South of Elfrida (9 page)

“He survived,” she says again to Sam.

It's warm and sunny—she wears cotton pants and a pair of running shoes—but in the days before the festival, vendors just arriving worried that a rainy streak wouldn't let up. Now everything is so thirsty you'd never know weather had been a concern. Lee smells the heat and dust and dryness. Her skin is always crying for cream or sunscreen in this climate; her hands are parched, the backs patchy with spreading freckles and whitish spots she'd rather not think about. People stroll by, talking and laughing, stuffing food into their mouths, mariachi music in the background from the Mexican restaurant in another lane. The festival draws huge crowds and takes place in a village two thousand miles south of the village where Lee saved Cuthbert and where Gregory, she believes, despite what others say, killed himself.

“What happened to Irma?” Sam wants to know. He has big brown eyes and unruly hair.

“What are you saying?” Lee thinks about the astonishment on Gregory's face the day that Cuthbert wobbled to his feet and stayed there. Gregory had been diligent in feeding Cuthbert mash and water with a baby spoon and eyedropper, yet repeatedly he told Lee she was wasting her time. The day Cuthbert stood up, Gregory smelled of quinine and bergamot and he'd been wearing the same shirt for three days; he hadn't won the contract he expected, after all. And soon after that, as though (she'd thought at the time) the blow to his career was the last straw, he took a noticeable number of pills, a combination of Aspirin, Tylenol, and maybe a dozen Benadryl, the drugs that she'd assumed killed him. The autopsy uncovered the fact that he had kidney cancer, advanced and undiagnosed. His death wasn't ruled a suicide. He would have been in great pain. Why hadn't he told her? Why had she been so oblivious?

The trumpet in the mariachi band blares its solo.

“You said Irma escaped.”

“Oh, Irma.” Gregory's death remains sad and confusing; Lee just can't figure why she didn't have some wifely insight that he was so ill. “Irma escaped from that bear twice,” she says. Irma was such a survivor that when the bear came again, the chicken ran to the house and threw herself against the sliding glass door, just as the ambulance was on its way for Gregory. Lee, distracted when she spotted Irma frantic against the glass, had slid the door open to let her in and then forgot about her. Irma pooped all over the living room before hunkering down beside a basket of straw flowers. Only a serene clucking led Lee to her the next day, after Gregory was pronounced dead and the whole spinning house came to a stop.

“Christ,
Irma
was saved. Why not Gregory?” Had she noticed anything wrong, anything that stood out? No, she had not.

“We don't get choices,” Sam says. “What about Cuthbert?”

“What?”

“What about Cuthbert when the bear came back?”

“Oh, he ran into the bush and came out when I called him. He knew me. He seemed so grateful to see me, it made me cry.” Cuthbert had followed Lee back to the chicken coop, repaired by a neighbour. Irma was already inside, so Cuthbert was happy. “So there they are, Cuthbert and Irma, and here I am, Lee alone.”

Shirley steps down from the truck, mop in hand. It's not that she likes to do everything related to sanitation and hygiene, but she does it because Sam is so bad at it. “It was fate,” she says to Lee. She takes the band out of her ponytail and shakes her hair.

Shirley won't use the word
death
or
dying
or
dead
, so Lee says, “What was fate?”

“That Gregory moved on.” She taps her toe against the front tire of Lee's new Schwinn cruiser that leans against the trunk of a mesquite tree.

“Yeah, moved on,” Lee says. She likes them because they don't mind listening to her theories about what happened to Gregory. They don't think she should have “moved on” from her loss. She stands, stretches her back. “See you later.”

She dingles the bell on the handlebar and rides away past the food stalls—the Indian fry bread and taco trucks, the pizza stand with red-and-white striped umbrellas out front, the corndog and cotton candy trucks—and turns onto the lane where she rents the apartment above a fine arts gallery. Her landlord, Derek, and his partner play opera in the mornings while they dust and tidy, open boxes that arrived in yesterday's delivery, and set the new paintings and ceramics in place before opening the store. Passionate arias wake her every morning, and she lies in bed listening, Mr. PurrBunny asleep at her feet, realizing she is far from home, and this realization causes feelings both satisfied and unsettling.

