Detachment by Lee Kvern
Detachment
Fiction by Lee Kvern
Illustration by Carl Wiens
The dog attached itself to us. He bounded across the frozen schoolyard the same day the Grade 7 boys found the nest of baby field mice. The older boys dangling barely formed, pink-bodied mice from their pinched fingers, chasing Aurum, my Grade 1 asthmatic brother, Grade 4 me, plus the screaming preschoolers and kindergarteners, dropping live mice down the backs of our winter parkas when they caught up with us. The dog, a multi-cultured, mottled-looking stray that no one recognized from any yard in our Ukrainian/Native/Hutterite town, ran haphazardly among the Grade 7 boys, the mice, us terrified girls, the too-young boys; the teachers barking cease-and-desist orders from the edge of the playground.
Grade 4 English: I raised the pine lid of my desk; inside, on top of my Language Arts book, lay the cold, pink ball of a dead field mouse. I put my head down and cried soundlessly into my desk. When I got control and shut the wooden lid, which seemed like a large coffin for a small mouse, Mrs. Michelchuk looked at me strangely, as if to say: What’s the big deal? It’s a goddamn field mouse.
Aurum and I walked home after school, his raspy-breathed terror, my anguish barely contained, calmed only by the line of poker-faced teachers on the playground. The children stepping carefully around the debris of dead field mice, some live, most not, a Mickey Mouse murder scene. The adrift dog walked with us, only sniffing at the mice, not consuming them like monosodium glutamate chicken wings or swallowing them whole as in live goldfish or flinging them about for the wretched fun of it, just canine curiosity. Aurum dubbed him Larry and rested his hand on the dog’s natty fur all the way home.
My mother spotted Larry before we even reached the RCMP Detachment where we lived in the domestic half, and shared our beloved corporal father with the barracks separated by a flimsy adjoining door like in hotel rooms; the barracks where the holding cells were for minor criminals, the office, the six-metal bunks for the unmarried constables that worked under my father.
“Don’t you bring that wretched dog in the house, Christina-Maribel-Madsen,” my mother hollered through the kitchen window.
Aurum ran across our tundra-lawn to my mother now standing at the back door, her cast-iron gaze fixed on me as she muffled Aurum’s blonde head protectively into her groin. He choked on the October air, bawled about the horrible day, the awful grade sevens, the pink mice, his new dog Larry. I waited, glassy-eyed, only my trembling chin betrayed me; my vole-brown hair that my mother scarcely patted.
“You’re a big girl now,” she said, and then so Aurum couldn’t hear, “Put the goddamn thing in the garage.”
She gathered Aurum and took him inside the attached house. I sat on the concrete step, pulled out the silver pillbox with the hollow cutout cross in it that my mother had given me. Slid back the cold metal lid. Inside: the detached pink ball of a dead field mouse.
Supper: My father, mother, Aurum, myself, Constable Pete (our favourite), although he had Tourettes Syndrome, not the swearing kind but a facial affliction where he arched his eyebrows, opened his mouth wide, then rotated his jaw like he was doing arm circles; Constable D, married, lived down the street; Constable C wasn’t present. Constable B and E were out working, something about a safe-cracking ring, money that had been marked with powdered dye that stained your hands green.
“So the mice,” my father said to Aurum after fried chicken, garlic-smashed potatoes, my mother’s homemade chocolate cake with fudge icing that she also served to criminals.
Aurum nodded solemnly, his jaw wobbly, ready.
“The dog?” My father’s eyebrows arched.
We stayed ourselves, two sets of eyes on my father, three if you counted my mother’s, four including Constable Pete’s. No daddy, darling, sir, could we please? No promise to feed everyday, cover the cost of food, excrement removal, daily walks, nothing untrue from our mouths but our steadfast eyes on our attached father. My father looked at each one of us separately, moving his saddle-brown gaze over our faces, he lingered at my mother, the light in his eyes.
“You know the drill,” he said to her.
Aurum got up, squeezed my father violently around the neck, and ran out of the room to the unheated garage. My mother sighed, rested her hand on my father’s arm. I got up from the table.
“I’ll go with them,” Constable Pete said, winking at me, his brows vaulting high, his mouth wide, his arm-circling jaw.
