Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  It was, finally, the officer himself who pulled on the large chrome lever and pitched them all into shock.

  Exposed: a roiling curtain of carcasses. Steers. Gutted, obscenely lanced on thick hooks, the lapels of their slit underbellies flapping and gaping like eyelids around empty sockets, they swayed in the sun. There was a metal screech as the officer shunted the hooks across a track, then silence, then something amazing: a group of people, perhaps ten of them, men and women, huddling together from cold. They gazed out like exhumed relics of another world. Like animal things still warm and faintly bleating in the midst of an abattoir’s carnage.

  Gus blinked and glanced at the whiskey bottle (no, he had not yet broken its seal), then back at the freakish group portrait in its frame of dead cattle. He looked away, half afraid for himself. Hallucination? He gripped the steering wheel: solid. He cast about for other moorings — and in the eyes of the Datsun driver saw something he recognized. It’s not just me then, he thought.

  The look they exchanged was the look of strangers made suddenly intimate.

  Felicity had certainly seen more distressing sights. Or almost certainly. It was so difficult to be sure on a continent where no one believed in the unpleasant.

  At the time of her birth, in another country, people were killing one another over issues of land and language. You were riot-induced, her father said. Your mother was not prepared. Of course Felicity remembered none of this. Perhaps her father had invented details. What proof did she have?

  Still, by the age of five, she herself had seen children die in the streets. Before her eyes, sores had flowered and unfolded like peonies on the skin of beggars. She had watched as a girl of her own age tore apart a dead rat and ate it raw. Years later, of course, the aunts in Boston said she must have imagined such things. Felicity, they told their friends, is so theatrical. Such a taste for the macabre. She will become an artist or a writer.

  But this was happening in front of her Datsun, within the chrome frame of her windshield. Otherwise, perhaps, she would have the usual trouble knowing whether to believe. And even so the composition invited doubt: the blankets and shawls warding off refrigeration, the glitter of frost on raven hair. She thought of cave dwellers. Of refugees from another time and place — the Ice Age, say, or the age of myth.

  The truck-travelling cave dwellers did not stir. They sat there blinking through their ice-crusted lashes like owls transfixed by dawn. The Beckett’s driver and the immigration officer seemed frozen too. Motionless.

  Felicity did not breathe.

  Without knowing it, Gus rubbed the St Christopher medal that dangled from his dashboard and reverted to Latin: Mater misericordiae, ora pro nobis. Now and at the hour of our death, amen.

  Silence, the weight of it, bruised.

  Then pandemonium.

  As though a starting gun had been fired, the Beckett’s man suddenly lunged away from the officer and began sprinting back across no-man’s-land. A whistle. Somewhere a siren. Guns, warning shots, armed men. Herding: of the cave dwellers, and of the drunken Winnebago crowd, who waved fishing gear and outrage like flags. The official building swallowed everyone whole.

  Then a settling, and the kind of quietness that drops milkily from the sky after thunder.

  Gus stared at the abandoned control booths, at the driverless trucks, at the pallid blood-streaked rinds of cattle still rocking gently on their hooks. He looked across at the impossibly blue Datsun in which the fair-haired woman was resting her head on her steering wheel. Stunned, apparently. He looked behind him: there were no other cars waiting. It was the tag end of a summer’s afternoon, and sensible travellers were sipping drinks in air-conditioned road stops, postponing border irritations till evening. Gus stared down Route 87, curling emptily back into New York State and innocence. He wished he had stopped at the last motel.

  He turned his windshield wipers on and then off. He was not sure why. To see if logic applied, perhaps. He opened his door and staggered from his car as from a fallout shelter. Avoiding looking at the carcasses, but feeling a puff of the dwindling refrigerated air, he walked behind the open van and leaned on the front of his own Chevy, facing the Datsun. The duty-free Scotch was still in his hand and he broke its seal and put the bottle to his lips. Sweet comfort. All this time he was watching the woman slumped over her wheel and now he grunted in her direction, dribbling whiskey, as though suspecting it might only be possible to communicate at primal levels.

