The man was still angry, his knuckles white on the phone, and I thought he really wished he had that hand around my brother’s neck. Then he said something I’ll never forget. “You’re a minister, aren’t you? What the hell do you teach these boys?”
Blake took a step toward him, his face crimson. For a second I thought he might kick the man in the shin, but he stopped after one step. “It won’t happen again,” he said, his voice so low I’m not sure the man heard him.
When the man was finished on the phone, he walked us to Zellers front door and held it open. “Get the hell out,” he said, “and don’t come back.”
“I never did anything wrong,” I said. “I can come — ”
“Shut up!” said my brother, and he started across the parking lot.
I caught up to him and grabbed his arm. “I don’t get it. Why would you — ”
“I don’t know.” He was almost yelling. “Motley Crue — I don’t even like them.” He shook me off and started walking again.
“When we get home you’re really gonna catch it.”
He turned to glare at me. “You think I don’t know that. Come on.”
When we got to the bus stop on the far side of the mall lot, I stopped, but he kept walking.
“It’ll pick us up right here,” I said.
“You think I’m getting on that bus with all those bloody people, you’re crazy.”
There was no one at the stop but us. “What people?”
“People staring.” He glanced back at me, but he never slowed his pace. “Hurry up. We’re walking.”
And we walked all the way home, nearly two klicks it was, the snow on the sidewalks crunching beneath our feet, the sky already darkening, Christmas lights glowing on trees and bushes, red rope-lights curled around the pillars of front porches, a few deer sculpted with wire and silhouetted in white lights as they fed on snow-covered lawns, a three-dimensional manger scene, the Christ Child wrapped in a real blanket and luminous in a box of straw, my brother dragging his feet the closer we got to home, signs of the Christmas spirit everywhere and nothing but grief awaiting him at home, for Blake had brought shame upon our family. I would have volunteered for a spanking if it would have eased my brother’s mind.
When we got home, Blake was summoned to the den and I followed behind until my father shook his head at me and closed the door. I stood in the hall a moment, wondering how he would punish Blake. I should have known he wouldn’t yell at my brother, but I was surprised by the restraint I noted in my father’s voice, the words indistinct behind the door, a steady flow, low and murmurous, the tone as soothing as a massage on aching muscles.
I looked for Anna in the halls at school, tried to run into her, but I never saw her once, not even on Tuesday when I hung around outside her history class until everyone had left the room. Blake gave me a funny look when he came out and saw me standing by the fountain, but he never said a thing, and I sure wasn’t going to ask him where she was.
I first heard the talk on Wednesday morning.
Hurrying down to my locker to switch books between classes, I passed two boys going up the stairs, their voices loud and animated.
“Not in town,” one of them said. “Somewhere out in the country.”
“Jesus. Who would do a thing like that?”
That was all I heard, but I had seen their faces, flushed, excited. I wondered why I felt uneasy.
I pushed through the crowd around the lockers, found my own, began to turn the dial on my combination lock. From behind me I heard someone say, “In a field somewhere. North of town.”
“Dead, you mean?”
“Yeah, they said a body on the radio.”
The lock was shaking in my hand. I tried to hold it steady and work the dial, but the numbers were all wrong.
“It wasn’t that cold last night, was it?”
“I don’t know. But frozen was what they said.”
The numbers on my lock were blurry now. When I turned the dial, they seemed to shift. A girl had joined the group behind me, her voice high and troubled, almost screeching, but I didn’t turn around.
“I heard it was a native — that’s awful.”
“Yeah, you don’t expect it here in Palliser. Maybe in Regina.”
“It’s awful anywhere.” The girl’s voice again.
“They said she’d been beaten.”
“She? You mean it was a girl?”
“According to the radio.”
I quit fooling with my lock, let it fall against the metal door, stood there, my nose almost pressed against my locker, staring at its dented surface, a gun metal grey.
The girl behind me began to sob. I think I knew what she was going to say even before she spoke. “Anna,” she said, “she hasn’t been at school all week.”
I had to get out of there. “Excuse me,” I said, pushing between them, my head down, almost running, wanting just to get away, going back up the stairs, heading for the front door, but no, there were always kids outside, where could I go? The football room, there’d be no one in it now, not a soul, the football room, that was the place. I bumped a kid as I turned into the hallway by the gym, someone I hadn’t seen, almost flattened him against the wall.
“Hey!” he said. It was Evan Morgan. I hardly recognized him. “You hear about that body? It might be someone from our school.”
I grabbed him, gave him a shove along the hall. “No,” I said, “no, it couldn’t be.” I didn’t want him looking at my eyes. Pushing open the door to the football room, I ducked inside. Empty, thank God, it was empty.
The room was a blur. I could barely see where I was going, but I felt as if my body had been set on automatic pilot. My legs walked me across the room to my locker, turned me around, sat me down on the bench where I always sat. Where everybody sat.
“Red meat,” Jordan Phelps had said, “good for the appetite.”
I dropped my head into my hands. “Anna,” I thought, “oh, Anna.” I may have said her name aloud, I think maybe I did, and the next thing I knew, I was bawling like a baby.
