by Kate Cayley
She sprays every surface with disinfectant. They left condom wrappers on the bedside table, the wastebasket a foot away. The paying man was smiling as she refilled his coffee four times this morning and as he thanked her for her hospitality in the drive. She drags the bedsheets off the mattress, has to crawl across the king’s width to pluck the fitted corners up. His smell hides in the linen like a body in a blind. Chemical cedar. The wife’s copper filaments wire the pillowcases like the remains of a gutted radio. Loyola does not seek out the spots where they soaked the sheets through, but still, she can smell what they left rising from the bale in her arms.
The only thing she finds in the brother’s cabin is a tip in American singles. She pockets them. This far into the season they’re still in the red, and the couple thousand from these three will splinter fast. In the lodge, she pushes the sheets into the laundry, pours bleach, and goes to the kitchen to stack half a dozen roast beef sandwiches.
Now the sun’s up, soaking the mountaintops and green-heating the trees. The helicopter gleams on its pat of asphalt. The paint scratches have been polished away. She finds Riley under the hooks in the hangar, sluicing the concrete. He’s too lazy to scrub. The air in here is cool with silt, paint, old meat. He throttles the water before taking a sandwich. He eats it with unwashed hands, the creases in his knuckles dark.
“You seen Stein?” she asks.
“Barn, maybe.”
The dogs follow the roast beef on her plate. Down the switchblade trail, dried hot with rusted juniper and pine sap, to the barn. Come upon it from above and it’s a witch’s house: steep-pitched, stitches of paint on the leeside. There’s a paddock where she and Dino used to keep the horses when they ran the place by saddle. But it wasn’t a barn, originally. At some point, Dino’s forebears lived inside. Dino’s been saying they should buy a few auction block nags. He says he misses the whickering at night. But Dino thinks money shows up as soon as you’ve spent it.
She ducks into the dustpit paddock and as she nears the unlatched doors Stein slides out.
“Morning.” He’s a skinny kid, short, the tip of a tattoo starting under his left ear. He’s not breathing right. She looks at his greasy lips and guesses where the girl is.
He takes two sandwiches, one in each hand. She says, “Riley’s got that west gate yet.”
Stein nods as he works his snake throat. Nods and swallows. Keeps nodding, swallowing.
The doors creak and the girl joins them. Her eyes flick to the trees, the paddock corners, the sharp ears of the dogs, Loyola. She’s wearing Loyola’s dress: blue with white flowers, pearly-buttoned. Those boots, haydusted now, predictably.
“Morning,” she smiles.
Stein closes his eyes against them both, chewing.
Loyola has never seen him embarrassed. She tips the last of the sandwiches toward the girl. “Roast beef.”
The sandwich is opened like a book. The girl eats one slice of bread while looking down at the old dog, who supplicates forward on his elbows. The younger dog crouches likewise, at an hour-hand angle but just back. The girl tilts her hand, and the meat and cheese hit the ground, slick as livers in the pine needles. The girl eats the other slice of bread—margarine, lettuce. The dogs stare, arrested in half-launch. The old one’s saliva droplets the dust six inches from the meat.
Loyola scratches her forehead, sweeps crumbs from the plate. The dogs don’t blink, watching the girl’s eyes for release.
Stein swallows one last time, wipes his hands on his pockets. “That’s cruel,” he says. Then he crosses the paddock, hoofs the bluff’s hairpins up to the hangar. The girl turns her face to track him. The old dog passes a twitch to the younger one.
“Blow away in a stiff wind,” Loyola says.
“I like them like that.”
Loyola snorts.
“All wrist and ankle.” The girl rocks to her toes, swings her arms to stretch, and starts for the trail up.
Her first step, the dogs lunge. The old dog for the meat and the young dog for the old. The old dog twists to run and fight at once, drops the meat, pisses on the ground. He thrashes on his spine in the dirt with the younger on his throat. The younger is snarling and doesn’t let go until Loyola boots him off. White fur pink, black fur oiled wet. The old dog spiders into the pines. The younger, wet-muzzled, snaps the meat and it’s gone.
