The Bodice Ripper

by Byron Rempel

  She should have known when she passed the last McDonald’s before the wilderness. Or when she discovered most of the faculty invitees had sensibly canceled. Only Dmitri waited beside his car, struggled with dated Russian equipment, revelled in the conditions, still in sweater and dress shirt underneath his unzipped parka.

  “Do not worry about me,” he said. Blood stained his teeth. Anna winced. Somehow he’d hurt his lip already, and he was only at his leather boots. “In Russia, this is Sunday afternoon in park with George. This is comedy musical.” He smiled red. She said nothing to encourage him. She’d tried to stop Dmitri before. Tried to stop a masochist’s complaints with a whip. The Chair of History was aglow. He would glean months of misery material for conversation.

  “Like the Mother Country makes,” he said, and rubbed his bare hands together, his boots now fastened, his face aflame. How could his roundness cavort through these hills?

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “Only obsessive-compulsives. They’re on a test run. There. That’s Thorbert, our trusty guide. And Native woman.”

  Anna watched a blur of black emerge from the woods, eventually discernible as three figures. If he wasn’t among them, she would turn back right now.

  “Our French colleague the only other brave enough, I guess.”

  Anna recognized his cantered stride, the easy way he moved through the world. He’d grown up on skis, weaned on holidays in Chamonix, all après and cocktails and furry boots. Tanned, rugged faces. Mountain climbs to discover medieval monasteries. The camaraderie of explorers. Fireplaces, hot mulled wine. Confessions. The brush of fingers.

  “Your car door, you left it open.”

  Anna shivered.

  Thorbert glided towards Anna. A gadget freak. Like he was ready to scuba dive. Everything matched and tight. While she struggled with her baggy pants and zipped-up down parka. A quick repair job lingered around her arm, black electric tape to keep in errant feathers.

  “You are mourning?” Thorbert asked.

  Everyone’s cheeks were already red.

  “You have come alone?”

  “I’m a single girl. All alone in a great big world.” She watched Christophe race The Native Woman in her peripheral vision.

  “It is not possible.”

  “Oh it’s possible. I work at it. Yourself?”

  But the two others slid beside them, the dark woman with a pale laugh.

  “These are not my ski,” said Christophe, for he arrived a metre behind her. “A woman waxed them this morning in the shop who did not know what she did. I am sticky, not swishy. I should be swishy.”

  “We should all be swishy,” the woman said. Diane Silverbow she called herself. A fringed leather coat. Pocahontas, from the costume party. More like Madonna Thunderhawk. Black tights outlined her young calves and thighs that never touched. Behind her, Christophe pulled up his mountaineer goggles. He still caught his breath. They looked like newlyweds. The snow their confetti.

  The last time Anna had seen such thick snow was when she fell in love with the new neighbour boy who stood outside in his yard and caught flakes on his tongue. Until his knit tuque fell off and she saw he was a girl. Her twilight of gender.

  Now she shivers again, alone. Her glasses are fogged and ice-crusted, useless. She puts them in a pocket. Above her the hungry roar of a jet prepares to descend upon Montreal. People don’t freeze to death below airport flight paths. After the noise subsides, she listens through the wind. Must be back over the river. She wiggles her toes in her boots, can still feel them. She moves one ski forward and it glides underneath the river ice into a trough of slush.

  “Hey guys!” she tries. “I’m here.”

  But nothing moves. She yanks her foot back in a panic. The ski tip claws underneath the ice. More shivers. She will be frozen to the spot, drive-thru for wildlife. The water feels transgressive in her boot. She pulls harder, and falls back onto the snow. Anna takes off her gloves and puts both hands under the ice to unfasten the boot from the ski. In a few seconds she pulls her hands out again, unsuccessful. She claps them together, blows on them, plunges them in the water again. Fumbles with her laces, slides her foot out of the boot, kicks it away. She watches the ski and boot bubble into the grey of the river’s belly.

