South of Elfrida (2 page)

“Every human needs a name.”

“Not this Chiquita banana,” she says. She sips her can of iced tea; it's tepid due to problems with a propane line to the fridge. He's taken off the panel that accesses the back of the refrigerator and messed with it, then tucked a torn sheet around the exposed fins and wires to keep out the cockroaches.

“Isabella was a queen of Spain. Bella means beautiful.”

“I am not beautiful. I don't plan to be beautiful ever. Nothing but trouble.”

A hip-hop song comes on the radio: “I wanna do you, girl.” “I know that song!” she yelps. Then she sings bars of it, slurring. He thinks she shouldn't know how to sound so sexual. She sings, “‘The things I wanna do to you, girl.'” Her shoulders slump, then she throws her head back—like a spasm, a fit—and slip, slide. “‘You can do what you like to me,'” she says, “because I'm already dead.” She flops onto her side in the sand.

On another day she says, “My bruises are gone,” and looks sideways at him, her eyes appraising his. They've taken the aluminum chairs to the water. Surf rolls over their feet. She lifts her T-shirt, looks at her belly and bare chest with its buds of breasts. “Meth whore,” she says.

He raises his finger in caution. “No, no. Por favor, don't say that. Forget those words. You're here now.” He draws an inverted
V
in the sand, a simple tent shape. Pokes a little indentation inside. “Lambda,” he says. “You are safe here.”

She puckers her lips. “Maybe. I like lambs.”

He has to laugh. He hopes the wretched events of the past year in particular—his sister, on drugs again, hooked up with another lowlife—will slip away like a tide and leave the surface of the child's mind smooth as fine, wet sand; that happiness is what he wants for her. He wants her to be delighted someday by the memories of her childhood.

He says, “When the eggs hatch, the turtle man won't let the hatchlings crawl to the sea right away. Why would that be?”

“Predators,” she says. “Those gulls. Gulls like to eat babies.”

The sun falls, a flattened globe, pale orange against a glistening line on the horizon. They drag their chairs back to the camper, leaving tracks in the sand like the Olive Ridley turtles. He takes a beer out of the cooler. The ice has nearly melted. He sighs, puts his feet up on the cooler next to hers. He loves the size of her limbs, her feet with the splayed toes. The odd toes make her unsteady when she runs. Lambda likes her feet bare. Bianca has painted her toenails a little-girl pink.

Sometimes by the fire he talks about his sister and the rebellious girl she was and how it turned out. He speaks in a low tone, falls into his sister's grammar, syntax, her slipshod use of words: “Your mommy did, hey, outrageous things. Hair-raisin' things, wouldn't you say?”

“Yep.” Lambda lifts her shoulders and lets them down with a loud sigh that imitates his.

“Did you understand?”

She taps her chin. “Nope.”

“You laughed anyway.”

“Yep.”

He remembers his sister as sometimes being animated and lively. He himself had no idea what the joke was. It doesn't matter now.

Lambda says, “But who are you?” and tilts her chin inquisitively.

She's snoring, whispery little-girl snores. The refrigerator, rattling, works again, though now it has frozen their two eggs in the blue bowl. She wakes as he's looking at the eggs. She comes down the ladder in the pink nylon dress; she's attached to it. It will be small for her soon. She allows him to flick sleepies from the corners of her eyes. “Want some milk?”

“Let's go see the turtles first.”

He smiles. She will grow into a woman with priorities.

They reach the wire fence.

“Look,” she says, pointing. “One's hatching.”

He sees a beak working out of a crack in an egg.

“Look! Two, three. Oh, look, look!”

He says, “Let's go tell the turtle man.”

“Let's! Let's go tell the turtle man!” He hears the thrill in her voice. “The turtle man has the key. He'll unlock the gate. He'll save them!”

She runs up the weedy bank to the road and stops the village taxi. “Do you know where the turtle man is, señor?”

The man in the Skylark says, “No, señorita, this hombre, he is a mystery to me.”

