Which Might Contain Such Liquors As They Often Buried — Roderick Moody-Corbett

Norman Lune knew better than to call the cops. Working his way across the cold knotted fields behind the College—it was late October, the rattlers and wandering garters denned, the hognoses burrowed, yet Norman proceeded cautiously, idling a pole over the tufted parry oat and skunk brush and knobs of mealy wolf willow, less concerned for snakes than rolling another ankle (he’d taken a nasty fall spinning bull trout and grayling with Bill Younger) off some errant berm of gopher hole—he spotted a solitary figure, a boy, inky and spectral, squatted along the valley’s tall, south-facing hills, hugging his knees and swaying a bit, and something about his sitting out here, all by himself, wearing nothing but a skimpy windbreaker and jeans, this early on a Sunday, unsettled him. As for Norman, an evening grosbeak, scoped in the coulee gorge two weekends ago, accounted for his own presence. “I wish you could’ve seen it,” he’d told Lynn. “It was about this big.” He held open and widened two cracked and shaking hands. “Looked just like a yellow hawfinch.”  

But the grosbeak, whom the World Bird Database listed as a vulnerable taxon, would have to wait. Norman called out to the boy but received no response; he simply continued swaying. The boy’s shoulder blades were thin and jagged. They backed out sharply from his jacket like rigging, luffed in a gale. Norman kept a naloxone kit stowed under the front seat of his pickup but he didn’t think that’s what this was. He came alongside the boy and asked if he was okay. The boy didn’t say anything. Norman put him at fifteen, sixteen. His hair was buzzed nearly bald on the sides and a newish cut seared across the hollow of his left cheek, backlit by a curious emerald bruise. Norman unscrewed the cap of his Nalgene and set the bottle beside the boy’s feet. His jeans were torn at the ankles and he wore white Velcro sneakers with plump, muddy toes. “Water,” Norman said. “Yours if you want it.” The boy picked up the bottle and drank. “You out here all on your own?” Norman asked. The boy belched elaborately.  

Norman wanted the boy to sit back from the ledge and quit swaying. The hill, which leveled out on a narrow arroyo mounded in stiff, nerdy trees, wasn’t altogether precarious, but you wouldn’t want to go tumbling all the way down it. A little further along the ridge a broad orange sign stippled in goose shot and girded in barbed wire warned of erosion and sedimentary collapse. Norman petted the loose silt with his pole.   

“That’s a bad-looking cut you got there,” he said, touching a thumb over his own cheek. 

The boy’s eyes were tired and glassy; their corners banded with freckles and dark, webby lines. He peered up at Norman from the brim of the canteen, firming his bottom lip. 

“I don’t have any bandages or unguent or anything like that,” Norman said. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’m thinking maybe I might call someone.” 

At this, the boy lifted his chin and squinted, briefly, over Norman’s shoulders. He leaned the near-empty Nalgene on a shag of paling rattle weed and yawned, his teeth blunt and close as a pacu’s. 

It was at Lynn’s insistence that Norman kept the SAGE Clan number in his phone. The discriminatory practices of the Lethbridge PD were so well established, its offices so embroiled in controversy, that the province’s Minister of Justice had threatened to dissolve the force.  

To the groggy voice on the other end of the line, Norman gave his name and location, and described the situation—but did a quiet boy sitting by himself on a sullen hill with a cut on his face even constitute a situation?—as best he could. The woman who answered, whose name he missed, thanked him. They’d send some of their people right away.

