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  STEEL ANIMALS

  Copyright © 2018 SK Dyment

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Steel Animals is a work of fiction. All the characters, situations, and locations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead, or actual locations, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dyment, SK, 1967–, author

  Steel animals / SK Dyment.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-533-1 (softcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-534-8 (epub).--

  ISBN 978-1-77133-535-5 (Kindle).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-536-2 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8607.Y64S74 2018 C813’.6 C2018-904347-4

  C2018-904348-2

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  STEEL ANIMALS

  a novel

  SK DYMENT

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  For epicyclic thinkers

  1.

  JACKIE IS SLEEPING NAKED now. “To understand love,” she murmurs, speaking to the empty room in her sleep, “I will need to fit all this heart machinery together.” The treacherous fan with the sharp metal blades whirs sympathetically from her windowsill and Jackie dreams that hot fingers are undressing and seducing her on the floor of a desert. An African violet has kicked out a spray of dirt and small rocks in the night, allowing earth to rain from the sill. The mess has fallen onto Jackie’s alarm clock, which is set for six a.m. In defense of the violet, it merely surrendered to a caress, a stroke of wind that entered through the window at three a.m., touching down on her turf as she slept. Her cactus had watched. The cactus knows the retro fan will be blamed for everything. The fan drones on through the pre-dawn heat, exposing her wires at the outlet source. It appears that it won’t be long before she sparks and creates a fire- or sputters out altogether. A sort of revenge to surprise the violet.

  Jackie knows about her fan. When she wakes, she is going to cannibalize her toaster and swap cords. The fire will never materialize. She is clever, mechanical, likes to tinker and comprehend. In relationships, she fights the desire to take people apart entirely, controlling her impulse to examine their interlocking psychological pieces. Typically, when her intimates plead with her to return to them, they beg her to reassemble their emotional health with the deft use of her muscular hands. The ruby-headed cactus studies her face as she sleeps. She is a woman who waters her cactus in correspondence with her menstrual cycle. To the cactus, her love is a desert where it rains every twenty-eight days.

  Jackie shifts, her black hair falling into her eyes, drifting through a mindscape of sunlight and sex and hot surfaces. It is delicious for her to be at home in her bed. She has just spent a brief stint in custody for a crime she did not commit. As she has explained to her lawyer by phone, the actual perpetrators were copycat criminals responsible for a sloppy rip-off of Jackie’s talent in heisting unattended banking machines, and so it was a butchering of something fine. Technically innocent, she clattered home on her rollerblades a free woman.

  The only positive note to the insult has been a chance encounter with Wanda, a charming dreamer who was not only physically affectionate, but knew a lot about motorcycles. After several modified performances of Macbeth’s final moments staged atop a holding cell bench, Wanda had taken her hand and declared, “Never have I met such a lady as thou,” causing Jackie to inquire as to whether Wanda was queer.

  “Not!” she had answered. “I love only a lost rogue biker prince named Ben.”

  Applauding, Jackie decided to accept the offer of friendship and the invitation to stay connected to the social stability Wanda’s heterosexuality represented. If she had known how unstable that world was, Jackie might not have felt so reverent.

  Sociologically speaking, Jackie has never been granted the easy, light-hearted safety of boyfriends with motorcycles and guitars. She occasionally longs to be sheltered by things defined as normal: not deviant, not criminal, not psychologically twisted. She has always known she was different, and was, for those wishing to psychoanalyze her, a basic case of cleverness and gender ambivalence combined with being broke.

  The violet and the cactus agree that Jackie should get a new honey. It would be nicer than living with this incessantly rattling forties-style fan, and in the right conditions, if the new romance was a waterer, the cactus could outlive Jackie. At the moment, they are in rhythm together, and the cactus feels peace rushing through her stem and along her strong green torso. She feels it roar in the red part of her head. Because it is in love with Jackie, it does not mind waiting for her to menstruate, watching her plan her next desperate life move devotedly from the sill.

  2.

  NOVEMBER. A skiff of snow has descended on Vancouver. The snow dusts the green peaks that embrace it. They look like torn paper unwrapped by a curious child, abruptly crumple-pressed against a backdrop of glowing blue blending to bone.

  Wanda is walking far past her usual stroll. She is walking to move her body, to feel the blood coursing through the muscles in her limbs, to feel her long legs stretching. Defiance, when it visits her, does not want anything to slow it down. Glancing at her reflection in a parked car, she sees her strong features, her pouting lips, the way the cool air has coloured her face. “This is a mountain wind,” she sighs, “a breeze descending from snow.”

  When she was a young girl, her mother had married a man who took them to Switzerland. They stayed at a resort on the Schilthorn, where she listened to the man and her mother argue as they drank. Wanda had slipped out, feeling the now familiar restlessness that sometimes overtook her, and she skied off-piste, far from the sounds of anybody, into the snow. A storm had risen, and she had felt a child’s sense of satisfaction that she was lost.

