South of Elfrida Read online

  Colin is worthless when she feels sick; he’d as soon open a can of pork and beans for dinner, which leads her to think that all the effort she puts into slow-cooking meat and vegetables is a waste of time. He says he likes her stews. Like? Is that all he can say? His Adam’s apple shinnies up and down whenever he starts sweet-talking: “Sugar, I love your stew, bring your little stew over here.” And she does.

  The country they’re driving into is wide-open ranch country, trees in clumps around tidy houses, and a big sky. “It’s so pretty,” she says. Black Angus cattle graze on the hills. A barking dog runs after the car. Skunkweed fills the ditches alongside the road.

  They pass the fairgrounds. Colin says he wants to drop their things off, take a look at the ranch. They swerve off the highway onto an unpaved road and climb. The tires throw stones. A carved wood sign leaning against the fence reads ANGUS-PURE RANCH. They pass the gate, gaping open, and pull into a dirt area between some animal pens and a ranch-style house. The shiny metal roof of the house sparkles, hit by the sun just right. Then dust catches up with them, settles like a swarm of gnats. Colin says, “Look. Emus. Over there.” Crystal leans across him. She sees ostrich-like things with waving necks. Colin lets the truck idle. Over the noise of the engine, he clears his throat. “This here is nice country. Angus has got himself good land. A man could like it out here.”

  She catches the quick look he gives her before he opens the door. He’s thinking something that he’s not saying directly. Crystal sits a moment in the truck and then follows him inside the house. It’s nice and cool compared with outside. A lazy cloud of flies floats over a little pile of dried cat shit on the vinyl floor. She wrinkles her nose. Dishes need to be caught up with. An orange and white cat lounges on top of the TV, another hides under the couch. In the kitchen and bathroom, sulphurous-smelling water drips from the taps, but the parched flies don’t mind. “Just so you get the idea,” Colin says and puts their overnight bags on the dining room table.

  They have to park in the overflow lot, weave through cars, and push through crowds of people with strollers and kids with balloons. When they arrive at the trade show tent, Angus looks over her head and says to Colin, “I knew you’d be late. I can always count on that.”

  “It was my fault,” Crystal says. She sells Avon, so she’s learned a few ways of dealing with people. She reaches out her hand. Angus is a big guy with dark, curly hair and red cheeks. His eyes are lit with anger toward Colin. She steps forward, her body between the two of them, her hand still out. Angus notices her then. He takes her hand and pumps it. His hand is fleshy and calloused. She holds it until she feels him calm down, and then the three of them unpack the rest of the oils and creams and set them on the fold-up tables Angus has brought. On one side of them, a vendor is selling a drain-unplugging device, and on the other, they’re offering samples of peanut brittle. That’s good, Crystal figures; the peanut brittle will slow folks down.

  “I need a beer,” Angus says, and Colin says, “Sure. Go on.”

  In the first two hours, she and Colin sell more than two-hundred dollars’ worth because Colin walks into the aisle with a confidential attitude and confesses that one jar of emu oil cream cured his foot fungus, but maybe the pretty lady doesn’t want to see that, but take a look at his little gal. He nods toward Crystal, who stands and shimmies and waves. (They have devised this plan and his nod is her cue.) Angus-Pure Ranch Emu Oil cured the arthritis in her hips, and there she is, working the fair, bending her hips every which way.

  People hand him cash and Crystal makes change. One old man buys a Hair Care Pak special for seventy-five dollars because Colin asks him, “You ever seen a bald emu?”

  The man allows as he hasn’t never seen an emu, and Colin says, “There you go,” and makes the sale.

  He comes back laughing, and Crystal says, “You con man,” and kisses his whiskery chin. Then Angus joins them. He hands his dad some cash.

  Crystal turns for her bag—her vitamins and antihistamines, her concealer and lip gloss—when Colin vanishes. The fact that he hasn’t invited her to go with him makes her symptoms begin, like a car engine that cuts out, causes the car to roll to a stop. She and Angus sit in the booth. The peanut brittle vendor is on a break. The drain-opener fellow is dozing. Occasionally merry-go-round music bursts into the dark building. No one walks by.

  Angus says, “I appreciate you coming. I’m good at growing the birds, rendering the fat, making the oil.”

