Fauna

by Alissa York

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In her highly anticipated new novel, Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated author Alissa York creates a contemporary human fable that taps into the great tenderness and drama at the heart of the animal world.

The wide ravine that bisects the city is home to countless species of urban wildlife, including human waifs and strays. When Edal Jones can't cope with the casual cruelty she encounters in her job as a federal wildlife officer, she finds herself drawn to a beacon of solace nestled in the valley under the unlikely banner of an auto-wrecker's yard. Guy Howell, the handsome proprietor, offers sanctuary to animals and people alike: a half-starved hawk and a brood of orphaned raccoon kits, a young soldier whose spirit failed him during his first tour of duty, a teenage runaway and her massive black dog. Guy is well versed in the delicate workings of damaged beings, and he might just stand a chance at mending Edal's heart.

But before love can bloom, the little community must come to terms with a different breed of lost soul - a young man whose brutal backwoods childhood is catching up with him, causing him to persecute the creatures that call the valley home.

Release date: July 27, 2010

Publisher: Random House Canada

Print pages: 384

Sample

1
The City Book
 
MONDAY
 
 
She wakes to the sound of claws—a busy scrabbling on hardwood, not far from her ear. Pre-dawn darkness, a drift of warm, weak light from the bathroom down the hall. Slowly, warily, she turns her head. The mouse halts, whiskers quivering. Less than an arm’s length from her face.
 
Letting her breath out in a thin, steady stream, Edal does what she can to soften her gaze. The mouse is unconvinced. It holds its position, flank pressed to the skirting board, fur jumping with the panic of its pulse. She knows better than to try soothing it with words; years of experience have taught her few sounds trouble the wild ear so much as human speech. A small shock, then, to herself as much as to the creature before her, when the sound escapes her lips.
 
“Hello,” she says softly, and the mouse swivels and runs.
 
 
Looking up from the sink, Edal meets herself dripping in the medicine cabinet’s mirrored doors. The centre seam draws a line down her nose, her unremarkable mouth. It separates her eyes, brown and large, already set slightly too far apart—a little odd, but not unattractive, perhaps the best feature in what she hopes could be called a heart-shaped face. Shoulder-length hair lies flat and brown against her skull. She would cut it short and be done with it, but she needs it to cover her ears. No one’s ever told her they’re too small—she reached that conclusion all on her own. They feel almost vestigial, like a dewclaw, or the ancestral nub of a tail.
 
Reaching for a towel, she thinks again of the mouse. Its ears are in fine proportion, sweet little petals folded neatly against its head, designed to lift a thousand times a day in alarm. There must be a hole behind the dresser—it shot back there and didn’t show itself again. She should deal with it, find the breach and block it up.
 
Back in her bedroom, she folds open the closet door. Her work clothes take up half the space: short- and long-sleeved duty shirts, three pair basic cargo pants, two pair tactical pants, patrol jacket, fleece—all in peaceful forest green. She’s only been off duty for three weeks and already she’s starting to feel as though the federal wildlife officer uniform belongs to somebody else. As though she’d be committing an offence—personating a peace officer—if she tried any of it on.
 
She touches a summer-weight sleeve, laying a finger to the crest. She can remember exactly how it felt the first time she sported that blue and gold insignia on her arm—the mixture of pride and relief. And now, only five years on the job and she’s living off a store of sick days, unsure when she’ll feel steady enough to go back. It’s one thing being off work because you’ve caught a nasty bug, quite another because you’ve broken down on duty, sat down on the floor and buried your face in your hands. At least the crying jags seem to be easing up. The choking sensation still comes, but it’s been days now since her eyes ran like faucets. Some inner salt reservoir finally running dry.
 
She sweeps a palm down the front of the shirt. In the breast pocket, a familiar bulge. Her notebook, perhaps two-thirds full, every workday set down in its relevant details. She draws it up out of the pocket and flips to her final entry.
 
Canada Customs paged her first thing that morning. She made it to Pearson International in good time, arriving half an hour before the flight from New Delhi touched down. Anna-May Button had been flagged due to previous violations. She looked like a TV granny, a plump, apple-cheeked woman whose bags should have been crammed full of presents for the little ones back home. Instead, they were stacked with cardboard egg cartons—nine in her carry-on, twenty-four in the one she’d checked. Nearly four hundred little egg-shaped depressions, a juvenile Indian star tortoise in every one.
 