Norman unhooked his backpack and crouched down beside the boy, close enough that, should he fall, he could probably reach out a hand and grab him. The sun was starting over the hills in brilliant earnest. A blue jay darted across the ridge, jeering lewdly. Norman placed his camera case on the grass. “I take pictures of birds,” he said. “That’s a Canon 7D mounted with a 70-300mm Sigma lens. Nice wide aperture. Feel free to look all you want. You get used to the weight.” Norman rubbed his hands. “Two Sundays ago I was up here and I saw an evening grosbeak just over beyond those rocks and down inside the brush a ways. Looked just like a yellow hawfinch. Maybe a little stouter. I’d hoped to see it again, but I’m not sure today will be my day. I’m leaving this place.” Norman was quiet. A pair of mule deer stotted over the slender grey wash. He listened for the blue jay. “My wife Lynn, that’s soon to be my ex-wife, found a place off Ridgewood Heights. That’s westside. Back of the Safeway. We sold our home. Been living there going on five years. Lynn—she’s got a head for these sorts of things—managed a private sale. Me, I couldn’t sell myself out of a wet paper bag. But if you know what you’re doing, and don’t mind putting in the work, there’s no sense engaging a realtor, is my understanding. It’s lawyers and a half-competent broker, Lynn says, do most of the lifting. I don’t know. The new owners take possession next week and later today I’m supposed to pack up the rest of my gear and give Lynn a hand cleaning the place. We’ve got professionals coming Tuesday but Lynn wants us to do one last once-over.” He sat back on his elbows and scrubbed a clod of mud off one boot with the heel of the other. “So that’s my Sunday.” 

Years ago it had occurred to Norman that the coulees, taken in the first light, were like the muscled sides of lions easing themselves to sleep on an arid veld, and now, though he wondered at the legitimacy of this image—zoos weren’t his bag and documentaries outlining the dietary misfortunes of the sub-Sahara upset him—all he could think about were lions, slumberous and glutted.

“You know there’s dinosaurs all deep down below us? Hard to imagine those long surly bastards capering around these hills, before they were hills, I mean. Right now what we’re sitting on here is loess. L-O-E-S-S. That’s a clastic, sedimentary layer. Sands, gravels, silts. Underneath that you’ve got many levels of glacial till. Then Bearpaw shale and then a ways below that Oldman Formation. Late Cretaceous. My friend Bill Younger said a nephew of his, working a blue ammolite claim, turned up the skull and mangled shoulder girdle of a 75-million-year-old mosasaur just outside Cardston. You believe that? These were gigantic water lizards with fiendish, crocodile-like heads. Bill says his nephew told him the skull they drew was bigger than a grown foal. So that’s what? Fourteen, fifteen hands? Keep in mind this’s just the head we’re talking here.”     

And then, “You mind if I smoke? I shouldn’t smoke. But I’m going to smoke. The truth is I haven’t had a drink in twelve days and a cigarette’s about the only thing that’ll steady me.”

Norman was a moment knocking a dart from his pack, figuring his Bic for the wind. 

“I’m supposed to drive up to Calgary later today. My sister’s offered me the couch in her basement. She lives over by Crowfoot with this guy named Brad. He’s a floor manager or low-level pit boss at one of the Gap outlets. Wears his hair all up and cluttered and crispy at the front. Nobody likes Brad. I guarantee you wouldn’t think much of him. When I told my sister I’d be coming back to Calgary, and she offered me the couch, Brad—I could hear him puttering around in the background the whole time me and my sister were talking—jumps on the line, just to make sure I know that he knows that I know this wasn’t going to be any sort of permanent arrangement. Ridiculous. I mean I get that I’m a handful, all right. No one’s disputing that. I’ve got my problems like anyone else, we all do. But there was no need of him to lay it in on me so cold.

“Of course, there’s a chance I’ll stay on in Lethbridge one more night. I broke the bed down yesterday and put it in storage. Lynn says she got no use for it. Tells me she always hated that bed. So I hopped up the mattress and frame and all those jaded dowels and turnbuckle screws and things into my truck and I hauled these over to Bill’s camper, what Bill calls his abattoir. A creamy no-windowed room on chocks, reeks of bull elk and wood bison and black bear and boy if I don’t know what else he’s bled back there, hogs, I guess. But I’ve got my sleeping bag, you know, my toothbrush, my undies, couple pair of socks, and a bottle of Grey Goose tucked under a slack panel downstairs in the rec room. I know I shouldn’t be thinking like this, but I’ve half a mind to do one last once-over myself, if you take my meaning.”  