From her canvas chair on the gallery's flat roof that serves as a deck, Lee has long views, over the freeway and, in the distance, the rocky orange mountains to the west, as well as the makeshift campground in the bare yard below where three vendors stay. She hears the sizzle of burgers on a portable grill. Shirley says Derek lets these particular long-time vendors set up their booths in front of his store, and camp out back, because Derek's store doesn't sell photographs of the Grand Canyon or beaded jewellery boxes or antique postcards. (“Cynical,” Sam says of Shirley.) The vendors—one of them a Bavarian photographer who wears a green alpine hat with a feather—live in vans or tent trailers and pull small U-Hauls for their wares. They're set up adjacent to the ravine, called a wash, a natural catchment for rain during Arizona's monsoons in July and August. Across the wash, she can see lights from a restaurant, the bookstore, and other galleries. A male Gambel's quail calls his harem with a cry that sounds like
Chi-cago, Chi-cago
. From her vantage point Lee watches the Bavarian photographer throw something to his yippy little dog. She remembers this dog from last year.

She hears the squeak of the door downstairs. Derek appears from under the line of the roof and, limping slightly, moseys over to the campers. Cooking meat this late in the evening will bring the coyotes closer, she knows he'll tell them. Last week a coyote killed the restaurant cat; the screeches were terrible. She didn't mind that the cat was dead; it was an aggressive black male that would climb the stairs, jump onto the balcony, and hiss through the window at her own Mr. PurrBunny.

A month or so ago, Lee hurried into the kitchen to make a quick sandwich and saw a huge rat, the size of a squirrel, panting in a corner. When she shrieked, Mr. PurrBunny leapt to the counter and from there to the top of the fridge, where he, the coward, watched Lee scramble around, find her gum boots, plaid jacket, and fur-lined gloves in order to corral the thing and not get bitten. Wearing those items from home, her Canadian clothes she calls them, made her feel brave. She herded the rat into the spare room that stored boxes she would repack when she left and shut the door. She used a strategy of boxes laid side by side six inches from the wall to create an alley. The box at the end, long enough to hold a table lamp, was open. Using a broom, she herded the rat along the makeshift passageway. Once he scooted into the box, she screwed up her courage, flipped it upright. She heard him scrabbling around in the bottom. She taped the top shut with duct tape. Muttering curses, she dragged it downstairs and knocked on the gallery's back door. Derek answered. Behind him she could see the supplies in the mailroom. “I found a rat in the apartment,” she said. She set the box down on its side and waited to see his reaction.

“Is it in there?” Derek pointed and Lee nodded. He stepped out from the doorway and stomped on the middle. The box moved, kind of rocked, scuffling on the gravel. Derek stepped hard again and dented another section. They could see where the rat made a bulge. Derek took aim, brought his heavy shoe down a third time, and the bulge flattened out. Lee felt a stir of admiration; she hadn't known Derek harboured such anger, such merciless violence just waiting to erupt; it was impossible to guess the depths of another's pent-up rage.

When she came back upstairs, Mr. PurrBunny was busy sniffing the trail of the rat through the apartment, from the cat door through the kitchen and into the spare room. He gave her an accusing look. She sat down at her computer and realized who the culprit was. Mr. PurrBunny. He had brought in the rat. Somehow he'd held that gigantic rat in his jaws all the way up the stairs, across the balcony, and through the cat door. She wondered if she'd known it was Mr. PurrBunny when she accused Derek of having rats in the building; she thinks perhaps she had. What was wrong with her? Why had she been so insensitive? “What a cat,” she said, by way of making him, and herself, feel better, and stroked him, but Mr. PurrBunny didn't raise his head from his pillow. She cocked an eyebrow. “Are you holding a grudge?”

No answer.

When she'd told Sam about the incident, he said, “Didn't you feel bad for the rat?”

“You must be kidding. It was a
rat
.”

“But that was cruel, the way Derek killed it.”

