South of Elfrida (8 page)

Her countenance is a portrait of disappointment; the lines beside her mouth seem deeper, the circles under her eyes darker. Stefan says, “I didn't mean unrealistic in a negative way.”

“Danny was pleased about the idea of meeting in Bisbee. He went to the hotel website and thought it looked super. Then, bango, a message on my cell saying he wasn't coming. One minute he's coming, the next he's not. There's something wrong with me.”

He nods sympathetically. What else to do? Karen sets herself up. Any woman who would sign on for ballroom dancing without a partner is asking for rejection. It hadn't turned out badly for either of them. He was the gay man in the class, the sought-after partner—no clammy hands, no clumsy steps—and she, in turn, protected him from overeager widows. They made a good pair; they were light on their feet, anticipated each other's moves, and caught on to new steps quickly. He lives in Phoenix now, two hours north of Tucson. After Danny cancelled, left her high and dry, she phoned him in tears and begged him to come down. She would reimburse him for the twenty-five-minute flight, and because she knows he can't bear sharing a bathroom, she booked him a room for two nights in a nicer motel near her condo. When she picked him up in her white Honda Fit at the airport, they drove east on the I-10 toward Benson. They passed miles and miles of identical housing developments. She said, “Not a solar panel in sight.” As soon as she said it, Stefan became conscious of the missing solar panels. Their absence was obvious. Talk about green energy; Tucson has sunshine for more than eighty percent of the year. That's the sort of fact she grabs and runs with.

In Tombstone they went first to the bookstore. Stefan has found his slender volume of poetry in unlikely places, but not here. Not that he actually expected it. The store specializes in the history of the west, with an eye to tourists. They have a few little books of cowboy poems, that's it. He said he was starving, so they went to the café and ordered emu burgers because they sounded exotic.

“What karmic sin did I commit that so many relationships are toast before they begin?” Karen presses her fingers to her eyelids.

The words are so familiar that Stefan says, without thinking, “He has always disappointed you, whatever his name is, he has never given enough.” The lines are from a long poem he's written about her but not let her read. He writes about a bitter, older woman too, a character based on her, and though she's read some of the poems, she doesn't realize she's his subject. “Expectations,” he says, getting the conversation back on track.

Karen pushes her plate toward him, crosses her arms on the table, and gives him a steady look. “I suppose I could join
Second Life
.”

Stefan flinches. Oh, crap. “Point taken, okay, all right.” He'd made the mistake of showing her the online virtual world,
Second Life
, and his avatar, a muscular female bouncer in a lesbian bar. He doesn't date much, so he thought it would be a hoot to hang out with clubbers of the opposite sex. The girls get into such extreme hair-pulling fights, it's hysterically entertaining. Karen deems
Second Life
a waste of time. Get a real life, she tells him, as though hers is working so great.

“Can you get out of it?” He means the hotel booking.

“Nada. Once you make the last confirming click, you kiss your moolah goodbye.”

He feels himself relent. “Maybe if you show up in person, they'll take pity on you.”

She pays for the lunch at the register and waltzes back to collect her jacket. “You know what? You're right. Let's go. And they have such a great bar.”

Stefan blinks, dismayed. That's the other thing about her—she's impulsive. He should have kept his mouth shut.

Bisbee, a half-hour drive south of Tombstone, is situated ten miles north of the Mexican border. He kicks himself as they drive through a landscape of loss (he makes a note on a pad he keeps in his shirt pocket), a settlement of dented trailers, the fronds of one lone palm tree flailing in the wind; a truck with a flat tire, at the driver's window a boy in a red T-shirt glowering; dust devils spinning across the road. She drinks a lot and invariably delivers maudlin monologues, critical of herself and her life. Then she will insinuate, in murmurs, her opinions about him, tiptoeing around the idea that he should get out of his dead-end job in the public records office. Yes, he does gripe, and there's good reason—tedious people surround him. On the other hand, he has a pension to look forward to, and he's not giving it up.