Norman looked at the boy. He didn’t seem to be listening, but he was no longer swaying; in fact, in the time Norman had been speaking, hanging his thoughts out to dry, testing each clause like a toe in a pond, the boy had stretched himself out, and was now lying on the grass, his legs crossed at the ankles, his hands tented over his chest in a posture of pastoral repose (a straw hat and stalk of fescue jockeying lazily from his lips wouldn’t have gone entirely astray). Norman smudged out his cigarette, pocketed the butt, and started another. He told the boy about his prospects: “Technically, I’m unemployed. I’m looking to get back most of what I put into the house. Money I thought was gone becoming real money again. Feel I can probably float a few months, get my bearings. Because the truth is I’m very adaptable. I’ve worked all kinds of jobs. Security, trades, residential abatement. I used to be in custom woodworking before my boozing got all out of whack I couldn’t tell my right thumb from my left, let alone the head of a nail”; his passions: “Took a picture of a rufous hummingbird slurping nectar out of an orange jewelweed when we were visiting Lynn’s mother’s cousin in Chicoutimi that was shortlisted for a photo contest in Canadian Geographic. Came out three years ago July. Figure I’m after buying a dozen copies”; his uncertainties: “I don’t know if there’s something wrong with my mind or my eyes or both, but you say a word like ochre to me—ochre—and I have to think real hard before I know what colour you’re actually talking about”; and Lynn. On Lynn Mary Ann Logue Norman Lune, sorrowing or listless, could go all day.  

The SAGE Clan arrived within the hour. Norman kept his distance as they conferred with the boy and draped a crinkly mylar blanket such as marathoners and astronauts bed themselves in over his shoulders. They plied him with bran cookies and juice, orange wedges, a browning banana half; and with cotton swabs, anointed in peroxide, they fussed at his wound. 

Norman thought to stick around and see what the boy’s deal was—where had he come from? had any of Norman’s oration obtained?—but felt, increasingly, a hindrance, a tourist, intruding on some vague, obscurely private scene. 

“Well,” he said, more or less to himself, “I guess I’m off.” 

Norman boosted his pole and waved to the boy, sheeted in tinfoil, his lips busy with rind. He stubbed his way back to the parking lot and stepped inside his truck. The arc lamps winked once, faded, and were out. He hadn’t realized they were on until he found himself submerged in the morning’s cool gluey light. Norman turned over the ignition and quieted the radio. A shaggy, rough-legged hawk, scouting deer mice and vole, kited over the open fields. Norman sniffed his fingers and studied his tremor. He wondered what he might tell Lynn. Not that it mattered now, he supposed, but, forgetting the grog, she’d never much loved his smoking. 

***

For months, years, Norman and Lynn’s Fridays ran as follows: beginning at about four o’clock, Norman, home from the shop or, jobless, fresh off a walk, would begin drinking, a can of nondescript pilsner and a couple quick warm belts of vodka from the flask he kept hidden in the high cupboard above the kitchen sink, the beer and surreptitious vodka chase repeated at intervals of thirty minutes for a period of two hours, switching to organic red wine as he cooked—he’d grown sensitive to histamines, and white wine, though he loved it, left him sneezy and blushing—becoming blurrily estranged as the night wore on, until, alighting on some minor household pettiness—untended laundry or dishes, a general clutter—Norman would lash out at Lynn, scold her, upbraid her for all the ills (foreign and domestic) he could, in his actuarial-like delirium, muster, to which unprovoked drunken reproachments Lynn (sober) did not (obviously) take kindly; and, as their voices grew louder and his logic—if so specious a diplomacy could be so called—floundered, he would threaten to run out of the house, to wander the streets in a nervous fury, muttering to himself, shaking his hands wildly, as his own father might’ve done, or else, pacing the kitchen, in ridiculously bright socks, he’d gnash his teeth and drive fist after fist against his own skull, harder and harder, beating himself until his teeth hurt and his eyes reddened and Lynn told him that if he kept this up she’d have no choice but to call the police, and Norman, undeterred, promising—daring, bating—worse violence, continued to hit himself, and Lynn began to cry, crawling across the kitchen floor on her swollen, arthritic knees, her voice hoarse, ragged, winded with fright, until Norman, crying also, eventually did stop.  

