Traplines (7 page)

“I’m such a marshmallow. I even cry at B.C. telephone commercials,” is what I said.

Paul leaned over and smoothed my hair away from my face. “You know we love you, don’t you, Pumpkin?”

He smelled of Old Spice and I felt like I was in a commercial. Everything would be perfect, I thought, if only Canada had the death penalty.

In a tiny, grungy antique store in Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands I found the moose. Paul and Janet had brought me with them to a business convention. Since the finer points of Q-Base accounting bored me silly, I left the hotel and wandered into the store.

Nature pictures and small portraits of sad-eyed Indian children cluttered the wall. The hunchbacked owner followed me everywhere I went, saying nothing. Not even hello. I was about to leave when I saw the moose.

“How much is that?” I asked, reaching for it.

“Don’t touch,” he grunted at me.

“How much?” I said.

“Twenty.”

I handed him the twenty dollars, grabbed the picture, and left.

“What on earth is that?” Janet asked when I got back. She was at the mirror, clipping on earrings.

“Oh, nothing. Just a picture.”

“Really? I didn’t know you were interested in art. Let me see.”

“It’s just a tacky tourist picture. I’ll show it to you later.”

“Here,” Janet said, taking the package from my hands and unwrapping it.

“Careful.” I said.

“Yes, yes.” Janet’s mouth fell open and she dropped the picture onto the bed. “Oh my God, that’s disgusting! Why on earth did you buy it? Take it back.”

I picked up the picture and hugged it to my chest. She tried to pry it from me, but I clung to it tightly. Paul came in and Janet said, “Paul, get that disgusting thing out of here!”

She made me show it to him and he laughed. “Looks very Dali,” he said.

“It’s obscene.”

“This from the woman who likes Pepsi in her milk.”

“Paul, I’m serious,” she hissed.

“Let her keep it,” Paul said. “What harm can it do?”

Later I heard him whisper to her, “Jan, for God’s sake, you’re overreacting. Drop it, all right? All right?”

I still have it, hanging in my bathroom. Except for the moose lying on its side, giving birth to a human baby, it’s a lovely picture. There are bright red cardinals in the fir trees, and the sun is beaming down on the lake in the left-hand corner.
If you squint your eyes and look in the trees, you can see a woman in a blue dress holding a drawn bow.

Amanda’s house was the kind I’d always wanted to live in. Lace curtains over the gabled windows, handmade rugs on the hardwood floors, soft floral chairs, and dark-red cherry furniture polished to a gleam.

“You like it?” Amanda said, throwing her coat onto the brass coat stand. “I’ll trade you. You live in my house and I’ll live in yours.”

“I’d kill to live here,” I said.

Amanda scratched her head and looked at the living room as if it were a dump. “I’d kill to get out.”

I followed her up the stairs to a large, airy room done in pale pink and white. I squealed, I really did, when I saw her canopied bed. Amanda wore a pained expression.

“Isn’t it revolting?”

“I love it!”

“You do?”

“It’s gorgeous!”

She tossed her backpack into a corner chair. I flopped down on the bed. Amanda had tacked a large poster to the underside of her canopy—a naked man with a whip coming out of his butt like a tail.

“It’s the only place Mother let me put it,” she explained. “Cute, huh?”

Downstairs, a bass guitar thumped. A man shrieked some words, but I couldn’t make them out. Another guitar screeched, then a heavy, pulsating drumbeat vibrated the floor. Then it stopped.

“Matthew,” Amanda said.

“Matthew?”

“My brother.”

Amanda’s mother called us to dinner. Matthew was already heading out the door, wearing a kilt and white body makeup. His hair was dyed black and stood up like the spikes on a blowfish. When his mother wasn’t looking, he snatched a tiny butter knife with a pearl handle and put it down his kilt. He saw me watching him and winked as he left.

“So where do your real parents come from?” Amanda’s mother said, pouring more wine into cut crystal glasses.

There were only the four of us. We sat close together at one end of a long table. My face flushed. I was feeling tipsy.

“Africa,” I said.

Amanda’s mother raised an elegant eyebrow.

“They were killed in an uprising.”

She still looked disbelieving.