  She stirred like a waking sleeper and turned to look at him. He held out the bottle and she opened her door and swung her legs out onto the pavement, bare legs, smooth and tanned under her pale blue sundress. (He could see the spaghetti straps now.) Nice, he thought. And had a sudden urge to splash her with whiskey and lick it off. Dazed, she reached to accept the bottle and he watched as she swallowed a greedy mouthful, saw the muscles flinch and the eyes focus.

  “Thank you,” she said. Like a concussed patient reviving.

  “Well …” Taking back his bottle, his voice shaky.

  “Yes. A bit … bizarre, wasn’t it? Illegal immigrants, I suppose.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Guess so.” And then: “Weird blue.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your car.”

  “Oh. Yes. I had it done. Not blue, in the usual sense. Lapis lazuli, actually. Eccentric of me.”

  He took another mouthful of whiskey and began to find the situation extremely funny. “Wish I’d stocked up on duty-free. Not a soul left. Could have got a whole case through.”

  Laughter — it was as though he had been injected with it or had breathed it in, in some gaseous form — began to inhabit him. Any breathalyser test would have verified: hysteria cachinnata, a helpless and immoderate mirth. They both gave in to it, leaning against their cars, holding their aching sides, gasping, rubbing their wet and salty cheeks with the backs of their hands. They were almost in pain.

  Gus knew he was laughing partly from relief. What could Therese possibly smell from the far side of fresh-slaughtered beef? Red herrings, as it were. “F — f — fi …” fishy cows he tried to say, in a paroxysm of glee.

  Felicity’s laughter was that of someone waking in the night, not certain if the sound of revelry came from a dimly heard party or was part of a dream; not certain if the dream was good or bad.

  “Those fishermen,” she gasped, fixing firmly on the particular. “They were so incensed. Did you see the big one … ?”

  “Waving his fish! The way he … the way he …”

  “As proof of his …”

  “I’m not a … not a …” Gus mimicked.

  They were holding on to each other now, weak with strained hilarity and dissipating anxiety.

  “And then,” Gus spluttered, “the way he slapped … kind of slapped that dead cow with his fish …”

  But this washed them abruptly against the sombre offside of their laughter. As suddenly as it had visited them, the demoniac merriment departed. They stared into the meat van around which a nimbus of flies now quivered, a pungent cave guarded by hook-hung carcasses as by a row of rotting pillars. Other carcasses (perhaps removed from their hooks by the stowaways) were stacked along the sides and back of the van, slit underbellies facing the walls, so that the remaining space resembled the interior of a sandbagged fort.

  “Well,” Gus said soberly. “Do we wait here all day? Or do we just drive through? Or what?”

  “Under the circumstances … I’d rather not look as though I were trying to get away with something. Suddenly I feel … I don’t feel so well.” Sinking back on to her driver’s seat but leaving her door open. “My legs feel like … ” All this, she was thinking, because Aaron had threatened to upset the status quo again.

  “Have another drink, ” Gus offered.

  She grimaced. “Don’t like Scotch, actually. Still …” Unsteadily she walked towards him again. “Perhaps I will. Thanks.”

  “Gus,” he said.

  “Excuse me? Oh. Mine’s Felicity.
”

  He did not even raise an eyebrow. It seemed to go with the lappy’s leisurely or whatever the hell it was.

  “Someone coming,” he said. “Oh shit. We’ll be nailed for opening the booze.” Jerkily he screwed the cap back on, his eyes flitting about and fastening on the large garbage can beside the control booth. He was calculating his chances of disposing of evidence, but the man was upon them and absorbed in other matters. He stopped at the cabin of the Beckett’s van, paused in mild surprise, noticing them, and said: “Someone will be out. All hell’s broken loose in there. Got to impound the van.”

