Instead Read online

  They were on the move again. Farrah got a second snowball made and her hands were already pink and drenched and numb.

  She fired it off and realized if she could get back to the front gate she’d have some cover. Mom was laughing like a giddy teenager. Farrah let out a cry of similar laughter, but there was no time for more. If she was going to have a fighting chance, she needed cover. She crouched as she ran, hoping not to slip in the slop at her feet. Baz leaped and frolicked by her, his tongue lolling. The pooch looked playful and energetic, despite his age. He’d need a nap—and a big one.

  “I’m gonna get you!” Kath shouted. She fired off two and one of them hit Farrah square in the back, getting her hair and turning scattershot down to her rump and up to her shoulders and neck. It was a blast of icy cold.

  She hooted but it was a fun holler, not an angry one.

  A third snowball came from Mom as Farrah got through the gate and around it to give herself some coverage. This one ricocheted off a peeling fence post and diverged into bits in multiple directions. Farrah ducked and got a handful of fresh snow.

  She wound up and was about to throw when she saw Baz duck his head down low. Like he did in the kitchen this morning, Baz started to growl. When Farrah looked out to what had the dog’s eye, he startled her with a loud, deep bark. Then three or four more, each getting louder. His attention lay with the north corner of the vast yard, over by the edge of the thicket. Movement.

  Farrah looked out past the gate at Mom who had relinquished her playful crouch, and her smile. Mom dropped a snowball into the mud on the side of the road.

  Farrah turned and saw Baz, head still lowered, tail stiff, moving away from the front of the yard and growling as he headed for that movement at its edge.

  And the movement became clearer to Farrah.

  Mom shouted. “Farrah, go in the house.”

  Frozen, Farrah didn’t move to do what she said.

  “Farrah,” Mom called again, this time more insistence in her voice. “Get in the house.”

  Farrah made to move and got two steps towards it. But the movement was mesmerizing. It was a feeling she could recall. That terror, and bewilderment, simultaneous to sheer curiosity and the empty feeling that something had entered what was sacred…or at least previously thought to be safe and impenetrable. She remembered as a child when a stray had come into the yard down in the south part of town while she’d been playing with dollies. How it had circled with its head down, not wanting to make eye contact, but also wanting to sniff out anything it could find. That animal had been desperate, Doug, her dad, had told her later, after he’d come out of the sliding doors waving a kitchen broom until it had fled. It just wanted to find something—anything—to eat, he’d told the bawling, quivering girl. It was starving, that’s all, hon. And a starving animal is dangerous, but not scary.

  This animal was scary though. This one was galloping towards Barrington from the north thicket. It was not starving. It was mangy and its coat was mottled with discolourations, missing patches of fur, but it was thick of body. It had teeth bared and it snarled as it dashed in a beeline to the trio at the main gate. Baz made movement to get some distance between his back and his pack—in this case his pack was comprised of Mom and Farrah.

  He was getting them behind him, to defend them from the interloper.

  The interloper, it had twenty or thirty pounds on ‘ol Bazzy. And it had no grey, except for one eye, as Farrah saw while it got closer and closer. That eye was milky like Baz’s, but probably not with a cataract. The interloper had big jagged scars across its snout. No, the interloper had fought in its life and the damage to its eye was only evidence of one such tussle.

  The interloper slowed. It almost looked like it was happy, grinning with yellowing teeth, not only in a snarl, but in wicked delight at finding an opponent in the lab with the greying nose and the noble but weathered chest, the bad knees and the failing vision.

  Farrah heard screaming. She realized it was her. The word she hurled was, “Grandpa!” It came out in a shriek. She didn’t know what else to do.

  15

  Danny didn’t come. Farrah felt helpless. She felt naked and alone and scared for Baz at the same time. He was far from the toughest animal on the block. Though, truth be told, Farrah thought he was the only. The closest houses were between here and Predis field—the new subdivision which was mostly empty or abandoned now.

