On the other side of the wheat field she pulls up the reins, her team snuffling loudly and shaking their manes. She leaps down from the cart and pats the side of the older stallion’s head. The Clydesdale nuzzles up to her, rearing his head several times against her chest, and snorts. The other Clyde brays and lowers his head to bite at scrub grass growing beyond the ragged borders of the wheat.
Jenny runs her palm down the panting stallion’s sharp-boned cheek as she rounds the wagon to fetch the feedbags. She watches the encampment, a haze of slow smoke and huddled wagons far in the distance and down a stretch of hill, as she pulls out the heavy leather sacks and secures them over her team’s muzzles. They chew noisily, tearing at what passes for feed – hard maize and scrub root. Jenny pats the flank of the younger stallion out of long habit as she clambers back into the wagon seat to wait.
◄ ►
They come in the night, the rustling of the wheat giving them away. Jenny has been waiting for them since the sun went down. She lies in the back of the wagon, the long gauge in her hands, one eye closed, the other looking down the cylindrical length of the barrel balanced flat atop the lockbox.
Her finger rests lightly on the trigger, hammer already down. Beneath her the lockbox shudders as the bones rattle. “Shut up,” she rasps, and takes aim. Squeezes her trigger finger back and the explosion of the 12-gauge rips open the night, the thick slug slamming out of the hot barrel in a burst of light and powdery fire. A Lowlander falls apart wetly as the slug rips through his chest and knocks him back through the air. The others come at her fast and she drops them one by one, one eye shut tight as she fires, reloading cartridges two at a time and firing off shots in pairs. The muzzle of the gauge is red-hot and smoking when she finally stops shooting. Steam hisses off the slowly cooling metal.
The echoes of the shots fade into the darkness as she rises and gently hoists herself over the lip of the wagon, shotgun still in hand. She lands in a crouch by the side of the wagon. Waits for the telltale rustle of more Lowland men moving through the stunted wheat.
When Jenny deems it’s been silent long enough she straightens, and without taking her eyes off the wheat field reaches into the back of the wagon to retrieve her flensing knife. Rail-thin legs covering long strides, she moves into the field.
◄ ►
Her cart loaded down with new hides still curing in the burning sun, Jenny pulls into the outskirts of Spiritwood: the town still rebuilding after the Big Dry in what had once been the heart of lake country. Shanties at its edges give way to larger establishments in the city proper. Cattlemen drive their slave stock through unpaved streets – harrying filthy, heat-sick stragglers on with a crack of the lash – past whorehouses and saloons fighting for space with gambling dens and dingy hotels: all the elements of a booming frontier town – except there’s nothing left beyond Spiritwood’s westward edge but the dust bowls of the Barrens.
Jenny cranes her neck to admire new-cut boardwalks. The planking is sound wood – a rarity in the scorched expanse of the desert burn, the forests of the North denuded centuries back.
A lawman tips his hat to her. Jenny notes the polished, virgin shine of his sidearm. Notes, too, the blight lesions sluicing along his forearms in clear runnels, poking out from under rolled-up sleeves. The sores haven’t begun to weep yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Jenny makes a mental note to move on quickly. The marshal watches her, not sure what to make of her; shudders as he sees the contents of her wagon.
Her Clydes halt on their own in front of a saloon and Jenny vaults down from the wagon before it settles, eager to be out of Spiritwood’s board-stiff closeness. Eager to be out on the plains again. She leads her team to the trough, the wagon dragging behind. The water is caked with silt, but clean beneath the scum, and her stallions drink greedily, heads bent low. She strokes their sweat-flecked hides as she moves past them to the wagon bed, pulls the collapsible metal cover over the split wood and peeling paint, and digs deep in the pocket of her pants for the key. Retrieves the flensing knife from the wagon bed with her other hand and tucks it away in her hide jacket before locking up.
Jenny pulls a pair of leather gloves from the back pocket of her pants as she heads up the stairs. Slips them on and pulls them tight; not wanting to touch anything in a town where the blight has made itself at home. Takes a deep breath before she opens the swing doors and heads into the noisy, grimy saloon.
