South of Elfrida (14 page)

Mrs. Garrity wasn't her biological mother—Mary was adopted—nor had Mrs. Garrity ever lived in Florida, so far as Mary knew. Mary had the camper parked in the driveway when she found the cans and heard the story about the tamales. She brought her clothes into the house and moved into her old room, painted an enthusiastic, oppressive gold, like being buried inside a bouquet of slightly old, store-bought chrysanthemums.

It was a slow death, Mary staring into eyes that would suddenly change from calm blue pools with no glimmer to brown swirling tide pools crazy with anger. Mrs. Garrity would strike out and try to hit Mary. Mary had to slap her once to get her to calm down. The old cat would slither out from under the couch and join in, yowling. Then, within seconds of the outrage and destructive behaviour, Mrs. Garrity would cry out and sink to a chair, feeble and confused. Bowel incontinence would follow. Mary looked sideways at Tammy and thought about Nicky. “Diapers,” she said.

“Oh, shit. I never thought about that part. You sure?”

“No.”

“Omigod.” Tammy sucked the beer down, placed the empty on Mary's step. “I can't do that. I just can't. I was leaving him anyway. He wouldn't get a job. He was just, like, into skating.”

Mary stood. “Find a trucker without a wife living in the cab. Stay away from ones with dogs. There's a truckers' rest stop a few miles north. Most of them are gentle men. Bound to be a Weatherbee's down the road.”

The girl squinted at Mary and wobbled in her blocky sandals. “But he loves me,” she said.

“A problem,” said Mary.

Later, Mary wandered around the park, carrying her binoculars. Sometimes she thought her binoculars were a cover for snooping around in other people's business. Here, however, she was simply taken with the mating green herons.

The new arrivals on Mary's other side were drinking all afternoon, beer and glasses of white Zinfandel. They showed up on a Friday and set out a green golf rug, three chairs, two tables, and a palm tree the height of their rig, with lights on it. “We're on a long weekend away, just the two of us,” explained the man with a white goatee. “She likes to get out. We live 'bout thirty miles toward town, but this here, this here is wilderness, so we like it.”

Mary eyed the electric palm tree.

“Pretty, in't it? She chose it.”

“There's a whole river right here, with real birds and trees,” Mary said.

He shrugged.

Their dog was a Chihuahua named Princess. The dog's name was sewn in pink and purple sequins on a small canvas-back chair.

“Isn't she just a love?” the woman said to Mary.

“Chair is cute all right. Have a good one.”

In the trees above the get-away couple, the green herons, usually elusive birds, were making primitive, ecstatic jumps at each other. Leaves rustled, marking their excitement.

Mary overheard the man say, “Are you still cranky?” The country station played “Livin' Our Love Song”—again, third time in an hour, by Mary's reckoning. A woodpecker drummed on a pole, and a cormorant flew above the river in the other direction. Over by the laundry shack, in the tree, House finches were mating. The male stiffened his wings, lunged, pinned the female. Princess snoozed in her chair.

Mary walked past a row of campers to the clubhouse, a blocky stucco building separate from the office. Dee Erickson, who managed the place with Ben, told her that owls nested in a big hole in a valley oak and starlings were higher up. Dee was on the lawn, throwing plastic bones to their black Labs. She glanced at the oak and said to Mary, “I thought of poisoning those damn starlings. You seen the screech owls yet?”

“Nah,” said Mary. The owls would be Western screech owls, a bird she'd never seen—a lifer for her list if she saw one. She said, “Came to check last night but missed them. Most people don't know starlings are invasive, but you do.”

“I know more than I look like I know.” Dee had a big laugh. “I used to teach biology at the college near Santa Barbara. Ben had some big ideas about real estate.”

Trailing spider webs floated between the valley oak and the sycamore. Ben and Dee had two grown girls, one married with a baby, one at university. To keep the one girl in school, they'd sold everything and put off Ben's dental work.

In the bushes Mary spotted a pair of Bullock's orioles, their bodies the colour of oranges, their eyes rimmed in black to go with their black throats.

“Here's a true story,” Dee said, patting one of the dogs. “I was meeting Ben in Vancouver, staying at The Sylvia, by the water. You know the place?”

Mary nodded. The Sylvia, on English Bay, was a quaint old hotel with tiny rooms and windows that opened to real air. She'd stayed there once with a friend, when she had friends, before the Alzheimer's took hold of her mother. Funny how that went; people got tired of you complaining about how your mother told the same stories over and over again, as you yourself went on and on. Mary nodded at Dee again.

“So Ben's conference was over the next day. And there I was, in the room, a day early. A gull flew in the open window, and sat on the table and watched me eat dinner. A hot dog, something simple. I said to it, ‘Ben won't believe this, so please come back in the morning.' I phoned Ben, said the bird would see him in the morning. In the morning it came back, sat at the table in the same place. Ben opened the door and just started laughing.”

“I think you're a bird psychic.” Mary laughed.

“She is.” Ben walked up, smiling, and patted one of the Labs.

The three of them followed the dogs down the trail to the river.

“You want to hear my theory about how birds find their way?” Ben asked.

“He should have been the biologist, instead of an engineer,” Dee said, watching the Labs splashing in the river, pouncing in and out.

“Here's my theory.” Ben rubbed his palms together. “Birds have a different schema of seeing. They analyze everything through colour. They have fluorescent sight, so to birds the female is striking, whereas all we see is plainness. Same with mountains. Birds see the colour deep inside the rocks of deserts and mountains. They see blazes of deep colour that translate into a map of light in their brains, and that light leads them where they need to go.”

“Home,” Dee said. She took his arm.

“Anywhere you are, hon,” he said. “I made mistakes,” he told Mary. “I lost the house. I lost everything we had.”

