Guide to Animal Behaviour Read online

  A GUIDE TO ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR

  Books by Douglas Glover

  FICTION

  Savage Love

  Bad News of the Heart

  Elle

  16 Categories of Desire

  The Life and Times of Captain N.

  A Guide to Animal Behaviour

  The South Will Rise at Noon

  Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon

  Precious

  The Mad River

  NON-FICTION

  Attack of the Copula Spiders

  The Enamoured Knight

  Notes Home from a Prodigal Son

  Copyright © 1991, 2013 by Douglas Glover.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  The author would like to thank the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their support while this book was being written.

  A Guide to Animal Behaviour is a work of fiction. All the characters herein are imaginary and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

  Cover painting: “Alterpiece # 1” (detail) by Lindee Climo, 1989, oil on canvas, 117 x 168 cm, courtesy Nancy Poole’s Studio.

  Book design by Julie Scriver.

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Cataloguing data available from the National Library of Canada.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-136-9 (pbk) — ISBN 978-0-86492-787-3 (epub).

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For Helen

  CONTENTS

  Story Carved in Stone

  Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills,

  (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814

  Why I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes

  The Canadian Travel Notes of Abbé Hugues Pommier,

  Painter, 1663-1680

  The Obituary Writer

  Turned into a Horse by Witches, Port Rowan,

  U.C., 1798

  A Man in a Box

  A Guide to Animal Behaviour

  I, A Young Man Called Early to the Wars

  The Travesty of Sleep

  Woman Gored by Bison Lives

  STORY CARVED IN STONE

  I thought my wife had left me, but she is back. What she has been doing the last two years, I have no idea. She’s thinner. She has a Princess Di haircut, and she’s wearing tight, three-quarter-length, white sweatpants and a black blouse. She’s sitting across from me at the kitchen table, looking self-possessed and aloof. Her name is Glenna. She won’t speak to me.

  I make her a cup of instant coffee which she ignores. I do not press her with idle questions because, to tell the truth, she terrifies me. Brent Wardlow down the street had his wife leave five years ago. When she came back six months later, driving a new Eldorado with fluffy dice dangling from the rearview mirror, Brent asked her one question, and she was gone again the next day. Sitting down at the Dunkin’ Donut on a weekday morning, he allows that he has learned his lesson and will keep his mouth shut the next time she returns.

  I am not saying that my situation is exactly the same as Brent’s — everyone in Ragged Point knows he drove his wife out with excessive golf playing and sexual demands — but a word to the wise, etc. Also, I have checked the driveway, and it is evident that Glenna did not drive home in an Eldorado. Everything she has is packed in a brown United Airlines shoulder-bag, with the zipper popped, and a small, black pocketbook decorated with spangles.

  We sit for a couple of hours like this, not talking, Glenna just staring at the kitchen window where the lace half-curtains she made are turning somewhat dingy for lack of a woman’s care. As she watches, the window fills with purple sunset, then blackens like a bruise. The only sound comes from the bug-zapper in the breezeway, killing insects. At 9 p.m., Glenna heaves a sigh, whether of relief at being home again or of sadness, I cannot tell. Then she gathers her shoulder-bag and pocketbook into her arms and walks down the hall to the guest bedroom.

  I hear the guest bedroom door lock. I hear water running in the bathroom. Presently, I am disturbed by the sound of sobs, the sound of Glenna weeping with wild abandon. I am torn as to whether or not I should run to comfort her. But I recall Brent Wardlow’s experience and decide to leave well enough alone.

  Instead of knocking on the guest bedroom door, I head outside in to the darkness. Turning past the bug-zapper and the lurid pink neon GULF HAVEN, VACANCY sign, past the nine identical one-room holiday housekeeping cottages, painted coral, with red trim and matching concrete parking pads, past the peach tree just coming into blossom, the oyster cookery and the little dock where I keep my John boat, I stop at the tenth cottage, which is not identical-forest-green with weathered trim, cracked panes in the windows and a porch roof buttressed with two-by-fours.

  “Mama,” I say, bursting in, “Glenna’s back!”

  To tell the truth, I am pretty excited. Nothing this big has happened since Glenna left, and before that, not since my father died in a boating accident (he was leaning out of the boat to retrieve his oyster fork, fell overboard and suffered a heart attack — his last words to me were, “Shit, E.A., the fork’s stuck!”).

  Mama’s cottage is dark as a cave. She sits at a deal table, the glow of her cigarette lighting up her face, a frozen orange juice can full of butts on one hand, a glass and a pile of wrung-out lime slices on the other. She takes an extra long drag on her cigarette, then breaks into a coughing spasm.

  “The whore,” she says, finally, and I rush out again.

  For an hour I stand watching the bug-zapper, its eerie blue glow and the flashes and sparks it gives off as it does its work. A young couple in Cabin Six is making noisy and acrobatic love; the Firbanks, old regulars who have been coming here since my father built the place just after the war, are listening through their open window. My wife’s sobbing has subsided, though I am convinced she is not asleep, only staring at the ceiling, listening to the bugs dying and the distant love sounds.