Those in the carry-on bag fared better: a third of them had suffocated and only two had been squashed. Those that had travelled cargo saw the worst of it. Edal opened carton after carton while the sweet-faced lady looked on. Every crushed carapace leaked colour, the cardboard soggy in places, swollen with blood.
 
Edal had seen as bad or worse. So why did the tortoises get to her the way they did? Why, as the day wore on, did she find herself gripped again and again by a sorrow so intense it threatened to close her throat? She fought it long enough to drive Mrs. Button back to HQ, take her prints and record a video statement. It was only later, when she was alone in the live evidence room, that the strangled feeling became more than she could bear.
 
She can’t be sure how much time passed between the moment she gave in to it and the moment Barrett poked his head round the door. Even if she hadn’t been crying too hard to speak, it would have been impossible to explain. By then she was beginning to suspect that the state she found herself in had less to do with baby tortoises than with the phone call she’d received the night before. She’d known something was wrong even before she’d answered—the hometown area code attached to a number she’d never seen. If she’d mentioned that call to her regional director, it would have been the start of a very long story indeed.
 
She tucks the notebook back into her duty shirt on its hanger. Pulling on a sweatshirt and bike shorts, she walks through to the kitchen, plugs in the kettle and drops a slice of multigrain in the toaster. When it pops, she takes the butter dish down from the cupboard—the last time she left it on the counter, the block showed diminutive whisker prints—and spreads a thin layer to the four corners of the slice. She eats standing up, gulping tea between bites. In a hurry. Only she’s not.
 
You’ve got the days banked, Jones. Why not use them? She’d never heard Barrett speak so gently. Stress leave. The idea being that you leave your stress behind you when you go, only Edal seems to have carried hers home with her. Besides sleep, the only thing that helps is moving—walking or riding her bike. You might even say it’s all she’s good for.
 
Swallowing the last of her tea, she drops a greasy crust on her plate. It’s irresponsible, she knows, inviting the mouse up onto the counter, laying out the bait without the trap. Childish. She’ll have to stop.
 
Helmet and keys in hand, she eases shut her apartment door and takes the stairs softly. James and Annie won’t be up for at least a couple of hours.
 
It’s still dark out, porch lights and street lamps pitted against the last of the night. The maple trees stand shrouded. Within the hour they’ll ring with the multi-toned strains of spring migration, untold species winging through.
 
Edal unlocks her bike from the porch railing and carries it down to the front walk. There won’t be much traffic yet. She’ll cycle south to Lakeshore Boulevard then east to the Beaches, ride hard along the lakefront path.
 
She feels better the moment she’s on the bike, as though she’s peeled away from her miserable self and left it standing. Partway down the block, she flushes a pale tomcat from beneath a parked car. It crosses the street in low, swinging strides, pausing to turn its broad face her way.
 
Wheeling onto Carlaw, she glides past ranks of tall brick homes that face the darkened park, young professionals and their babies interspersed among what’s left of the neighbourhood’s older families—mostly working class, mostly Greek. Edal thumbs her bell just to hear it. The land slopes gently, guiding her down to lake level as though she were one of the city’s hidden streams.
 
At Langley, she changes her mind: she won’t go east, but west instead, through the city’s concrete heart. It’s been months, maybe even a year, since she threaded a path through those glittering towers—not an experience she generally seeks, but this morning the idea of deserted glass valleys appeals. From there she can cut down to the lakefront if the mood takes her, or carry on westward, maybe even as far as High Park.
 
Langley ends at Broadview, where Edal bumps across streetcar tracks and jumps the curb to ride overland. The grass is springy beneath her wheels. She rounds the looming statue of Sun Yat-sen and enters the deeper dark of the trees. The long bank of the Don Valley drops away. Giving gravity its head, she splays her legs wide and coasts, gathering speed.
 
She joins the path near the mouth of the Riverdale Footbridge—a quaint name for an arcing pedestrian overpass, all concrete and steel. Pedaling hard through the narrows where the bushes close in, she pumps up over the rise.
 
