The Journey Prize Stories 22 (3 page)

“So how many women did you pick tonight? How many are you going to see again?”

“Maybe I won't have to see any others,” he says.

He offers her his drink.

“About that eighth boyfriend of yours,” he says as she takes the glass, “my grandfather was an alcoholic.” She sips and tastes only mineral water with lime. He takes back the glass and looks into her eyes. “I don't drink.”

“And I'm not always sarcastic,” she murmurs.

Over the next two hours, he fills in the details of a life that is placid and unthreatening. He works for the police and his brother teaches at the private boys' school near her apartment. He meets his parents and brother at a pub every Sunday for lunch. He owns a home in the suburbs just outside the city. One of his friends is a fireman.

While he speaks, her body – with preening self-caresses and head tilts – is holding a covert discussion with his. Her body is welcoming his, rolling out its little red carpets while doorkeepers swing wide the doors. She is barely aware of what her body is up to until she notices that she and Number 29 are
sandwiched together, her hand on his knee, his arm around her waist. A great strategizer, the body has dumped doses of oxytocin – the body's rohypnol – into her bloodstream to counteract her adrenalin, to relax and stun her.

They leave the restaurant. Night has shrouded the streets and alleys. As Number 29 steps onto the sidewalk, night falls over his head and shoulders like a black hood.

He turns to face her, where she stands in the doorway, and holds out his hand.

“Come on. I'll drive you home.” With his other hand, he scoops a key ring from his trenchcoat pocket and whirls it around one finger – more confidence than he has shown all night.

His keys. His car. His area of awareness.

In the parking garage, he mentions that hidden eyes are watching her.

“Security cameras,” he says, scanning the concrete roof.

She trails behind him as he points at beige cones poking from the ceiling like tiny beehives. She always thought they were sprinklers.

She thinks about getting into his car.

Yes.

No.

“This is a high-risk society,” he says, still looking up. “Terrorism, bio-chemical warfare …”

“ ……HIV, hepatitis, pregnancy, serial killers,” she thinks.

“I have a camera for a brain. I remember everything about tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sitting at the table beside yours was Number 26, a lawyer in jeans and a green sweater. Beside her was Number 10, gold barrette and contact lenses. I saw the rings around her irises. Then Number 12, picked at one of her cuticles the whole time we talked. Black wool skirt, run in her nylons. Then Numbers 20 and 18 and 4. And on the other side of the bar, 8, 16, 2, 22, 30, 6, 28, and 24. I could tell you how each woman dressed and how she behaved and what she said. Five women wore glasses and only two wore jeans. Nine worked as teachers. And you, you were Number 14.”

Number 14 stops walking.

“I think I'll take the subway home.”

He stops as well and turns to face her. “Why? Are you nervous about me seeing your place? Are you married?” He pretends to joke but his voice cracks on the final word.

The problem with his questions is this: she cannot answer them. She cannot say, “I suspect you might be a serial killer,” for if he turns out not to be a serial killer, such a statement is an insult, and if he turns out not to be a serial killer, she might want to see him again.

He takes off his glasses and blinks down at her, as though he is just as confused as she is. Then he reaches forward and lays a large hand on her arm.

She sees this image – his hand on her arm – as though watching it from above her own body. She imagines police officers in a dank concrete room, viewing the security video from tonight, clearing their throats, taking notes.

She asks Number 29, “Do you wear a uniform?”

“I don't follow.”

“At your job, do you wear a uniform?”

He steps back from her and takes his hand off her arm.

“No. Sorry. Women always ask me that. I'm sure I could rent one if you wanted.”

He turns away from her and moves between two parked cars, saying over his shoulder, “People used to focus on punishing criminals once a crime had been committed, but these days we try to prevent crimes before they happen.”

He opens the passenger door of a black hatchback and looks at her expectantly.

“Of course, security is all a question of balance,” he says. “Balancing caution against necessary risk. There are no guarantees.”