  He revved the engine. Gus and Felicity stared vacantly into the gaping hold where the carcasses began to jostle one another in agitation. Those that were stacked horizontally, like so many folded table napkins, began to slide and thump across the floor. There was a lurch, a screaming of metal hooks. The unfastened doors flapped to and fro, the hanging carcasses swooped up and out like playground swings. When the van gunned suddenly forward there was a horrible crowding of the floor-stacked meat at the doors, as of bodies panicking to escape from a burning building. A stampede of dead cattle: thump after thump, the grotesque smack of butchered flesh on pavement. And the hook-hung siblings careened violently away toward the immigration building, gymnastic on their tracks, keening a wild metal note of sympathy.

  Gus reeled from the impact of three hundred pounds of bullock. Felicity covered her face with her hands. There was something quite appalling about this indignity to the great slaughtered torsos, something that affronted deeply and powerfully, like the desecration of a grave.

  And then La Magdalena appeared, illogically, as in a vision.

  I must be dreaming, Felicity decided. Or perhaps a disorderly phantasm was slopping out beyond the borders of sleep. It was, she told me later, so typical of her night-time collages, a multiple exposure, a Perugino superimposed on a Bosch or a Munch. Or one of Seymour’s latest.

  Gus blamed his duty-free Scotch.

  They stared at the carcass nearest them. Its unzippered front, wilting in the hot air, curled inwards — a cesarean wound around a fetus. Something, someone, was in there. A woman. Across her forehead hung a tendril of intestine, ghoulish curl. Her knees were hunched up and her arms were crossed over her breasts like a careful arrangement in a coffin. There was no way of knowing if the eyes registered the two figures bending over them. Though they blinked every few seconds — the only sign of life — they were blank and unreflecting. Felicity was shaken by the face. She knew it from a painting. It was the kind of face that, seen fleetingly in a crowd, is not easily forgotten.

  “Perugino,” she said. “The Magdalena.”

  “What?” Gus crossed himself

  Afterwards, neither of them could recall any sense of making a decision, or even of being particularly conscious of what they were doing. Felicity dropped to her knees and took hold of the frigid hands. It was despair that she touched, an absence of all trust in warmth, as though the body, in abandoning hope, were backing quietly into a state of nonbeing. There was no movement, and no flicker of response from the eyes.

  “We’ll have to lift her,” Gus said. “You take her arms. The trunk, I suppose? There’s only one suitcase in mine.”

  “Don’t be crazy. They always look in the trunk.”

  “Oh shit.” He rapped his knuckles against his forehead. “But how the hell will we …?”

  They paused. It was not a simple matter.

  Felicity said: “Back seat. On the floor. I’ll cover her with a sleeping bag.”

  “My car, then. It’ll have to be.” His voice skittered momentarily, like a boy’s voice breaking. He cleared his throat, recovered. “Yours is too small.”

  “What’s your citizenship?” she asked urgently, as though the question were germane to the size of their cars.

  “What?”

  “Citizenship. What’s your citizenship?”

  “Canadian. Why?”

  “Born there?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “They always ask.” She was rubbing the woman’s hands, brushing wet strands of hair from her face. “Poor thing. Thank God she’s lucked onto one person with no complications.”

  Gus had no idea what she was talking about, but who thought logic would apply? It came to him that he still had the whiskey bottle rammed into his coat pocket, and he put it to the woman’s lips. Amber rivulets coursed from the sides of her mouth and down her neck, but some of the fire must have found its mark. There was a shudder, a swallow, a momentary focusing of the eyes.

  “Hang in there, baby,” he whispered. “Drink up.”

  Felicity looked at him, analytical, assessing risks at lightning speed. There was the larger space in his car, his uncomplicated passport, his ordinariness. Surely any border guard or policeman would classify instantly: Salt of the earth. An innocent.

  On the other hand, there was his nervousness. And a powerful sense, somehow, of a child with one eye perpetually open for the big stick. A lousy liar if complications should occur. (And when, if not now?) Clearly someone who would blunder into unstoppable truth-telling.

  “My car,” she said decisively. “Pull this damned ribcage open, quick!”