  Until Farrah had seen what her mom had called the ‘puppies’ out on the lane during their drive late yesterday, Farrah hadn’t seen a stray on the island in years, not since the one that had come sniffing for garbage when she was a girl playing in her yard. And that one, they discovered later, had been brought by tourists—Sheriff Birkhead’s least favourite part of being the law in DC. Stories of the strays up north had lingered for years. At night, campers claimed they heard them howling like wolves. Farmhands up at the northwest fields insisted they roamed the farmyards looking for trash and taunting the house cats. But those were mythical tales. This was real.

  Now, these two animals circled each other in a slow-moving arc for a minute or two. Kath joined her daughter on this side of the front gate and they stood helplessly. The tension in their bodies made them feel like sets of coiled springs. Farrah’s eyes darted around, looking for something to use as a weapon, a scrap of wood, a shovel. Kath called to her father again, but Danny didn’t come.

  The interloper had slowed, as if readying to savour the catch. It voiced nothing, did nothing, but continued circling Bazzy.

  And Bazzy followed suit, keeping his head low. He did all the noise-making. The guttural vibrations of his growl were percussive and surreal against the backdrop of the late morning where everything else was still and calm.

  The interloper leapt at him. Bazzy reared up and met the interloper with an open mouth and aggressive front paws. Spittle flew. Both dogs bit and tore at one another. In a flash, the altercation turned to a spinning and mud-flinging brawl. They chomped at shoulders and napes of necks, got teeth dug in and then pulled back as the other did the same. Snow scattered and earth went up in the air in clumps. The noise was the most bothering part for Farrah. The sounds were dire and final. Both animals were locked against each other, Baz defending his pack, the interloper seeming to do this for nothing but sport.

  Finally, they split apart. Farrah let out a breath as Bazzy huffed and backed up weakly from the mess the two animals had made together. He was dazed and bloody. He could only look sideways at the other dog, seemingly to find a clear patch in the cloud of his own spotty eyesight.

  The interloper bowed its head in a sinister gesture.

  Then, surprising both Farrah and her mother, it barked twice and turned to flee. Loose clumps of frigid mud and slush kicked up in its wake.

  In a flash, Bazzy followed.

  Farrah shrieked after him. “Baz! Stay!”

  And with almost as much immediacy, Kath started running too. Off in the diagonal towards Baz and that mystery animal, she dashed without a word of warning.

  15

  If Mom hadn’t run after the dog, Farrah would have hauled ass up the front steps of the house and burst in the front door to holler again for Grandpa Danny.

  But Mom had fled after the animals. And, instinctively, Farrah did the same, shouting, “Mom! Where are you—What are you—Don’t—”

  As Farrah ran, she heard her heart beating in her ears, throbbing. Her breath sounded like it was coming through a scuba tank connected by a hose. Sound was gobbled up.

  She went into the dark hole in the woodwork fifteen or eighteen strides after Mom, who had probably disappeared into it thirty or so after Bazzy had gone in. Farrah felt like she’d been swallowed whole by the whale Monstro.

  She called her mom’s name again and again as she ran, the wood closed in around her, threatening to cut her, to slice her skin with its jagged tentacles of black and brown.

  She wound through the path, panting heavily and aching in her legs as they pumpe
d her through the mud and leaves of the forest floor. She flashed back on the night when she was twelve, racing home through the much thinner wood to her backyard on her bike. That made her think of the redheaded man…and that, in turn, made her think of Mom speaking of him early in the middle of the night when she’d been sleepwalking. That brought a mad panic into her gut and that made her legs pump harder.

  “Mom!” she screamed again.

  She saw her own feet in her filthy Adidas tennis shoes, blurring to grey beneath her. Instantly, this showed her a mental view of the mud on Mom’s ankles and down her calves to her black feet. Those muddy bedsheets. Farrah knew Mom had been out again last night—after Farrah had bedded her down the first time. And she’d come out this way, hadn’t she? Secretly. Or, at least, quietly enough that Farrah hadn’t heard her the second time.

  Farrah burst into a clearing and the brightness of it blared in her eyes, even though its grey floor mirrored only grey sky above, letting in scant sunlight.