“Oh, this is not good news for the turtles,” Lambda says, her hand on her chin, a parody of a child perplexed.

She looks both ways, crosses the road, and runs up the stairs to Bianca's apartment. Bianca is making coffee in her percolator. “Ah, that mystery man. There is a camper on the beach. Do you know it? He might be there.”

They arrive back at the camper. He brushes two fingers across her eyelids. She obediently closes her eyes. He quietly opens the door and steps inside. Lambda, still outside, scratches the screen: “Sir, I am looking for the turtle man.”

“Ah, the mystery is solved. Fair señorita, I am he.”

“I know,” she says. “I knew.”

After the sun sets, they take flashlights to the arribada. The dozen hatchlings are clustered in a heap against the mesh. Leonard unlocks the gate and steps inside, carrying a cardboard box. “Hatchlings are appetizers for the sharp-toothed grazers beyond the surf line, but I can't do anything about that,” he says. He picks the turtles up, places them in the box, relocks the gate.

Outside the fence, he releases them. They lift their heads and, searching, align themselves slowly toward the ocean. They creep and scratch over the sand until they come to where the land meets the sea. He and Lambda walk behind at a distance. “They have to do this part on their own,” he tells her. “It makes them strong, and they learn the scent of home.”

In the surf, the tiny turtles tumble. Some return on their backs in the smooth glide of a wave onto the beach. She reaches her hand to turn a baby upright. He shakes his head. “No, my dear. They have to figure it out themselves.” Only one or two of the batch will survive, will have the strength to push past the waves and swim the five days and five nights to go beyond the reach of predators. He's ready to tell her all this, his voice grave, when she lets out a shout.

“This one can do it!” Lambda shrieks, pointing to the one he considers the weakest, a hatchling who struggled, upside down, too long. It has flipped on its own and turns a second time, with good speed, toward the sea.

Lambda claps her hands. She looks up at Leonard, delighted. It's so dark, just a few lights from farther up the beach, the stars pressing through the haze, that her face transforms as he stares at her. He sees figures from another time lurking behind her young features, a rose-cheeked barmaid, a princess wearing a robe and crown, and he sees a fair boy grey-faced in the gloaming. Then he fixes on this particular body of this particular child, who is grinning at him as though she knows something, as though she knows what he's about to say. A survivor of this batch will live one hundred years and return to this beach because here she was born and here she was saved.

Crystal and Colin are into hill country and climbing. They're in Colin's pickup; a little bashed here and there, like they themselves are, is how Crystal thinks of it. She's given a few years to Colin. Before she found him, a man raked thin from hard living and hard work, she'd lost a lot of years to booze. When she pulled herself out of it, she was no longer homely Doreen, acne pits ruining her face, but she was, as she jokes, hanging on to the shirttail of youth.

They're driving up into the north Okanagan to help Angus, Colin's stepson, sell emu oil at the fair. Colin likes to say he mostly raised the boy himself. For the entire drive—all five hours of it so far—Colin has been going on about the Angus-Pure Ranch, its size, what hard work it is for one man because of the animals—emus, bison, yaks, and goats. “Angus says emus are short-sighted. They pick lint off your shirt. I bet you won't go into their pen,” Colin tells her.

Crystal doesn't know what an emu looks like. She wonders why anyone would want to go into their pen, anyway. She says, “I wouldn't be afraid.” She keeps her eyes on the road.

Colin smacks his hand on the steering wheel. “Jeez, sugar. You get sick from everything and you're scared of everything. You won't go into that pen.”

“I'm going in with them, you'll see.”

“Look at that pretty little skirt you're wearing. You looking for somebody new at the fair?”

“Yah, so you think,” she says and then shuts up. She listens to her earrings tinkle as she shakes her head. Her heart is starting to tremble and quiver.

He says, “Sometimes I wonder if you're too good for me.”

A man talking like this is bad. She looks at her feet, in new strappy sandals. She's wearing them so Colin will feel proud when he introduces her to Angus, but no sense explaining such a thing to him. She sips from her bottle of negative-ion water.

