Read Online The Journey Prize Stories 24 by Various - Free Book Online Page A

answer. He sat between a spilled glass of wine and a discarded pair of women’s nylons from a weekend party and stared into my vacant living room. There are a few other things you should know about my living room. It is large. It is has high ceilings. Only one couch and one chair. No television. Hardwood floors and no carpet. Along with the fossils there are also remnants of gatherings that happened too near in the past to be fossils. Stains. Smudges. Stilettos. A calendar girl with a blue bikini, a singles magazine soaked with merlot, and a leather-bound address book with many names. He stared out across this smear of a house and the stubble on his chin grew dull.
    “Why do you do all this?” he said.
    “I like to imagine how those creatures used to be. I know, your religion, you don’t believe in evolution.”
    “I’m not talking about the fossils,” he said.
    And then he put his head in his hands and he howled. He howled so loud his voice went down into my basement and rattled the jars of preserved plums and the tiny skeleton of a bird encased in formaldehyde trembled, too.
    “Don’t make me go out there by myself,” he said. “I know you don’t have children so you can’t understand, but please help me find the only thing I’ve ever loved.”
    “All right,” I said and made my way to the workbench where all the tools of the trade were kept. “I’ll help you find her.”
    Was this a bad thing? Was this a pernicious thing? Did I say yes because I just wanted to shut him up? Maybe I deferredbecause his wife was promiscuous. She went to parties, that much I knew. She didn’t connect well at soirees but it was obvious what she wanted. It was obvious what she wasn’t getting at home although I never went there. She would stand there in the corner of a kitchen with a wool skirt hiked up to her knees and a single malt clenched against her ribs. I think her nose was pierced.
    We went down to the Red Deer River in the dark. Let me tell you something about the Red Deer River at night. The water is slow and sullen and hides things in the filigreed shadows of cottonwood. It hides alabaster larvae and cardamom condoms; stories of pioneers starving on the banks, of soldiers who went away to distant European wars and never came back. Today, there are stories of automated farming accidents and postmodern suicides because it’s such a melancholy place, the pastel grey Badlands sunk below the prairie with spent oil rigs and abandoned wheat kings. But sometimes people just kill themselves because economic times are bad or they have nowhere else to go. They could have done it in Calgary or Vancouver, but this is a better place for it.
    I had the flashlights attached to the brim of our helmets. The kind spelunkers used. You could fall in the river with them and the bulbs would still work. Still find the clutches of ancient Pteranodons and the tangle of teeth in the late night sediment. I ran my hand across a layer of prehistoric rock that vanished into the water. Lacerated by the glaciers, the ridges coughed up Cretaceous spines and amber wings.
    “Forget about those,” he said. “Give me one of those lights and turn them on.”
    “Why are we looking here?”
    “This is the way she always comes.”
    Laid waste in the mud was the axle of a combine, a weasel skull, and what could have been a free-base pipe.
    “Isn’t it dangerous this way?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
    “Then why do you let her do it?”
    “Children are like that,” he said. “You tell them not to do something, but they go ahead and do it anyway.”
    His face was dirty. He looked like a miner with my headlamp on. His breath came out in a white cloud then hung around in a bundle.
    “Maybe we should retrace her steps,” I said. “What school did she come from?”
    “School?”
    “Yes, what grade school?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “How can you not be sure?”
    “You bring your dates here, don’t you?” was all he said.
    There