South of Elfrida Read online

  The nature of relationships is skilfully illuminated in this collection of stories by award-winning author Holley Rubinsky. South of Elfrida delves into the lives of those coming face to face with personal truths that require resilience, humour, and the ability to change.

  With a clear eye for the complexities of the human heart, Rubinsky’s stories take the reader to deeper understandings about the nature of love, loss, and longing. Spare and rich with wit, these stories celebrate the act of self-renewal.

  * * *

  “In these tender and surprising stories, Rubinsky is the voice of a true original. Quirky, moving, and laugh-out-loud funny.”

  —Caroline Adderson, author of The Sky Is Falling and Pleased to Meet You

  Praise for Holley Rubinsky's Writing

  “Beautiful, spellbinding evocations.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “Affecting, fascinating . . . Rubinsky reveals the strangeness of humans and the heart-rending drama of ordinary survival.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “Books this good are rare.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Impressive.”

  —Maclean’s

  HOLLEY RUBINSKY

  Yuri

  CONTENTS

  The Arribada

  Among the Emus

  South of Elfrida

  Stronghold

  The Compact

  Banished

  Coyote Moon

  Borderline

  Desert Dreams

  Bingo

  Little Dove

  Darling

  Miami

  Heart of a Saint

  Open to Interpretation

  Delilah

  Galaxy Updraft

  At Close Range

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The Arribada

  The ragged fronds from palms along the strand twist in the breeze as Leonard walks his nine-year-old niece down the beach to the fenced turtle enclosure, his toes and hers sticky with sand. The turtle enclosure is made of finely meshed wire so the turtles can’t escape when they hatch. The gate is kept locked and wire is attached to the top to prevent the theft of eggs, a local delicacy. In the sand, beside the mounds, there are ice cream sticks with labels, noting dates, the type of turtle, relative age, and size.

  “How do you suppose the eggs get inside the fence?” The child is slight for her age, so the reflective phrasing of her question seems incongruous coming from her lips.

  “After the mother turtles lay them, it is the turtle man who collects the eggs from the beach to keep them safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “Predators,” Leonard says. Her eyes are a remarkable green. She has long, dark lashes and light brown, curly hair. The bruises on her cheeks and upper arms are fading. “There are many kinds of predators—birds as well as people—who hurt the young.” She throws him an irritated look before turning away. “The Olive Ridley nests in an arribada,” he resumes, using the Spanish word for a group of nests. “The arribadas are a mystery. The egg-bearing females seem to know where to come. It’s as though they get a message and then pile up together on this beach where they were born.”

  “How do they know where to find the beach?”

  “Finding. Ah. The greatest mystery. Perhaps the whiff of a familiar wind from offshore tells them.”

  She runs her palm along the wire enclosure and cocks her chin. “I knew it was you in my room.”

  She’s lying. At the back of her eyes he sees a pool of confusion. He visited his sister when the child was two years old, too young to remember him. Because of the nature of his work, he was able to keep tabs on her. The word uncle means nothing to her. She has had too many uncles.

  The moment of alarm in her room was followed quickly by willingness. He despairs of the willingness of little girls. You don’t have to be in law enforcement to understand the vulnerability of girls.

  He’d left the village with Bianca in the Skylark, an old car in better shape under the hood than it looked from the outside; Leonard had seen to that. The Skylark belonged to the village taxi driver. Bianca, who had children of her own, knew that a little girl could need rescuing. She made arrangements with a nurse at the health clinic to take care of her children for two or three days, depending. Leonard didn’t tell Bianca his niece’s name because he didn’t want her to be implicated, should there be questions in the future. He paid the tolls along the road north, waited patiently in lines while inspectors inspected. They slept in the car on the long ferry ride.

  He dropped Bianca off at the Walmart in Nogales, Arizona, and continued on to his sister’s shoddy house in south Tucson, notorious at that time for gangs and drugs. He entered the child’s bedroom through the window—he had some experience along those lines—and waited for her. The look on her face when she came into the room for her Barbie doll’s silver shoes was one of haughty surprise, an expression charming on a little girl.