The first thing that catches her eye isn’t the bar itself, or the patrons, mostly grizzled veterans and whores; it’s the impressionist mural adorning one full wall of the interior: an iceberg floating in choppy seas. The rendering an imagined one with no subject available for reference since the polar melt. The painted blue is as cooling as the ice itself would be and Jenny leans her face toward a phantom arctic wind, drinking in the genetic memory of the cold.
“Something, ain’t it?” The bartender flashes a broken smile at her, hands working the counter with a dirty rag.
Jenny startles at a white face behind the bar. Then comes up to lean on the wood with her elbows. There’s plenty of room, though the tables are occupied well enough. “How long you had it?”
“Since my grandfather opened the doors, back when Spiritwood was just starting over: all of two streets and a railyard.”
Jenny frowns at the boldfaced lie: the mural’s new, and the saloon’s belonged to the Chamakese family since George came down from Pelican Lake Reserve with his sons a couple of decades back and built it. She looks around pointedly. “I don’t see many medicine men ’round.”
The bartender rubbernecks awkwardly as his patrons raise their heads at Jenny’s words; leans in to whisper, “They ain’t welcome round here no more. Local marshal and his boys run what few of ’em were left out on a rail few months back.” He answers Jenny’s confused stare with: “New law passed in the territories. We don’t have to treat ’em like people no more.”
Jenny spits on the floor, thinking about George. About his sons. About herself. “Well how in the hell am I supposed to make a living now?” She slams one hand down on the counter, startling the bartender; shoves a finger in his face. “I ain’t gonna end up like one of them doxies down by the depot.”
He opens his mouth to answer but looks up past Jenny, eyes widening, and slips off down the bar to “attend” to other patrons.
Jenny glances over her shoulder as a tall shadow falls across her; turns to stare up at the men caging her in a semicircle. “I think you’d make a right good doxy,” leers the head man, big grey cow’s eyes sizing her up. Both he and the two men who flank him are ham-fisted bruisers, built like trees and just as broad. Jenny knows their kind, the remnants of their eugenically bred lines still working the mines back East; she’s put down more than a few of them in her time. She’s not sure what men like this are doing so far west but there’s always work on the frontier for big men who don’t think too much. “What’s the matter, whore, you didn’t hear me?” the ringleader barks, shoving her back.
His hand flies into the air before any of them realize she’s drawn the knife. His eyes widen as she cuts open his throat, hot blood spraying where she was standing a moment ago. She’s already moving in among the other two bruisers, opening up bellies. They goggle stupidly at their own spilling intestines, trying to hold them in, before they topple, gurgling.
By the time the lawman makes his way in the bartender is crouched down behind the bar, whimpering, and the patrons are all carefully minding their own business. Jenny stands farther down the bar, finishing an abandoned drink. The lawman takes in the bodies on the floor, the crowd nursing their drinks in dead quiet, and lonely Jenny down the other end of the bar. She cradles the remnant of the alcohol in her glass like a dying lover. She can feel his frown from across the room as he steps over the dead men, leaving a trail of bloody footprints.
“You gonna run me out on a rail too?” she says as he sidles up next to her. She downs the alcohol in her glass in a single slug.
The mars
hal settles in beside her. Leans on the polished wood and folds his hands together on the bar. “Could hold you till a judge comes through.” Jenny snorts, unimpressed. “But I get the feeling you don’t like being tied down to one place too long. And, truth be told, I’d rather have you gone. So I tell you what: you leave town before the sun goes down—” he pauses, Jenny casting a sidelong eye in his direction, “and we’ll say you were never here.”
“What about them?” asks Jenny, nodding at the bodies.
“Ma’am,” he smiles, “world’s dying by slow inches, I got a town full of people holding tooth and nail to what they got while the blight cuts ’em down, and a territory full of men waiting on Spiritwood to fail so they can wipe it off the map and start over. Three dead men from out East don’t make a world of difference to me. One lone medicine woman, neither.” He straightens, waiting for Jenny to leave.