“I want to die,” he’d admitted more than once. “I’m not a good man.” 

Reconciliations were swift but balsa slim, and quarrels often renewed to still greater decibel. Mornings, while Lynn slept, Norman found excruciating, as the night’s terrors replayed themselves over his coffee and chores, knowing that more talking, more fighting, lay in store when she awoke. 

Norman did not know when he’d lost control, when he’d become so angry, only that his appetites—his anger—were undiminishing. He drank earlier and later, harder and faster, the empties accumulating, bottle by dumb lonely bottle. Norman no longer denied the circumference of his problem, its ontology, whether or not he had a problem, as such. He’d tried hashing it out with a counsellor, a kind young man with round wire-frame glasses and a juicy ponytail that dumped off his nape like a soaked ferret, but found that he couldn’t quite keep from lying, understating his intake, and neatening up the details ever so much. Because he usually didn’t drink during the week, and because he’d largely avoided any criminal or public incident—the most notable of which, having occurred at the lag-end of a wedding reception for Dale and Ginny Holley’s eldest, found a half-corned Norman Lune catching the hindseam of the shorter (but nicer) of his two suit jackets off an ornate newel cap, the sudden perception of which bondage (and such efforts as Norman made to liberate himself from the offending newel) occasioning a dramatic shedding of vestments, followed by a no less exultant stumble down a flight of stairs, during the course of which journey Norman upended a trolley of hors d’oeuvres (gazpacho shots, sliders, sesame-coned swallows of tuna tartare), startled a child, interrupted a conversation, and clomped a chaste foot, before colliding, in the hopes of regaining his balance (or stymieing further calamity), with a large artificial topiary, shaped like a roaring bear, and with which leafy ursid Norman tussled, futilely and, from certain vantages, somewhat erotically, for a minute, on the floor—it seemed within the realm of his control, something he could fix when he decided it (his drinking) needed fixing, that he alone would know when the time had finally come to change his life.  

But he hadn’t been paying close enough attention. He’d miscalculated or lost sight of his thresholds, his standards of propriety. And, what’s worse, he’d hurt Lynn, irreparably, many times over. “I’m not saying this is an ultimatum,” she’d warned him, years before. “But I think we both know I deserve a mite better than this.” 

When Norman told his sister that things between he and Lynn were over—for good, this time—his sister looked upon him with a complex of incredulity and distress he’d not thought her capable.  

“That’s horrible,” she said. “Is Lynn okay? That poor woman. I’ve always felt so sorry for her. And what about you? What are you going to do for money? I mean, Jesus Christ, Norman. What are you going to do with yourself now?” 

It was a fair question. Norman knew he would find no one else; and understood, too, that, unchecked, the drinking to which he committed himself over the weekends (of which all statutory holidays were plainly a part) risked expanding into the rest of the week. It was pitiful. He really had no one else. He saw his ruin not so far off—a pinch of gin in his coffee, a screwdriver, a Caesar, a dry rosé with lunch—like a black mantle of cloud thickening on a gold valley flat.  

But something about this morning’s encounter had clarified things for him. He wasn’t bad. Norman Lune was good. Or, rather, capable of goodness, and perhaps—the thought was new to him—deserving of goodness, and he felt Lynn needed to know this, if only to unburden her, to let her know he’d be alright.   

Because of course bad things had happened to him. Terrible things. He remembered sleepovers at Matten’s—Matten, with whom he’d not spoken in decades, whose parents operated a small farm of dairy and field crops. Canola, soybean, a tidy artery of corn. The house, which Matten’s dad had built himself, had that green, stricken feel to it, a prickly, cacti-like bite. And there were rules about running the water too long, bathing, and flushing the toilet to excess. Some nights he and Matten would disdain their toys and roll around on the bucked tiles, pressing and tickling each other. Their privates weren’t much to fiddle at. Just two short ungrowing acorns of sore-looking flesh. Then there’d been the one night when Matten’s dad caught them at it, the smile on his face, the white of his teeth, his wreathy beard, and all the raunch and secret ugliness that came after. 