  In the morning, I rise early and drive to Biloxi for supplies: croissants, real coffee, fresh butter, Glenna’s favourite marmalade, a New Orleans TIMES-PICAYUNE and white napkins. While I am making breakfast, I hear her stirring at the other end of the house. I hear the shower running, then I hear her soft voice singing. I can’t make out the words, but I know it’s a hymn.

  I am sugaring my coffee, listening to Glenna, when Mrs. Firbank knocks at the back door. She has come to complain about the young couple in Cabin Six.

  If there is anything the Firbanks cannot stand, it is young people having fun on their vacation (to think that when I was a boy I used to call them Uncle Ted and Aunt Netty). During the Firbanks’ annual two-week stay, Cabin Eight becomes a veritable black hole of joy, and I am under constant pressure to turn Gulf Haven into a police state.

  Needless to say, they are great friends of Mama’s, and there is much toing an
d froing between their respective lairs, where they drink and reflect together on the bitter emptiness of life. Though my father willed Gulf Haven to me, all three of them regard me as a form of renter, a temporary interloper with no idea how to run a successful business.

  Mrs. Firbank believes something “funny” was going on in Cabin Six last night. She has noted a “peculiar odour” and heard “nigger music” played on the radio. Above all, she wishes me to demand to see the young couple’s marriage licence.

  “Maybe I’d better get Sheriff Buck to run their plate number through the computer,” I suggest, having learned never to argue a moral point with a guest.

  When I finally shut the door on Mrs. Firbank’s righteous back, I turn to find Glenna sitting at the table, a knowing smile on her lips. She’s wearing the white sweatpants and black blouse, but her pink feet are bare, and her hair is swathed in a towel turban.

  For Glenna, the most difficult thing about life at Gulf Haven was dealing with the public, especially with guests like the Firbanks. She much preferred helping Effie, our black chambermaid, with the cleaning, and made a show of mocking my secretive politeness. Mealy-mouthed is what she called it. Though, when she said the words, she would laugh and roll her eyes as if to say, “I know what you’re up to, you.”

  To see her smiling now in our kitchen feels like a gift from God, and I turn quickly to hide the mist that comes to my eyes. It is like old times, except that I dare not say a word (remembering what happened to Brent) and Glenna will not speak to me. I am almost paralysed with fear and hope. I know she is capable of leaving again the minute my back is turned, the first mistake I make.

  Out the window, I see Mama conversing with the Firbanks next to their vintage Dodge Satellite. They keep looking in our direction, and I know Mama is telling them the good news about Glenna. Mama has a glass and a cigarette in one hand and a claw-hammer in the other. The claw-hammer is a constant, silent rebuke to me. She is always “repairing” something on the property and holding up the sorry state of her own cottage as evidence that she doesn’t have a moment to spare to look after herself.

  The truth is that Effie’s husband, Bubba, and I keep the place up with very little effort. We are always trying to fix Mama’s cottage, but she throws a fit every time we go near it. She says Bubba “watches” her. It took us three years to remove a limb that fell on her roof during Hurricane Camille.

  When I turn back to Glenna with the tray of croissants and marmalade, her face has gone cold again. She sips her coffee but refuses to eat the meal I have made for her. I bite my tongue to keep from saying, “A person can’t live on coffee alone.” If anything, she is more ravishing now than when she left, her body a geometry of angles and curves like one of those magazine models.

  Then my watch alarm sounds, telling me it is time to go outside and supervise the help. In fact there is little supervision to be done. Only I must be on hand to prevent Effie from barging in on the young couple in Cabin Six. Effie is a large, lusty woman who delights in breaking in on guests, especially when they are in the throes of passion, sometimes scaring them half to death with her booming laughter. She is a great displayer of used condoms and is always on the lookout for signs of perverse practices.

  As I stand to leave, I allow myself a quick glance at my wife, who is staring at the wall. Her expression is a sermon of loss, and it is with great difficulty that I restrain myself from throwing my arms around her. But I am prevented by the thought that I do not know where she’s been or what she wants or what she has lost. With Glenna now, anything is possible.

  At 11 a.m., I am sitting on a stool at the Dunkin’ Donut, Bubba on my right, Brent Wardlow on my left. The place is crowded with fishermen, shopkeepers, resort owners, hardware salesmen and local clergy, all shouting, laughing and gesticulating. Everyone knows that Glenna is back, and I am the centre of attention. The booths and counter stools are alive with noisy speculation on motives, itineraries and outcomes. Each new topic is quickly exhausted for lack of hard facts. Questions break out and spread across the room like grass fires, and I am continually saying, “I just don’t know.”

  Everyone understands why I hesitate to ask Glenna direct questions. Besides Brent, many men in Ragged Point have lost wives, permanently or temporarily. Intuitively, we all recognize that this is an age of adventure for women. We are learning to respect their privacy, just as they are learning the special pain of being free and responsible people. It is not easy; it is like watching some great and beautiful creature being born.

  The facts are these: two years ago, Glenna slipped out of the house at dawn and walked over to Moody’s Fish Restaurant to catch the morning Greyhound for Biloxi. She wore a cotton print dress with a white belt and carried, according to Darrell Moody who sold her the ticket, an alligator-skin purse I had given her for Christmas and a Land’s End canvas briefcase we shared for business purposes. She had seemed, Darrell recalls now, especially cheerful, and, with her coral lipstick and faint trail of eyeliner, “so pretty she hurt your eyes.”

  She headed inland from Biloxi. Sheriff Buck and I interrogated a ticket agent who swore she had paid for as far as Nashville. Lois Motherwell, Andy Motherwell’s mother and a Grand Ole Opry fan, claimed to have spotted her at a Merle Haggard concert that night, though Sheriff Buck discounted her story on the grounds that she did not think of it till three months later.

  In Nashville, we lost Glenna’s trail. We know she didn’t linger because the sheriff turned that city upside-down searching for her. But, except for a state trooper who thought he recalled “a lady with a briefcase hitchhiking north,” we had no other clue.

  By 11:30, we have reached a consensus plan of action. I am to use my insider position to add whatever snippets I can to our precious store of information, using my eyes and ears but not my mouth. “Like a fly on the wall,” someone says. I forget who.

  Bubba swears he will tell me anything Effie lets drop, though we agree he must not appear to “pump” her. Brent Wardlow suggests checking her clothing for store tags or dry cleaning stubs. Sand caught in the seams might indicate she has been to the seashore. Sheriff Buck advises getting a look at that United Airlines bag for transit tags.

  Above all, I must not arouse suspicion. Everyone agrees that Glenna must be the first to speak. I must not appear upset or condescending. Brent says I ought to act “as normal as possible.”

  As Bubba and I stroll along the breakwater toward Gulf Haven, I feel a sudden rush of belonging, of brotherhood. My pessimism evaporates, my spirits begin to rise. I grasp Bubba by the shoulder and make him stop. When he looks into my face, he understands.

  “Sure ’nough,” he says, clapping his pink palms with glee. “Sure ’nough,” he hoots.

  He takes my hand and leads me a step or two in a little tango dance. The noon sun catches us there, freezes us in its opaque whiteness, two men dancing under the cabbage palms.

  She’s back.

  At Gulf Haven, a scene awaits us that brings my heart to my mouth.

  The Firbanks’ Satellite is parked across the gravel drive next to the neon sign, forming a roadblock. Someone has tried to squeeze my utility van past the Satellite, only to get it stuck in the azaleas. The driver’s door gapes open, the engine is running. A Datsun station wagon belonging to the young couple in Cabin Six has nosed up to the Satellite, and the young couple is standing next to it, waiting to drive out. The Firbanks hover at the bottom step of the stone porch, watching Mama and Effie grapple together at the door. Mama has a death grip on the handle latch. Effie is trying to peel her fingers off.

  “You leave her alone, Mizz Toby,” says Effie, as Bubba and I run up. “You leave Glenna alone.”

  “Let go of my hand,” gasps Mama, who has bad lungs and is turning blue from the exercise. Seeing me, she suddenly abandons the struggle.

  “Never mind,” she says, her eyes savage with triumph. “E.A.’s here. E.A., she’s
locked us out. She tried to leave in your van, but Ted Firbank foxed her.”

  Glenna is not in sight, though I am certain she can hear every word I say.

  “I believe it’s our van, Mama,” I begin. “Just as much hers as mine.”

  “E.A. Toby, you can’t be serious. She was going to steal it and run off again.”

  I do not know why Mama hates Glenna so much (maybe it is only that my wife is still young and has all her hopes before her) or why she is so down on life. But there have been times in the past when I have considered murdering her for the benefit of mankind. And now it takes all my powers of self-restraint to keep from committing a crime against a person I love for which the state gives lethal injections.

  “Ted,” I say, nodding toward the Satellite, “you think you could move your car? I appreciate the help and all, but the other guests will want to get out.”

  Then I race around by the rock path to the back door, hurrying inside before Mama catches her breath and follows me.

  A shadow slips down the hall into the guest bedroom. The house is silent except that I am almost sure I can hear Glenna’s heart beating. Then I notice a slip of paper and a pencil stub on the kitchen table. Trembling, I begin to read.

  “E.A., I wasn’t stealing the van. I just wanted —”

  The letters slope off drunkenly and stop, as though she lost heart with her explanation, as though she realized how futile and humiliating it was to make any explanation at all. But it is still a note, a message addressed to me. It is something. I suddenly forget myself and stride down the hall. I pause at the guest bedroom door and listen. She is crying again, but muffling it. I can barely stand the pain she is in.

  I take a ballpoint from the plastic penholder in my breast pocket and scribble beneath her words: “G., You don’t have to tell me.” I add the phrase, “Welcome home,” but black it out. Then, “I love you,” and black that out, too. The pen slips in my sweaty fingers and skips as I try to write against the door. I end the note with “Love, E.A.” and leave it at that.