  Across from her, a hundred or more paces away, Bazzy fought with the interloping dog, as before. But onlookers were there now. Not people, but more stray dogs, each of them imposing and large. They were all kinds of different breeds. Mutts mostly, and another like the interloper, that looked like a very large wolf. They moved in, closing the sloppy circle around the fighters. Near Farrah, Mom shouted, “Don’t!” Kath made to lunge in the direction of the fighting animals, but Farrah hurtled towards her mother, grabbing her, and seeming to snap her out of a trance.

  The animals crowded Baz. Snow and ice and mud flew in the air. They bit and tussled, falling all over each other to get in on the drama at the core of this mucky, disastrous circle of strife.

  Finally, stiff-shouldered, Mom burst free of her daughter’s grip and bent down to the muck. She found rocks and flat stones and sticks, and she ran towards the messy group of animals, flinging the debris at them, and shouting like the madwoman she might have been. “Go’way!” she bellowed. “Git, you filthy buggers!” she screamed. “G’wan! Git lost!” Her speech devolved into meaningless blurts that didn’t sound like English or even human speech. It was animalistic noises at the height of her lungs’ breath. She blasted more junk, picked up and launched more still. The animals finally began to scatter. A few of the strays leapt into the thicket and out of the clearing. But that original interloper and a matching fellow, they remained, only backing off from Baz a few feet. They stood their ground, not threatened by Kath. Bazzy’s breath clouded and he staggered away from them, threatening to buckle and fall.

  The last beasts in opposition beasts gazed silently at Kath. Farrah came in tighter to, what, back her Mom up? Rescue the woman who’d clearly gone off her rocker to stand up against a pack of wild animals?

  But Kath kept shouting her nonsense. She kept bending down to fetch garbage from the forest floor and whirl it at the messy animals. They flinched from the projectiles, but only as if it was a minor nuisance. Even though Kath landed many of them surprisingly close and even hit the animals a few times. Farrah caught a strange new shiver as she looked into the yellow eyes of the lead beast and its companion. It registered high up on the creep-scale for her. Those eyes didn’t look tame. But that wasn’t the worst part. They looked extremely thoughtful.

  These animals were not desperate. They weren’t starving. And they weren’t irrational. These animals were the opposite. Yes, thoughtful was the word. There was some kind of…malevolence in those eyes. Like no other she’d seen in any creature, human or canine.

  Finally, one flat stone hit the interloper and it yelped and retreated. Its companion turned and went with it. But they didn’t flee in panic. They left the clearing—left Baz—in more of a restless manner of boredom than anything else. It was like they had simply tired of the nuisance of these two women and their bloodied mongrel. They sauntered off, climbing up over a fallen log and then dissolving to grey and then to black with the rest of the forest and its haunted posts of birch, fir, and poplar.

  Before Farrah and Kath, Baz fell. He lay into the steaming ground, pouring dark red ink into the mottled white snow around him, labouring with each breath and wheezing as his colourless tongue lolled dryly out of his mouth. The poor lab lay in a bed of muck, startlingly dark against the grey and blue-white of trampled snow. He was stained by blood, smeared with dirt and sopping wet. Chewed up leaves clung to him. Much of what was on the inside of the animal was now pouring out of him. Ailing Bazzy stared at the sky like there was something up there.

  For him, soon maybe, there might be.

  Part II

  Middle Ground

  1

  Instead of dispatching someone to fetch Danny, the two women shared the load. Like some bizarre funeral procession with only two pall bearers, Kath and her daughter hoisted Barrington Hellegarde between them, Farrah at the front, smeared in the dog’s blood, and Kath in the rear, covered in the entrails that had been ripped from the poor animal’s insides.

  The dog wheezed shallowly. A deep rattle accompanied the sound.

  They got back down the trail as if it was a dream for Farrah, retracing the dash they’d done minutes before. But this time, in tow, was the frail and quivering form of the greying lab. They stumbled and the dog flopped around between them.

