Doesn’t Matter
Blood dries the same everywhere. Under my nails, in the seams of my palms, gone tacky like the last inch of a chap stick. Jimmy’s, mostly. Some mine. Doesn’t matter.
We’re camped on the steps of the United Church, the doors propped with a pew, glass gone from every window facing the street. Sun’s out, not a cloud to be seen, and the light makes the whole street look freshly washed if you don’t look too close. Sally sits three steps up, ukulele in her lap, working it with three fingers. She misses more notes than she hits, tongue caught between her teeth, like she’s trying not to think about something else. Can’t blame her. A lot has happened. The plunky sound carries down Main Street and dies somewhere past the huge ass blueberry statue at the edge of town, chipped now, one leaf broken off, paint gone the colour of an old bruise.
Clyde’s inside going through the church’s food bank pantry with Billy, counting cans, arguing low about whether the tuna’s still good past whatever date’s stamped on the lid. Ben is about to give the truck its last rites. Eunice is stretched out in the shade of the last pew, eyes shut, breath rattling shallow in her chest, a sweat-sheen on her face. Been getting worse. Nobody wakes her to ask.
I get up and walk. Nobody stops me. This is what I do now. Just me and my machete on patrol. I walk until something needs doing, and something always does.
The frozen-food plant sits two blocks over, loading bays yawning open, the stench coming off it like something died slow inside. And kept dying. Behind it, along the fence line, a goose has tangled itself into the wire, one wing laced through rough rust and blood, feathers matted with it, dragging every time it fights. It shrieks when I get close. Strikes at my hands hard enough to split skin along one knuckle. I work the wire loose anyway, wrist over wrist, metal biting my palms, until it drops free and staggers into the ditch grass beyond the fence, wing dragging, breath ragged, alive.
Two streets over a stroller sits tipped against a mailbox, bright yellow, wheels still spinning slow in the breeze like somebody just let go of it. No rust on the frame. No dust thick enough to matter. A soother lies in the gravel beside it, pink, barely scuffed. I pick it up, rinse it under a gutter still running from last night’s rain, and set it back in the stroller’s seat, tucked into the blanket like somebody’s coming back for it. Somebody might be. The whole street still smells like someone was cooking something two days ago, three at most.
Behind the Pioneer Cemetery, past a worn iron gate hanging on one hinge, a woman sits cross-legged against a headstone gone soft with lichen. She squints up into an oblivious sky. Bees work the clover between the plots like nothing’s wrong, which nothing is, for them. She’s talking, low, to nobody I can see.
I sit down in the warm grass beside her, close enough our shoulders almost touch. She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t ask who I am.
“He used to say the tomatoes never took out here,” she says. “Too much shade off the Legion hall. I told him three summers running and he planted them in the same spot every time.”
“Where is he now?” I ask.
“Gone before any of this started. Heart.” She says it easy, an old grief worn smooth, easier to carry than the new one. “Dog’s now gone too. Different way.”
I don’t ask which way. She’ll say it if she wants to.
“Kitchen had these curtains he picked out,” she says. “Rooster print. Ugly as sin. Wouldn’t let me change them. Some days I miss them so much I could scream.”
Her voice cracks every few words. I stay until she runs dry, then a while longer, the sun climbing, the bees still working the clover like the day owes them nothing.
A sound comes from behind the Capitol Theatre, a gurgling wet growl and a scraping drag against brick. The marquee above the alley still spells out FRIDAY NIGHT JAM in loose plastic letters, one J hanging by the corner. I go quiet, moving along the wall, and find the source in the alley behind the sign: small, still finding its legs, knees buckling and catching, buckling and catching, arms reaching for balance that isn’t there yet. Blanket-shaped rags hang off one shoulder, yellow. I don’t let myself finish it. Its head turns toward me too fast, too eager, mouth working around a sound too young for the noise it’s making. I close the distance in three steps. The machete goes through easy. It always does. I don’t stay to look at what’s left. I don’t check the yellow.