  She walks down to where the Lions Gate Bridge starts, thinking about that day in the storm, and then she heads out along its length. She does not know where she is heading, only that work is not a pleasure; her life is not a pleasure.

  Because she feels angry, she doesn’t care that she is far out on a lonely bridge in the middle of nowhere.

  She considers how to tell her aggressive, high blood pressure employer that she’s quitting.

  “Well, we’ll always have Paris, sweetheart…” says Wanda, imagining the expression. She laughs to herself.

  “Blessed are the pacemakers,” she adds.

  Normally reserved and even shy, she is made shyer by an unfocused eye for which she refuses to wear glasses. Her nose, broken in her girlhood, would cost next to nothing for a Canadian middle-class person to straighten. Bec
ause of this, the broken nose represents to many people a quirky decision to look off-kilter. In fact, to some it represents a girl who has been in some fights. She adapts to the misconception by developing a talent for smartass remarks. Her right hand is a prosthetic. Not one of the more expensive kinds, but a functional, basic, fake one. Many times, she has put on velvet creations sewn by her artist-friend Vespa, the sister of her lover, Ben. She has stepped out in her velvet and attended parties with people living in comfortable homes. Afterwards, her head would ring with the banter of politically suggestive remarks and ignorant laughter made to sound informed. She knows that in many people’s minds, the poor are embarrassing as windblown garbage, as if they represent excess instead of desperation. Her young face, while hopeful, is already pocked with the marks and scars of hard living, and her teeth are not covered with the kind of enamel that well-heeled people buy to appear more than natural when they smile.

  “‘Oh woman tempest-tossed!’” Wanda shouts in her best theatre-club growl. She giggles.

  Pressing her toes against the guardrail of the Lions Gate Bridge, she stares at the cold water shimmering two hundred feet below her, a small blizzard beginning to obscure the waves. When she was a child, she skied into a storm of whirling snow until it overcame her. She had rested finally, on the side of an alpine forest, the wind chill cutting through her. Her right hand was the loser in the event, and in her memory is the sight of her girl-fingers turning white and then blue. Slipping into unconsciousness, her skis at crossed angles, she had started to freeze to death, beginning the descent from warm, runaway child to cold, hypothermic tragedy.

  She walks to the centre line of the bridge. But the bridge has changed. An off-duty taxi is rushing at her. The men inside are chatting away like two teenage girls on a romantic date. She glances up. There is a warm light of human life inside the car. Too late they see the woman on the road. The driver pumps the brakes, but the speeding car slides into the oncoming lane, then turns around three hundred and sixty degrees. Spinning another one hundred and eighty, they come to rest inches from Wanda, facing backwards into town. Knocked off her feet, Wanda has been swatted by the fender on her backside and lands plumb on her bottom. Her leg does not feel anymore as if it is attached. Who really knows? thinks Wanda. Things detach, fall away, new ones are brought in to represent them. She looks up at the snow swirling down from the gathering darkness. Moments earlier, she thought she had grappled life by the horns. Now, she realizes any person can just as easily be killed by something random.

  The driver, whose face appears as shocked as Wanda’s, reaches to the dash and turns on the service light, wrongly indicating that he is accepting rides for fare. They lock eyes.

  Uncertain, Wanda flashes him a quirky, perplexed-looking smirk through the mirrored surface of the window.

  He shudders with relief. “You’re still alive!” he shouts from window. He hops out, together with the passenger who had been sitting next to him.

  She rolls down her window and looks at the car. “Heading back into town?”

  “Yes. We are taking you to a hospital at once. My name is Swan.”

  “Swan, that’s new.”

  The two men lift Wanda into the back seat. They notice she smells of alcohol, and the passenger gives her a mint. “My name is Gus,“ he tells her, and she notices he has muscular arms, interesting tattoos, friendly teeth. His friend Swan is slighter, with soft black curls and brown-gold eyes with wet lashes.

  “Thank you. It was nice of you to stop.”

  “Well, you were struck.”

  “I thought your car was going to plunge over the edge of the rail, and then I thought you were going to hit me.”

  “We both did. How does your leg feel?” Gus asks. “Do you think it is broken?”

  She looks down at it. “Broken or reluctant.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Isn’t this a romantic evening turned nightmare,” says the driver.

  Gus hands her another mint and leans over the seat.

  “Why were you out in the middle of the road?”

  “Only way you can hail a taxi in this town,” she answers him, her old self starting to surface through the storm.

  “She’s in a state of shock,” comforts Swan, unaware that Wanda is flexing her sense of humour.

  By the time they arrive at the hospital, Wanda has eaten three mints and nine butterscotch Life Savers.