Halfway across the bridge, Edal brakes and slows. Balanced against the railing, she twists to look down on the slate glimmer of the Don River. Clumps of growth overhang the banks; a fallen tree rakes the current, waving a snagged plastic bag. The river has been straightened here, forced into the lesser form of a canal. The lit-up parkway follows one unnatural bank, the railway and Bayview Avenue the other. The tracks lie quiet, but already cars are speeding into and out of town, some seeking space, others forming small processions, nose to tail. Edal looks north, her gaze swimming against the flow.
 
Not far upstream—perhaps two city blocks—the Don begins to meander as a river should. Left then right, in wide, lazy turns. The roads keep their distance. Darkness opens like a rift between them, home to marshland, grassland, woods. Given half a chance, the land would revert, clawing back through time, tearing holes in the city’s thin coat.
 
A path winds through the shadows, and she spots a solitary runner, visible between the trees. She can’t make out his face, only that he’s tall and thin, with a dark mop of curls. He pelts down the path as if something’s after him, though as far as she can make out, he’s alone. Either way, he’s crazy. Edal’s trained in personal protective tactics, and she would never run alone down there in the dark.
 
She hears a distant rumble and lifts her head. Farther up the valley, a subway train crosses the barred undercarriage of the viaduct. On the deck above, cars dart and flash between the netted cables of the bridge’s span. Netted to dissuade jumpers. Edal looks down into the sluggish, reflective river, and wonders at its depth.
 
 
He’s found another one—she can tell by his low, snuffling wuff. Lily loves the shape he makes, shaggy and substantial, true black against the Canada Trust Tower’s glimmering granite wall. She knows a stab of pride. His coat is impressive, even here, in the eerie, aquarium light of the business district before dawn.
 
“Whatcha got, Billy?” Crouching down, she cups the ruched, wet-velvet edging of his lips. His breath is jungly. As she feels up over the points of his teeth, he relaxes his jaw, delivering the small feathered body into her grasp. She drops a kiss on his wet black nose.
 
“Good boy.” She rises, closing the bird in her palms. It’s alive, the certainty palpable. “Any more?”
 
He sets to work again, nosing along a planter’s edge, disturbing ghostly petunias with his snout. Lily follows him to the corner, where Bay Street stretches north into spotlit gloom. She can make out the slow-swooping arc of a flashlight maybe a block away. A few minutes, no more, before they ought to be moving on.
 
Warming the bird a little longer in her hands, she turns to look west along Front Street, wide and quiet save for the taxi line out front of Union Station, shrunk to a mere three cars. Median gardens stand like skinny tropical islands, palm-leaf shadows, flowers lying low. Maybe they’ll try there next, cross three deserted lanes to pick a path along the concrete rim. Birds that live through the impact often make their way to the nearest patch of green.
 
Across Bay, the Royal Bank Tower shows a sensible black hem of three or four storeys before rising in golden, knife-edged pleats. Its heights betray the first red hints of sunrise. Gulls are beginning to circle up from the lake; a fat one lands close by, stretching, then stowing its wings. It rotates its snowy head Lily’s way, eyeing her carefully clasped hands.
 
“Fuck you,” she murmurs, “fucking creep.”
 
Pressing the stunned little body to her chest, she frees a hand and unsnaps her right cargo pocket. The hunting vest isn’t much to look at—shit brown and big enough to hold two of her—but it’s lightweight and warm, and all those pockets mean she generally has what she needs. The Tim Hortons bag is used but clean. She shakes it open and slips the bird inside.
 
Billy’s growl is soft, the frequency felt as much as heard. Lily turns. At the curb, a woman in bike shorts and a pale sweatshirt stands astride a mountain bike. She’s unusual-looking, built like a gymnast, pretty in a not quite human way. Lily flashes on the little tree frogs that used to cling to the siding beneath her bedroom window. Grey-green backs and pearly bellies. That trilling sound.
 
Billy eases up beside her, his growl rumbling in her kneecap, humming coldly in the steel shank of her boot. She touches a hand to her breast pocket, seeking the folded outline of her knife.
 
“Excuse me,” the woman calls, “can I ask what you’re doing?”
 
There’s something of the teacher in her tone, maybe even the cop. Lily takes a step back.
 
“Don’t be scared.”
 
