The Unfinished World Read Online Free Page B

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. Resumesstaring. 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.

    When they were small, Louise and Clarence would put their sleds in the back of the car and drive with their father to a hilly placewhere the mountains started to rise. Louise watched the earth dash by under her sled, arms around her father, trusting that the ground would eventually come up to meet them. She loved that feeling of flying. She loved how everything seemed to sharpen in that moment; how the sled’s shadow seemed inked onto the snow. How the soft edges of the pine trees could cut their cheeks like razors as they flew by. There was something about that moment that seemed to stamp the hardness of nature into everything—not in a cruel way—only in the cleanest, most Darwinian sense. It was the nature of avalanches, of hard, icy snow and buried footpaths. The nature of the wild dream before man.
    Louise remembered how Clarence was always frightened of the initial jump. When they shared a sled he would hold her waist so tightly she felt her lungs close a little, her arms tingle, and her vision blacken at the edges. She would often return to this memory after her parents’ death. She wondered if there was that same strange sense of euphoria, if the world seemed so perfectly black-and-white in those last several seconds. She wondered if the last thing her father saw was his own shadow, flying impossibly over the snow.

    Louise as a child eventually learned all she could from Thumbelina. She then took to the parlor, sketched the stilled bobcat, the snowy owl, the dancing mice with their little legs akimbo. She would sit there for hours with her drawing pad and her pencils, sketching the fine lines of whiskers, the wet-looking noses, the curved claws, the tufts of hair in the ears.
    Other children would have been terrified, alone in that great darkroom with its heavy wall hangings and wine-colored carpets,