  “Hold on,” Kath called to Baz. “Just hold on. Daddy will know what to do.”

  In that instant, Farrah thought of her own dad and how her mom sounded desperate to get to him. Dads just know what to do, whether it’s to patch a skinned knee or chase off a stray in the yard, Dads were the ones their daughter counted on. Not to listen all the time. No, that was a mom’s job. A dad’s was to fix.

  And right now, Kath was counting on hers to do the fixing. Just as Farrah was counting on Grandpa Danny to know what should be done. Danny would fix this.

  While her mom coaxed the dog away from the bright light Baz might be staring down, Farrah started hollering for Danny. There he was, in the yard and coming as fast as his bowed legs could carry him. The look on his face was a whitewash of emotion.

  He met them at the maw of the thicket, but had no words.

  “It’s not our blood,” Farrah thought to say, as if that would help him. Of course, he would be concerned for his two Little Ladies, but he likely summed it up with just a glance at the wreck they were carrying.

  “Pack of strays,” Kath said, out of breath as Bazzy wheezed out another sigh against wounds in his torso. The bites went deep. New blood glistened on his straining belly and chest. His head lolled lazily up at his papa Danny. Danny’s eyes went pink and he took over for Kath at the dog’s hind end.

  “Quickly,” Danny blurted. “The back door. I have sutures. We have to stop the bleeding.”

  2

  And they went. The blundered through the doorway. Kath took instructions from Danny and got a first aid kit, towels, blankets, and alcohol. She brought needle and thread from under her mom’s sewing machine. She boiled water and filled a wash bucket.

  Danny knelt at the wounded animal for an hour or more, working away on him. The women, coated in the dog’s insides as they congealed, dried and began to flake, alternated between a brooding back-and-forth pace, or kneeling beside Danny and assisting.

  Ol Danny Hellegarde had been in the war, and carting for the ambulance drivers, he’d picked up a few nuggets. And a lot of that came back to him. Stitching up men who’d lost limbs in an explosion. Closing gashes from yanked shrapnel. Disinfecting wounds and checking for internal organ damage, sometimes when the opening was large enough to put a hand right inside.

  By the end of an hour with poor Baz, it was clear to all three that the dog’s wheezing had ceased. Whatever light had called to the beautiful beast, it had surely gotten loud enough to coax him over. Hopefully there were ear scratches and copious pettings for Danny’s best pal in whatever place it was where that light burned bright.

  In that new place, maybe the glaze left his poor eyes, his knees limbered up and that grey fur receded to that
of youth. Wherever he went—if there was a place that animals went—Farrah cried for his departure.

  In time, with his knees popping, Danny hid his face and got up from his place on the bloody kitchen floor. He didn’t turn to his Little Ladies, only went out back and smoked a Marlboro from a stale pack he had waiting in a bucket that hung in the rafters of his big shed. He smoked it and stared at the dark thicket.

  He had not smoked a cigarette since the night his wife—the elder Katherine Hellegarde—had left this earth.

  He pulled on a heavy work coat he had out there, donned its hood and stood in the silence of his own breath on the cold air.

  Kath and Farrah held each other for a while. Then Kath set about boiling fresh water and gathering up PineSol and fresh rags begin the awful task of cleaning Bazzy’s blood from the kitchen.

  Farrah watched Danny smoke that cigarette for a while. She stood at the side kitchen window and saw him take long drags. He caught a coughing spell near the end but finished the whole cigarette anyway, doing so as he watched that hollow place at the edge of the thicket. He stared it down, as if it was a living thing and he could will the breath out of it just by glaring and wishing it to be.

  Maybe the thicket would trade his breath for Barrington’s. Just maybe.

  After some time of staring in silence, Danny trudged, crouched, and began washing his bloodied hands with the cleanest snow he could find. Dripping from the elbows down, he moved back to the shed with his head down. He came out a few minutes later carrying his hunting rifle.

  Farrah ran to the kitchen door, flinging it wide and running out into the slush and mud. “Gramps, don’t,” she said.

  Kath came to the door frame carrying a pink rag.