Lily spins on the spot and runs, Billy right behind her, keeping himself between her and the woman at the curb. The bike glints where she left it, propped in the recess of an emergency exit door. The crossbar means she has to swing her leg out over the back wheel, but it’s better like that, you can bring your boot down pumping and tear away.
 
She burns down Front on the sidewalk, headed for the first glaring slip of day. For seconds she’s on her own, then Billy pulls alongside her, a shaggy black bison on silent hooves. Lily grips the handlebars. The pair of them stampede toward sun-up, leaving the frog woman to choke on their dust.
 
 
Nothing in the kitchen traps this morning. They’re getting wise to him, learning the heady scent of peanut butter can herald death. Maybe he’ll have better luck in the yard.
 
For now, Guy sips his coffee, using the barbecue tongs to prod the frozen grey lump simmering on the stove. An inch of water in Aunt Jan’s cast iron skillet—she’d kill him if she knew. If she wasn’t long dead herself.
 
The mass in the fry pan is beginning to break up. Like the crust ice beside a riverbank, it develops seams along which to divide. Softening, it reveals heads and slender tails. Bodies separate, becoming distinct. Limbs loosen and seem to swim.
 
Good enough. Guy plucks the mice from the water one by one, arranging them like furry sausages on the tin pie plate in his hand.
 
Letting the screen door slam behind him, he stands for a moment on the concrete step, looking out across the yard. Howell Auto Wreckers, also known as home. The place always looks its best in the morning—the sun cresting the metres-high piles of wrecks along the eastern fence, winking through missing windows and gilding crumpled hoods.
 
Behind him, the house stretches long, living quarters down this way, cinder-block office at the other end. All that stands between it and the sullen, mud-coloured Don are the sloping ruins of Aunt Jan’s garden, the high back fence draped in creepers, the on-ramp to the parkway’s roar.
 
A whiff of warm, wet mouse calls him back. He walks south along the wall and rounds the corner. A narrow chain-link enclosure runs between the house and the southern fence. Setting the plate down on the ground, Guy feels for the key on the chain around his neck, opens the padlock and steps inside.
 
Down the far end, the dead oak looms. It was a big job, sinking the trunk two feet deep and bolstering it with a pair of engine blocks; he couldn’t have done it without Stephen’s help. It’s handy having a live-in employee, especially one so keen to learn. It was the first time Stephen had laid hands on a chainsaw, and as usual Guy only had to show him once. Stephen took his time, measuring the oak’s limbs before stunting them. When they stood the tree up on end in its hole, it grazed but didn’t breach the cage’s roof.
 
At the near end, they rigged up several of the cut-away boughs. Guy has to stoop to avoid them as he drags the mesh door closed, and for a moment he feels a sense of winter forest, barren canopy overhead. Between the branches and the tree they came from lies a run some twelve metres long. A stump stands at the midpoint. Guy sets the pie plate down on the round, ringed surface and steps back.
 
Invisible until this moment, the enclosure’s inhabitant appears. Forsaking its private branch at the back of the oak, it stretches one yellow, reptilian leg along a leafless side limb, then the other. Talons gripping bark, the hawk balances. Its gaze sweeps the cage, touching briefly on Guy before returning to the plate of mice.
 
Guy catches his breath when the bird takes to the air. It’s over in seconds—only a half-dozen pumps before it reaches out with its feet and lands, retracting its long, mottled wings.
 
The hawk settles on the edge of the stump then begins to sidle round, showing Guy its layered back, the rusty, spreading wedge of its tail. Shrouding the tin plate with its wings, it huddles and bobs. In no time it’s bolted the mice into its crop. Taking flight again, it falters ever so slightly, flapping clumsily to regain the branch.
 
As the bird hunches to bring up the mice, Guy pulls a sandwich from the breast pocket of his heavy Mack shirt. Nothing fancy, ham and bread. Uncle Ernie liked his sandwiches simple—a taste he managed to pass along.
 
The hawk dips its bright crown and tears into a mouse. The sun is warm; it rests like an open hand at the back of Guy’s neck. He stands and watches. After a moment he remembers the sandwich and eats.
 
 
As a rule, Lily coasts the last half block to the dead-end foot of Mt. Stephen Street, but this morning she rides hard to the last, jams her boot down on the pedal brake and skids to a halt. Billy gallops past and turns a sloppy U to come panting to her side. She takes pains to prop the bike against the fence, hooking a handlebar through the chain-link so the front wheel won’t fold, taking the old paper-boy basket along for the fall. Its cardboard banana box holds precious cargo, a collection of rustling paper bags.
 
