Bone Dance (9 page)

Lungs bursting, the two were forced to come up for air. Harry broke through the surface fully expecting to hear another gun explosion. Instead he heard radios. Police were scrambling over the rocks. In their midst stood Sam's aunt, in a red blouse, looking more like a trussed chicken then a bobbing robin. And behind them beamed Sam's freckled face, his fingers raised in victory.

Feeling as though they'd been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Harry and Sam told the police about their bird watching contest. Except instead of the feathered variety, which had become boring, they owned up to spying on girls who played their musical instruments alone in the forest. They targeted only girls whose colouring and instrument sound corresponded to that of an actual bird. Twice, Maestro Malinovka, whose name meant robin in English, had ruined the sightings with his bobbing intrusion.

Next day, Harry led the police to the locations where he'd spied on the Eastern Bluebird, their name for Chantal with the blue streaked hair, and freckled Yvette, the Hermit Thrush. It didn't take the police long to uncover the girls'
bodies. Sam's aunt had taken to getting rid of her husband's protégées before he got rid of her.

From his buddy, Harry learned that Sam was the one who'd brought in the police. Turned out Harry hadn't beaten Sam after all. Yesterday, while Harry had been crowing over his sighting of Yvette, his buddy had been less than a hundred metres away. As Sam was leaving, he'd seen his aunt walking in the same area. Later he'd caught sight of her hiding a gun. When he heard Yvette was missing, he went to the police.

Unnerved by their experience, and with a strong warning from the police, both boys ended their contest. In future they'd stick to real bird watching.

Besides, after Zoë's thank you kiss, Harry decided looking at girls up close was way better.

R.J. Harlick
,
an escapee from the high-tech jungle, decided that solving a murder or two was more fun than chasing the elusive computer bug. This is her second story to be published in the Ladies' Killing Circle anthologies. Another story, “Lady Luck”, won third place in the 2002 Bony Pete Awards
.

When Bill opened the grocery bags Myrna had tossed onto the kitchen table, he knew his paycheque hadn't vanished at the supermarket. A dozen boxes of Kraft Dinner, several cans of no-name peas and one head of rusty lettuce.

“Finally, the discus are getting their own display,” she said, setting up the new hex tank in the only open corner of the living room. All of the chairs and the sofa had been shoved into the basement storeroom. “Their spectacular colours disappear when they're cluttered up with the rest.”

Bill squinted through his bifocals at the receipt on the table. Four hundred dollars. Every set of breeders had a separate home: mollies, swords, catfish, characins and angels. The fifty-gallon tank was reserved for Bubbles, the African clown knifefish, too fond of her fellows.

Five nights later, while his wife ate her noodles directly from the pot in order to watch the fish feed, Bill decided he couldn't stomach another supper of ersatz cheese sauce and mushy vegetables. What could he make? He recalled taking Myrna to Pancho Villa's on her fiftieth birthday. “Flaunting poverty. A cuisine based on tortillas and beans!” she had snorted after the meal, forbidding him to leave a tip.

His taste buds tingling, he drove to the supermarket for
ingredients, then dared to toss together a hot chili: pintos, tomatoes, onions, jalepeños and a handful of five-alarm powder. The redolence filled the house, and he was stirring home-made cornbread for the private feast when a shriek came from the living room. “You idiot! Look what your stinky food is doing!”

He put down his Corona beer, saved from a Christmas splurge, and joined Myrna to inspect the tank. The fish, normally passive at night, were swimming up and down. “Don't think they can't smell that foul air when the pump is spewing it all over. Are you trying to poison them? Open a can of Spam and make a sandwich.” And she rushed to the kitchen, grabbed the boiling pot and hustled it outside, where she dumped the contents contemptuously into the garbage can, slamming the lid like a cymbal. Then she arranged a portable fan and opened all of the doors. After anticipating the chili, Bill didn't feel like anything else, so he took another Corona and sought refuge in Bret Harte's
The Luck of Roaring Camp
. Too bad they didn't live near a major dam site, he thought. Flash floods had their good points.