  Crystal thinks about the word rendering. “You kill them?”

  Angus nods. “I hate the selling part.”

  She touches the bottles—three ounces, six ounces, the pint specials, bulk-sized for the whole family—and thinks about the slaughter of emus. She hasn’t thought about “emu oil,” not precisely, thought maybe they had glands, like a cow, that gave out oil. She imagines the blood. Her battery blinks on low. She feels faint.

  “Here.” Angus passes her a flask. She sniffs the rye, hands it back. She’d nursed her alcoholic father, developed a taste for liquor herself. She remembers going to her first AA meeting, dirty bra strap showing. Angus hands her a Mars bar, and even though it’s against her principles, she eats it.

  “There’s more to emus than their oil,” Angus says.

  She sips her negative-ion water and thinks Angus is suited to be a rancher, even one with unusual animals, because he has a slow rhythm. But when he speaks next, she feels the top of her head separate somewhere above her temples. The look on his face is secretive, angelic.

  He says, “Emus are actually space creatures. They grant wishes.”

  “Grant wishes?” She reaches out and takes a customer’s twenty dollars and says, “I guarantee this oil will help you,” and hands over a three-ounce jar. People want miracles, that’s plain.

  “I’ve seen things out there in the pen with them.”

  She quips, “If emus could grant wishes, you’d have a wife to clean up that house of yours.” The look on his big, shy face, the red flush, makes her wince. She says, “I hope God chokes me for saying that.”

  “I don’t have much luck with women.” He looks at his fleshy palms with their scars. “Figured I don’t want a wife anyway. So it worked out.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she says, thinking of his house in need of help and those orange cats in need of litter box training.

  Colin lost more than a hundred dollars in some game, and by the erratic way he’s driving from the fairground to the ranch—he speeds up, slows down—and the tension in his jaw, she knows he’s in a bad mood. Her heart goes crazy what with one thing and another, and the heavy heat in the truck doesn’t help. Flat summer clouds silver the sky; lightning darts in the distance. Colin smokes a cigarette even though he’s quit. Her eyes are raw, maybe from the smoke or an allergy, or the silence between them. The scent of grass and hay borne on the wind through the open window is strong. Angus in his old Chevy pickup isn’t far behind. They pass through the gate of the Angus-Pure Ranch.

  They land. That’s how she feels when Colin jams the truck to a stop, slams the door, and leaves her sitting. She pats her skirt around her knees, looks out the windshield splattered with bugs. The mounds with horns out there would be the yaks. Or maybe the bison, she doesn’t know. Brown-faced goats bleat in a pen near the house that needs paint. She sees all this. How to describe what happens next.

  She drops down from the truck as though slipping through the sky. She descends and sinks right into the place. You turn, turn around, look at your life from wherever you’re standing and that’s where you are. These two men today are the only men she will ever need. An orange kitten rubs her leg.

  She looks at the emus in their pen, clustered in the back. They elongate their necks and run at each other and ruffle their feathers. She watches them for a minute, looks at her feet in their flimsy sandals. You would never wear sandals like these if you lived on a ranch. She says out loud to no one, “I’m going in. I’m not afraid. You emus can pick lint off
my shirt all you want.”

  And she’s not afraid. Easy as pie, she works the latch and steps inside. One emu sees her. Then the others swivel their heads in her direction, and like a wave of feathers on stilts they come bobbing her way, their necks swaying from side to side, their eyelashes fluttering over heavy-lidded eyes, huge eyes. She hears deep-throated bok-bok sounds as they trample toward her, sounds like ping-pong balls hitting a table. They’re so close, Crystal sees a whirlwind of dirt-pronged and scaly feet. Necks like fronds reach down for her. She ducks, puts her hands over her ears. Their beaks tap her neck, tap her skull, rip at her skirt. They pull her hair.

  She hears Colin and Angus yelling. The men leap into the pen, arms and curses flying. The emus retreat like thunder. Colin draws her out.

  Because she brought the wrong clothes, Colin gives her a pair of his jeans and Angus loans her a plaid flannel shirt. The shirt has been line-dried; it smells fresh and feels crisp on her skin. She joins Colin and Angus by the bonfire. After a while the three of them eat bison steaks under the stars. The animals shuffle around and bleat or grunt. Her heart stays where it should be, not losing its beat, not banging around to get out.

  Before bed, she finds a well-used spatula in the kitchen, heads to the guest room, and flips cat shit out the open window. She tucks the spatula under the kitchen sink so no one will use it for scrambled eggs. As she steps carefully back to her room, she thinks that Colin’s golden retrievers would like living on a ranch. Then she lies down on the covers, dabs her bruises with emu oil, and makes her wish.

  South of Elfrida

  They’re on a birdwatching fieldtrip, driving only as far as Elfrida, through the unpopulated grids north of Bisbee, Arizona, up and down country roads, past flat, shorn grain fields, checking telephone wires and the tops of poles for raptors—hawks and falcons, eagles and kites. The landscape looks to Jean like Saskatchewan after harvest. She and two other women are crowded in the back seat of a white Camry driven by John Malcomb, the workshop leader, the tall, authoritative man Jean thinks of as “the hawk man.” The temperature is soaring, but he won’t use the air conditioning because a good birder needs to hear as well as see. Dust gusts in periodically through the open windows. Norma, the fourth woman in the car, is in the passenger seat keeping a tally of the birds they identify. At the morning lecture in the motel rec room, Jean assumed that Norma, passing out the doughnuts, was the hawk man’s wife, but she’s a regular, like some of the others, taking classes with him every chance she gets.

  The three vehicles following are connected to the lead car by walkie-talkie. When the Camry pulls over, they pull over. Everyone quietly piles out, no slamming doors. They huddle over their birders’ guides while the hawk man sets up his scope. Everyone must have a turn looking through the scope, and they guess and are wrong and guess again. And through his persuasive suggestions regarding the size of the bird in the air compared with the size of known objects (the width of a barn, the height of a telephone pole) and considering size and colour related to distance and distortion, adding in light and cloud and, so far as Jean can tell, adding willy-nilly flicks of colour here and there, all eventually agree with the hawk man and climb into the cars again. As the day passes, they troll by so many hardscrabble ranches, faltered land developments, trailers on half-acres, and half-started houses that Cochise County, Jean muses, will never amount to much property tax.

  After a pit stop and quick lunch at a convenience store, Diane, the freckle-faced, small-boned woman on Jean’s left, introduces the topic of cats, and they idly talk about cats in relation to birds. Jean hasn’t told her fellow birders about her own cat, Buster Furman, back in the camper parked behind the motel, basking in the breeze from the Fantastic two-way fan. Buster Furman is seven years old and has been known to catch a few birds. “Tails,” she tells him. “Tails, not feathers,” but he has his limitations.

  Norma glances over her shoulder at the group in the back seat. She bites her lip and then says, “I killed my neighbour’s cat.” The car grows so still you can hear the tires sweat on the surface of the road.

  “How could you?” Jean sits forward.

  “It saved the birds around my feeders.”

  “But it was someone’s pet.”

  “I know. I heard the family calling him. I felt terrible. I had to pretend I didn’t know anything.”

  Jean wonders out loud how Norma did it—the gruesome details—but the hawk man interrupts. “The damage to birds in North America cannot be calculated. The domestic cat is a killer, and no science can change the way they are.”

  “Yes,” says Norma. She’s thick-bodied, her hair a fading blond that, Jean knows, she’ll have to make a decision about soon—cut it, colour it, or let it hang in greyish wisps, the sort of decision necessary beyond a certain age. Jean herself is beyond that certain age, on the cusp of fifty, and even as she tells herself she’s willing to grow old, in an ideal world she doesn’t want to do it alone, which may explain why, she thinks, she put up with her last boyfriend for so long.

  “Each outdoor cat is responsible for the death of ten birds a year. And that’s not counting feral cats,” the hawk man says.

  The women on either side of Jean nod.

  Jean knows the statistics—seventy million cats in North America are born in the wild. Feral cats endure horrible lives—they breed, fight, starve, or freeze to death in the winter. Jean jumps at the chance to shift the conversation away from pets. She says, “Feral cats should be captured and euthanized.”

  “I don’t like killing,” murmurs Diane.

  Jean knows the SPCA policy regarding feral cats—trap, neuter, return. “Returning neutered cats to their colonies doesn’t save birds, does it? We are trying to save birds, right?” She feels righteous using we, as though she’s a member of a principled club. She glances at the rear-view mirror. The hawk man isn’t looking at her.

  The car falls silent.

  They drive slowly past another alfalfa field. Norma points. “Zone-tailed. Wow. Left.”

  “Where?”

  “Eleven o’clock. Left.”

  “Why can’t you describe where? Which pole?” He brakes.

  “Flying. To the left of the hay barn. Eleven o’clock.”

  “Hell. That’s a turkey vulture.” The car lunges forward.

  Jean wonders if the others are also wracking their brains for something to say. She murmurs, “Easy to confuse.” He’d said so himself at the lecture.

  You want to feel loathing move from one human being to another? Feel the disgust palpating from him in the driver’s seat to her—to me, thinks Jean, squashed in the middle.

  “At least we can count it,” says the heavy-set woman on Jean’s right, helpfully. “That’s twenty-two turkey vultures today.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Two.”

  “We still have another three hours.”

  They drive on.

  Jean sees a thin brown cow. Not a cow. A steer. A member of the cattle family, as the old man she’d met in California clarified. She lets her mind drift and imagines people in this environment keeping bees and making honey in sheds using plastic buckets, or putting their hopes into scrawny steers, animals that pick through the bristly landscape, future dinners on the hoof.

  The workshop is based in a motel surrounded by barbed wire and warning signs in Spanish: PROHIBIDO EL PASO. NO HAY AQUA. Keep out. No water here. After choosing a space for the camper and hooking up to water and electricity, Jean strolled out beyond the iron gate—a sign said management locked the gate at 9:00 PM—to take a look around. She was grateful for the sunshine and heat. She’d had such a rotten time in California, she anticipated this workshop would be a holiday. The weather was holding, and best of all, she wasn’t required to make decisions, she wasn’t responsible for any of it, she was along for the ride.

  The desert at the border consisted of coarse reddish dirt out of which struggled brushy scrub, low-lying thorny cactus, and a shiny line o
f border surveillance towers. She imagined bored men trapped inside, peering through binoculars. She thought of waving, thought again. The guys in there would be the new recruits, young, mouths teeming with insulting language toward women. She trotted back to the camper, cuddled with Buster Furman, read her paperback mystery, set the alarm.

  At 6:30 AM eleven birders materialized and settled at tables in the motel’s recreation room. After brief introductions, the lecture started. The hawk man—John Malcomb—was lanky yet powerfully compressed; his body looked taut, controlled, tough, and durable. Jean was impressed by his organization, the slides whipping by, the unwavering laser pinpointing what they should look for to positively identify the species and age of a bird. The precision in his presentation reminded her of the military, reminded her of her father. “Hawks,” he told them, “are, strictly speaking, buteos.” Jean liked that crisp, confident remark. He said they were to look for wrist commas, cheek colour, malar stripes. Wrist commas, cheek colour, malar stripes. Jean felt part of something wonderful there in that dingy room, the refrigerator grumbling. Wrists are at the bend of the wing, the cheek is the space below the eye, the malar the line below the beak—she could remember that. Clues to identification were subtle, he said. Location, light, and wind conditions could factor in. They weren’t to leap to conclusions. The default hawk was a redtail unless they had a positive diagnostic field mark.

  “It’s a privilege to be with him,” the woman sitting next to her whispered. “He is such an expert in the field.” Jean, chewing on a day-old doughnut, had looked at the man again.

  During the quick multiple-choice quizzes following a series of slides, Jean did well. She felt the hawk man’s sharp eye settle on her, and she thought his lips moved in a smile, or something like a smile. A pleasant little flurry of feeling ruffled around in her chest; she was pretty sure he had taken note of her. He didn’t look anything like her tailored, military-mannered father—this man was wearing a red kerchief around his neck, for one thing, and he had sandy hair and weathered skin—but she understood something about him because she knew her father. Her father had an even-tempered exterior belying a demanding core. Even though he wasn’t a big man, you wanted to belong to his army; Jean certainly had. She had tried. When she heard the tone of quietly controlled loathing in the hawk man’s answer to a woman’s question, it was a tone at once faintly familiar and subtly thrilling. When they broke into groups to use the fewest vehicles, Jean had manoeuvred into the Camry. She told herself she’d learn more that way.