  As they drove back to Nogales, she asked if he had a gold tooth because robbers always had a gold tooth in the stories she wrote for school. She was smug with excitement. He told her he wasn’t a robber.

  At the prearranged time, he met Bianca outside the Walmart, surrounded by bags and bags of nonperishable groceries, clothing and toys for her children. They loaded her purchases in the trunk and went into the store together, with the child (named Chastity by her mother; a name he would never call her), to let her choose a brand-new Barbie. Bianca picked a fairy doll and pretended to listen to it. “This dolly tells me she like you very much. She like to go on a trip with you.” The child shook her head and chose instead a Barbie Stardoll, a fallen angel, a rebel—strutting in patterned black nylons, wide red streaks in her raven-black hair, wearing a very short, red sateen dress. Bianca put the fairy doll back on the shelf. “Que escandalo!” she sighed. The child peered quizzically at Leonard. “She says you are outrageous, scandalous.” His comment made her laugh with wicked delight. Bianca led her into the restroom—by then they were giggling—and changed her into a ruffly pink nylon dress with white lace on the collar. As Leonard had instructed, Bianca stuffed the shorts and T-shirt the child had been wearing into her large handbag. In the car they ate candy corn while Leonard applied light brown makeup to the backs of the child’s hands and on her face, his fingers patting gently over the bruise still fresh on her cheek from that scumbag. He combed her brown hair with oil.

  The camper where he lives year-round is set under a palm, near enough to the village, yet close enough to hear the ocean all night. The odour of the sea is that of slightly sweet greenness, humid wetness, the flavour of oyster on the tip of the tongue. On their way back she walks ahead. Her small footprints darken the sand.

  “Who takes care of them?” She turns and looks back at the egg mounds.

  “The turtle man.”

  She has gradually adapted to limitations—one doll, sketchy TV reception, milk that comes from a can.

  “I don’t know who you are,” she occasionally murmurs.

  “I am your real uncle.” The old news causes her to shrug. Off and on they have this talk, at the morning market, when they visit Bianca and the children, or at the panaderia, where he allows her to buy sweet, sticky buns.

  In the mornings he slides open the six windows, including the two in her sleeping area over the cab of the truck. Her breath is fresh and delicate; her lips rosy. He hesitates. She is so beautiful, so fine. And a new feeling stirs in him: he loves her.

  They take their chairs to the sand and put their feet on concrete extrusions from an abandoned building project. She sets her chair far enough from him to indicate she doesn’t trust being touched yet; she flinches involuntarily if his hand grazes hers as he pas
ses her a corn tortilla he takes from the iron skillet. Her involuntary movement tells him more than she can. Sometimes when they sit out, watching the ocean, they turn the transistor radio on and listen. One day Leonard introduces the idea of a new name for her. “Chastity is a stupid name,” she says. “I don’t want a name.”

  “Every human needs a name.”

  “Not this Chiquita banana,” she says. She sips her can of iced tea; it’s tepid due to problems with a propane line to the fridge. He’s taken off the panel that accesses the back of the refrigerator and messed with it, then tucked a torn sheet around the exposed fins and wires to keep out the cockroaches.

  “Isabella was a queen of Spain. Bella means beautiful.”

  “I am not beautiful. I don’t plan to be beautiful ever. Nothing but trouble.”

  A hip-hop song comes on the radio: “I wanna do you, girl.” “I know that song!” she yelps. Then she sings bars of it, slurring. He thinks she shouldn’t know how to sound so sexual. She sings, “‘The things I wanna do to you, girl.’” Her shoulders slump, then she throws her head back—like a spasm, a fit—and slip, slide. “‘You can do what you like to me,’” she says, “because I’m already dead.” She flops onto her side in the sand.

