‘They can’t take away people’s homes,’ Cale says.
Clary isn’t sure. There are fewer trailers than this time last year. Her toes nudge empty cans, Wild Turkey bottles, tread softly around diapers dumped on the grass. It looks less like home than like a pullout on the way.
Outside the steel trailer, a man and a woman sit on deckchairs, sticks loaded with sausages pointing at a fire.
‘How you doing?’ says Cale, holding his pen. ‘I’m putting together another petition. They can’t do nothing if we all stand together.’
The woman glances at her husband. Her husband inspects his sneakers. Cale’s pen glints in the firelight. The metal trailer is a flickering mirror of them all.
‘That guy was over here today,’ the woman says.
‘Oh yeah?’ says Cale.
‘Promised to relocate us, all of us, to that new park outside of town. Hear they have a hot tub, communal laundry, the works.’
The paper crumples in Cale’s hand. He turns away, tossing, ‘Enjoy your ba—… basket sausages,’ over his shoulder.
‘Come on, Cale! No need to be that way,’ the man says. ‘Sit, take a load off. Have a beer. Come on! It ain’t a bad offer, you could do worse.’
‘They just gonna do it anyway,’ the woman yells after him.
The words bounce off Cale’s back. He walks. Clary does a foxtrot to keep up.
‘We could knock on other doors,’ she says, one foot on the porch, one inside home. She will go inside if he says, or she will grab the pen and hammer on every door for twenty miles.
‘Guess people like hot tubs more than loyalty,’ her father says.
Clary knows what he’s thinking as he sits on the steps outside. He looks out at the lights over the highway like a poor man’s Vegas. His head is full of the help he has given his neighbours, the handout to Mrs Jones when her husband stepped out, Clary’s old clothes donated to the Stephensons and their expanding tribe of blonde girls. He can give them cold morning tow-starts till hell freezes over, but they can’t give him a signature — won’t. He has said these things a hundred times, but tonight, he says nothing. Clary sits beside him, fresh out of what to say. His silence sticks to her thick as the night air. She wishes he would talk. He doesn’t even mention the jackalope trail.
The first time a letter came, Cale paced round the trailer. The paper in his fist was fuel on a fire.
‘What’s it say?’ Clary asked.
‘Don’t worry, pumpkin, someone just wants to buy our land. It won’t happen. I won’t let it,’ he said.
‘Where will the jackalopes live?’ she said.
That was it. She was a genius, he said. He knew how to make folk sign his petition. He picked up a pen, handed Clary a pad of paper and sat beside her as she wrote the letter.
Deer Everyone,
My name is Clary and I am six years old. I live with my father on a jackalope reserve. Most people don’t know it, but jackalopes are rabbits with antlers and they are very VERY rare. Pleese don’t take away their home.
Clary’s printed letter was sticky-taped to the door. The letters were pouring in, Cale said. Some woman who thought his daughter sounded adorable wanted to sign his petition, so did some guy who hated stores, and someone who had chained herself to diggers seven times. One even arrived from a magazine called Mysteries. They wanted to take photos of Clary and Cale wearing deerstalkers on their ‘jackalope reserve’. People were on their side, Cale said. Weird people, but people nonetheless.
‘Maybe I should start a jackalope trail,’ he laughed, after the photographer left. ‘People want to believe in all sorts of sh—… sherbet.’
He photocopied flyers and left them in the hunting store. Two college kids with skinny cigarettes stopped by.
The padlock glares on the dumpster now. Clary and her father stand in the alley like people in a restaurant presented with a dish they don’t know how to eat.
‘Who locks their trash?’ Cale asks.
The air nips Clary’s hands. Winter is around the corner, watching their every move with its silvery eye. Her yellow shorts are stuffed in a bag above the water heater. She has dragged out the coat that makes her arms look like Frankenstein.
‘What now?’ she says.
Cale rakes through his pockets: lighter, keys and loose change. Not enough for a dog or a slice, not enough to be able to say ‘shoot’ and go home.
‘There’s other markets,’ he says. ‘There always is.’
They trail along the highway, cars whipping by. Thirteen-year-old girls lean out the window of a pink limousine and cheer. Clary looks straight ahead at the lights of the Saver store like a beacon. Behind it, the dumpster is open. Pickings are slim. No meat, just eggs, avocados and dill pickles. It will do.
Clary mashes avocado and slices dills into a bowl. The omelette is good. They splash an island of hot sauce next to a swamp of avocado on the plate.
‘What’s this one called?’ her father says.
Clary thinks. It’s her job to name every dish, on days when their haul isn’t amazing. The omelette is sandy-coloured and frazzled at the edges. The makeshift guacamole looks like something squished.
‘The great Mexican frog rebellion,’ she says, dipping egg into green and red.
He has to laugh, wherever he can.
Clary washes the plates. Her father looks an army of stuffed mice in the eye. They stand on the table, some on their tiptoes, some looking down. He groups a few together as if they are friends, angling them just right.
‘What do you think?’ he says.
Clary looks at the scene. The choir of mice have red jackets and scarves looped around their necks. One wears wire spectacles. One is holding a scrap of paper with squiggles on, all have open mouths like they are ready to sing a mouse song.
‘They need something,’ Clary says. ‘A wool hat with a pompom on top, something like that?’
Cale shrouds two mice wielding polystyrene snowballs in tissue. He sighs, picking up a fat mouse in an apron, positioning the doll’s bowl and spoon in her paws.
‘Humiliating,’ he says, placing it in a box.
Clary stacks the little boxes inside a bigger box by the door and thinks about the black boxes outside. Humane traps, they’re called. The floors are sticky with glue. Once anything is inside it can’t get out.
It’s early when Cale loads the pick-up. There is nothing in the flat back that looks ready to swoop, bite or run for its life, just mice, messed about with, given people-like poses. He covers the boxes with a tarp and Clary hops in. The radio crackles to another station as they drive into the next town.
‘Adorable,’ the store owner says. ‘We can take more in a few weeks.’
She sits behind the counter, tucking instructions into plastic packets of worry dolls. Cale stares at the stick people, legs and arms bound with colourful string. Little squares of paper litter the counter. Place a worry doll under your pillow each night, tell her your problems and when you wake they’ll have disappeared.
The shop owner looks at Cale and leans forward with worry dolls in her hand.
‘You want some?’ she says.
Cale steps back, the way he does when women are too nice and smile for no reason. He looks around for Clary. She is wandering around the store inspecting displays of kitchen whisks shaped like rabbit ears, lamps shaped like bears, candles that look like fancy slices of cake. Everything is shaped like something it isn’t. Cale shakes his head at the worry dolls in the shopkeeper’s hand.
‘So you’re making another order?’ he asks.
‘Sure,’ the woman says, stroking a mouse ear with her fingertip. ‘Can you do some mice on bicycles?’