Alice Munro - Alice Munro's Best

That’s what she’s got in her, he felt like saying to them all. He thought that he had known it. He had known something the first time he had seen her at the Fellowship. It was summer and she was wearing the little summer straw hat and the dress with sleeves that all the Fellowship girls had to wear, but her skin was too golden and her body too slim for a Fellowship girl’s. Not that she looked like a girl in a magazine, a model or a show-off. Not Liza, with her high, rounded forehead and deep-set brown eyes, her expression that was both childish and fierce. She looked unique, and she was. She was a girl who wouldn’t say, “Jesus!” but who would, in moments of downright contentment and meditative laziness, say, “Well, fuck !”

She said she had been wild before becoming a Christian. “Even when I was a kid,” she said.

“Wild in what way?” he had asked her. “Like, with guys?”

She gave him a look, as if to say, Don’t be dumb.

Warren felt a trickle now, down one side of his scalp. She had sneaked up behind him. He put a hand to his head and it came away green and sticky and smelling of peppermint.

“Have a sip,” she said, handing him a bottle. He took a gulp, and the strong mint drink nearly strangled him. Liza took back the bottle and threw it against the big front window. It didn’t go through the window but it cracked the glass. The bottle hadn’t broken — it fell to the floor, and a pool of beautiful liquid streamed out from it. Dark-green blood. The window glass had filled with thousands of radiating cracks, and turned as white as a halo. Warren was standing up, gasping from the liquor. Waves of heat were rising through his body. Liza stepped delicately among the torn, spattered books and broken glass, the smeared, stomped birds, the pools of whisky and maple syrup and the sticks of charred wood dragged from the stove to make black tracks on the rugs, the ashes and gummed flour and feathers. She stepped delicately, even in her snowmobile boots, admiring what she’d done, what she’d managed so far.

Warren picked up the hassock he had been sitting on and flung it at the sofa. It toppled off; it didn’t do any damage, but the action had put him in the picture. This was not the first time he’d been involved in trashing a house. Long ago, when he was nine or ten years old, he and a friend had got into a house on their way home from school. It was his friend’s aunt who lived in this house. She wasn’t home — she worked in a jewelry store. She lived by herself. Warren and his friend broke in because they were hungry. They made themselves soda-cracker-and-jam sandwiches and drank some ginger ale. But then something took over. They dumped a bottle of ketchup on the tablecloth and dipped their fingers in, and wrote on the wallpaper, “Beware! Blood! ” They broke plates and threw some food around.

They were strangely lucky. Nobody had seen them getting into the house and nobody saw them leaving. The aunt herself put the blame on some teenagers whom she had recently ordered out of the store.

Recalling this, Warren went to the kitchen looking for a bottle of ketchup. There didn’t seem to be any, but he found and opened a can of tomato sauce. It was thinner than ketchup and didn’t work as well,but he tried to write with it on the wooden kitchen wall. “Beware! This is your blood!”

The sauce soaked into or ran down the boards. Liza came up close to read the words before they blotted themselves out. She laughed. Somewhere in the rubble she found a Magic Marker. She climbed up on a chair and wrote above the fake blood, “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

“I should have got out more stuff,” she said. “Where he works is full of paint and glue and all kinds of crap. In that side room.”

Warren said, “Want me to get some?”

“Not really,” she said. She sank down on the sofa — one of the few places in the front room where you could still sit down. “Liza Minnelli,” she said peacefully. “Liza Minnelli, stick it in your belly!”

Was that something kids at school sang at her? Or something she made up for herself?

Warren sat down beside her. “So what did they do?” he said. “What did they do that made you so mad?”

“Who’s mad?” said Liza, and hauled herself up and went to the kitchen. Warren followed, and saw that she was punching out a number on the phone. She had to wait a little. Then she said, “Bea?” in a soft, hurt, hesitant voice. “Oh, Bea!” She waved at Warren to turn off the television.

He heard her saying, “The window by the kitchen door… I think so. Even maple syrup, you wouldn’t believe it.… Oh, and the beautiful big front window, they threw something at that, and they got sticks out of the stove and the ashes and those birds that were sitting around and the big beaver. I can’t tell you what it looks like….”

He came back into the kitchen, and she made a face at him, raising her eyebrows and setting her lips blubbering as she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone. Then she went on describing things, commiserating, making her voice quiver with misery and indignation. Warren didn’t like watching her. He went around looking for their helmets.

When she had hung up the phone, she came and got him. “It was her,” she said. “I already told you what she did to me. She sent me to college!” That started them both laughing.

But Warren was looking at a bird in the mess on the floor. Its soggy feathers, its head hanging loose, showing one bitter red eye. “It’s weird doing that for a living,” he said. “Always having dead stuff around.”

“They’re weird,” Liza said.

Warren said, “Do you care if he croaks?”

Liza made croaking noises to stop him being thoughtful. Then she touched her teeth, her pointed tongue to his neck.

BEA ASKED LIZA and Kenny a lot of questions. She asked them what their favorite TV shows and colors and ice-cream flavors were, and what kind of animals they would be if they could turn into animals, and what was the earliest thing they remembered. “Eating boogers,” said Kenny. He did not mean to be funny.

Ladner and Liza and Bea all laughed — Liza the loudest. Then Bea said, “You know, that’s one of the earliest things I can remember myself!”

She’s lying, Liza thought. Lying for Kenny’s sake, and he doesn’t even know it.

“This is Miss Doud,” Ladner had told them. “Try to be decent to her.”

“Miss Doud,” said Bea, as if she had swallowed something surprising.

“Bea. Bzzz. My name is Bea.”

“Who is that?” Kenny said to Liza, when Bea and Ladner were walking ahead of them. “Is she going to live with him?”

“It’s his girlfriend,” Liza said. “They are probably going to get married.” By the time Bea had been at Ladner’s place for a week, Liza could not stand the thought of her ever going away.

THE FIRST TIME that Liza and Kenny had ever been on Ladner’s property, they had sneaked in under a fence, as all the signs and their own father had warned them not to do. When they had got so far into the trees that Liza was not sure of the way out, they heard a sharp whistle.

Ladner called them: “You two!” He came out like a murderer on tele vision, with a little axe, from behind a tree. “Can you two read?”

They were about six and seven at this time. Liza said, “Yes.”

“So did you read my signs?”

Kenny said faintly, “A fox run in here.” When they were driving with their father, one time, they had seen a red fox run across the road and disappear into the trees here. Their father had said, “Bugger’s living in Ladner’s bush.”

Foxes do not live in the bush, Ladner told them. He took them to see where the fox did live. A den, he called it. There was a pile of sand beside a hole on a hillside covered with dry, tough grass and little white flowers. “Pretty soon those are going to turn into strawberries,” Ladner said.