  He obeyed instinctively. There was a cracking sound, and Gus was six years old again, smelling the sawdust and guts of a butcher’s shop: cleaver descending, bones snapping to attention on the block, the butcher — bloody to the elbow — reaching in to grasp handfuls of soft insides too awful for a boy to tear his eyes from. Gus extracted the soft bundle and cradled it against his chest as though it were his first-born, the one he had never held.

  “Through here,” Felicity said urgently, pulling the driver’s seat forward.

  He had always hated two-door cars. He had known, somehow, that he would never get Therese to the hospital in time, her hastily packed overnight bag jammed half in, half out, of the back, so that the passenger seat could not be pushed properly upright and Therese had to pleat herself forward over her own contractions. (A judgment, her sister Marthe always said, for not waiting until they were married. It must have been true. There had been no more sons.) He heaved and shoved, sobbing.

  “Take it easy,” Felicity murmured. “I’ve got my eye on the building. No one coming.”

  The body in Gus’s arms settled like a rag doll around the hump in the floor. Felicity covered everything with a sleeping bag over which she scattered some books, a bag of apples, a crumbling packet of cookies. Artless disorder. Traveller’s junk.

  “Right.” She straightened up, brisk, rubbing her hands. “I’m not going to wait here sweating.”

  Gus watched her stride across the pavement, positive thinking personified. He wished he could get the knack of it, but his limbs and guts seemed to be liquefying. He managed to get back into his own car, but it was inconceivable that he would be able to move it forward, stop it, answer questions, and drive on again. He sat behind the wheel and waited passively for doom, though the St Christopher medal found its way into his palm, a small comfort.

  Movement and confusion. The fishermen returning like a swarm of bees from unsatisfactory flowers. A buzzing haze of resentment, he registered that. Also Felicity walking back with an immigration officer, her head tilted to one side: a deferential listener, the kind who encourages self-esteem and expansiveness in the speaker. From this distance the two had the appearance of strangers beginning a flirtation.

  “ … told to watch out for a van, you see,” the man was saying. “But we didn’t know what kind, so we had to be very thorough with all of them. Got a tip-off from Boston.” Gus missed the next bit, and then he heard: “served deportation papers last week. Trying to jump the gun.”

  Felicity’s voice, on a falling inflection: “It doesn’t seem possible, so far from the Mexican border.”

  “Nothing stops them,” the officer said. “They’ll cross twenty states, God knows how, bribe their way out of anything. You wouldn’t believe. Fear of death, they try to tell you, but it�
�s green stuff they want.” He rubbed his fingers together. “Not enough to go round down there, so they come to nibble at our pie. Tens of thousands in Boston and New York, and now it’s spreading to us. All this economy needs.”

  “And so you …?”

  “Yeah. Round them up and send them home. When we can catch them.”

  “Poor things,” Felicity sighed. “Rather sad work for you, isn’t it?” She was giving him the full benefit of mournful but understanding eyes.

  He appeared to be mesmerized. Coughed a little. “Well now,” he said. “You get a bit cynical in this line of work.” She lowered, for a moment, her sad eyes, and he added hastily, “Not pleasant, of course, though someone has to … And we do get to be grateful for a bit of excitement.” He seemed embarrassed by the admission and became brisk.

  “Well now, young lady. Where are you headed? And for how long?”

  “My cottage near Montreal. For the weekend.” With a rueful laugh. “This was supposed to be a quiet interlude.”

  He clicked his tongue in sympathy. “And you’ve come from?”

  “Boston.” She realized instantly: mistake! Damn.

  Almost imperceptibly the man stiffened. “Boston?” A pause. She could hear the click-click of association, hear his ponderous thought. “You’ve been following the meat van for quite a way then?”

  She puckered her brows in concentration. Gus thought suddenly: What do I know of her? And sensed the liquefaction of his bowels reaching some critical stage. It would all be over in seconds. Scandal, complicity, trying to prove he’d never laid eyes on her before, trying to explain why he’d … (my God! what had he done?), criminal charges, God knew what.