  On another day she says, “My bruises are gone,” and looks sideways at him, her eyes appraising his. They’ve taken the aluminum chairs to the water. Surf rolls over their feet. She lifts her T-shirt, looks at her belly and bare chest with its buds of breasts. “Meth whore,” she says.

  He raises his finger in caution. “No, no. Por favor, don’t say that. Forget those words. You’re here now.” He draws an inverted V in the sand, a simple tent shape. Pokes a little indentation inside. “Lambda,” he says. “You are safe here.”

  She puckers her lips. “Maybe. I like lambs.”

  He has to laugh. He hopes the wretched events of the past year in particular—his sister, on drugs again, hooked up with another lowlife—will slip away like a tide and leave the surface of the child’s mind smooth as fine, wet sand; that happiness is what he wants for her. He wants her to be delighted someday by the memories of her childhood.

  He says, “When the eggs hatch, the turtle man won’t let the hatchlings crawl to the sea right away. Why would that be?”

  “Predators,” she says. “Those gulls. Gulls like to eat babies.”

  The sun falls, a flattened globe, pale orange against a glistening line on the horizon. They drag their chairs back to the camper, leaving tracks in the sand like the Olive Ridley turtles. He takes a beer out of the cooler. The ice has nearly melted. He sighs, puts his feet up on the cooler next to hers. He loves the size of her limbs, her feet with the splayed toes. The odd toes make her unsteady when she runs. Lambda likes her feet bare. Bianca has painted her toenails a little-girl pink.

  Sometimes by the fire he talks about his sister and the rebellious girl she was and how it turned out. He speaks in a low tone, falls into his sister’s grammar, syntax, her slipshod use of words: “Your mommy did, hey, outrageous things. Hair-raisin’ things, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yep.” Lambda lifts her shoulders and lets them down with a loud sigh that imitates his.

  “Did you understand?”

  She taps her chin. “Nope.”

  “You laughed anyway.”

  “Yep.”

  He remembers his sister as sometimes being animated and lively. He himself had no idea what the joke was. It doesn’t matter now.

  Lambda says, “But who are you?” and tilts her chin inquisitively.

  She’s snoring, whispery little-girl snores. The refrigerator, rattling, works again, though now it has frozen their two eggs in the blue bowl. She wakes as he’s looking at the eggs. She comes down the ladder in the pink nylon dress; she’s attached to it. It will be small for her soon. She allows him to flick sleepies from the corners of her eyes. “Want some milk?”

  “Let’s go see the turtles first.”

  He smiles. She will grow into a woman with priorities.

  They reach the wire fence.

  “Look,” she says, pointing. “One’s hatching.”

  He sees a beak working out of a crack in an egg.

  “Look! Two, three. Oh, look, look!”

  He says, “Let’s go tell the turtle man.”

  “Let’s! Let’s go tell the turtle man!” He hears the thrill in her voice. “The turtle man has the key. He’ll unlock the gate. He’ll save them!”

  She runs up the weedy bank to the road and stops the village taxi. “Do you know where the turtle man is, señor?”

  The man in the Skylark says, “No, señorita, this hombre, he is a mystery to me.”

  “Oh, this is not good news for the turtles,” Lambda says, her hand on her chin, a parody of a child perplexed.

  She looks both ways, crosses the road, and runs up the stairs to Bianca’s apartment. Bianca is making coffee in her percolator. “Ah, that mystery man. There is a camper on the beach. Do you know it? He might be there.”

  They arrive back at the camper. He brushes two fingers across her eyelids. She obediently closes her eyes. He quietly opens the door and steps inside. Lambda, still outside, scratches the screen: “Sir, I am looking for the turtle man.”

  “Ah, the mystery is solved. Fair señorita, I am he.”

  “I know,” she says. “I knew.”

  After the sun sets, they take flashlights to the arribada. The dozen hatchlings are clustered in a heap against the mesh. Leonard unlocks the gate and steps inside, carrying a cardboard box. “Hatchlings are appetizers for the sharp-toothed grazers beyond the surf line, but I can’t do anything about that,” he says. He picks the turtles up, places them in the box, relocks the gate.