Later, in a rare social gesture, Myrna subjected Bill to fish imitations. While he read, she peeked out from behind a chair and then retreated when he looked over. “Guess who?” Spot, of course, the shy catfish. Then she rubbed her knuckles over Bill's close-cropped grey head like Bubbles scratching herself on the coral. Building to a climax, she concluded with a pantomime of the meanest small fish in the tank, the bumblebee cichlid, aka the Terminator. Her breath hot with sherry, she rushed at Bill and butted him in the chest, cackling like a demented parrot.

Myrna rarely spoke to Bill except about the daily problems with the fish. “Bubbles is outgrowing her tank again. We've got to get that one-hundred-gallon job,” she wailed as Bill
limped in from the 37°C record Toronto heat. Buses had broken down, the fans were off at work, and his ancient Aries needed new ball joints.

“Why not give her back to the store? Maybe they'd trade for that needlefish you've been wanting,” he offered, picking up the mail from its pile under the slot. It was stifling in the house, but Myrna wouldn't allow an air conditioner to alter the tropical conditions. Tonight was his washing and ironing night, he remembered with dismay as he stripped off his wet shirt.

Myrna dipped into a small holding tank for Bubbles' supper. “Are you kidding? Even if she bullies the others, she's the queen of her species.” As she warbled “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles,” her ritual during feeding time, the mammoth jaw of the twenty-inch leviathan vacuumed up the feeder guppies.

The costs escalated with the new glass fortress. Along with lavender gravel, Myrna had to have the latest bionic filter system, which required constant monitoring for weeks to establish a balanced chemical cycle. Bill would come home to her stunned face peering at a murky test tube. “Not more ammonia! She's swimming in a toilet. Time for another water change.” And out snaked her Python syphon hoses to drain and refill the tank. No bath for Bill until midnight. And if it wasn't ammonia, it was too much chlorine or iron. Delivery men lugged in spring water in gargantuan proportions. Subscriptions to Freshwater Aquariums and Tropical Breeders littered the coffee table. That was where she learned about the fluval, a costly refinement which sold so rarely that the pet store owner made a mark on the wall when one left the shelves. “Now I can relax at last,” she said. “This baby will filter out anything!” And the new toy hummed away.

In fact, everything hummed day and night. And Bill, never
a heavy sleeper, lay tossing for hours, Peggy Lee's “Is That All There Is?” running through his mind. One night when he got up for a glass of milk in the wee hours and switched on the kitchen light, Myrna was crouched in the living room with the glow of the tanks giving a ghastly pallor to her skin. “Douse that, jerk!” she yelled. “I just got the boys and girls settled. The reflection is confusing them. Look at Bubbles, gone behind the condo, just as I dropped down her favourite tiger shrimp.” A grinning plastic skull coughed up air as its teeth met and parted.

Deciding on a drink instead, Bill overturned the ice cube tray into a tumbler, added a double thumb of bourbon, then took a long swallow. Several minutes later, he was relaxing in bed with
The Outcasts of Poker Flat
. Blizzards, he thought. Convenient, quiet. Easy to run off the road in deep snow, leave Myrna, go for “help.” How long would it take come January to drive up to the wilderness north of Sudbury? Six hours tops! Suddenly he gagged. “What is this?” he yelled as he pulled bits of pale ragged flesh from the glass.

Myrna appeared in the doorway, a smile flickering. “Silly Billy. Just some cod I froze for Bubbles for slow release. Won't hurt you.”

A few weeks later, when Bill tried to use his
VISA
at the Shell station, it was rejected. Myrna, responsible for paying the accounts, blamed an oversight. But then he found the warning letter from the tax department and handed it to his wife, who was crumbling white mosquito larvae. “So sue me,” she said, tapping on the glass at an inquiring discus. “Do you know how long it takes a bank to foreclose? Nearly two years. By then, your GIC comes due.”

“Myrna,” Bill said, a catch in his voice, “I saved that for a fly fishing trip to the Yukon.”

Myrna didn't answer, admiring her new red cap oranda, its
lumpy pompon plastered on like an exterior brain. It was lurching around the tank, gobbling whatever came near. Bill blinked at his wife's henna hair, sculpted eyebrows with that perpetually surprised look, exaggerated lipstick outline. Only Lucille Ball got away with that.

Later that month, as Bill watched Myrna flipping through
Getting Started in Salt Water Aquariums
and making an ominous list, he could see his last dollar sinking faster than the loonie. And when the nursing home called to tell him they hadn't received the monthly check for his mother's care, cold sweat formed on his brow and his chest pumped like the Aries going up a hill. Not Mom's trust fund! “Did you send out the Happy Valley payment?” he asked.

Myrna clipped a romaine lettuce leaf to the tank for Annie the ancistrus and hummed a little tune. “Don't worry your pea-brain about that. Bunny Bagshaw says everyone's doing it.”

“Doing what?” Bill gasped, his knees weakening.

“Liquidating, of course. That way the government picks up the tab quite nicely. The supplement for indigents kicks in. What a country.”

“Indigents! You mean you told them Mom is broke? It meant everything to her to pay her own way! She trusted us!”

“Don't be a fool. She doesn't have to know, but she will have to leave her semi-private for a quad. Big deal. Give her more company anyway.” She attached the Python hose and began to suck up Bubbles' tank, swirls of debris forming miniature tornados.

Bill braced himself against an onset of vertigo. As Myrna started the refill, with a strange and sudden focus, he saw the dangling electrical cord for the immersion heater. He had connected the system and knew the dangers. What would cause Myrna to be careless? The death of one of her favourites?
Bubbles? Yet Bill hated to see even a guppy suffer. He heard Myrna open the front door. “I'm going to Popeye's for some Fung-All,” she called. “The barbs have been scratching.” The door slammed, and the Aries groaned into action.

Bill rummaged in the basement freezer. There it was, a nice medium sized Pacific salmon languishing through the months since Myrna had stopped cooking. He gently removed the wrappings and scrutinized it from all sides. It resembled Bubbles, or would with the lights off.

Back upstairs, he removed the cover from the big tank, disconnected the electrical cord and set to work. First, he dipped down with a big net and hauled out Bubbles, placing her in a full, lukewarm bathtub. Then, with dark thread the same colour as the fish, he tied the salmon among the heavier plants under the large heater tube. He connected the thread to the tube and unscrewed the heater until it rested perilously in place. “CAUTION: Do Not Immerse Beyond This Point!” it warned. Finally, he replugged the main cable and waited, turning off all the lights in the house.

As soon as Myrna opened the door, he yelled, “Come here! The power's off, and there's something wrong with Bubbles!” Myrna rushed over, bugged out her eyes and plunged her hand into the tank, pulling the heater element with her. “Bubbles!” was her last word.

In the ten minutes before the ambulance came, Bill shut off the main breaker, chopped up and flushed the helpful salmon and thread, set up the fluval, and dabbed a bit of cayenne into the corners of his eyes. “I took the big fish out of her tank to give the walls a good cleaning. I guess Myrna didn't see her, panicked and reached in to move the plants,” he told the attendants, and later the police as he blew his nose. “That fish meant the world to her.”

Bill was given the week off to make arrangements for the funeral. Along with the obituary, he included a note that, in lieu of flowers, donations could be made to the African Knifefish Rescue Association.

Back from a weekend of trout fishing, he made plans to return his charges to the pet store. The tanks might make attractive terrariums for the nursing home. Then Bubbles hove into view. The large, placid fish had missed her guppies and was staring out through the glass, clown dots undulating along grey velvet folds, eight on one side and six on the other. She is a beauty, Bill thought, counting the circles as he felt his heart rate slow; the tight metal coil had disappeared from his chest. Bubbles swam so gracefully . . . and so sadly. With an underslung jaw and limpid gimlet eyes, the fish could have been pouting. Bill went to the fridge and returned with a Corona and shrimp bits. “Don't worry, Big Girl,” he said. “Daddy's home.”