Around the back of the plant, past the loading bays, a crow is tangled in a nest of wire and split garbage bags near the cold-storage doors, one wing pinned, screaming the way crows scream, personal and offended, like how thieves think everyone is stealing from them. What is it with me and birds? I kneel in the gravel, wrist over wrist again, and work the wire off feather by feather until it comes free. The emancipated crow explodes upward into the blue, and something in my chest unclenches that I didn’t know was clenched.
I’m three streets further out, in the Home Hardware, checking the shelves for anything worth carrying, when Clyde’s voice comes down Main Street, cracked and raw, calling Sally’s name over and over like volume alone might turn her up. I drop what’s in my hands and run, boots skidding on sunbaked gravel, the blueberry statue going by in a blur, back toward the church.
Clyde meets me halfway, chest heaving, Billy behind him white-faced, Flower barking at nothing and everything. Sally’s gone, he says. Went looking for the rabbit, he says, the stuffed one, grey, one ear chewed to nothing, the one Billy’s been holding over her head half the week just to watch her steam. Said she wouldn’t go far. Saying it again don’t make it true.
We split up. Nothing pulls at my teeth for this, not the way it does around the Zs. This pull’s different. Doesn’t come for the living. Sally isn’t dying. Sally is just gone. Just blocks of empty houses and no way to find her but looking.
Billy finds her behind the plant, in the loading yard past the cold-storage doors, where wooden crates rot in stacks taller than a man and the smell of rotten fruit hangs thick and sweet. He just stops walking and stands there, and Flower starts barking and won’t stop, and that’s how the rest of us know before we’re close enough to see it ourselves.
A dozen crows come up off her at once, a black cloud of fury, pissed at being interrupted, wings louder than anything else in this town. Not the one I freed. Or maybe it is. There’s no telling one crow from another and it doesn’t matter anyway. The rabbit’s up top, wedged grey and small between two crates near the stack’s peak, right where Billy hid it this morning. She must have climbed, too proud to ask him to get it back down. The wood up there is soft clean through, rotted from the inside like everything else these days, and it must have given way the second it took her weight. Neck bent impossibly at the bottom. Quick, at least. Which is a weird thing for me to think. The birds found her after, because that’s what birds do. None of it is anyone’s fault, and all of it happened anyway.
Clyde doesn’t say anything for a long time, just stands over her with his hands hanging useless at his sides. Then he says they’re staying. Says it flat, done, no argument left in him. Billy doesn’t argue either. Flower won’t leave the spot where she’s lying, not even when we start digging.
I dig with them until my hands blister. It’s not for them, or it is. Doesn’t matter. I do it anyway.
Ben finds me after. Hands me a bottle of water, warm from sitting out all day. I drink half of it before my hands start shaking bad enough to spill the rest.
Sweat and dirt run together down my face, gritty, stinging when I wipe it off with the hem of my shirt. My eyes burn. I sit down right there in the gravel and cry, ugly and loud. I haven’t let myself do that since Jimmy turned, since I put the machete through him myself because I told him I would and nobody else was going to.
Ben doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t say a word. He just stands a few feet off, looking back towards Main, at nothing in particular. Staying close. Staying out of the way.
I cry for Sally. For Jimmy. For me, some, I guess. Though I don’t let myself look too deep. I can’t.
The three of us walk out of Oxford, Ben on point with the rifle slung. He’s humming under his breath, some stupid cereal jingle, off-key and unbothered.
“Stop that,” I say. “Seriously, you’re going to get us fucking killed.”
He doesn’t stop. Hums louder, if anything. Jesus.
Behind me Eunice’s voice comes thin but exact. “‘Seriously’ doesn’t belong in that sentence, and neither does the swearing. If you’re going to curse at your brother, at least construct it properly.”
Even now. Even like this. I don’t laugh, but something close to it moves through me anyway.
Eunice is slower every day now, breath short, one hand pressed to her ribs like she’s holding something in. Nobody says anything about that either.
Somewhere past the tree line on the other side of River Philip a bird calls, and I don’t stop walking.