  Outside the fence, he releases them. They lift their heads and, searching, align themselves slowly toward the ocean. They creep and scratch over the sand until they come to where the land meets the sea. He and Lambda walk behind at a distance. “They have to do this part on their own,” he tells her. “It makes them strong, and they learn the scent of home.”

  In the surf, the tiny turtles tumble. Some return on their backs in the smooth glide of a wave onto the beach. She reaches her hand to turn a baby upright. He shakes his head. “No, my dear. They have to figure it out themselves.” Only one or two of the batch will survive, will have the strength to push past the waves and swim the five days and five nights to go beyond the reach of predators. He’s ready to tell her all this, his voice grave, when she lets out a shout.

  “This one can do it!” Lambda shrieks, pointing to the one he considers the weakest, a hatchling who struggled, upside down, too long. It has flipped on its own and turns a second time, with good speed, toward the sea.

  Lambda claps her hands. She looks up at Leonard, delighted. It’s so dark, just a few lights from farther up the beach, the stars pressing through the haze, that her face transforms as he stares at her. He sees figures from another time lurking behind her young features, a rose-cheeked barmaid, a princess wearing a robe and crown, and he sees a fair boy grey-faced in the gloaming. Then he fixes on this particular body of this particular child, who is grinning at him as though she knows something, as though she knows what he’s about to say. A survivor of this batch will live one hundred years and return to this beach because here she was born and here she was saved.

  Among the Emus

  Crystal and Colin are into hill country and climbing. They’re in Colin’s pickup; a little bashed here and there, like they themselves are, is how Crystal thinks of it. She’s given a few years to Colin. Before she found him, a man raked thin from hard living and hard work, she’d lost a lot of years to booze. When she pulled herself out of it, she was no longer homely Doreen, acne pits ruining her face, but she was, as she jokes, hanging on to the shirttail of youth.

  They’re driving up into the north Okanagan to help Angus, Colin’s stepson, sell emu oil at the fair. Colin likes to say he mostly raised the boy himself. For the entire drive—all five hours of it
so far—Colin has been going on about the Angus-Pure Ranch, its size, what hard work it is for one man because of the animals—emus, bison, yaks, and goats. “Angus says emus are short-sighted. They pick lint off your shirt. I bet you won’t go into their pen,” Colin tells her.

  Crystal doesn’t know what an emu looks like. She wonders why anyone would want to go into their pen, anyway. She says, “I wouldn’t be afraid.” She keeps her eyes on the road.

  Colin smacks his hand on the steering wheel. “Jeez, sugar. You get sick from everything and you’re scared of everything. You won’t go into that pen.”

  “I’m going in with them, you’ll see.”

  “Look at that pretty little skirt you’re wearing. You looking for somebody new at the fair?”

  “Yah, so you think,” she says and then shuts up. She listens to her earrings tinkle as she shakes her head. Her heart is starting to tremble and quiver.

  He says, “Sometimes I wonder if you’re too good for me.”

  A man talking like this is bad. She looks at her feet, in new strappy sandals. She’s wearing them so Colin will feel proud when he introduces her to Angus, but no sense explaining such a thing to him. She sips from her bottle of negative-ion water.

  She’s recently moved from a rented room into Colin’s double-wide trailer. His closets are full of clothes from the days he played in a country band—plaid shirts in soft colours with snaps. He has two golden retrievers that he never brushes. He’d never change the sheets if she weren’t there to do the wash. She likes doing it, thought he appreciated it, thought they were in love.

  Her heart does its flippity-flops and lumpity-lumps like it’s trying to get out. Colin says her ailments are all in her mind. Can a person have hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism at the same time? Crystal—a name she gave herself—has symptoms of both. She’s been diagnosed with hypo and prescribed Synthroid. Yet online she reads that two symptoms of hyperthyroidism are anxiety and brittle hair. She has those symptoms too, but it’s her heart that worries her the most.