There are no guarantees. But there are safeguards.

“Just a minute,” she says and pulls her cellphone from her jacket. “I need to check my messages.”

While he fiddles with his own cellphone, she lowers hers and snaps a photo of the back of his car.

Then she texts a co-worker, someone who might ask questions if Number 14 stopped showing up for work.

“I met someone!!!”

She attaches this message to the photo of his licence plate and hits send.

“Don't let them take you to a second location,” she remembers a newscaster saying about serial killers, as she slides into his car. “That's where they kill you.”

No.

Yes.

She pulls shut the door.

————

They drive away from the city centre, travelling north up a highway and then a series of side streets. She does not drive and is unfamiliar with this route to her apartment, but he knows the area. His brother lives nearby, he says.

The car has leather seats and a
CD
changer in the back. She has never heard, before now, of a
CD
changer. He widens his eyes with disbelief and pleasure at such naivete. As a female folk singer wails through the car's speakers, he grins about all the things he knows.

“Have you ever seen the houses along Arbour Path?” he asks.

When she shakes her head, he announces, “I'll take you for a drive then.”

He turns down more and more streets, away from the street lights and into a residential area thick with trees. She sways with the car, relaxed and dizzy.

High walls of stone and tightly packed evergreens, as well as wrought-iron security gates with cameras and intercoms, surround the houses. A jeep with the words “Securo-Guard” written on one side cruises past. The houses look like sets from a movie. Massive Greek columns glow in the dark. Spotlights shine on the arched stone entrances of Tudor manors. These homes are not like anything an architect would design for beauty, but like something the owners imagined would be a grand home when they were ten years old. Number 14 stares at a stucco Italian villa and realizes that it is not a house but merely a dream of a house.

Number 29 points out five-car garages. He talks about what sort of house he might like to live in. What sort of house he has now. How many children it would take to fill his
house (one) and how many children before he would have to move (two). He lays it all out like a banking plan. His voice drones on, nasally, but she is not paying attention. She is watching his large hands grip the steering wheel.

The houses are now farther back from the road, separated by vast stretches of dark lawn. She can barely see his face.

Of course, he will never own a house like this. These houses belong to pop stars and the Russian mob.

Even now, he is frowning and pausing at a crossroad, turning his head side to side. “I don't …” He wheels the car to the right.

It slows to a stop.

“Ooops, dead end,” he says. He turns to face her.

They are on a gravel road, surrounded by black shapes of pines. His headlights cast the only light. She looks at the uneven outline of his ridged skull, at the dark shadow of his face, at where she thinks his mouth should be.

It's him or me, she thinks. Him or me. Him or me.

And I am willing.

She smothers him with her mouth.

She tongues the hollow beneath his Adam's apple.

She shoves her hand under his sweater and pinches his nipples.

She pushes back his head with both hands, to expose his neck, and bites.

Only when his hands begin to dig into her shoulders does she stop. He has made an X with his arms in front of his chest, palms facing outward, pushing her away.

She grabs at his groin, but he swats away her hand and says, “I thought you were shy.”

His voice is querulous and accusing, his breathing uneven. “I watched you at the club. You barely moved your hands or body when you spoke. You took up as little space as possible. Very shy people do that …”

“You profiled me?”

“ ……or liars.”

The adrenalin that rushed through her body a few minutes ago seems to have pooled in her stomach, leaving her legs and arms numb. She feels tired. No, exhausted. The heft of her disappointment and humiliation, surely, will capsize the car.

“I have no idea how we're going to get back,” he says, and she turns towards the windshield. The yellow arm of a barrier gate extends across the road in front of them.

They are both lost. Lost in this suburb of designer homes. A dream of a dream she had when she was much younger.

“I won't hurt you,” she says. She remains still. She makes no sudden movements.

“Liar,” he whispers.