“They were missionaries,” I added. I took a deep drink. “Doctors.”

“You don’t say.”

“Mother,” Amanda said. “Leave her alone.”

We were silent as the maid brought in a large white ceramic tureen. As she lifted the lid, the sweet, familiar smell of venison filled the room. I stared at my plate after she placed it in front of me.

“Use the fork on the outside, dear,” Amanda’s mother said helpfully.

But I was down by the lake. Mama was so proud of me. “Now you’re a woman,” she said. She handed me the heart
after she wiped the blood onto my cheeks with her knife. I held it, not knowing what to do. It was as warm as a kitten.

“I think you’d better eat something,” Amanda said.

“Maybe we should take that glass, dear.”

The water in the lake was cool and dark and flat as glass. The bones sank to the bottom after we’d sucked the marrow. Mama’s wet hair was flattened to her skull. She pried a tooth from the moose and gave it to me. I used to wear it around my neck.

“I’m afraid,” I said. “She has a pattern, even if no one else can see it.”

“Your stew is getting cold,” Amanda’s mother said.

The coppery taste of raw blood filled my mouth. “I will not be her,” I said. “I will break the pattern.”

Then I sprayed sour red wine across the crisp handwoven tablecloth that had been handed down to Amanda’s mother from her mother and her mother’s mother before that.

After a long, shimmering silence, Amanda’s mother said, “I have a Persian carpet in the living room. Perhaps you’d like to shit on it.” Then she stood, put her napkin on the table, and left.

“Lisa,” Amanda said, clapping her hand on my shoulder. “You can come over for dinner anytime you want.”

Mama loved to camp in the summer. She would wake me early, and we’d sit outside our tent and listen. My favorite place was in Banff. We camped by a turquoise lake. Mama made bacon and eggs and pancakes over a small fire. Everything tasted delicious. When we were in Banff, Mama
was happy. She whistled all the time, even when she was going to the bathroom. Her cheeks were apple-red and dimpled up when she smiled. We hiked for hours, seeing other people only from a distance.

“Imagine there’s no one else on earth,” she said once as she closed her eyes and opened her arms to embrace the mountains. “Oh, just imagine it.”

When we broke camp, we’d travel until Mama felt the need to stop and settle down for a while. Then we would rent an apartment, Mama would find work, and I would go to school. I hated that part of it. I was always behind. I never knew anybody, and just as I started to make friends, Mama would decide it was time to leave. There was no arguing with her. The few times I tried, she gave me this look, strange and distant.

I was eleven when we went through the Badlands of Alberta, and while I was dozing in the back, the car hit a bump and Mama’s scrapbook fell out of her backpack.

I opened it. I was on the second page when Mama slammed on the brakes, reached back, and slapped me.

“Didn’t I tell you never to touch that? Didn’t I? Give it to me now. Now, before you’re in even bigger trouble.”

Mama used the scrapbook to start our fire that night, but it was too late. I had seen the clippings, I had seen the headlines, and I was beginning to remember.

That night I dreamed of Aunt Genna showering in blood. Mama held me until I stopped trembling.

“Rock of ages, cleft for me,” Mama sang softly, as she cradled me back and forth. “Let me hide myself in thee.”

I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. Mama squeezed herself into the sleeping bag with me and zipped us up. I
waited for her to say something about the scrapbook. As the night crawled by, I became afraid that she would never mention it, that I would wait and wait for something to happen. The waiting would be worse, far worse, than anything Mama could do to me.

Amanda and Matthew had a game called Take It. The first time I played, we were behind a black van in the school parking lot. They stood beside me as I rubbed a patch of skin on my calf with sandpaper until I started to bleed. The trick to this game is to be extremely high or just not give a shit.

Amanda squeezed lemon juice onto my calf. I looked straight into her eyes. “Thank you,” I said.

Matthew pulled a glue stick out of his schoolbag and smeared it on my calf. “Thank you,” I said.

Back to Amanda, who had been poking around in the bald patch of earth by the parking lot and had come back with a hairy spider as large as a quarter. It wriggled in her hands. Fuck, I thought. Oh, fuck.