By Thursday morning every kid at school knew that Anna Big Sky’s body had been found in a field north of town. Even the teachers knew. On the radio, the T.V., announcers said that a farmer driving on a grid road had spotted the body in a field, but they kept saying no name had been released, the police were waiting for the next-of-kin to be notified. There was no announcement of her name until the news at suppertime that night, and by then the kids at school had already collected over a hundred dollars to buy flowers for her funeral.
I didn’t want to hang around the school that day at noon hour, didn’t want to have to listen to kids going on about someone most of them didn’t even know. I asked Ivan Buchko if I could catch a lift home with him.
“Sure,” he said, “if you don’t mind going the long way around.”
I hopped into the front seat beside him. He was so big I swear the whole car slanted toward his side of the road. I guess I noticed more about the car this time than I had the night we took Amber Saunders home. It was a ’76 Ford LTD, with the front seat shoved back as far as it would go, but Ivan’s huge body was rammed behind the wheel as if he was just some slightly bigger than normal guy who’d crammed himself into an old Volkswagen Beetle. Somehow it was comforting to ride with a guy so big and strong you knew that nobody could ever beat him up and dump him in a field.
Ivan didn’t turn at Huston Way, but kept driving straight up Main Street. “Where you going first?” I asked.
“The old McCauley place.”
“What’s that?”
“Old homestead — well, a farmyard. Where the house and barn used to be. Just trees and bushes now. Not much else. People sometimes go out there to drink.” He looked grim.
“That’s where she got it.”
“Anna?”
“Yeah, Anna Big Sky.”
I felt like asking him to stop the car and let me out, I could walk home. But something kept me seated there,
a sense of inevitability I guess you’d call it, a feeling that a chain of events had long ago been set in motion and now something more was going to happen, something I was meant to be a part of.
“How do you know where to go?” I finally asked.
“From the news. I recognized the place.”
Ivan followed the highway that ran straight north of town till we reached a gravel crossroad and he turned east, going fast on the gravel, gravel and snow, the sound of the tires changing as soon as we left the pavement, a dismal wail. Flat prairie stretched ahead of us, and the occasional farm, outbuildings huddled under a thin, white shroud. After a few kilometres I saw the McCauley place ahead of us and knew what it was without Ivan saying a word. The yard was set back from the road the length of a city block, a line of Manitoba maples on either side of the yard, their trunks thick and dark even in the noonday sun. Most of the bigger branches were down, some of them split in two and dragging on the ground though still attached to the trunk, everywhere around them a snarl of broken limbs. Between the rows of Maples was a caragana hedge that looked as if it hadn’t been trimmed in years, the branches wild and tangled, in places stretching a dozen feet into the air.
Ivan pulled onto the side road and stopped the car. From a fence-post right beside the car, a hawk rose into the air, wings beating for an instant, then falling still and silent as it glided toward the McCauley place. It was stupid as hell — I know it was — but I shuddered when I saw the hawk.
“There,” said Ivan, and pointed at the field. Perhaps two dozen metres into the field, an irregular orange rectangle was painted on the snow, fluorescent orange. I’d been looking at the hawk and hadn’t seen it. Spray paint, I thought. Ivan left the car running and we walked into the stubble field, the crust of snow snapping with every step we took, the sun above us almost lost in cloud now, our shadows like dim ghosts moving across the field. There were lines of footprints leading forward, and just as many going back the other way, then a mass of prints in a circle around the orange rectangle which was broken in places where someone had stepped. There were fewer prints inside the circle. We stopped before the paint, hesitant to take another step, as if this were sacred ground where no one dared trespass.
Blighted sunlight, wind beginning to rise, wisps of snow lifting, gathering on the flattened crust, sifting through broken stalks of wheat.
There, where she had lain.
“Poor Anna,” said Ivan.
My eyes were damp. I felt myself moving backward, was afraid I’d start to run.
“Yeah, let’s go.” Ivan, too, had seen enough.
We hurried back to the car. I could feel my shoulders shaking inside my jacket and hoped he wouldn’t notice.
I was still shivering in the warm car.
“Sure as hell,” said Ivan, “they wouldn’t have done it there.”
“They?” My body jerked against the seat.
“Whoever — I don’t know.” He glowered at me. “Nobody’s going to beat her up out there — where any car coming along would see them.” He gestured toward the farm yard. “Behind those trees, that’ll be the place.”
He drove slowly along the narrow road, which was thick with weeds and grass, but not thick enough to prevent you from seeing that other cars had taken the same route. As we passed the caragana hedge, the car bounced beneath us.
“Ditch,” said Ivan. “Somebody dug it right across the road to keep people out. Kids must’ve filled it in years ago.”
Beyond the hedge the yard was full of swaying grass rising at least a metre above the snow, but here and there were tracks where cars had pulled off the road, patches where the grass was trampled down. High on the branch of a broken maple I thought I saw a shadow move. In one corner of the yard, a ring of snow-covered rocks marked an abandoned firepit. Near them, barely visible through the swaying grass, orange paint outlined an awkward circle.
Ivan swung his door open, got out of the car, swung the door shut again. I watched him step toward the circle. Wondered why I was just sitting here, watching him go. Finally, I dragged myself out of the car and followed him to the circle’s edge. Here the grass was trampled, the crust of snow beaten down, but there was no sign of blood. From the edge of the circle, uneven footprints laid down a crooked trail through a break in the maples and out into the stubble field. The trail of someone staggering. Half a kilometre in the direction Anna had taken, smoke rose from the farmhouse she must have seen and tried to reach. Where the trail began, here in the heart of the circle, the snow was stained with urine.
SIX
Tires on gravel, motor hum were the only sounds as Ivan drove us back to the highway. Once he looked at me, and I shoved my Kleenex back into my pocket. It was already soaked anyway. Once, too, he spoke: “She was going in the right direction. Damn, if only she’d kept going.” After that we were both quiet. He had his thoughts, and I had mine.
I kept seeing that patch of yellow snow, kept thinking — I turned to Ivan. “Put on the radio, will you? This silence is driving me nuts.”
He gave me a funny look, but he punched a button on the dash and the car was filled with sound. Some country singer wailing on about his friends in low places.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have gone out there,” Ivan said, “but I knew her, you know. Somehow it kind of seemed the thing to do. To see where it happened. As if I owed her that much.”
“Uh-huh. I knew her too.”
We bounced onto the highway and headed back to town. I noticed Ivan glance again at the dash.
“We’re not going to have time to make it home for lunch,” he said. “Sorry. Maybe we better grab something at McDonald’s.”
I was sorry too. “Okay, sure. Fine with me.”
That much piss, there must have been a bunch of them. Had the bastards tried to rape her and she’d fought back — was that what had happened?
“We’ll try the drive-through,” said Ivan. “We can eat on the way back to school.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” I’d left my lunch on my locker shelf at school, hadn’t even thought about it, just wanting to get away from the place, and then we’d gone to somewhere worse.
We clattered over the C.N. tracks on the edge of town, the tracks that seldom carried a train anymore, drove past the Canadian Tire Store, the A and W, turned in at McDonald’s.
“You want a Big Mac?” Ivan asked.
“I guess so, sure.”
She had fallen in the snow and they had stood around her.
“Anything to drink?”
“No, that’s okay.” I wasn’t even sure that I could eat.
Ivan stopped at the speaker. A burst of static, a distant voice, and he was putting in our order.
All of them looking down at her, where she lay, crumpled in the snow, one of them suddenly hauling out his dick to piss, the others reluctant maybe, but one by one joining in. And I was sure I knew who they were.
“You can always tell when they like you,” Blake had said. “I’m gonna try again.”
The trouble was I didn’t know what to do. I needed to talk to my brother, but he ignored me at football practice after school that day. They were working on a play where he lateralled to Vaughn Foster in the flat, then ran downfield himself so that Vaughn could pass the ball to him. A surprise play that might score a touchdown in a pinch. Yeah, and any kind of touchdown seemed like small potatoes now.
Football practice was no time for the kind of conversation I needed with my brother. I’d catch him at home.
When I went down for supper that night, there were only three places set at the table. My mother was busy at the counter, pouring soup into the frying pan.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
She shot me a puzzled look before picking up a spatula and beginning to stir. “Just making Sloppy Joes is all.”
“No.” I pointed to the table. “Who isn’t coming home for supper?”
She laughed. “Here, I thought I’d thrown you for a loop, putting soup in the fry pan. Your
brother’s sleeping over at Fosters’.”
“On a school night?”
“They’ve got that joint history project. Going to try to finish it tonight.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.” But I knew history wasn’t what they’d be discussing. They were up to something.
Standing in the hallway outside my father’s den, I could see his left elbow on his desk and beside it the stack of books that he always kept at hand: Cruden’s Complete Concordance, The Concise Concordance, The New Compact Bible Dictionary (the only paperback in the pile), The New Oxford Annotated Bible, The Book of Alternative Services (the B.A.S. he always called it). In front of them was a pile of loose papers weighted down with an Indian hammerhead he’d found years ago in the Coteau hills west of town. Beyond the papers and the books, I could see the dull glow of his powerbook. Until six months ago, a huge old computer had stood like a stone monument at the centre of his desk, but then he’d bought a laptop that he could cart back and forth to church. The best thing he’d ever done, he claimed, grinning as if he’d just won the lottery. It didn’t take much to make him happy.
I knew he must be working on his sermon, but I needed to talk.
When I stepped into the den, I could hear his fingers tapping the keys, but barely, for his touch was light and quick.
“You got a minute?”
Half a dozen words marched across the screen, followed by a period. He turned in his swivel chair. “Sure. Have a seat.” He smiled at me, that warm smile that said he didn’t mind the interruption, and I thought, he’s a good person, he can help if anybody can.
He motioned to the straight chair beside his desk. “Just set the minutes on the floor.”
I moved the binder of vestry minutes from the chair to the floor and sat down. A couple of pages must have been loose in the binder; they had partially slid onto the floor, white paper stark against the dark hardwood of the den. Like snow on rock, I thought.
Living with the hawk Page 8