Norman understood enough about the neurochemical properties of addiction—dopamine overloads and their diminishing receptors—to know that his own dependencies, however routed in trauma, exceeded easy articulation. 

And it was true that there were some stories you just didn’t tell about, or couldn’t. Not to anyone. Norman remembered when, exasperated by another fight—what had then seemed like a defining nadir—he’d tried, in detail, to explain to Lynn just what exactly had happened to him, as a child—he’d been six, seven, eight years old—all those years ago. Lynn was the only person to whom he’d confided these things and he could still see her sitting there, on the edge of their bed, shaking. “I’m so angry,” she said. “I’m just so, so angry.” She squeezed his hand. “Not at you,” she clarified. “I’m not angry at you. But no one, no child.” She couldn’t finish her sentence. “You did nothing wrong,” she said. “Tell me you understand.” So he told her. 

***

The deer were back on the lawn when Norman pulled up to their lot; and, from the looks of things, this was a does only affair. Norman sighted three females and one gawky hind nibbling on the half-frozen winter cheeks he’d neglected to harvest. Their apple tree stood at the northern edge of the property, its anarchic canopy overhanging the sidewalk. The smell of trampled apples was not unpleasant but pungent, a cidery constant. The neighbours had expressed their displeasure and Norman sympathized. He’d tried raking them up but the tines stole right through their cores. He could’ve hosed some of the sludge off the sidewalk, went to work with his short spade and pail, but September passed, an ice fastened and thawed, encasing the apples in a laminate of their own dissolve, and Norman did nothing.  

This was good news for the deer.  

Absent intervention, a period of tentative, oh-dark-hundred sharecropping had given way to bolder incursions. Word had got out among the ungulates, and now the deer presided over this territory (shitting, sleeping, bullying passerby) with the entitled tranquility of feudal lords. Norman, enveloping the heaps of excrement with pea gravel and stones and artful little scatterings of mulch, moved among them like an indentured peasant. “Forget netting,” Bill suggested. “That’s just a fool’s errand. No, what you want for these deer is to get you some catmint. That, or, I don’t know, set me up down the block with my Marlin, a box of .45-70, and case of Busch Light.” Bill laughed. “Look at that one over there. What’s he sniffing all up in that rose for? Is like they fixing to gentrify or something. I know goats that has acted odd but I never seen deer give zero fucks like this before.”

A light flipped on in the kitchen. Lynn wandered from one window to the next, emerging—through shadowed glass—briefly headless, lugging a brown wicker box. Norman withdrew from the truck, clutching the grab handle as he hefted himself forward, resting his boots on the exposed gravel aggregate—a coarse pour, crunchy and brown, like troweled muesli. He snapped his fingers at the deer, clapped his hands, hissed scat, but not even the hind bothered looking up at him.

Theirs was a bright, bay-windowed bungalow, sided in white brick and pine. Henderson Lake made a ten-minute walk detouring round the golf course and Whoop-Up Downs grandstand. They’d fared okay here, all things considered; and, thanks largely to Lynn, turned a decent profit. It helped that they’d invested so much in this house—reshingled the roof in May, and, the year before that, done away with their aged hot water tank and installed central AC. Neither he nor Lynn quite minded the heat, but the weeks of wildfire smoke, pooling in from the Okanagan, and inching into their home through open windows—open, in the mornings, by necessity—wreaked havoc on their allergies. Beyond the lawn, the front walk still needed leveling, the trap and drain line in the downstairs bathroom (corroded in a greenish-blue grit resembling an astral fog) replacing. They’d talked about expanding a sunroom into the backyard, which was enormous and overrun with beautiful but hysterically invasive creeping bellflower. There was space enough for a garage or carport—something to keep the elements from gouging their cars—but weighing incentive on cost netted an unending stalemate. Not that he minded. Come thunder or hail, Norman, already an oddity, assembled his bungees and D-rings, quilting their windshields in rank pillows and tarps.

The front door was unlocked. In the living room, Lynn, perched over an empty IKEA bag, her heavy grey hair swept up in a bun, attended a briery gnarl of coat hangers. 