  No time to wonder. She pulls off her soaked wool sock, twists it till no more water drips off, then slides it back on again, a cold comfort. Her foot burns. Off comes the sock, and instead her Peruvian toque goes over her foot. She fishes in pockets until her numb fingers find a hair elastic. Slides it over the toque and lets it bite into her ankle. As she fishes she paws at her phone, something she should have done long ago. The battery is weak but alive. But there are no bars in this wilderness. Anna takes one step and her unskied foot sinks three feet into the snow. When she pulls it out her tuque is gone.

  That’s her sock sunk goodbye in the water. Anna falls backwards again, and the snow catches her. Her legs pull to her belly. Squirrels of red hair nestle her cheeks. The naked foot rises into the wind. Christophe would hold it in his paws. Only them, two natural-born healers. Her toes warm already as he massages. Words of comfort through the lips of a foreign tongue.

  And then, with the nerve to make a guest appearance in her delirium, that Native woman. Looks over the shoulder of Christophe, guides his hands, plucks herbs and enchantments from a fringed satchel.

  The vision is enough to shake Anna out of her reverie. Her foot jerks on muscle memory, digs into her other leg. The other leg hardly notices.

  She manages a smile though: she is happy to have worn her baggiest and heaviest clothing, dressing in layers perhaps the one eternal thing her father had taught her. Black tights were no help in a blizzard. And this puffy jacket thing, that was back in style, wasn’t it? The Seventies? She calculates eras by instinct. Is that the limbo zone of hipness? Thirty-eight years? In nineteen-seventy she was three years old. She rubs her foot. In nineteen-seventy her father and his layers flew away. She ought to get into the bush, out of the wind that carried sounds. What might be a pigeon. Or an owl. Pigeons are for cities, like professors. No matter what they wear.

  Anna shivers again. She knows she should move, not ice up on the riverbank. But there is something comfortable when she lets go. When she is left.

  On her back, she avoids the worst of it. The wind howls at the bent fir and pine tops, loses its voice in the clearing. A crow calls, that she recognizes. Warns others of her? The bird is frozen in the air above her, points into the wind and doesn’t advance. Where does it go?

  Against the grey sky, a cloud emerges. Condensed breath from a god’s cough. The wind comes in ragged exhales now, in the silences the storm inhales more force. Iced trees clear their throats in the woods. But the snow has stopped. Anna sits up. Another cough blows at her face, tears salt from her eyes. A snap—this one almost above her head—and she turns to see a six-foot branch land in the snow beside her, its viscera exposed, moist with recent life.

  Without intent Anna is already twenty feet from the tree. She hasn’t noticed how she got her last ski off and cut through the snow banks, nor has she heard her panicked breaths, or the faint call on the wind. She bends over, feels her foot, now takes stock of her breath, slows it down. And the call, a whisper that fights the wind with the frozen crow. Christophe has a high-pitched voice like that. Christophe has not deserted her. The call comes again, but this time it’s not him, can’t be. A dog’s wail, chained and lonely. She wants to sit down again. But a dog, if there’s a dog there’s a master. She yowls back at it. The thing answers, lonelier. But not alone. Other dogs are with it. Anna stumbles towards the sound. Then, on a day when crows freeze in midair, when tears gel on cheeks, when waterlogged limbs snap, Anna’s temperature rises ten degrees. She pulls hair from her forehead and comes away with fingers salty with sweat. She realizes she hasn’t gone to the bathroom for a long time. The dogs are n
ot dogs. They are coyotes. Or wolves.

  [

  “There they go,” said Diane.

  “The boys,” Dmitri said. “Off to races. All for you, understandably.”

  Thorbert and Christophe tore up a hill through the blizzard’s veil. Dmitri arrived at the bottom to see them disappear.

  “When did this country get so hilly?” Diane said.

  “Thousand million years ago,” said Dmitri, between heavy breaths. “Tectonics incident. A Tuesday morning, I think. Oldest mountains in the world, some say. Shortly after, organisms started to compete for space and energy.”

  “Wow. Ask a professor, get an answer. But funny you talk about competition for energy.”

  “Those two, anyway. Propelled by that most ancient impulse.”

  Diane Silverbow caught his arm as he stumbled towards

  a stump.

  “Ill-fitted for our modern proportions.”