Larry: a dog like any other, ran without boundaries through our minor town, jumped the fence in our backyard, leapt through barbed wire, chased the Ukrainian Whitehead cows, the Anglo-Norman horses, the MSG-free chickens, one of which he de-winged, the pork piglets he only mauled. He walked us to school every day, chased the awful grade seveners and every other child in the K-12 schoolyard. Larry mouthing his way across the unfettered ground—a quick scent, his pink tongue, yellow teeth catching not only Aurum’s and my hands but also the hands of the school children, so that collectively, instinctively, we tucked our child hands into our pockets when we saw Larry ripping towards us, his canine teeth a sharp tear in our thin skins.
Grade 4 Math: Mr. Predy at the chalkboard, simple addition/subtraction, the complicated trick of fractions 1/2 + 1/2 = (Aurum + me) = one (only). The new four-coloured pen I worked out the answer with: red, green, blue, black, me doodling green monsters (Aurum, always Aurum) in my math book. The knock on the door, the hush, Constable Pete and B in their navy RCMP trousers with the yellow stripe down the sides standing at the front of the class saying, “We need to have a look at your hands.”
All the grade fours holding their hands out, Constable Pete and B walking slowly, pausing to turn some hands over, Mr. Predy following along behind. Constable Pete does an involuntary jaw circle at which the children raise their brows; I hold them in my Brillo-pad gaze. He examines my hands all the while suppressing a grin, our infantile game of Round about, round about, catch the little mousey. Up the stairs, up the stairs, in the little housey—only he doesn’t tickle my underarm like he does at home.
Then he leans down for a closer look, the smeary green ink of my four-coloured pen, the graphic doodles I’ve covered up on my workbook so Mr. Predy won’t see. The detached look on Constable Pete’s face that I don’t recognize from our supper table. My frightened face before I uncover my workbook, reveal my green monster.
Supper: my mother, my father, Aurum, minor daughter criminal.
No Constable Pete or B. An investigation gone sideways. What were they doing anyways? The Senior Highs, yes, but checking grade fours for powdered dye that stained your hands green? Marked lunch money given to us by our safe-cracking fathers? Whose idea was that? Certainly not my father’s.
“Green,” my father said to me, cupped his warm hand over mine.
My pink, swollen eyes.
Larry: well after the mice, the ink, the awful grade sevens, reinstated suppers with the Constables; Larry birthed nine puppies in the unheated garage. Aurum and I spent the glacial mornings before school in our plaid-flannel pajamas and fur-hooded parkas on the cold concrete, puppies crawling, nipping, jostling, fighting each other for our warm laps. Larry, mottled, matted, exhausted-looking like my mother, no doubt from the whole parental adventure, licked her pup’s excrement off the bitter cement. Aurum wheezing, crying every time my mother wretched a puppy out of his arms, detached him from his feverish headlock on Larry to go get ready for school. My mother sheltering his flimsy body in hers while I stood like a winter ghost behind them.
Barracks: They brought in the killer wanted on a Canada-wide warrant. My Corporal father and Constable Pete, ash-faced, dog-tired, covered from head-to-boot in quagmire.
“A G.D. chase through a prairie slough,” he told my mother.
Constable D on holidays, Constables C and B attending court. Constable E on lend to the next detachment. The Ukrainian guard they hired to watch the prisoner who’d murdered his entire family; the radio call that beckoned my father (all the town’s father) and Constable Pete, dead-on- their-feet, out again.
“Lock the adjoining door,” my father said. “Don’t open it and for God’s sake don’t let the kids run roughshod through the office.”
My mother’s domed brow, Constable Pete’s jaw gone crazy in the background.
“Bed,” my mother said, shooed me off to our adjoined bunks.
She carried Aurum down the hall, tucked him into the bottom bunk; I felt her velvet lips, never long enough on my thin cheek, then she clicked the lights off, shut the bedroom door.
Later that night the muffled bang bang banging from the barracks, the Ukrainian guard’s fractured Anglo through the wood door.
“I go home now missus, I go home.”
The click of the office door as the guard left, the homicidal ruckus from the holding cells. In my mother’s mind, the prisoner out of the inner cell, using the metal bunk off the wall as a projectile on the outer door. His soulless detachment, my mother’s full attachment: Aurum huddled on our rose-bloom chesterfield, him clutching her poppy-red pillows, me standing on guard for him. She opens the door, prepares me with her steel-wool gaze, locks the flimsy door behind her. Aurum’s mouth the size of Constable Pete’s, mine pressed, bloodless.
My mother on the office radio, the metal blunt banging from the holding cell.
“Hurry, hurry, he’s breaking out,” my mother stage-whispered into the receiver.
The banging stops momentarily. My mother’s caught breath, the menacing silence, the listening murderer.