  “I feel sick,” she tells them.

  Without waiting for ambulance attendants, the men carry her into the nursing station.

  “I have seen my life flash before my eyes twice tonight, once in each eye.” She gives Vespa’s number to a nurse. Vespa tells the nurse she is talking on her emergency cellphone while modelling for an art class in the nude, which she is. She sends her brother Ben to go see Wanda in her stead.

  Gus and Swan, having given their report to the police in the waiting room, stand around idly. No one will be charged. From the room where she is having some routine tests, including pupil tests for brain injury, Wanda can watch them easily. She can hear them, and they do not seem to be aware she is listening. Gus is staring at his own reflection in a pop machine. He looks distorted, like a carnival mirror, older, wider, his handsome form removed. He wonders aloud where he has seen the young woman before.

  “An image of a young girl who has run away from her parents is drifting in and out of my mind,” he tells Swan. “I was much younger, scarcely a teenager, my first real job. A ski patrol in the mountains. They were all looking for the girl lost in the wooded slopes. I reached down to pick her up, and she was sleeping in the snow.”

  “Sleeping?” says Swan.

  “Well, her lips were blue, but she was still alive. Her hands were frozen, but I pressed them in my own. They were white, bloodless, like the hands of a statue in the local town square.”

  He raises his brows. “But then one of them moved, just so slightly, and it curled tightly around my fingers. She was still sleeping, but she was alive.”

  Wanda worries that while they are waiting, a tired, over-protective Ben will turn up and start some sort of man-to-man fight. Swan sighs and expresses the wish to go to a steam bath to unwind, perhaps to pick up a charming man called Gus.

  “But this has already happened,” he laughs.

  “Then we are ahead of schedule,” responds Gus.

  The door to the hospital slams open and Ben indeed enters with the attitude of a gunfighter coming to settle a score. His dark frame is tense but tired. Ben is likely booking off from work. He will call his kid sister later and Vespa will leave the studio and she will wait. Later, the phone book will be covered with Vespa’s dramatic pen-and-ink designs portraying the day’s events.

  “You hit her with a car?”

  The men begin to argue.

  “Are you sure your name is Swan?”

  “Yes, S-W-A-N.”

  “What kind of name is that? That’s a girl’s name! That’s a bird’s name! Are you certain that’s your name? You don’t want to take the heat for this. It could be ‘Sven’ instead.”

  “It could be ‘Swine,’” says Gus, “but it isn’t.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake. I hit the girl, but it wasn’t my fault. I’m not afraid to take the heat. She was walking on the road, in the middle, and my car spun around like a vitamin on a plate.”

  “We’ll see what Wanda says to that,” says Ben, sweeping into the room where Wanda is being treated.

  Gus waits, immobilized. His eyes slip shut. Behind them he is again engulfed in snow, mountains, his eyes blurring from the bright white, and then there is the girl. He picks her up, carries her back to the emergency station on the mountain. His skis sing hush hush hush beneath his feet.

  “It’s not their fault,” says Wanda softly.

  Ben tells her it appears to have been an accident, and everyone has waited
and spoken to the police. But he has no idea why they are still sitting there. She sees he is still shaking with adrenaline. He tells her his day has been long, the hurried pace dangerous. Ben has been working for B.F. Turner, a notorious mass-producer of condos. At first, it had been drywalling, but then he had come within inches of his head being chopped off from thrown rubbish slicing through the air at dumpsters from ten floors above. A death trap. Later, welding. The supervisors turning the other way.

  “Darling,” she answers, and he tenderly strokes her brow. She observes that twice in her life, a disaster of her own folly has brought her affection and concern.

  “All day, do you know what I have been doing? Welding together supports for upper floors. And thinking if there was even a small tremor, the whole place would drop like a house of cards. Water everywhere, electrodes destroyed, workers fired. I think of you more than I can admit. And then this, an accident! Look, my hands are shaking!”

  She looks, and a self-indulgent feeling that the hands belong to her seeps warmly into her senses.

  Beyond it, the battered blue Chevy pickup Ben has just bought sits in a badly parked position in the hospital lot collecting snow. A ticket flutters underneath his wiper blade.

  The tests completed, her leg wrapped, Wanda rolls back out in to the room where Ben has shouted at the men.

  “You know,” says Swan, “I am thinking about a young boy running by the Pacific Ocean. He does it every day, although he is too shy to try out for the track team at his school. He does it to avoid the other boys. They tease him because he is beautiful. Because he is homosexual. And because he has the name of a bird. Once again, everyone is asking me how a good person such as I can be so fucked-up. And now he has hit a girl!” A tear slides from his eye and a sob shakes him. “I love girls. I would never hit a girl, even out of anger. I wonder if you have the same principles as I do. I wonder if Ben would ever hit a girl.”