T
he hunter followed the blood down from the North Shore Mountains into Vancouver. This was the third day he'd tracked the buck his father wounded but couldn't kill, because a fall broke the old man's femur. The hunter had never known a buck to bleed this much and go on. It should have bedded down and died two days ago, but here were drops of its blood on the white shoulder line of the Upper Levels Highway and, a mile on, a tuft of tawny hair caught on a chain-link fence. He crossed the Lions Gate Bridge at dusk and followed the blood trail east past Coal Harbour, down Cordova Street into the lower East Side. Twice his .30-06 leapt to his shoulder, but the crosshairs fell on the ghosts of old kills and he cursed his exhaustion, his hunger. His image of the wounded buck, blood staining its white belly, blood trickling down its pink-white thighs, blood loss lowering its head inch by inch, pushed him past the broken women who all smiled and asked if he wanted a date. He came to Powell and Raymur and the blood trail went north and east.

He peered both ways through his scope: at the desolate
parking lot of the sugar refinery; at the dark road east. “Where are you?” he hissed. He wanted to shoot off a couple of rounds, fucking have done with it. It had drizzled for two days and his wet mackinaw and wool shirt made him itch with cold. Hunger was making him see double, he concluded, but neither blood trail, north or east, vanished after he downed a handful of bread crumbs from his pocket.

“Where is she?”

The hunter thought he imagined the voice, as he had imagined the branching bloody trails, but there was a woman now in a navy pea jacket beside him. She swept the eastern road, back and forth, with binoculars.

“He,”
he said. “A muley buck. Six point.”

“She,”
the woman said. “My sister. That's her stroll two blocks back. She called last night and said she was in trouble. I called the cops, but …”

The hunter knelt down and touched both sets of tracks with his index fingers and brought them to his nose. Copper, gasoline, ocean rot – he couldn't tell which was human, which was deer. The buck would die, curl up behind a dumpster, get plucked to bone by crows and rats and the carcass buried in a Cache Creek landfill. No way to die, not a six-point beauty. As for the woman's sister, he pictured a similar end for her. No way to die? He didn't know anything of her beauty, inner or outer, enough to say.

“I'll go a little ways in both directions,” he said. “Look for signs. Maybe a hoofprint, maybe dung or hair. It's a full moon – sometimes his shadow leaves impressions.”

“Can you see the impressions a person's shadow leaves behind?”

“If the light is right.”

“Is the light right?”

The ghosts the hunter's scope showed him half an hour ago, the ghosts of those old kills; he couldn't remember if they were all animals. And whose old kills? Who left them there on an urban street? It was his hunger thinking again. “For deer the light is right.”

“Help me find her.”

The hunter went a little way in both directions: north up the railway tracks and east along the road, but there was no sign of the buck.

“If your sister is bleeding like this buck is bleeding, then she hasn't got long.”

The woman looked towards the parallel rows of lights on Grouse Mountain. They seemed to define a wide, curving road that went deep into the night sky.

“I can only follow one path,” the hunter said. “Maybe your sister is there, maybe not.”

The hunter went east, a few paces in front of the woman, towards Franklin Street. The low buildings closed around him and the further he went down the grubby road, the uneasier he grew. There were signs everywhere. A red condom hung from a blackberry vine. A hypodermic stuck up from the belly of a rag doll. A white ankle boot with a stiletto heel disappeared behind the passenger door of a black Escalade. In the lot of a burnt-down house, the grass was flattened as if animals had bedded down there. “What colour was your sister's hair?” the hunter asked. He passed the woman three blonde hairs he'd found on a pile of blankets and garbage.

“Bleached blonde. Brown before – I won't cry, you know.
Our lives divided. Val went one way and I went the other. Sometimes she called every day, sometimes weeks passed. Her last call was the first in two months.”

The hunter split his last digestive biscuit in half and gave a piece to the woman. It was the only food he'd eaten in a day.

The black Escalade they'd seen earlier ejected a teenage girl in a pink fur coat and then her ankle boot. She limped down the street and wiped the blood from her nose with the sleeve of her coat.