She's recently moved from a rented room into Colin's double-wide trailer. His closets are full of clothes from the days he played in a country band—plaid shirts in soft colours with snaps. He has two golden retrievers that he never brushes. He'd never change the sheets if she weren't there to do the wash. She likes doing it, thought he appreciated it, thought they were in love.

Her heart does its flippity-flops and lumpity-lumps like it's trying to get out. Colin says her ailments are all in her mind. Can a person have hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism at the same time? Crystal—a name she gave herself—has symptoms of both. She's been diagnosed with hypo and prescribed Synthroid. Yet online she reads that two symptoms of hyperthyroidism are anxiety and brittle hair. She has those symptoms too, but it's her heart that worries her the most.

Colin is worthless when she feels sick; he'd as soon open a can of pork and beans for dinner, which leads her to think that all the effort she puts into slow-cooking meat and vegetables is a waste of time. He says he likes her stews. Like? Is that all he can say? His Adam's apple shinnies up and down whenever he starts sweet-talking: “Sugar, I love your stew, bring your little stew over here.” And she does.

The country they're driving into is wide-open ranch country, trees in clumps around tidy houses, and a big sky. “It's so pretty,” she says. Black Angus cattle graze on the hills. A barking dog runs after the car. Skunkweed fills the ditches alongside the road.

They pass the fairgrounds. Colin says he wants to drop their things off, take a look at the ranch. They swerve off the highway onto an unpaved road and climb. The tires throw stones. A carved wood sign leaning against the fence reads
ANGUS-PURE RANCH
. They pass the gate, gaping open, and pull into a dirt area between some animal pens and a ranch-style house. The shiny metal roof of the house sparkles, hit by the sun just right. Then dust catches up with them, settles like a swarm of gnats. Colin says, “Look. Emus. Over there.” Crystal leans across him. She sees ostrich-like things with waving necks. Colin lets the truck idle. Over the noise of the engine, he clears his throat. “This here is nice country. Angus has got himself good land. A man could like it out here.”

She catches the quick look he gives her before he opens the door. He's thinking something that he's not saying directly. Crystal sits a moment in the truck and then follows him inside the house. It's nice and cool compared with outside. A lazy cloud of flies floats over a little pile of dried cat shit on the vinyl floor. She wrinkles her nose. Dishes need to be caught up with. An orange and white cat lounges on top of the
TV
, another hides under the couch. In the kitchen and bathroom, sulphurous-smelling water drips from the taps, but the parched flies don't mind. “Just so you get the idea,” Colin says and puts their overnight bags on the dining room table.

They have to park in the overflow lot, weave through cars, and push through crowds of people with strollers and kids with balloons. When they arrive at the trade show tent, Angus looks over her head and says to Colin, “I knew you'd be late. I can always count on that.”

“It was my fault,” Crystal says. She sells Avon, so she's learned a few ways of dealing with people. She reaches out her hand. Angus is a big guy with dark, curly hair and red cheeks. His eyes are lit with anger toward Colin. She steps forward, her body between the two of them, her hand still out. Angus notices her then. He takes her hand and pumps it. His hand is fleshy and calloused. She holds it until she feels him calm down, and then the three of them unpack the rest of the oils and creams and set them on the fold-up tables Angus has brought. On one side of them, a vendor is selling a drain-unplugging device, and on the other, they're offering samples of peanut brittle. That's good, Crystal figures; the peanut brittle will slow folks down.

“I need a beer,” Angus says, and Colin says, “Sure. Go on.”

In the first two hours, she and Colin sell more than two-hundred dollars' worth because Colin walks into the aisle with a confidential attitude and confesses that one jar of emu oil cream cured his foot fungus, but maybe the pretty lady doesn't want to see that, but take a look at his little gal. He nods toward Crystal, who stands and shimmies and waves. (They have devised this plan and his nod is her cue.) Angus-Pure Ranch Emu Oil cured the arthritis in her hips, and there she is, working the fair, bending her hips every which way.