“I'm not responsible for what Derek did,” Lee said, suddenly lost, suddenly thinking,
Gregory. What Gregory did
. She slapped her hands together.

Sam blinked, startled. “You will never be a Buddhist.”

“The rat was in my territory. I'm a coyote. Think of me that way.”

“Coyote is more than Trickster. Coyote means adaptability. Wisdom.”

“Bullshit,” Lee said.

Shortly after Gregory died, a colleague, someone almost a friend, invited her to lunch.

The friend told Lee how amazing she was: “You're on your feet, walking and talking, doing so well.”

This particular restaurant, owned by gay men, was in a nearby town and was known for its fresh, local ingredients. On the small table by the window where they sat, a crystal vase held a single iris. Lee studied the iris, the tight folds of mauve and cream, hints of its future glory. She wore Gregory's wedding ring on her left thumb, holding on to it for him; she didn't yet believe he was dead for good. She was in the philosophical stage of grief, a confident period of waiting for fate to change its mind. She and Gregory had been married for nine years. After all, Cuthbert and Irma were back together after surviving their ordeals with the bear. Anything was possible.

The friend said, “My worst nightmare is my husband dying.”

The friend said, “I wouldn't be able to function like you are;
I
would have to be scraped off the floor or the walls.”

The friend said, “I envy you your freedom.”

Lee had looked up then.

Shirley and Sam are over, to drink wine on Lee's second little balcony, the one that faces the street. Lee tells them the story of the lunch but can't recall whether it was the floor or the walls that her friend said she would have to be scraped from. “Scraped, anyway,” she says, handing Sam the second bottle to open. His hands are warm, and he has a sweet smile. “She envied me my freedom.”

“Coyotes don't whinge or whine,” Sam says.

“Jesus.” Shirley wears a calculated, disgusted look. “That was so shitty of her.”

“I didn't think so at first. Now I do.”

“Coyotes get on with things.”

“What is this shit about you and coyotes?” Shirley asks Sam and sits up in her chair.

“Hey, hey,” he says, and she settles back.

The friend had talked about her own second marriage, the difficult children, her dependence on the man. If he died, she would too.

Lee had told her, “No, you wouldn't.” Then changed the subject.

She takes Shirley's empty glass.

“What a bitch,” says Shirley.

“This earth is purgatory, that's my theory,” Sam says and pours another round. They clink glasses, Lee's new ones from Cost Plus.

“See, that's why I love him,” Shirley says. “Thoughts like that never enter my head. I live in the moment, count money, move on.”

“That's why I married you. To follow orders.”

Then their banter: “Oh, yeah?” “Make something of it, why don't you,” as they drink up and prepare to leave.

She sits on the balcony, the glasses dried and put away. People are still wandering the streets, though the vendors have closed their booths and stored their wares in locked vans. She hears a radio, some laughter, smells smoke from a bonfire from another camp. In the distance, the quail call each other home; the coyotes lead off with some preliminary yipping. They stop; they will break up, separate, slink around in the moonlight.

She hears someone on the outside stairs and turns to the screen door. The Bavarian photographer holds his feathered hat in his hand. He says, “Excuse me. Have you seen our dog? The little white one?”

“Oh.” Lee takes a moment.

“Buddy's adventurous. He has no idea he's so small.”

“Buddy?”

“Our dog. The wife's dog.”

She hears the yip of a coyote. “Oh, that sweetie,” says Lee. She can't clearly see the man waiting in the dark, but she knows the expression on his face: despair around the mouth. She looks at her hands. These hands helped to wreck a rat's life. These hands saved the life of a rooster, but not the life of a man. She glances back in the direction of the door. Hope may be better than no hope. “I saw him a little earlier, heading to the food court.” This may be the kindest thing she's said in weeks.

Coyotes yelp in celebration of a kill, so when the real ruckus begins and fills the night with bloody festivity, Lee's heart lifts too. What is the wisdom in loss? What is she supposed to learn? For now, she wants something chased down; she, too, carries grudges. The stars rise like diamonds from behind the mountains into the vivid sky, deep indigo and mauve. This is the first truly dark place Lee has ever lived; nightly she experiences miracles.