Climbing the wide staircase to the posh hotel, built in the heyday of copper mining when grandees escorted lavishly embellished ladies, Stefan glances at Karen. Because she's blond and has sensitive skin—thin-skinned, she says—her cheeks are red from the wind through the open car window. Before they enter the lobby, she turns to Stefan, places her hand on his arm, her eyes lit. “Just think how incredibly mind-blowing it would have been if Danny was the man I thought he was. It would have been a dream come true.”

Stefan winces. From the lobby they turn toward the lounge, the decor plush green velvet, cherry wood, and nickel light fixtures. Believing that dreams come true is another annoying trait of hers. Despite her environmental work and all the losses to developers, she really believes in happy endings, believes the world can be a better place.

They take stools at the black granite bar. She orders a double margarita. Maudlin is on its way. He readies himself for her boozy regrets.

Back in his Phoenix apartment a week later, the sound of the freeway is a depressing, constant whine. His latest batch of poems has been rejected, this time by the publisher of a small press who ostensibly admires his work but can't fit the poems into the existing schedule. It's a blow, when people you trust start stepping sideways. More mail bangs through the slot. He rises from his computer to find a card from her. He opens it eagerly. In the envelope he finds a note and a cheque. The amount is puzzling. It includes the airfare, which he expected, but also a tip for his time. How wonderfully spiteful she is.

Why not cash it? He had hell to go through. All that listening.

The note says, in her angular penmanship:

I will stay away from you now, knowing you think me exhausting to be around.

I will pick you out of my brain, cell by cell, until you are the stranger you want to be. Giving you what you want, I relieve you from having a relationship with me.

I banish you.

Stefan is pierced to the heart. She is so arch, so precise when she's angry, and so ruthless, a quality he lacks in his poetry. His poetry tends to lie down, take a meandering view, nothing ball-breaking or cruel or overwrought, as her words are. He reads the note again. Okay, he'd made a few honest observations about her character. The day after Tombstone and The Copper Queen, they'd driven down to Nogales and parked at McDonald's and walked into Mexico, despite the drug wars. Stefan was prattling, nervous. She insisted the restaurant she'd chosen was worth the risk. They'd been seated behind a pillar and she complained until they were reseated, after which the vindictive waiter ignored them. The tortillas were from a package, and the whole day was a bust. His telling her she was demanding was like canned frosting on a crumbling cake.

Traffic is building up; an ambulance, siren sounding delirious, honks and butts its way through. The sky used to be blue, but now the smog is as bad as
LA
. He places the note and the folded cheque on the table. The cheque is evidence that at last some attention has been paid to his long-suffering friendship.

The ambulance has made it to an off-ramp. He hates this apartment. The building is so shoddily constructed, the walls are so thin, that he can hear the refrigerator door slam in the apartment above his. He wanders over to look into his own fridge. A head of organic cauliflower he paid too much for still looks okay. He'd bought it because he was worried about not consuming enough fibre. She'd phoned to read him a recipe for cauliflower and sweet-potato soup. Chicken broth and something else. Was it coconut milk?

He thinks it was coconut milk. But he'll give her a call. She loves being helpful; she's easily flattered and eager to share. As he reaches for the phone, a thought nags him: She wouldn't really banish him, would she? No, he assures himself, no. She's too loyal. Especially to her suffering.

One time—it happened in October, two and a half years ago—Lee saved a rooster's life. The rooster was a bantam called Cuthbert, named after an Anglo-Saxon saint. Lee's husband, Gregory, was into saints and chickens. Cuthbert lived with his two hens, Irma and Matilda, in a small coop at the bottom of the unfenced yard, below Lee and Gregory's house in the mountains in the southeast corner of British Columbia. The coop was situated in the open area before the ground sloped and fell into a steep ravine that dropped farther to the creek.