“We keeping our shoes?” Norman asked. 

The coir mat with the tan circles umbering off its middle was gone and Lynn seemed happy enough in her Vasques. 

“Ouch,” she said, bringing a nicked thumb to her lips.  

“Cut yourself?”

Lynn examined her thumb, squeezing the sides, and easing down on the mantle. “I don’t think so.” She turned her palm. A wan scar like an upended G threaded the flat veinless hollow of her left wrist. The scar predated Norman, but not by much.  

From within, empty or nearly, the house radiated a peculiar compactness, sterile and pinched. What belongings of his remained Norman could almost certainly live without, but the pantry and fridge still needed clearing, the furnace room, the shed. 

The essential effects, his keepable togs and tackle, he’d left with Bill. “You know I’ve got room back here for one sad bastard-sized human, too,” he’d said. “I’m not meaning to mother hen, but if you need me, just say the word.” 

Norman appreciated the offer (and storage) but what he needed now was a night to compass himself, correct his declinations. And beyond that? He couldn’t see sticking around Lethbridge. Calgary was fine, in the short term, but the city, his sister, Brad, seemed inconducive to his what? Recovery? Maybe he’d go north. Or west. Sparwood or Radium. Or south. The fishing was good off Milk River—he’d be closer to Lynn—and he’d always loved the lower Badlands.  

“So what’s our game plan? Where’re you needing me?”

She started him in the furnace room, one pile for garbage, another for recycling. Items of which he was uncertain (or whose immediate utility eluded him)—a round wooden birdhouse lacquered in topcoat with a brass bail and wide open globe like you’d find on one those old-timey hurricane lamps; a bowl of keys and keychains and ticket stubs; rancid towels and blankets; a copy of Moulin Rouge on VHS; an unattempted cross-stitch kit titled Meet Me at the Pumpkin Patch; random operating manuals and adaptors—Norman wedged inside a navy laundry basket with a wonky handhold sutured in electrical tape. Leaning on the wall behind the sump pump he recovered a long-lost ball peen hammer and bradawl with a blunted chisel tip he could probably sharpen. He set these aside, brought the basket upstairs, and fixed a note to the birdhouse labeled misc. junk? 

Lynn packed with untiring fanaticism, voiding cupboards and cabinets of their abundant stores—chickpeas and canned salmon for days—moving mutely from kitchen to car.  

Norman, all but depleted, fretted at various crannies and windowsills with a frayed Swiffer he’d found gusting over the baseboard vent in their bedroom. 

Nail holes dotted the living room walls, and Norman did his level best to mend these with a narrow putty knife, smoothing out the last of their spackle. They had no more sandpaper, no emery cloth, no pumice stone. Norman waited for the spackle to dry, before working the scour half of a sponge across his edges.  

Missing from this room was a picture of Lynn as a kid standing astride a tasselled tricycle, her too-small leather helmet lending her mom-spun bob a tonsured, Friar Tuck-look, smiling, a long smear of what was probably chocolate ice cream or fudge (or some ambrosial hybrid of the two) blotching both cheeks, one hand gripping her bike by the stem’s handlebar collar, the other planted firmly on her hip, a big toothy smile with a single black gap presenting off the lateral incisor, and the t-shirt, either orange or peach, maybe salmon, with an eagle and some waves and a passel of lunatic squirrels in sunglasses surfing very coolly and nonchalant across the trim of it.  

“I thought you were doing the shed,” Lynn said. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I got distracted.”

“You don’t need to say sorry.”

“I know.” 

Norman itched his stubble. He was thinking about how to stop himself from saying sorry again. Lynn passed him a facecloth. 

“You remember the dog that came into our yard that time?” she asked. 

“I believe somebody had a hand in letting her in,” Norman said. He dabbed the sweat from his brow. “Not naming names.”

“She was so wild and so old,” Lynn said. “Running and running.”

“I was sure we were going to end up adopting.”

“I wanted to,” Lynn said. “I would’ve taken that goofy old girl in and loved her so much, I’m not even kidding.”

