Living with the hawk (11 page)

“Look at it,” said my mother. “Around here, you seldom see it snow without a wind. Usually a howling wind. It's beautiful.” She glanced back at Blake, but I don't think my brother was looking at the snow.

Before I went to bed that night I stood for a long time at my bedroom window. The snow had stopped falling hours ago, but the world outside was white and still, shining under the streetlights. When I switched off the light, the ceiling of my room seemed almost luminescent. I lay down and stared at the dim glow that had to be reflections from the snow outside.

For some reason, I thought of the time my brother took me Christmas shopping at Zellers. I was in grade three and he in grade six. He'd helped me pick out coffee mugs for our parents, nice ones with a Canadian flag on the side; then he left me in the line to pay for them. It was a long line, but I didn't care. I remember being pleased because the mugs weren't going to cost as much as I thought they would. I'd have money left over for a chocolate bar.

The next time I saw my brother, a man wearing a tie and vest had him by the arm, was almost dragging him along. They seemed to be arguing. When they got close to me, I heard Blake say, “That's him — in the green tuque. Just wait till he's paid. I don't want him getting lost.”

What's he talking about, I thought, I'm way too big for getting lost.

The two of them stood there, watching me while the clerk rang up my purchases and counted out my change. They weren't arguing now. The clerk wrapped tissues around the mugs and slipped them into a bag. I handed her the looney she'd just given me and said, “I'd like a Crispy Crunch too.”

“Come on, kid. We haven't got all day.” The man sounded angry.

I shoved the bar into my pocket and grabbed my change. “What's going on?” I asked.

Blake shook his head at me. The man gave his arm a yank and headed toward the other end of the store.

I had to trot along beside them to keep up. “What is it?” I asked.

The man stopped so suddenly, his face so angry when he spun towards me that I ducked my head. I thought he was going to hit me. “Your brother,” he said, “is a lousy thief.”

When he got us to the office he phoned my father, told him his son had been caught shop-lifting a CD, he wasn't phoning the police this time, but if the boy ever tried it again, there'd be no second chance, the police would be handling the case for sure.

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.