—
Dino comes back after three. He drove the tourists all the way to the airport instead of just to town, which is all they’re supposed to get with the package. He almost always does that, unless he can’t stand the people, and there aren’t many people he can’t stand.
He’s brought back groceries and two tanks of fuel. They usually tip him in hundreds. Loyola shelves cans while he opens a beer and eats the sausage she’s sliced for him.
“I was thinking she’d be good on front desk. Answer the phone, greet them, get them settled.”
“What desk,” Loyola says from the pantry.
“You know what I’m saying.”
“Sure,” Loyola agrees, pulling her bag of salt forward on the shelf, tucking a new one behind it. “Pretty smile.”
Dino is silent and Loyola takes the cans off the counter. She ferries two loads before Dino says, “You think she’s got much else?”
Loyola lifts her eyebrows at the vinegar. He was supposed to be picking up the repaired sump pump the night he brought her home. No report on where he found her. Gas station, truck stop, diner, ditch. Barelegged with blades for calves. Veins like spring rivulets down the backs of her brown hands. Right now, the girl’s asleep in the sunlight by the pool, the younger dog in sprawl nearby. She’s obviously healthy. Fast blood. Curved hamstrings like she was built for flight. She would’ve asked him for a light or a phone call. Dino would’ve had to offer more. He offered Loyola a meal, which she declined, and when his came she ate half of it with grimed fingers. She remembers onion rings, a screwdriver. He drove a rusted-out Ford back then.
He says, “She mention family to you?”
“Not to me.”
“We could give her a hand,” he says.
“Of course,” she says.
He watches her for a while, swirling his bottle. She plucks four tomatoes from the basket. He turns on the radio. She halves them, quarters them. She flicks a burner on. Why did she start cutting these? He looks out the side door to the hangar. He goes outside. Loyola twists the stove off again.
The girl picks herself up off the stone terrace when Loyola steps out into the sun. Sleeping on the rock’s left red scars on the flats of her arms and thighs. The urns alongside the pool are just nameless grocery store annuals, whatever was on sale. Up here the sun is so close it thins the air dry. The stalks give up their dead easily: Loyola plucks browned florets and tucks them to decompose in their own roots. She tips water into them.
The girl trails after her. Her hair is clean now: the colour of woods before foliage. She points her face at everything in turn. Loyola pulls a limp clump, and they leave her fingers sticky and purpled. The girl snaps off something and rattles the roots doing it. She doesn’t look at it, just drops the golden head on the stone. Loyola moves on to the next. The girl murders another.
“I brought you this,” she says.
Loyola looks over her shoulder. The girl opens her palm. A twig. A rough-barked stick thick as a finger bone and grey with witch’s beard.
“Magic powers,” the girl promises. One eyebrow up, smirking.
Loyola takes it.
“You should use it,” the girl advises. She pulls a plant whole from the soil, roots dripping mud.
“Thank you,” says Loyola. She slides it into her breast pocket.
The girl follows her back to the faucet. The younger dog’s sucked up some new scent trail and whips back and forth in the lodge’s shadow, rushing their legs. His fur is wet.
“What did he do with my pelt?” says the girl.
“It’s in the rifle locker at the back of the hangar.”
T
he dog yelps once, thrilled. The girl’s fingers shred the flower in her hands. She’s standing very close. “What about yours?”
Loyola picks up her watering can. “He burnt mine,” she lies.
The sound the girl makes isn’t audible, it’s too deep in the lungs. Her pink mouth. She reaches for Loyola’s wrist, but Loyola’s stepped away.
—
The next party is four men. They’re staying the weekend; they’ve booked three flights in the bird. They’re licensed for a small massacre. When they climb out of the jeep Dino names everyone but Loyola lets the burning wind off the peaks take the sounds.
Dino introduces the girl alongside Loyola and Riley, while Stein moves luggage into the cabins. Stein’s been loitering after the girl. Him and the old dog always at the edge of sight, ready to disappear. He doesn’t come to sit at dinner or around the hearth in the great room when the sun steps behind the mountains.
Through the plate glass, the valley is a thick fur of pines, piebald with broadleaves and slit by the river. Loyola serves beer, coffee, whisky. The sun appears again, then moves behind the next peak. Every poplar for miles is a steeple with leaves like lit windows.