At the gate, she lays a hand on the painted plywood sign. howell auto wreckers since 1966. The key hangs on a bootlace around her neck. She fishes it out and jams it into the padlock with nervous hands. It’s stupid. She must’ve looked over her shoulder a hundred times during the ride—there’s no chance the woman followed them all this way.
 
She’s careful not to bump the bike on her way through the gate. Billy follows, nuzzling the small of her back.
 
“Hold your horses.” She shoves the gate closed and fumbles again with the lock. He drops into a sit, releasing a soft, impatient whine.
 
“Okay, go on.”
 
Billy whirls, his blunt head trading places with his behind. He lopes across the yard, past the two trucks sitting idle, the bunker-style office with its shabby add-on house. She watches him disappear around its far corner, hears his bright, delighted bark. Amazing how he knows exactly where to go, his brainmap of the yard sparkling with streams of scent. Lily wishes she could sniff people out. Smell them coming before they get close enough to do any harm.
 
She runs a hand through the choppy, hot pink inches of her hair, turns back a moment to peer through the gate up the lightening street. Nobody. She guides the bike forward, following Billy’s trail.
 
Guy steps out of the flight cage as she rounds the corner of the house, and Billy greets him with puppy sounds, his dark mass rippling with joy. Lily watches her dog best the jumping-up instinct she trained out of him. It felt a little cruel, saying no over and over like that, but she hadn’t any choice once he reached full size and started knocking her to the ground. It was easy teaching his Newfoundland retriever majority—bred to work and generally eager to please—but there was the other portion too, the muscular mystery breed responsible for his height, his shortened muzzle and steely jaw.
 
Guy doesn’t let him suffer long. He drops into a crouch, grasping Billy by his furry jowls. “Hey, Billy. Hey, Billy-boy.” Billy licks him on the cheek. Lily taught him that too. No kissing on the lips.
 
Down the far end of the cage, the hawk mutters, fussing along its branch. It humps its wings, directs its gaze at Billy and releases a prolonged, peevish shriek. Billy parts his jaws, but Lily nudges his back end with the wheel. “Quiet, you.”
 
“Hi, Lily.” Guy stands, glancing down into the box. “Not so many this morning.”
 
“Nope.”
 
“Any live ones?”
 
“A few.”
 
“Good stuff. Bring ’em in and we’ll take a look.” He leads the way, waiting while she leans the bike against the house and lifts the box free. “You want a hand?”
 
“I’m okay.”
 
He holds the screen door open for her and Billy, leaves a gap before stepping in after them and letting the door slap shut on its spring. She likes the weird little house. It’s more like an oversized trailer than anything, the kitchen flanked by Guy’s bedroom and the can on one side and Stephen’s room on the other. No denying the hum of the parkway, but she’s used to that after the last couple of months; she’d have trouble getting to sleep without it.
 
Standing in the bright patch where the door lets in the morning, she watches Guy open the Living section of the Star and spread it out. She’s fond of the table too. It’s the old fifties kind, with shiny metal legs and a scrubbed pink surface that used to be red. He always leaves the centre leaf in, even though the edges don’t quite meet up.
 
“Let’s see what you’ve got.”
 
He stands at the other end of the table with his arms folded, and for a moment Lily feels like she’s in school—that same sick dread. Only Billy’s here with her, not chained up waiting at home. Not nosing for crumbs around the kitchen counter like any other dog, either, but right beside her, leaned up against her leg. She sets the box down and fishes out the Tim Hortons bag. See to the living first.
 
The little bird lies motionless in her palm, but she can feel the quickened beat of its breathing, the faint sensation of warmth.
 
“Another ovenbird,” Guy says.
 
“Yeah.” At the shadowy foot of the tower, she could be certain of little beyond general colouring and size. Here in Guy’s kitchen, she can make out the speckled belly and pinkish legs, the Mohawk stripe at its crown, the white rings around its tightly closed eyes.
 
“He’s a beauty,” Guy says quietly. “Needs a little longer, I guess.”
 
“Yeah.”
 