“The guard?” my father’s faraway voice. “Gone,” my mother said.
“Jesus H. Christ,” my father breathed through the radio.
“Get back,” my mother said.
“Do what you have to do,” said my father. The dead ominous air of radio static.
The banging starts up again, louder, more urgent this time. The scuff of my mother’s apricot slippers down the narrow dark hall to the holding cell.
“That’s enough now,” my mother said to the prisoner through the door.
The banging stops, the prisoner listening to my mother’s calm, female voice. His mouth pressed inches away on the steel door, his terrible rough breathing in my mother’s ear, her talking, speaking to the killer of families.
Interminable it seems, before my father, Constable Pete, and seven other constables from the next detachment rush the office.
“Sexy,” the prisoner said to my Corporal father the next morning, in reference to my mother’s voice; my father’s frightened face.
Larry: the pups old enough to be on their own now. Aurum’s asthma attacks the nine times someone drove up and left with Larry’s live, warm legacy tucked under their arms, drove away. Finally, only Larry was left, lying in the corner of the garage having licked the cement floor over relentlessly if only for the attachment.
Barracks: Me in my father’s office, the pile of photographs on his desk. Aurum pretending emergency on the extra radio. Hurry, hurry he shouted into the disabled receiver. Constables Pete, B and E—their seemingly effortless back and forth through the Detachment, our attached house. My mother brought lemon cake hot from the oven, brewed a fresh pot of coffee. The group of them sat in the outer office, talking, cracking jokes, my mother’s lilt, the dark laughter of my father and his men.
Me looking at so many coloured photographs of the decapitated woman, hanging out the open door of the ruined car; the black pool of her. The man who looked like he’d been tossed from some wicked heaven lying facedown on an abandoned street. Photographs of pick-up trucks, like crushed aluminum pop cans, blurry figures imbedded inside, metal tombs, hollow cutout crosses, my pink, cold mouse, my monster-green heart—the big girl I am now; the thick skin I will need to acquire.
Larry: walked us to school again, inadvertently, not on purpose, her jumping the fence after Aurum and I were careful to shut the gate so she wouldn’t escape but she did anyway, ran headlong after us. Her pink tongue flapping wildly, spiky teeth ripping ahead of us the minute she spotted the school-yard children. The swirl and squeal, our hands tucked smartly into our pockets, running, laughing, shrieking. Larry whirling about like a comic devil, whipped up by the frenzied twirl mass of children. Then the one piercing scream that cemented it all—Larry’s fevered leap, the Grade 3 girl’s bloodied face, the yellow-toothed tear on her thin-skinned cheek.
Breathless: Aurum and I, the poker-faced teachers, Constable Pete in the Principal’s office.
Detachment: my brother and I at the kitchen table with our mother. Why did you let her out? Well, then, why didn’t you bring her home? My mother’s angry face directed at me: daughter, older, healthy—not Aurum: younger, sickly, always off-the-hook, who sobbed uncontrollably. My mother pressed a warm dishrag over his pallid face to try and stop the flow, ease his breathing. I sat dry, stone-eyed, untouched by my mother.
We all heard the single shot outside. My mother rushed to the kitchen window.
“Jesus almighty,” she hissed through clenched teeth.
Aurum and I tried to reach the window but our mother shoved us back.
“Go to your room!” she said.
We went down the hall, Aurum gasping air, me press-lipped, silent.
“Get the goddamn thing out of here before the kids see it,” my mother said through the kitchen window, yet another dog-gone thing gone sideways.
Aurum and I on the top bunk, our faces pressed to the bedroom window. The backyard scene: my beloved father, his RCMP-issue revolver, Constable Pete and C in attendance, standing around like intermission at a soccer game. Finally Constable Pete dragged the dog around by her hindquarters to the front yard where the truck was; Larry’s black pool, blood trail. My father stared up at my mother, his brown eyes burning with something other than detachment.
“We did what we had to do,” he said.
The next day Aurum got up early before the winter sun, pulled his fur-hooded parka over his flannel-plaid pajamas, went outside and followed the dark trail of Larry in the morning black while I watched from the top bunk. From the front to the backyard, over and over again, went Aurum. And when he lay down on our tundra-lawn, his fractured, asthmatic breath delayed in the arctic air, his paling face; I didn’t move. Instead my mother rushed out in her nightgown, her apricot slippers. I watched, my cheek pressed to the thin, bitter pane that separated us—my detached attachment, my thickened skin, my mother’s steel wool gaze staring up at me. »