The girl sits off in one of the solitary armchairs, cornered beneath six antlered heads. Their expressions vary: some have artful, alert ears and lifted chins, but the elder faces are dull as barn mares. Their dusty eyeballs. The girl keeps her bottle full between her bare knees. She is silent. She may be listening. That’s fine, the men don’t want her to speak. They just like an audience sometimes, until they don’t. At that point Loyola gets tired. “Are you tired?” she asks the girl, standing.
They climb the open stairs together. The men are watching. The girl murmurs, “What about the one with glasses?”
The men are talking about pilot licences. One of them’s an air traffic controller. One is building a floatplane in his garage.
“It’s his credit card on file,” is the only thing Loyola knows about him.
“Which cabin?”
Loyola bites her smile.
“I bet he thinks I’m your daughter.”
“Probably.”
The men are laughing.
“He’ll like that,” the girl says.
The men are still laughing.
The girl jostles her shoulder against Loyola’s. At the top of the stairs, the row of doors. Loyola in one, the girl in hers. At the end of the gallery is Dino’s. Beneath them in his armchair Dino is telling about flying through last year’s whiteout, two bears dead in the cage.
The girl says, “So it’s elk tomorrow.”
“Or something.”
“Can I go with them?”
Loyola shrugs. She asked, once.
“I could walk,” the girl says.
Loyola leans her shoulder against the frame. “There’s a trailhead past the river. Up Sawback. We could drive part of it, walk the rest.”
“You want to come?” says the girl.
“I want to see his body.”
The girl blinks. If she were the least bit human her wet eyes would be full of pity.
—
When Dino comes upstairs it’s late, black in the valley and in the house. Loyola’s been sitting in the glow of her little lamp. She’s fingered the bark off the twig the girl gave her. He isn’t drunk enough to stumble. He’s led the guests to their cabins. She cracks her door when he’s close. Then she widens it.
She never sees his broad face any more, she never touches his grey hair that’s too long. He’s always had gundog eyes and she puts her nose to the collar of his shirt so he can’t look at her. He smells like he’s always smelled. He never stopped smelling this way, but he stopped letting her get close enough to know it. It’s painful, how familiar he is. Her memories are accurate, even if they’re used ragged.
“What?” he says. She stays close under his chin, out of sight.
She kisses his throat. With his hands inside her shirt his mouth becomes less inhospitable. She is steady and silent. She used to voice eagerness. Then she learned to conceal herself in the underbrush, let him track her down. Lately, she’s been waiting months, seasons, this dry summer at least.
The girl’s little stick, lost on the bedspread, jabs her. She’d rescue it from snapping under them, but her hands are busy. She arranges them, moves on him. He grips to slow her down but she refuses. He comes loudly, even though next door the girl is or is not listening.
Loyola pulls away as he takes in air. She could lay herself down beside him like she used to and let all his circling mongrel thoughts thicken the air. Instead she brushes away the snapped halves of the twig. In her bathroom she runs water like she’s killing his scent, clearing the mess. But she doesn’t step under the jet. She stands lock-kneed on the tile with him all over her.
Outside, there are bodies under the trees. Split hooves and missing skulls, bones jawed open by opportunists. She’s found them deep in underbrush or at the foot of high places. She walks whole days. She finds a few every season. Never any antlers. She can’t tell. She couldn’t say for sure. Who else would come all this way but their guests, their dogs.
When she comes back he’s gone. He’s draped her pelt over the quilt, fur down, a skin waiting to wrap her. She’s always been free to go.
—
At breakfast the men are mouthy over coffee. The one in glasses is grinning his stupid secret away. The girl doused him with herself. He must think he split her open. Dino is all anecdotes and wisdom. He smiles at Loyola when she refills his mug. She walks back and forth, bringing hot things and removing what’s finished.
In the kitchen she fills a cooler with sausages, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bread. Dino comes in. He strokes her waist. He puts his nose to the back of her neck and breathes against her vertebrae. He kisses her skin.
She stays still until he goes. Then her knees sag. Her mouth opens. She folds against the cabinets, forehead to the wood, battered in the chop.