She tilted her hands toward my calf. The spider struggled against falling, its long, thin legs scrabbling against her palm, trying to grab something.

Long before it touched me, I knew I’d lost. I yanked my leg back so that the spider tickled the inside of my leg as it fell, missing the mess on my calf completely. I brought my foot up and squashed it before anyone thought of picking it up again.

When I was twelve, I took the Polaroid picture Officer Wilkenson had given me to a police station in Vancouver.

In the picture, Aunt Genna and Officer Wilkenson are both blurs, but there is a little brown-haired girl in the foreground clutching a broom handle and squinting into the camera.

I showed the Polaroid to a man behind a desk. “That’s my Aunt Genna,” I said. “My mama killed her, but she’s not in the picture.”

He glanced at the picture, then at me. “We’re very busy,” he said. “Sit down.” He waved me toward a chair. “Crazies,” he muttered as I turned away. “All day long I got nuts walking in off the street.”

After a while a policewoman took me to another room, where a grave-looking man in a navy-blue suit asked a lot of questions. He had a flat, nasal voice.

“So this is you, right? And you say this is Officer Wilkenson?”

He made a few calls. It all took a long time, but he was getting more and more excited. Then someone else came in and they made me say it all over again.

“I already told you. That’s Aunt Genna. Yes,” I said, “that’s the officer. And that’s me.”

“Holy smokaroonies,” said the navy-blue suit. “We’ve got her.”

The third time I tried to commit suicide, I found out where Paul kept his small automatic at work. It was supposed to be protection against robbers, but it wasn’t loaded and I had a hard time finding the ammunition. When he was busy with an order, I put the gun in my purse.

This time I was going to get it right.

I remember it was a Wednesday. The sky was clear and there was no moon. I didn’t want to mess up Paul and Janet’s house, so I was going to do it at Lookout Point, where I could watch the waves and listen to the ocean.

I left no note. Couldn’t think of anything to say, really. Nothing I could explain. There was already a queer deadness to my body as I walked up the road trying to hitch a ride. This time was the last time.

Cars passed me. I didn’t care. I was willing to be benevolent. They didn’t know. How ironic, I thought, when Matthew pulled over and powered down his windows.

“Where to?”

“You going anywhere near Lookout?”

“I am now.”

I opened the door and got in. He was surprisingly low-key for Matthew. He had on a purple muscle shirt and black studded shorts.

“Going to a party?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me and a few old friends.”

Something British was on the radio. We drove, not saying anything until we came to the turnoff.

“You were supposed to go left,” I said.

Matthew said nothing.

“We’re going the wrong way,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Lookout’s that way.”

“Yeah?”

“Matthew, quit fucking around.”

“Ooh. Nasty language.”

“Matthew, stop the car.”

“Scared?”

“Shitting my pants. Pull over.”

“You know,” he said casually. “I could do anything to you out here and no one would ever know.”

“I think you’d better stop the car before we both do something we might regret.”

“Are you scared now?”

“Pull the car over, Matthew.”

“Babe, call me Matt.”

“You are making a big mistake,” I said.

“Shitting my pants,” he said.

I unbuttoned my purse. Felt around until the smooth handle of the gun slid into my palm. The deadness was gone now, and I felt electrified. Every nerve in my body sang.

Matthew opened his mouth, but I shut him up by slowly leveling the gun at his stomach.

“You could try to slap this out of my hand, but I’d probably end up blowing your nuts off. Do you know what dumdum bullets are, asshole?”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the windshield.

“Didn’t I tell you to stop the car?” I clicked off the safety. Matthew pulled over to the embankment. The radio played “Mr. Sandman.” A semi rumbled past, throwing up dust that blew around us like a faint fog.

He lifted his finger and put it in the barrel of the gun.

“Bang,” he said.

Mama would never have hesitated. She’d have enjoyed killing him.

I had waited too long. Matthew popped his finger out of
the barrel. I put the gun back in my purse. He closed his eyes, rested his head on the steering wheel. The horn let out a long wail.

I can’t kill, I decided then. That is the difference. I can betray, but I can’t kill. Mama would say that betrayal is worse.

A long time ago in Bended River, Manitoba, six people were reported missing: