‘Mr Harris? Cale Harris?’ the man says, extending his hand. It hangs.
Cale Harris continues working. He tucks the rabbit mould into the skin and rolls over the fur like zipping up a sleeping bag. The man wraps his handshake around his folder full of forms.
‘I’m here from Moss and Sons. We wrote to you recently regarding an offer on your land. I’m not sure if you received our letter…’
‘We got it,’ Cale says. ‘Then we got it again.’
Clary flops onto the foamy seating area of the trailer, one leg dangling, one foot on the ground. She watches the shirt guy look around for something to butter up her father like toast. ‘Nice place you have here, really cosy…’ Something. He looks at the girl, then back at the dead rabbit.
‘Then, you’ll know we’ve made you a very generous offer on your land,’ shirt guy says.
‘I know,’ says Cale.
‘We understand drainage is poor and it would take considerable resources to correct. You haven’t built on it?’
‘Nope.’
‘And nor did your father?’
Here it comes again, the offer, the argument. Clary clinks through the jar of glass eyes on the coffee table and lies back, balancing fox eyes on her eyelids. The glass is cold. The jar mists under her fingertips. She balances the eyes on her face, then replaces them with the deer eyes so much bigger than her own. On her back, she pictures living in a supermarket, the trailer smack bang in the middle of the hot-sauce aisle. Shoppers mentally scrape past with shopping carts and peer through the windows to see what’s on offer: just a girl and her dad watching Shark Tank every night.
Clary removes the deer eyes from her eyelids and gazes into their amber mirrors in her hands. Deer eyes would be cool.
Coffee freckles the papers under the jar, a grain here, a grain there, sprinkled each day. There are more papers somewhere, buried in the forest of the trailer. Clary’s surrounded. There’s a deer in the bathroom, a crow perches on the closet about to swoop onto bits of cotton wool on the carpet like carrion. Glass eyes watch Clary eat, sleep and pick her nose all day. The hunting store in town used to buy the animals, the museum too. Since the store closed and the museum got computers, business isn’t what it was. Clary feels the animals are breeding, crowding in. Yet still her father can’t pass anything on a roadside without stopping and wondering if he can make it work.
‘Good find today,’ he says, swinging a dead raccoon through the door by the tail.
Clary sighs, stroking the rabbit squatted by the kettle, the nook of fur between its ears. Not an antler in sight. There hasn’t been a jackalope in years.
There were rules about jackalopes, Clary’s father explained. It was Mom’s job to hunt them. You could only hunt at night. Jackalopes were skittish, wily and rare as turkey’s teeth.
‘Is that why I’ve never seen one hopping around?’ Clary used to ask, yawning as he made up her bed. ‘Is that where Mom goes all the time?’
Her father placed a finger on his nose: ‘Bingo.’ He sniffed. The air lingered, clouded with perfume. He stared at the dust framing the absence of a bottle on the shelf, swiped his eyes with the back of his hand and tucked Clary in.
‘Let me tell you about jackalopes,’ he said. ‘On a full moon, you might see one, if you’re lucky. You have to be really something to catch them. You have to cover up your scent so they don’t sniff you coming. And you have to set a whisky trap so they’re easier to catch. Then, you wait. Sometimes you have to wait a long time.’
Clary paints her toenails blue with a bottle of varnish she found on top of the mailbox. The light outside is fading. The sun slots down between the silver trailers like a coin in a machine. Clary’s stomach rumbles, followed by her father’s. One, then the other, they rumble like drums going to war. It’s time.
‘You ready?’ Cale asks.
Clary scrapes her hair into a cap and grabs her sneakers. The insides stick to her wet toes. They look both ways behind the Megamarket. Cale opens the dumpster.
‘One. Two. Three. Umphh.’
He hoists Clary onto his shoulders like a kid at the circus. She dangles into the trash, diving for boxes and glistening Saran Wrap. She claws, tossing packets onto the asphalt. Meat wrapped in slick plastic. Bananas, potatoes, and eggs she must hold carefully while scrambling down.
‘Hell yeah,’ Cale says, tossing sell-by dates into a duffel bag. ‘Why do they need another market? The one they’ve got don’t even sell all they have.’
In the trailer’s kitchen, everything is more than it looks. The dining table folds down into a bed. The drawer of one cupboard can become a counter; the door of another is secretly an ironing board. And trash can be dinner, and dinner can be victory just like that. Clary puts the eggs in water and watches some sink to the bottom, and some waver, deciding whether to bounce.
‘Good eggs,’ Cale says. ‘Perfectly fine steak. Past its best my…’
The room sizzles, smoke off the hotplate hisses into her ears faster than rumours. Clary chews her food slow as a thought. Her father wolfs down the meat, clearing the plate to the dots under the glaze.
‘Tastes like fu… f… fudge you, Mr Megamarket,’ he says. ‘Oops, sorry pumpkin, not a word you should hear. Don’t be cussing at school, pay attention, you don’t wanna end up like me.’
Clary laughs, she can’t help it. He slips into talking to her like she’s six a zillion times a day. His mouth is full of fudge, fluff, sugars and shoots, every word tamed so it won’t bite her ears. Yet he’s forever apologising, sorry for what he’s thinking, rather than what he lets himself say. Clary remembers him arguing with a neighbour when she was small. He reddened like Christmas and clenched his fists.
‘You, you…’ he said. He spotted her beside him, a child fingering a flower into the dirt. Only muddyfunster would come out of his mouth. The neighbour laughed in his face.
‘Let’s go,’ he’d said.
There were holes under her armpits to sew for school. The cotton blouse in his hands looked slippier to get to grips with than the squirrel he was fixing on the bench. Clary saw him measure every squirrelly inch. Her spine tingled, afraid, as the squirrel got lost, then became itself again. Cale stitched her blouse to the leg of his jeans and said fuck — ‘Sorry pumpkin, not a word you should use. Ok?’ he said. The girl nodded. She has always understood some words are wood wool, stuffed into gaps to fill holes, and others are flesh, stomachs and hearts. They must be removed.
The trailer is hazed with burnt fat. Clary’s father steps out for a cigarette. He looks out to the field. The lights of the trailers are scattered white as litter. Clary flicks nail varnish off her fingers and watches her father consider his land. And again, she pictures the market, right here, a Buy One, Get One Free sign above his head. She follows him across the long grass with the petition in her hand, water seeping into her sneakers that blow bubbles at the marsh.