“I guess we got lucky.”

“Did we?” Lynn asked.     

The shed was stale and humid. Cobwebs depended from the rafters’ horizontal beams and the shiplap was ruddled with mildew. On the floor were coiled baling ties and carton staples and swathes of plastic pack wrapping. Norman kicked these into a crude jumble by the door, and rolled the mower to the back corner alongside a fresh sack of topsoil, a set of brown paper garden bags bound up in bright orange twine, and the last of their cedar chips. The new owners could help themselves. Then he gathered the ties and wraps and as many of the staples as he could reasonably be expected to thumb and dumped all of this into the trash. 

Birds occasionally flew into the awning window at the back of their house. While a stunned chickadee or nightjar recovered speedily enough, Norman remembered the robin who didn’t. He’d heard a thick whump on the glass—a magnificent sound, large and wet, a good snowball coasted in June—and rushed out to find the robin flat on its back, legs curled up in an impossible clutch like young twigs in a fire shying flame. The eyes were just two neat black lines bedded in feather. Norman waited a day for the ravens and crows, if not the coyotes or neighbourhood tom, to come pick it apart, before bringing the bird to the trash. He felt bad about this. Norman didn’t think of himself as especially spiritual—historically, anyway, this had never been the case—but he wanted to believe that some other, softer realm awaited us beyond this one, which it was the living’s duty to imagine for their dead. He ought to have secreted the robin under the alders, composted the poor buoyant thing amid the rhubarb and cabbage and bunches of sour coronation grape brocading the back gate. 

He’d miss this house, miss the neighbourhood cats they visited on their walks, a ginger miscreant and longhaired tabby with a red collar who always came bouncing up to Lynn for a snuggle. Norman hoped the boy on the ridge was managing. In his experience, it wasn’t the moment that got you, but the ones succeeding you had to watch for. 

They worked all afternoon. Lynn ran a final load of boxes across the river while Norman busied himself in the basement, sweeping and dusting. He debated smoking a cigarette, debated crumpling his pack. In their bedroom, or former bedroom, he balled up his coat and lay on the floor. Shadows streaked the ceiling’s ricotta-like stipple and a sharp wind prattled the siding. If you close your eyes, a prairie wind takes on a purling, oceanic quality, murmurous and metrical, a tuneful calm. 

Lynn nudged him awake. 

“I brought food,” she said. 

“What time is it?” 

It was dark, and the air smelled thick with salt. 

“It’s half past five.”

He sat up and rubbed a knot in his back.  

She’d ordered pizza from Two Guys, a Peppadew Mobster, and, special for Norman, a basket of salt and pepper wings. They ate, or Norman did, in the living room, sans table or plates. Lynn huddled beside the empty, cumbersome shelving unit the new owners wanted to keep, skimming her phone.

“You’re not eating?” he asked. 

“I’m going to get something at home.”

Norman paced the naked windows, chewing a wing. He was unsure if by home Lynn intended to wound him. He missed the voile blinds and felt the barrenness of this room—its stripped walls and patches of worried spackle, his stupid eating—acutely.   

Lynn clicked off her phone and set it face down on the floor. Her gaze idled over him, blandly preoccupied. 

“Okay,” she said.

“You’re leaving?” 

“I think it’s time.” 

Norman placed his wing on a paper towel. The bone was beige as driftwood with a fret of marrow seeping down one side.

“You’ll take all this stuff out of here when you leave? And be sure to lock all the doors?”

“Of course.”

“And the windows?”

“I’m not going to open any windows,” Norman said. 

“You have to put the keys in the lockbox for the cleaners, and make sure it’s locked,” she said, “the lockbox.” 

“Lynn.”

She brushed her jeans, unplugged her phone, and slipped her charger inside her coat pocket. Norman walked her to the door and they hugged goodbye. She squeezed his arm. This grip seemed new, the reach of her fingers, their cling. 

“I still love you,” he wanted to say, and almost did, but instead found himself suddenly telling her in a voice he identified as frankly manic about the boy he’d seen earlier that day. But it wasn’t coming out right. He’d expected more from this story, but his telling took no time at all. 