In saving Cuthbert's life, Lee didn't do anything daring like race to rescue him from a pack of dogs, she didn't swat a vaguely cognizant yearling bear about to go against his fruit-eating nature (that summer had been hot and dry, and huckleberries were scarce), and she didn't shoo the rooster off the road just as a logging truck went rumbling by. Lee's saving of the rooster was quieter and, in its own way, dramatic. Gregory said it was miraculous.

One night, a bear, perhaps desperate with hunger—it was, after all, late in the year and almost time for bears to hibernate—shuffled up from the ravine, sniffed the air and smelled the chickens huddled on their roost, and clawed at the door. Gregory had forgotten to latch it, so the bear shouldered its way inside and broke the roost. It mauled two of the chickens—Irma escaped, as usual—but Matilda and Cuthbert were left wrenched and crumpled on the straw floor. The bear then ate most of the bag of chicken feed and left its signature in the yard: a mound of scat full of plum pits.

In the morning after Lee left for her teaching job at the school, Gregory went down, as he always did, to check on Cuthbert and the girls. He was shocked, he told Lee, to see the old wooden door off its hinges, the scatter of Cuthbert's orange and black feathers, and both tiny, unmoving bodies. He barely glanced in before despair overtook him. He ran around the yard and up onto the road calling for Irma, then turned on his heel and waited in his office at the front of the house for Lee. He was inconsolable, and still teary-eyed when Lee came in the door for lunch.

She marched down the hill to look at the damage and found Cuthbert still throbbing. Matilda was dead, it was true, but poor Cuthbert had existed in a subtle state, hovering between life and death, since the attack. “Gregory,” she shouted. “Gregory!” She made him bring a box and fresh straw, lift the rooster, and carry him up to the house. They decided to put the box on top of the freezer, in its own small room with a swinging door. Lying stricken on the straw, Cuthbert looked like a shred of Japanese silk.

When Lee came home from her classroom that afternoon, Gregory seemed calmer; he'd tried giving Cuthbert water through an eyedropper. She moved her hands slowly into the rooster's space until she touched him. She placed her hands side by side on his deflated body. Cuthbert looked at her with one bright little eye. Then he closed it. For ten days, twice a day and sometimes more, she put her hands in the box and let them do the work.

“But did he survive?” This is Sam. He and Lee are sitting in folding chairs in the shade behind the gyro food truck, while Shirley, Sam's wife, finishes cleaning. It's February, and the village south of Tucson, where Lee stays for four months in the winter, is hosting its annual week-long arts and crafts festival. It's her second year of helping out in the gyro truck, and Shirley and Sam have become instant friends, the way people do who are always on the move. From the truck they sell pressed Greek-style minced lamb and beef cooked on a rotating spit, folded into pita bread slathered with tzatziki, shredded lettuce, and cut-up tomatoes. A food truck is a lucrative business, Shirley says. You get your circuit, you stick with it, you show up on time, you're clean, you serve good food. Shirley, a perky blonde from Phoenix with a ponytail and eyes that mean business, is the truck's owner. Her husband, Sam, a younger man on his way to being plump, studied biology at university but short-circuited himself two months shy of his degree. Lee likes him for this; he has a destructive edge.

“Hello? Planet Sam to Planet Lee. Did Cuthbert survive?”

“Of course he survived. Didn't I say that Gregory used the word ‘miraculous'? Would I have said ‘miracle' if Cuthbert had died?” Sam has heard about Gregory's death but hasn't heard Cuthbert's full story, far more graphic: After the first day he struggled to his feet, his neck so bent his comb touched the bottom of the box, and stood for a moment before sinking like a balloon leaking air. A thick, bloody mucous hung from his beak. “His neck is broken,” Gregory had said. “No, it is not,” she'd said, sounding annoyed. They took turns feeding him a soupy gruel of ground chicken mash and water. “He's going to die,” Gregory had said. “No, he's not,” she'd said, adamant. Cuthbert came to recognize her voice as she soothed him, and he blinked as though sending her messages from afar. After eight days, he lifted his head a little and took a halting step. Two days later he raised his head above the top of the box.