  Diane didn’t know what the History Chair said half the time. His historic words sounded intelligent. And he was a Chair. He looked like a chair too, a comfortable recliner you could curl up inside. A man of ample mind, body, spirit.

  The round man floated in a cloud of frosted flakes.

  “We are not what we seem,” he said. “Neither do we seem to be what we are.”

  The more she didn’t understand him, the more Diane felt free. Tiny bells rang near her tympanic membrane, and a distant drum kept time. “It’s funny,” she said again, although her face was a placid receptacle, “that you should talk about energy.”

  “I have profound belief in energy. I simply do not possess

  it myself.”

  “Oh I don’t think so.”

  She bent over. Dmitri thought: I am blessed to see this form of nature in the wilds. She unclipped her boots and fell backwards into the snow. This form of curves and circles in harmony with all around it. Powder exploded at her edges, then colonized nearby trees and her leather fringed coat. She traced her arms above her head, spread her legs and shut them. When she sat up they admired the form. A form one could curl around and keep safe.

  “An angel,” said Dmitri.

  “An angel with a big butt,” she said.

  By the time they continued, it was almost buried.

  [

  The plan, she knows, is to run in the opposite direction until civilization returns, since Anna Hill is neither prepared to become a popsicle stand nor be licked at by wolves. But opposite is a relative notion.

  The yelps of the beasts come from above, below, from underneath her skin. She flees from a random direction and maintains her course as the golden mean, then turns into the woods, which is when she sees the things twenty feet in front of her. The coyotes are surprised. The wind was right. Their attentions pinned on the sprawl of fur and blood at their feet.

  The one nearest her turns and stares. Two others turn from the kill, but only long enough to give the fourth, the smallest, the quickest, time to snatch the remains and vanish into the pines. A second later the others tail it.

  Anna realizes she has no breath. Then she is all breath. She runs. She’s clear on opposite now. She has no concept otherwise of where, or how, she only moves. Her bootless wet foot is forgotten. She may have wet herself. Her body is hot. She has never been so in shape all her life. She tears off a scarf, lets it catch on the branches.

  After ten minutes, Anna realizes she bounded across the whole clearing, across the slushy river and into the far woods. She holds her breath long enough to listen for the beasts, the sounds of sadistic German fairy tales: cackles, knives on stones, heavy breaths, guttural snarls. They won’t look for her—they’ll smell her out. Smell her fear, she’s heard that. They’ll smell her period. Turn their noses in the air and find her blood, the blood of the kill still on their lips. She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t feel her foot.

  Where is everybody? The snow starts again, or maybe it’s only wind redecorating the trees. It doesn’t make it easier to find a trail. Civilization has abandoned her. She refuses to take off her glasses, no matter the frost on them. But everything has packed up and moved. Anna will spend her last minutes, perhaps her last hours, in the middle of nothing, pursued by beasts best left in children’s books. She looks up in trees, tries to spot one that would shield and protect her, a benevolent spirit. She would take the assistance of Diane Silverbow now, would swallow whole her tales of Indigenous knowledge, of ten thousand years of harmony with the land, of the time she made her own snowshoes from birch bark and bulrushes. How did people forget someone? Was she that unremarkable?

  A noise, and Anna drops her self-pity immediately. Nothing. She realizes she is hugging a tree. Lets it go. Grabs it again. Indistinguishable, the sound through the wind, the trees, her frozen ears. A school bus on a road, or a siren, or the comforting scream of an infant. The wind exhales and half of the tree above her shakes off the snow cradled in its branches. With a cry of shock and frustration, since much of the snow falls on her neck, Anna pushes the tree away from her. She trips on another tree prone underneath the snow, brings her head out of a snowdrift, wipes her eyes and looks up a rise to what must be a cabin, its chimney proud with smoke.

  She scrambles towards it. A half-forgotten trapper’s outpost. She sees what looks like washtubs hung on the log walls, and as she gets closer, an enormous pair of antlers, elk or moose or mammoth. And over the door, mounted like bushman voodoo, a rusty axe.