“I don’t understand,” Lynn said. “He was hurt?” 

“His cheek was cut and he had this bruise coming up under the cut. Like it was almost green,” Norman said. “It didn’t look great.”

“And you sat with him?”

“That’s right. On the hill. We sat together on the hill and we talked. Or I did.”

“What did you talk about?”

Norman thought about this. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it felt like I needed to tell him everything I knew.”

Lynn smiled but a look of confusion, concern even, lingered on her face. He watched her walk down the steps. Norman wondered now if he were interfering with her goodbye, her final minutes with their house, which was also, crucially, her house, and he felt, as with the boy, like an intruder. He’d made a mistake sticking around here. He should’ve driven up to Calgary.   

Norman waited an hour before retrieving his sleeping things from the truck. He ate more pizza, finished his wings, cracked a window, and smoked a cigarette. He streamed a clip of some grizzlies chasing wild horses on his phone, and forwarded the link to Bill, who wrote back, “saw that” and “those don’t look like real horses.”   

In the distance, coming up on the viaduct, he could hear a train, heading east, sounding its whistle, as the boxcars slotted over the tracks. The viaduct spanned a mile and stood 100m above the riverbed. He used to walk across the bridge when he was boy. This, in a lifetime marked by so much idiocy, numbered among his most reckless escapades. There were no barriers then, no phones. It was just you and the creosoted tracks and a shining scrim of foxtail plunging out over the banks, the rusted girders and lashings nearest the west valley walls smeared in graffiti, pale names, dead names, names plaqued in ancient neon hearts.   

Norman went downstairs and opened the rec room closest and fished around for his bottle. He looked forward to the blue cork, its grooved cap and pop. Where was it? He flicked on the light and blinked. He peeled back the loose panel and reached through a batting of fiberglass, pink and ticklish on his wrist. He’d left his toolbox in the furnace room and he went and retrieved his hammer and penlight. He shined the light inside the closet and pried back the panel with the claw of his hammer. He set the panel on the floor and wrapped a greasy J-Cloth over his fist and dug around in the insulation. Maybe he had the wrong panel? Norman coughed. He was sopping sweat. The wings weren’t sitting right and an acidic hollowing radiated down his chest. He was so tired and so weighted in his tiredness and he needed water. But he’d left his Nalgene with the boy or maybe the boy had left his Nalgene on the ridge. Either way, it was gone. He had no vessel, no means. There was nothing, not a bottle, not a glass, not a stitch of anything, anymore, in this house. 

In the kitchen, on the counter beside the fridge where they used to keep the toaster and kettle and broad amber jar where Lynn stored her tea, now, crumbless and moonlit, stood a bottle—his bottle—of vodka, and a short, clean, square-bottomed glass. Through uncurtained windows the moon hung fat and pale on the trees—a cratered face, liverish with dim lunar mares. Mare was Latin for sea (which the moon’s grooves weren’t) but where, Norman wanted to know, had they got mare for female of the horse? Norman turned on the stove light. They’d forgotten to replace the vent, which was dappled in bronze lard, and he wondered if the cleaners would see to it. Pinned to the rim of the glass was a lime sticky note. He removed the note and brought it closer to the light; though, in a sense, he already knew what it said.   

Opposite the apple tree swayed a tall and ragged spruce, stricken and dying, its roots all torn up and abraded from where the previous owner had mowed over them. Norman remembered how, against their arborist’s advice, Lynn had endeavoured to save this tree, watering its wounded roots morning and night. “The neighbours must think we’re crazy,” he’d told her. Mindful of ticks, she wore her high purple rainboots and hat. Norman hoped the new owners wouldn’t cut it down. He uncorked the vodka and sniffed. It didn’t even smell good, was one problem. Norman set the bottle on the counter and peeled the green tab from his thumb. 

“Cards on the table,” is all she wrote.  

***

Roderick Moody-Corbett’s work has appeared in the Drift, the Paris Review Daily, and Soft Punk Magazine, among others. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Story and a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.