She slams her glass down and slides it back toward the bar rail. “Ain’t got no reason to stick around this shithole anyway.” She stretches out the kinks in her shoulders, pushes off the bar, and shoulders past the sheriff. Knocks him a step back to make a point. He makes no move to stop her. Just settles back against the bar and reaches for a half-full bottle as the saloon doors swing uneven in Jenny’s wake.
◄ ►
Twenty kilometres north of Spiritwood, Jenny stands knee-deep in dirt and mud, digging a hole. The spade, acquired on her way out of the city limits, is a parting gift from an unsuspecting prospector. She wipes the back of one gloved hand across her sweating brow – even in the dead of night the heat oppressive – and shifts another load of dirt. The moon hangs low and silvered in the sky and somewhere off in the distance a coyote howls as she bends down to dig one final furrow out of the cracked earth.
Panting, she tosses the spade to the ground and clambers out of the hole to grab the lockbox from the back of her wagon. Carries the lead-lined crate over to the hole, balances it on one knee so she can unlatch it, and upends it. The skeleton of the hanged man dumps out into the hole, and Jenny spreads the mess around with one foot while the bones rattle – still caught in the grip of the radioactive blight that was killing him long before he was hanged.
Then Jenny goes back for the rest of her wares. Dumps hard-won skins into the hole by the armload. And when the cart is empty and she’s finished covering over the hole she pats the earth down and jams the shovel in at the head of the impromptu grave as a marker. Lays one arm atop the other over the rough wood and rests her weary chin on the back of her hands, breathing slow.
She glances north to the lands of her own people, the Nakota. Considering. But there’s no life to be had there, not anymore. That land is being winnowed; history repeating itself in cruel turn as treaties are revoked – those that still stand – and her people are driven farther and farther north; a new Trail of Tears already begun. With each territory law there’s less land for any of the First Nations; day by day the men of the East hem in the West. And Jenny will not be caged.
She turns tired eyes, dirt-rimmed, closer north to the cattle yards and mills of Leoville, next stop on her seasonal round, some dozen kilometres distant. No point heading that way now. She glances back east. Dismisses the idea quick as it comes. Rubs at her sore neck before looking west, to the Barrens: a desert of salted, broken earth stretching out beyond the matchstick-dry grass of the plains, far as the eye can see. There’s open territory out West; out past the Barrens; over the mountains; bordering the risen sea. Or so they say. No one’s ever come back to tell the truth of it. ’Course, that don’t prove a thing: even if there is something past the Barrens – some fabled strip of land that ain’t swimming in sand and choking dust – who’d want to come back from that to this?
Bones aching, long arms swinging at her sides, Jenny clambers up into her wagon, takes the reins and snaps them down with a lash that echoes against the baked scrubland beneath her stallions’ hooves. And heads West.
At her back the sirocco stirs, drives her on and washes over Jenny’s dust-caked skin to scour the ruined earth. High above, a murder follows; black wings beating against a black sky. And in her wake, nameless bones rattle beneath the earth, dry as the land in which they rest.
The wind sweeps away all trace she was ever there.
SNOW ANGELS
A.M. Dellamonica
Lindy was elbow-deep in window glass when the tech started giving her hell about her Winkles.
“You haven’t been dusting.” He ran a rag over their faces. They were on a stretcher beside Lindy’s varnishing table: a boy, a girl, a something. Not kin, from their looks: the girl had Southeast Asian features and the boy was a mixed-race cherub with honey curls. “This one’s got cobwebs. You gotta take better care.”
“Who’s taking care of me?” Lindy had been fusing scavenged windshield shards, filtering out the surviving smartcrystals and printing a self-charging pane which drew power from the weak northern sun beyond her window.
“Red here’s got an elevated heart rate.” The tech meant the devil child, the one in the cheap Halloween costume.
“Take it for analysis.” Lindy didn’t move. She had to stay still when she had a shard in progress. Glass was glass. It scratched; it sliced.
She’d tried to wiggle out of storage duty but the prime minister had been firm: no special favours for family.
“You must’ve done something.”
