He says, “We can clean you a room.”
She rinses her face and spits. Rinses again. The muscles in his shoulders are knotted. He’s tense. He wants her to stay? To be what the boy isn’t? What is he thinking? How long has she been here now? Has she ever been more clear about what she needs from him? That he’d offer her a permanent room. A room, not a bird. The kid’s room, too.
She picks up her underwear and slaps them over the side of the sink next to her. “I have a room now?” she says. But it’s not even the room that bothers her. It’s not that he’s writing off the boy, who needs, well, someone. It’s that he’s asking for help. Asking her. “You talking about giving me Cody’s room? You want me to move in?”
She shuts off the shower. Axel stands and turns to her. The heat from the shower is replaced by late-afternoon chill. Is it that she’s naked? Is that what makes him think that giving up his role — she’s his apprentice — will fix his plans, his bird, anything? He’s holding on to her and he doesn’t know what he’s holding on to.
She takes her clothes from his shoulder and meets his eyes. Blue, set in tanned, weathered skin — not wrinkled, that would imply he has extra flesh. He’s bone and leather. “No, Axel,” she says.
He limps to the house.
“Shit.” She leans on the shower wall. Her shoulder blades stick to the cold plastic. “Just, shit.” Across the highway the bare aspen dapple the riverside. Beyond them the black water pushes pallets of ice against the riverbank. Cows, some still on the highway but most of them back in the pasture, stand and fade — dull patches in the dark. The front of her truck, shiny in the snowy ditch down the driveway. She sets her clothes on the steps and turns the shower back on.
He limps the steps to the house and sits. Rolls his sweatpants above his knee and removes his prosthetic. Doesn’t bother him anymore, except sometimes he dreams the pain — a contorted limb that won’t relax.
His brother visited him in hospital when he was scheduled to lose it, like he told the boy. Travelled from the farm to Quebec, where the medivac had flown Axel after he’d landed his kayak at the camp with that smashed leg. The hospital had called his brother, unable to talk sense into Axel.
“How do you expect to hold a falcon during surgery?” His brother leaned over him on the hospital bed. He held the gyr, downy and peeping, to his chest.
“A bird in the hand,” he said.
“Two feet on the ground.” His brother leaned so close Axel worried the bird would be crushed, and tucked his fingers under the falcon.
He let go. Damn him, he could have cried. His brother kept a hand on his shoulder while the nurses rolled the stretcher into the hall. Locked eyes when he had to let go. Brown eyes. Like the boy, Cody. When he was wheeled back with a freshly severed stump, his brother put down his newspaper. “Was it worth it?”
In the ICU on hospital sheets, the chirps of machines and monitors, the pulse of the bird cradled again at his own heart, he never doubted. Even now it’s not doubt.
“Thirty birds in the hand,” he says aloud. At his own table, in his own house. The offspring of that first falcon filling the mewses outside. “A bird on the hand of every falconer in North America.”
The school kids gone, he escapes to the garage. Reflex. The still. His father’s pet, ordered from Europe, runs on sawdust bricks. Steel base polished at alternating angles to look checkered, the sleek rose-copper boiler and botanical basket, the thick windows the gin condenses behind — his father didn’t skimp. Austin used to steep juniper, peach, sarsaparilla, and a few more flora Milo’s forgotten, for twenty-four hours, and spend the next day in the garage monitoring optimum distillation temps. What Milo makes can’t be called gin officially, but it has the alcohol content. He unscrews the lid from a jar and sniffs it. Not good, except that it smells like alcohol. In fact, it could be called disgusting. He sets the jar on the cement floor.
The mess they made of the cow — a bloody puzzle on the tarp. The tractor in the driveway still has gas, and a backhoe attachment. The keys are in his pocket. If he couldn’t prevent the mess, maybe he can clean it up.
VII
The bus huffed the kids off her property, but not out of her space. The cow is spread on the tarp in a pile next to the empty carcass and calf.
She climbs the porch and opens the door. They were in here. Mugs and crusted bowls cover the table and counter. Instant soup packages are set on a melted bag of frozen veggies on the stove. And although the entire farm smells of shit, the human crap smell of the house is worse. Mud. Footsteps. She pinches the hair above her ears and pulls. They went through the kitchen. She drops her hands and heads for the bathroom, then stops. Cody stands in the old man’s doorway, in his kilt, with his cutesy bangs and his thin neck, his knees slightly bent like he’s trying to vanish or is ready to bolt. He wipes his cheek, tries to hide his embarrassment of her, no, worse, for her. His whole future life at Axel’s flung her in the face.
He starts to apologize. “Sorry, I—”
Sorry? She slaps his mouth. Punches. He curls. She punches again. Pushes. Kicks, then straddles him and beats: fists, teeth, fingers.
The worst, most awful thing she’s done, she thinks, was like what this boy is doing. Like Milo. Like those kids on the bus. In grade seven, she opened the door to use the girls’ washroom and found this special needs kid rocking in her own throw-up, saying, “I feel sick.” And she did nothing. Nothing at all. She shut the door and pretended not to know, even when Candice helped the girl from the bathroom — her hand on the girl’s back — saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” She hits Cody till there’s sticky blood and probably tears. Why apologize? Why be sorry? Should she be sorry? There’s black snot down his chin. He’s stopped covering his face. What good is that? She slides down his legs. His kilt is up round his hips. She unzips his pants and pulls out his dick.
“Sorry for what?” she says. His eyes are swollen shut, or he’s keeping them shut. His cheeks are red — either he’s blushing because she’s touching him, or blushing from being caught in her house, or from the kick to the face. She puts her lips on his penis — should she bite? — but the kid gives a twitch and pulls his hands back up over his face. She spits it out on his kilt.
She leaves him on the floor. Outside, there’s enough moonlight to see that most of the cows have wandered off the highway and back to the pasture. She shuts the door and walks toward the barn. She should be sorry. Walking isn’t fast enough. She runs. She is sorry. Still not fast enough.
Only because of the bathroom, because of the bathroom sink — all he wanted was to wash the cow-pie off his hands — and then because someone moaned in the back room, needing help. And he waited because he wasn’t sure what the next step should be. Otherwise he would have left when Axel did, taking Kendra’s clothes from him.
Or maybe he went inside to avoid the kids outside, because the kids outside were so mean to her. Or maybe it was because of the cow. His left eyelid is stuck — there’s a red pulse through the eyelid from the hallway light. He zips his jeans, rolls on his front, and cringes upright. He washes his hands and face. He walks home across the snow.
He starts to climb over the paddock fence, but hurts, so he crawls under. His kilt trips his knees and he has to tug it out of the way twice. The motion sensor flickers in the training yard — Kendra, scrubbed pink, back in her jeans and sweater and jacket, with the bucket of feed. He lets himself in. She looks him over and swings the bucket his way. He takes it. The dead chickens are coated in a greenish slime that could be decomp, but doesn’t smell like the crime shows on TV back home claim rot smells.