  Her foot is frozen. That’s good—she can feel it. But she’s about to fling herself into a solitary shack, the last redoubt of some bearded misfit pushed to these limits for all his sins and heinous tics, who has not bathed or deloused his beard since last St-Jean-Baptiste and wouldn’t he be delighted to have a half-dead Woman in Jeopardy knock on his door in the middle of a blizzard, all for himself to reinvigorate, and none of society’s niceties to bother with.

  Her toes will drop off any minute now, one by one. Anna can do nothing but go forward. She is ready, she will stumble to that front door and claw her nails down its worn timber, and accept her fate. Except that with the next step a beast flies towards her. A thing of black fur. With fangs exposed. In approximately one second, it will land on top of her, and everything will go dark. In the first quarter second Anna shields her head. In another quarter second her lungs fill with frozen air and hold it. The rest of time is waiting.

  [

  “Sorry about Spencer,” said the bushman. “He’s starved for company.”

  The black-furred poodle sat at her feet now, satisfied to have licked her enough upon her arrival. Anna lay on the chaise-longue, wrapped in blankets and fur coats. The man handed her another cup of decaf chai tea, with honey he’d harvested himself. The ambulance was on its way, it just took a while to get here, he assured Anna. Everything took a while to get here. That’s why they liked it, but it also led to insanity. I mean, they were here weekends, and longer in the summer, but his boyfriend (who’d forgotten to take his phone again and was in the village looking for half-way decent sashimi) did have concerns in Montreal, and one couldn’t play at nostalgie de la boue all the time, it lost its flavour eventually. You know?

  Anna didn’t know, but she didn’t much of anything, including feel her toes, or have conversational ideas, or taste how his honey tended more towards the woody than floral. She wasn’t sure either whether they spoke French or English, or a private language they recently invented. He showed her how Spencer the poodle attacked his daily spoonful of honey, which helped his breath at least for a little while and had a list of benefits so long that Anna was unconscious before the end of it.

  The urban bushman filled the emptiness between them with talk and fussed over her blankets and cooed noises for comfort, and when Anna was conscious she thanked him in numerous languages and felt her skin shiver with a life its own. If she tried to lift her head the shack would spin. But eventually she thought she felt
better and she threw off her blankets and said she would walk from here, and take Katharine Hepburn with her for protection.

  Immediately as she stood she fell over. The dog was thrilled to join her in the game, along with much barking and panting, mostly from his side. When the bushman got back into the room with more honey and tea he shrieked at her for getting out of the chaise. She was in no shape to do anything and he was sorry he had no car because Carl took far too long, and may have got distracted at the deli counter again, what with the new butcher and all. And he felt guilty, yes he could admit it out loud, that he hadn’t stripped naked and her naked and cuddled for the body heat, but could you even imagine Carl’s reaction, with a woman, and Spencer a spectator? At least he’d got her wet things off and in the dryer (sorry about the wool), and that was probably the ambulance now, picking its way down that unbladed road, or Carl, or at the worst some friends who said they might come, and they always said that but reneged at the last minute, and wouldn’t that be hilarious if it was them now, in their Smart car? But the bushman didn’t laugh, he sat in the chair across from her and put his face in his hands and sobbed as the flash of red lights filled the shack with alarm.

  [

  The phone rang every fifteen minutes. Mister Jackson Zaporzan had counted on a fine Sunday afternoon of televised sport, preferably the sweet science of boxing, interspersed with phases of sleep. But that insistent bell ruined everything. The phone wasn’t even his. He heard it through the wailing wall that separated his Baronial castle from Anna’s ersatz château, and pitied her phone’s electronic crying jag. The sound echoed through Zap’s undecorated rooms, bounced off his moving boxes, and drew him to his back balcony, where he tried to see in Anna’s house. In case of an emergency. He couldn’t see in her window. She’d been kidnapped. Zap leaned further into his balcony railing until it protested. Clipped on his tool belt. Hurried to Anna’s front door. Jiggled it ajar. When he called up the stairs no one answered. The phone was silent. A few puffed rice cakes lay on the kitchen counter, so he helped himself, turned on the TV, and flipped through Anna’s academic paper. He tore through the fridge for a drink after he almost choked.