The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [94]
Holding the carcass between her knees, the savage girl unwraps a bundle of cloth on the ground, a collection of knives and sharpening stones. Among them are a couple of double-edged razor blades, bent into curving shapes that roughly match the scars on her body. The backs of her hands, Ursula can now see as the girl spreads the knives out on the cloth, are scarred as well.
She picks out a box cutter, grabs the dog’s chest with her free hand, and begins to cut down the center, bending down over her work like a jeweler cutting a diamond, eyes inches from the blade. Perhaps she is myopic. Her face, covered with its scrollwork of scars, reddens still further with the effort, as her scarred, red hands rip open the gray, papery skin of the dog’s groin, and after that the binoculars are too heavy to keep holding up.
Ursula roots through the purse on her lap. She finds her wallet, pulls out all the bills. Quickly she spreads them in her fingers. Two hundred and change, trembling in her grip.
She gets up and walks toward the savage girl. As she approaches, the girl struggles with one of the dog’s stiffened forelegs, trying to peel off the skin but succeeding only in pulling free some tufts of salt-and-pepper hair. She pauses to stare at the mauled leg, blinking occasionally. She isn’t so expert at this yet, clearly. Ursula wonders what’s going through the girl’s mind, wonders if maybe she is at this moment trying to ascertain what’s become of her life, if maybe she’s observing herself as Ursula is, from the outside, seeing herself with a mixture of bafflement and outrage, seeing herself pretending to be something she isn’t, a savage, in hopes of having what she assumes savages have, seeing herself having forsaken everything, even scratched out her face, all in return for nothing but a dead dog that’s resisting her with every follicle of its fur.
The savage girl picks up a butcher knife and hacks away at the leg. Ursula stands over her now. She has to know Ursula’s there, but she still doesn’t look up. Ursula extends her arm, holding out the wad of bills in front of the girl’s nose.
Then the savage girl looks up.
Her gaze wanders from the bills up along Ursula’s arm, around Ursula’s breasts, up to her hair, and then back down again, backtracking along the same route—breasts, arm, bills. Her face is broad, with high cheekbones and a high forehead made much higher by the Mohican. The scars on her face and neck are still scabrous, crusted with blood and grayish pus. Her mouth is set in a line, small, like some atrophied, vestigial organ. Her eyes are almond-shaped and blue, displaying nothing, registering no difference between Ursula’s money and Ursula’s arm, between Ursula’s arm and Ursula, between Ursula and the trees behind her. The possibility that she doesn’t even recognize money is more shocking to Ursula than the possibility that she can simply choose not to see a person who’s standing right in front of her.
The savage girl goes back to what she was doing, yanking the leg back and forth with one hand and pressing down on the knife with the other. As Ursula watches, she cuts through the tendon and pulls the limb free. Ursula half expects her to fall upon the exposed meat with her teeth, but she simply holds the leg up in front of her face and gazes at it. Ursula gazes at it as well, mesmerized by the brightness of the colors, the redness of the muscle, the slick white nub of bone. . . .
Chat