Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

And she likes Noel. They are alike, very much alike, except that he is commercially minded and she is not. He is passionate about Audubon and says frankly if he were a better painter he would probably not be so bloody famous. He lost his little boy to brain cancer and his first wife left him six months later. Louise and he have sex sometimes on the floor of her workshop, surrounded by dead teeth and dead skin and the strong smell of formaldehyde. It’s not really a fetish so much as it is a pact of sadness, a shared wish to sail through the underworld and rescue the ones who left them long ago.

Louise is a scientist. She is experimenting with new things, working toward a greater knowledge of the world, a vague sort of natural philosopher in her way.

Clarence is an archivist. He collects and makes and organizes to preserve the past. He is working toward an understanding of the world through the memories it already holds.

Brother and sister look nothing alike. A full five years separates them, but no one would blame you for mistaking their unusual, unspoken closeness for the bond between twins.

The space between her and Clarence is a world. Sometimes she thinks they are the sun and moon, each rising when the other dies, each dependent on the other’s careful sleep. Together, she thinks, they are two strange creatures, and yet it is only together that they keep this place in a tense stasis; they are the precarious balance by which the estate holds steady.

Clarence at fifteen tries to be brave, just the once. He takes instruction from Louise, and he is, at first, an excellent pupil. His sculptor’s hands have always learned to wing their way through solid substance, and at first, soft rabbit skin is much easier to carve than clay.

But then he vomits into the bucket where the guts go, runs from the room, lays his hot face against the pillow and weeps. For himself? For the hare? Louise does not know. She knows she should go to him, but she is her father in so many ways and when she cannot fill a space with words, she will not fill it at all. She cannot help but scorn his softness.

Louise is working on a blue finch when Clarence enters the room, hands gray as a corpse’s with packed-in clay. Are you having any luck? he asks politely. He knows she hates doing birds-in-flight. She can never get the feathers to lie as they should.

Louise sighs and puts her brush down gently. Smoke, she says, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She packs them and peels open the top, slides one out and slips it between her lips in a graceful way Clarence always admires. He wonders, sometimes aloud and sometimes not, why his pretty, interesting sister has never married. She just smiles enigmatically in a way meant to discomfit him, meant to grab him by the apron strings and tie him tight to the fluttering strips of heart she still has left.

Clarence, she asks, cigarette dangling, when is Tony coming next?

Thursday, he says. He’s dropping off another dog for the Big Man.

Louise laughs. Do we have to call him the Big Man, just because Tony does?

I don’t know his real name, says Clarence. Don’t even know what he looks like. Big Man is fine with me. I met his wife, though. She came up with Tony last time. She’s a rhinestone. Must be half his age. He smiles, a soft, happy smile.

Louise doesn’t like that smile.

Their working theory is Russian mafia, but really they have no idea who the Big Man is. He found Louise, and he’s brought in a few hunting trophies and paid plenty for them. He also keeps dozens of whippets, and when they die he likes to immortalize them in his vast, unseen mansion.

Be careful, says Louise, and blows smoke in Clarence’s face. She leans back and watches it swirl across the air between the two of them, catching and distorting his kind features like a fog. You be careful with the Big Man’s things.

Louise’s father first taught her how to preserve and make dreams of the dead. But before she was allowed to touch an animal for reconstruction she was made to learn the basics: anatomy, sculpting, painting, tanning. She learned the long history of taxidermy, even took the train with her father to the Museum of Natural History in the city, so that he could show her the work of the best artists in the country.

She studied Carl Akeley, William T. Hornaday, Walter Potter and Edward Hart, Roland Ward and the specimens he preserved for Audubon. She learned how to cast a form, how the life in eyes died so you had to make new ones from glass, how to glue on whiskers, and how to extract and reattach teeth. She even learned the best way to clean a skull, how to breed the kind of bacteria that would eat all the meat right off the bone. She paced the woods with her sketchbook, storing the kinetic movement of bodies in dead ink, in her living hands. She got used to the smell of blood, the smell of guts, the smell of the meat that had to die before the body could live again.

Shouting outside. Honking. Tony the Tiger and his crew again. She throws a bed jacket over her slip because she has suddenly remembered something: Clarence is sick today. She normally lets him deal with Tony but she will have to do it herself. Her mouth is a moue shape at the thought.

Now she descends the stairs, bridelike in flimsy white, flashing bits of pale skin shot through with green rivers of blood. She fishes around in her jacket pocket to find the key to the carriage house, where the exhibit is crated up and waiting to go home.

At the door, Tony looks her up and down and laughs. He always laughs at her. She doesn’t mind but she minds the gun in the car in Jackson’s lap and the way the driver stares like a goat in heat. That’s why she usually lets Clarence handle this part of the business. He is so tall and looks threatening, though of course really he’s as soft and malleable as clay.

Please pull your car up closer, she shouts to the driver. I can’t push the crate that far.

The driver just stares, leans out the window, spits. Resumes staring. Smiles. He has a dark unibrow and broken-off brown teeth.

Animal, she says. Tony laughs, long, loud.

We are all animals. You too, no? He comes closer, stands in her sunlight, makes a dark shadow over her. She starts to back up but he grabs her wrist, pulls hard, touches a finger to her lips. You, for instance. You are bat. You are batshit, yes? He laughs and releases her, and she is suddenly glad Clarence isn’t here.

Don’t touch me again, she says coldly.

Tony smiles. He is not unattractive, maybe too tanned and leathery but she supposes given his age that’s not such a bad thing. Better to be preserved, to be pickled, rather than melt down as slow and soft as candle wax. Better to smile than leer. Her stomach goes rather wrong at the thought of what’s behind that smile. Follow me, she says, and she honestly doesn’t know whether she’d like him to turn around and go, quickly, or to follow her and then. . and then. Then what?

I can help you with the crate, he says, suddenly contrite. The Big Man will be so happy to see his friend again.

She is glad to have the help getting the crate onto the dolly. The dog was huge, nearly as tall as she was, not to mention the elaborate scene she’d placed him in. Hunting, perfect butterfly balanced on a flower, stump ringed with tiny ants. The perfect companion for a wealthy gangster. The thing he can’t kill.

When the car pulls out of the drive, Louise sighs. Whether in relief or frustration, she doesn’t know. Her hands are full of money.