“Yeah, but, hey, unlike a house, trailers don't take much time to clean so I have energy to burn.” Dee laughed. “We could go fuck our brains out right about now, but bingo starts at seven.”

“Bingo is my burden,” Ben said. “The one thing about this job I hate. I make 'em wait 'til 7:06.”

“They're not bad people,” Dee said. “Wanna come play?”

Mary shook her head no. She had played plenty of bingo when Mrs. Garrity could still play.

She watched Dee and Ben strolling away. Dee's head touched Ben's shoulder, moved back and touched him again, like nuzzling. The dogs shook themselves, a spiral head-to-toe shimmy that efficiently removed water from their coats. Then Mary was alone on the lawn, standing so still it felt like meditation. She glanced at the hole where the screech owls nested. Not a chance in hell she would see them, not with her luck. A gull landed on the trail to the beach—she identified it, tentatively, as a ring-billed; gulls were hard to positively
ID
because they passed through so many phases to maturity. The gull waddled toward her, its yellow eye bright, acquisitive, as though Mary might have a sausage roll in her hand, or the last chewy bite of a hot-dog bun.

The gull came to within two feet of her.

Mary asked, “Were you once in Vancouver?”

The bird muttered something and glided away.

Mary turned around and saw the girl, Tammy, walking up the road, a duffle bag slung over her shoulder. There was only one road in, and the same road out. Mary gulped air. Her eyes smarted. If she raised her arms, she might fly.

Dee appeared from the back door of the clubhouse to pick up a dog toy. Her gaze followed Mary's. “Young to be so burdened.”

“Maybe not,” Mary said. “Maybe not burdened anymore.”

“It's bingo time,” Dee said. “You sure you won't come?”

“No,” Mary said. “Actually, I'm not sure at all.”

She followed Dee inside and found a chair in the back row. Someone bumped past her, slid a warm paw across her shoulders on the way to a seat beside her.

Mary noticed the man's big freckled hands and his face glistening in the humid air. “You catch anything?”

“Not yet.” He bumped her arm with his elbow. “I don't usually do this. But get ready, girl. You're sitting next to the big-boy winner!”

“Hell, no,” Mary said. “This night's mine.”

On the dais, Ben made a trumpet sound out of the corner of his mouth, like the start of a horse race, or a rooster with a warbled crow. Someone laughed. Ben opened his mouth, showed his missing tooth. “You retired, easygoing
RV
folk ready for a good time?” He used an accent Mary hadn't heard before—the cost of being partly an entertainer for a living, she supposed. Dee shrugged as though Ben was out of her control. The ladies in front tittered. Beer tops popped. The air from the Sacramento River was sweet.

Delphinium is not a happy cat. Partly, Linda thinks, he must hate his name. She's tried calling him Del, but when she does he won't even turn his head in her direction. She inherited the cat when she rented the single wide trailer west of Tucson. Delphinium is a short-haired tabby with a restless orange tail. He's twitchy. Right now he's twitchy because the mourning doves that nest on the roof of the trailer next door have at least one fledgling and the fledgling is in the mesquite tree staring at Delphinium, and Delphinium, she sees, is plotting.

“You!” She slides open the window and gives a shout. The cat's eyes widen. The dove puffs its body up, as though it's big. “God.” Linda slams the window shut. She hurries to the door, flings herself out, and jumps off the porch, but by the time she makes it over the wire fence (the part the javelinas, a species of wild pig that roams the Sonoran desert, have wrecked) and into the vacant lot, Delphinium is long gone and the baby bird is now staring at her.

“Cats can climb trees,” she tells the dove. “Where's your brother?” Doves are prolific in southern Arizona. Usually they lay two eggs at a time, but the parents of this silly thing gazing saucer-eyed at her from the tree may be exhausted; they've had a pair of fledglings already this season. Maybe this one is on its own.

The finches and siskins have scattered from her feeder; she's scared them. They're hiding in the thickets of brush, waiting. She doesn't worry about Delphinium catching one of them; when birds know where a cat lives, they will tease it by diving low or gang up on it, chittering as though they're laughing.

Three children from her church will be over after school for an art lesson. Linda teaches Crayon Crazy! on her covered porch. She bought a heavy steel table and keeps the crayons, paper, and other tools in a locked box under it. She teaches the children to make layers of colour so that their work looks jewel-like, sometimes like an oil painting. The two boys in her class are seven-year-old twins, and the girl is nine. Today she'll be showing them how to texture, using woodcarving tools she bought at a second-hand store. The tools are well used, not especially sharp. She runs her hand over the oilcloth on the table, brushing off dirt. The slightest wind coats everything with a fine grey powder.

After lunch, she drives her car over to the bagel shop and parks out front. She feels like a criminal, sitting with her computer in her lap, but the bagel shop is also tainted—it moved into town under the guise of an independent business, but turns out to be part of a chain, a sly one. Linda doesn't like their bagels, but occasionally, out of courtesy for the Internet access, she buys something.

It's an intensely white April day, not bright, just an eye-aching white, the beginning of summer. By mid-May it will be scorching, and in June even hotter, the land drier. The monsoons start in July. By September it's fall, and in late December, the birds start mating. Linda's had to relearn the seasons; the prairies, where she's from, function on an entirely different schedule.

She sits in her Hyundai and scrolls through videos and jokes people feel they just have to share, and then her fingers stop, because her old friend Irene has sent a message. At first she thinks it's a mistake. She must have read it wrong. She looks again. There it is: “Anthony was hit by a car, they say he didn't suffer. Bawling my head off.”

Linda covers her eyes with her hands. The image of a little boy running after a ball and a car, like a nightmare, coming. Linda closes the lid of the laptop, closes her eyes. Her heart begins to race. She thinks she might faint. Anthony is Irene's only grandchild.