In his room, she does not touch anything or inhale. This room, the master, built when they first conceived of this life. Not horses but helicopters. Rifles and racks for tourists. They sold twelve strong mares too cheap at auction. They didn’t need all the extra acres of conifers. Loyola slept in this wide bed. She crept from it every morning to percolate the coffee. He’s left it immaculate.
The spare key for the gun locker is jumbled with some others—the generator shed, the jeep—in a drawer.
The girl comes with her to the locker, a chain-link partition at the back of the hangar. Loyola skims the black barrels. The girl goes straight for her pelt, stuffed into an empty shelf. It has no arms or buttons, no collar. It’s short-haired, rough, built on summer. In this light it’s the colour of dead leaves. Its underside is wet-white with grease, like he peeled it off her an hour ago. The girl folds it to her chest, bends her face down to rub against it.
Stein and the dogs stare at them when they come out into the yard. The side door hangs open. The sun’s been up for an hour, but the light’s still choked pink. The valley’s hazy with forest fires. Later, in the worst of it, they’ll all wake bleeding from the nose, desiccated, and Loyola will wash bloody sheets every morning.
Stein’s mouth moves as he calls to them. The old dog wags low, once.
As Loyola turns the engine the girl rolls her neck to look at the lodge, the cabins, the flowers lining the pool. She doesn’t see Stein where he stands. “Slaughterhouse,” she mutters, leaning back into her seat.
Down the valley, across the river, to the trailhead. The path is dry, scraping along at the spine of the Sawback peaks, a root-bound stepladder climb between aspen stands. It’s not quiet. There’s a roar. The red stags don’t bugle like birds, they make a meat eater’s sound of want.
One of them sounds, miles off.
Close, an answer from a larger set of lungs, a fuller-maned throat.
The girl’s grin widens. Loyola keeps climbing. The girl bounds ahead, hair sweating to her skin.
Loyola keeps
her eyes on the cliffs, and the bottoms of the cliffs, for his branched antlers. He’ll be his own gravemarker. They found him where he grazed. And the shot, if it hit, hit the hollow behind his shoulder blade. He tipped starboard, overcorrected, and then toppled. His landslide body. His feet at gallop down the shale. She’ll find his corpse at the bottom splayed by petty birds. Or else he walked away.
When they reach a bluff, a scoop neck between peaks yawning east over the foothills, they stop. The girl picks at her buttons. The borrowed jeans come off, the wet shirt. She’s stout, naked. Her sunburnt clavicle. She holds up her fur and flaps it. In the smoke it’s roan red, speckled down the haunches, paler in the belly. She turns into it, smiling as she shivers its fatty lining over her shoulders. The forelegs ribbon down between her breasts. Loyola reaches to pull the girl’s hair out from under the pelt and smoothes the lock down over one shoulder.
A stag roars eastward. Loyola jerks. That was his voice. The one who fell, or didn’t. There he is.
Beside her, the yearling doe with her long neck and soft muzzle flicks her ears and stamps her four fresh legs. She’s taller than a thoroughbred, black eyes already distant with alien concerns. She steps into the trees, crackling dead sticks, branches brushing her flanks and waving in her wake. She moves slowly, but she’s gone.
—
The road back to the lodge is rutted with smoke. The dirt widens into the drive before the rippled skin of the hangar. Loyola comes around and the young dog runs the older right under her wheels. His body is a jolt. She stops. Kills the engine. The younger wheels away, shouting.
The old dog is dying as she gets to him. His feet scrabble but it’s just his broken back finishing off. She touches his swivelling ears, then carries him to the hangar. She has to check. She heaves him up to hang and slits him to drip. The younger is hiding. There are a hundred places. The woods, or under the veranda. She follows the smell of him down the trail, into the old barn, and finds him in the box stall, backed up under the feed trough, growling like a meatgrinder. He is wet-mouthed and serrated. His throat tears rabid threats. He’ll chase her bleeding through the woods. He’ll find her by her screams. He’ll pulp her soft face and pull open her throat. He’ll drag her down and dye his muzzle in her rib cage. Has he ever killed anything? It doesn’t matter.