Lindy wondered, briefly, why most of her fellow Jitterbugs were such assholes. Then she tuned him out; the glass was charged. She upgraded it to a touchscreen, growing a long, heavy pane, then loading up text from her latest interview as she lowered it to the floor.
Terese Bianchi’s story:
Last Year was the spring I turned nine, the spring Mama brought my Nonna home to die. It was intense, and weirdly private. We kept to ourselves; we weren’t watching the news.
I heard at school about the airplane full of people with persistent sleep syndrome; heard about the beer garden in Frankfurt. When our music teacher became a Winkle it was still so rare that someone went to his house, to check.
The Tuesday when the American president went down, they closed school early. I went home thinking today, for this, I’d find the news on. But our house was dead. Lights out, the air steamy from the dishwasher and the clothes dryer.
Mama was zonked in the rocker chair, holding Nonna’s hand. They’re in Storage now, together. Neither looks a day older.
By the time the tech gave up on trying to make her care about her trio of living tchotchkes, Lindy had loaded photographs of Terese onto the window with her testimony. This was one of two lancet panes slated to go outside the Prince of Wales Heritage Centre. It had to be perfect.
Her modem was running hot.
She lowered her bit rate, cooling the modem before making final tweaks to the pane’s historiated initial. Big “T” for Terese, with a faux-medieval image of a uniformed schoolgirl. Last, she set the glass to fossilize, permafixing the images and text.
“Something burning?”
A middle-aged Sikh man was hovering in Lindy’s doorway. Her afternoon appointment.
“It’s my modem.” She raised her left hand, showing the burned palm, ring of red where skin met the umbilicus of her modem. Coiling the umbilicus around her wrist, she made a bracelet of it, fib-op loops that hid a multitude of sins. “Are you Abrik Singh?”
“Nice to meet you.” He helped Lindy lift the new pane, examining the images of Terese, girl and woman, and the status bar flickering below them. Eighty percent finished.
They set it on the table near the kids. Once the crystals were set, Lindy would polish the pane and seal it in several layers of weatherproof varnish.
“You burn like that every time?” He reached for her.
Lindy skipped back out of reach. “Don’t.”
“Oh, that’s right—” He raised his hands, embarrassed.
Missy had made points a few elections back off being “close” to a rape survivor, before Last Year. Everyone
knew she had a half-crazy sister who didn’t like to be touched. She might as well have branded VICTIM onto Lindy’s forehead.
But the public exposure was what bought her the modem she was, even now, burning to a crisp.
“You just surprised me,” Lindy said, offering him one of the portable mics she kept lying around. The whole studio was wired for sound, but her subjects didn’t know that.
Singh smoothed his moustache, left side first, in what looked like a habitual gesture. “What happened with the guy? He go to jail?”
“Yeah, but not for assaulting me. He went down in prison.”
Leaving Abrik to fit her past into his personal theory of Why me, why not her? , Lindy took up another mic:
“People say the Naptime phenomenon began in Frankfurt, on Groundhog Day. Four weeks earlier, though, a passenger jet from Vancouver arrived at Lester B. Pearson Airport in Toronto with everyone aboard, but for the captain and co-pilot, deep in something like a coma.
“Abrik Singh was a marketing manager for Molson Breweries. He was aboard flight WS700. Abrik, what’s your story?”
He toyed with the mic: “I was online during take-off.”
Lindy offered an encouraging smile. “Online… working?”
“Reports, spreadsheets. The usual bull. I was concentrating hard because of the girl sleeping next to me. Woman, I mean. It was supposedly hot in Toronto. Remember what it was like, being hot?”
Lindy nodded. She missed summer heat almost as much as she missed antianxiety meds.
“She was in a skimpy white sundress, and slumped… whenever I glanced right, I was staring down her neckline.”
“You try to wake her?”
“Nudged her. Even said ‘hey.’ She had that look, like a three-year-old after a bender.” Abrik gestured at Lindy’s three charges – boy, girl, polyester-skinned Lucifer.
“I decided if I kept working, it’d be okay. She wouldn’t come around and find me checking out her boobs.”
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