The Journey Prize Stories 28 by Kate Cayley Read Free Book Online Page A

anddrive them outside the city limits to let them free. Kyle wanted to know why they couldn’t just put them in the neighbour’s yard.
    â€œThing about raccoons,” said his grandfather. “They know where they live. Know their territory. You gotta take ’em an hour out at least, go out beyond their home range. Otherwise, they’ll just come back.”
    Kyle stares at the big mangy guy gnawing the cob like an old man chewing on a pipe stem. He wonders if this critter has been here before. If he recognizes Kyle—knows that this thin, wiry ex-punk with the two-day stubble and bramble tats is no threat to him. Kyle can smell his musk, the sour stink of old fish and muddy water. The raccoon keeps nibbling, eyes cast sideways at Kyle, waiting for him finally to get angry and take a real swing with the broom.
    Kyle turns and goes inside and turns off the porch light. White credits crawl up the black screen, hundreds of names disappearing as they crest the dusty curve of his old tube TV. Kyle clicks off the remote and the room plunges into darkness. He listens, for a minute, to make sure he can still hear the girls breathing, before going into his bedroom and collapsing into his unmade bed with his jeans still on.
    â€”
    The knock comes at 10 a.m., as the girls are tucking into their Quaker Instant Maple Brown Sugar oatmeal. Even though he’s been waiting for it, Kyle flinches like he’s been stuck with a shiv up under the ribs. He spent all night thinking, trying to sort out what to do with the girl—with Soo-bin. But he just kept coming back to Andy Dufresne, hammering on hissewage pipe in the darkness, and to Krista, lying on the hospital bed, the berserking metronome of the heart monitor shocking her life into the terrible flatline that took all of Kyle’s rage and pinched it into the helpless scream of a newborn. And to Abigail,
his daughter, his daughter, his daughter
, the word so charged with joy and pain that it still explodes, every time he thinks it, like a bomb inside the inner chambers of his scar-worn heart.
    The next knock comes, more insistent than the first. He gets up and gives himself maybe thirty seconds to haul Soo-bin up out of her kitchen chair, shushing Abby to quell her hurt questioning look, and hauls the cargo girl into his bedroom, where he stuffs her into the closet and puts all the compassion he has into his eyes and mumbles an apologetic plea—
justaminu​tepleaseb​equietjus​taminute
—before piling an old Slayer hoodie on top of her and closing the door and heading back out to answer to whoever it is that wants her back. As he grips the knob, Kyle puts on his calmest face, thinking how natural it will be to pretend that the second bowl of Quaker is for himself, hoping for the absurd impossibility that somehow, instead of someone from the union, it’s the raccoon from last night come knocking to ask him for another corn cob or to apologize for the awkward standoff they’d found themselves in during the midnight raid.
    â€œMr. Miller. Good morning.”
    Kyle’s fantasy falls away as soon as he opens the door and sees Szandor Zabados, head of the local ILA chapter, standing there with his cigarette pinched daintily between thumb and forefinger, shoulders hunched into his thick khaki coat,eyes gleaming oily crow-black under a thinning fringe of copper-pipe hair. Kyle has seen Szandor berate his fair share of stevedores, but that’s just the tip of it. Rumours have him deeply involved in trafficking, graft, and pedophilia, and they’re the kind of rumours everyone knows are true. Zabados keeps one can of Diet Pepsi per day in the staff refrigerator, and Kyle can remember the day some rookie decided to drink it and ended up getting a pink slip and a six-foot-five, 270-pound escort to the parking lot, who made it crystal clear that any further appearance at the wharf would result in a dislocated jaw and the distinct