She slides the ovenbird back into papery darkness. Laying it carefully on the newspaper, she reaches into the box again.
 
 
Edal can feel something crawling on her—one of the leggy millions that feed and multiply and die in the foxtail grass. Whatever it is, it’s making a pilgrimage up her calf. An ant, maybe, or a spider. A tick. She reaches down without looking to brush it away.
 
She’s only partly hidden by the plywood sign, one half of her face pressed to the cool chain-link. It was no mean trick, hanging back while keeping the girl in sight. Upon arriving, she heard a distorted screeching that seemed to originate from the far corner of the yard—some kind of pulley or rusted hinge. She listened for it to come again as she laid her bike down in the weeds. Nothing. Then the girl rounded the corner in the company of a red-haired man—him leading, holding open the screen door, her following with bent head, canine shadow and banana box.
 
Edal doesn’t ask herself why she followed the girl and her massive dog back to Howell Auto Wreckers—or why she lingers after they’ve gone inside. Instead, she wonders about the girl. There are people who comb the business district during migration season, many of them members of FLAP, an organization formed to draw attention to the deadly lure of the tower lights—but the girl doesn’t look the type to be a member of anything.
 
And what about the man? Presumably a Howell or an employee of one, but who is he to the girl? A boyfriend? Unlikely. Edal saw no hint of the loaded current that runs between lovers’ bodies. In any case, he’s Edal’s age, or near enough—late twenties at least—and the girl can’t be more than sixteen. Older brother? If so, there’s no resemblance. The girl is rail-thin, fine-featured, her skin watery, a shade of whey. Her hacked-off hair could be any colour under the dye, but Edal doubts it was ever a match for his.
 
She’s never seen that shade of red on a human, dark as an old penny with new-penny flashes when he moved. Only slightly shorter than her own hair, it feathers back from his broad-boned face—a style common where Edal comes from. He wears a green and black Mack shirt, a relic of sorts in the city. She had a red one when she was growing up. Sometimes she slept in it—soft as a chamois, smelling of herself.
 
Definitely not a brother. A friend, then. Edal can only guess at what they’re up to, now that they’ve gone inside. Still, there’s plenty to observe.
 
The wrecking yard sits on a deep lot that butts up against the Dundas Street on-ramp. Three-metre-high fencing lined with banks of crushed cars. Just inside the gate, a flat black pickup stands beside a baby blue tow truck long past its prime. In fact, none of the equipment looks anywhere near new: a front-end loader scabbed with rust, a limbed thing like a digger with a grapple in place of a scoop. A third corroded machine sits amid a field of broken glass. Composed of an open-jawed block mounted on a long metal bed, it resembles a child’s cereal-box construction more than an assembly capable of crushing cars. Because that’s what it must be; something flattened all those stacked-up wrecks.
 
Besides a small tool shed, there’s only one building: a cinder-block bunker trailing a long clapboard extension. The yard’s a mess, hard soil deadened by chemical runoff, mud healed into ruts, puddles showing rainbows of gas. Here and there a shock of grass perseveres. It’s the kind of place that makes Edal uneasy, a place where things collect. To be fair, though, the longer she looks, the more a rough species of order becomes clear. Steel-mesh baskets brim with seemingly sorted parts. Tires in a tidy mountain. Engine blocks like a cache of pirate chests.
 
“Looking for something?”
 
Edal jumps, jamming the bridge of her nose against the mesh. The pain is brilliant, fierce. She holds a hand to it and turns.
 
The voice was a man’s, but the tall, muscular creature before her is still part boy. Twenty, maybe twenty-one. Jet-black hair hanging down over dark, lashy eyes, cheekbones that look almost rouged. He’s holding something in his hand. A brick? No, an innocent carton of half-and-half.
 
“Are you okay?” he asks.
 
She feels it then, the warm, wet trickle snaking down her upper lip. Bunching her sweatshirt sleeve up at the wrist, she holds it to her nostrils while she pinches the tender bridge.
 
Why won’t he do the decent thing and look away? As long as he keeps staring like that, she can’t help but see herself through his eyes. If she were in uniform, it would be called surveillance, but she’s not; she’s somebody with nothing better to do.
 
“I’m fine.” The thickness in her throat alarms her. She can’t possibly be about to cry.