. She tumbled, tried to rise, commenced worrying her own flanks with her teeth, snapping and snarling. The rifle report thundered off the valley walls. Whimpering with puzzlement, the she-wolf dragged her useless back legs, still trying to run the elk but falling over every step until the others turned on her, ripping her open in a fury of bared teeth, liquid snorts, gouts of blood, fur and entrails gobbled down and forgotten in the lust for more. A banner incarnadine in the snow.

  He doggedly cleared the breech, reloaded and squeezed the trigger again, having an easier shot with the wolves bunched together like that, and wounded another, which, not being crippled, drew the others off a way in a running battle before he too succumbed. The elk tossed its antlered head and reared, attempting to pivot on its hind legs and escape along its old track, but was played out, short of blood and gripped fast in snow up to its belly, its nostrils venting gusts of pink steam, flanks heaving, and still nothing solid to fetch its hooves upon, only sinking deeper with its struggles.

  He squirmed forward over the snow, excited now, sweating with the effort and exhilaration of the hunt, trembling with eagerness and anxiety lest this opportunity slip away, would have kilt more wolves to fend them off if he weren’t husbanding his cartridges, the pack now watching him, panting heavily, raising a cloud over the gleaming rib cage of the dead one, muzzles lowered with exhaustion, wary of the human. He scrabbled desperate toward the elk, dragging himself on his elbows till he was near enough to touch the flank, then rose to a stand for the first time, sinking straightway up to his thighs but not stopped by it, thrashing up the length of the body from behind and driving his butcher knife into the animal’s neck, searching with it for an artery, licking the hot, steaming blood off his hand where it came out in spurts as the elk expelled a breath and subsided in the snow, still breathing but gone.

  He wept for thankfulness and set up his gun again toward the pack, which hung back but tracked with precise accuracy every movement he made. The shadows were lengthening, the dark line of the western ridge would shortly cut him off from the sun. He summoned every bit of pent-up strength and sawed the belly open along the rib line and reached in, warming his arm in the cavity, dragging out ropes of guts and reaching in again, rummaging around till he found the heart and tugged, feeling the arteries part, and he ate of it in the last sunlight, sucking out the blood, hot as if from a fire, and felt it flow into him like an inner light.

  He put the heart in his coat and fumbled for the liver and hacked off the tongue, then, resurgent, separated the back legs and haunches at the hip, threaded lines between cannon bone and tendon, and knotted them to his belt, knowing they were too much for him but also knowing the wolves would devour everything he left. Then, letting himself down, he commenced the long crawl back to the hut, dragging the rifle and meat like sea anchors, not looking behind because he could not bear the thought of the wolves feasting on his kill, hurrying as best he could against the cold settling with the twilight, sweating inside his wet clothes but his breath freezing in his nostrils, his hands stiff and painful. Stop and die, he thought. You stop and you die. Darkness falling, stars appearing, moon shadows, wolf howls so close he felt himself enclosed in the mournful circle of their threnody.

  Feet

  In the morning, they were both took by the gripes from gorging on raw meat. The sun found them squatting against the wall, side by side, clutching their bellies, grunting to void, though nothing came. He said, “This will bring on the piles somethin’ fierce.” Then he said, “I will call ye Good Luck on account of it was good luck that brought ye to me and then it was good luck for ye that I shot that elk. But I expect that is the entire extent of yer good luck.” He looked at her feet, which were beginning to fester and stink, jelly breaking through cracks in the skin. The colour edging up her ankles. “Do they pain ye?” he asked. She shook her head. Her buttocks were white and lean, he could see the mute line of her pussy in the mouse hairs. Under the filthy shift she looked quite clean, but her rank scent was strong in the close room where they slept.

  He tore up part of the pole barn and made a fire in the dooryard and roasted strips of elk for breakfast. The spring sun was so hot it rebuked the months of his arctic entombment, as if it could not have been. He unwrapped the Sharps and reamed out the barrel, then he found his stone and honed the butcher knife again. “Good luck, good luck,” he muttered as he worked. Around about, scattered bones, cracked and chewed for the marrow, began to work their way out of the snow like memories he would rather forget floating to the surface in a bad dream. The girl fell asleep in the sunlight wearing his wife’s wool coat. Her blackened feet looked like something stuffed and inhuman, like feet she was wearing over her feet. And like the snow, they were beginning to melt.

  “I hain’t got a bone saw,” he said, waking her with his boot. “But I seen them do this
plenty after the cornfield fight. Some survived. Yer want me to put ye out?” He raised a fist. The girl shook her head, leaned back against the wall and pulled the coat tight over her breast. He braced one leg on a split rail, pounded into the mud flat side up, then he gave her a length of check line doubled up to bite on and marked a spot where the flesh was still white and healthy, and without forewarning made a quick, deep cut to the muscle, first one side, then the other, till they came together. Then he sliced up her shin toward her knee a good four inches and peeled the skin back like a sock. He had rehearsed it in his mind and so did not hesitate or falter, nor did the amount of blood leaking from the meat cause him to worry or flinch. He cut deeper to the bone and peeled back a sleeve of muscle and fat. Then he stepped back and hefted the axe, took one slow aiming stroke, then swung it above his head and down so strong that it cut the bone and halfway through the rail. Then he snatched a flaming log from the fire and clapped the red to the stump of her leg and held it till the sizzling ceased. He had needle and thread ready, dropped to his knees and methodically sewed the sleeve of muscle over the bone tip, then the flap over the stump. It had taken him twenty minutes, working in a tranquil frenzy. He had thrown his coat off in the heat of it and still dripped with sweat, trembled with fatigue after the intensity of effort.

  He glanced at the girl for the first time since beginning. She was gone in a dead faint, eyeballs rolled up in her head, lids half closed, the check line fallen upon her breast halfway chewed, blood seeping from her lip where she had bitten through, fists clenched white, and an excavation of mud and snow where she had kneaded in her agony. He made to slap her then thought better of it, dropped his ear to her breast and, satisfied that she was still alive, turned his attention to the other foot while she could not feel the pain. Sliced, peeled, chopped and sewed, and checked to see that the first stump was not bleeding nor swelling. Then he stretched exhausted before the fire and dragged his coat over his head and slept till the cold woke him, shadows lengthening. The girl was staring at her legs and the feet where he had left them. Eyes like plates, repellent in their nakedness. And her strange silence that was getting on his nerves. “Yer might live now,” he said, “if you’ve a mind to.” But she seemed not to hear.