Canada: A Novel Part 11

"I probably won't like it," I said, which seemed rude and not grateful, but true.

"Then I guess you'll find a way to leave," he said. "It'll give you some purpose." He turned and began walking away back toward the Buick. "Dell, I'm awfully glad you're here. I'll be seeing you soon." He said this without turning. "Charley'll tell you about your work."

"All right," I said. I wasn't sure he'd heard me, so I said it again. "All right."

That was all there was to meeting Arthur Remlinger. As I said, life-changing events can seem not what they are.

Chapter 44.

In our mother's "Chronicle of a Crime Committed by a Weak Person," she wrote as if Berner and I were present and could read her thoughts the instant she wrote them, and were her confidants who would benefit from what she was thinking. Her chronicle represents to me her truest voice, the one we children never heard, but the voice in which she would've expressed herself if she ever fully could've-without the limits she'd imposed on life. The same must be true with all parents and their children. You only know a part of each other. Our mother didn't live a long time in the North Dakota prison. And anyone can tell-true sounding or not-that she was beginning to break apart when she wrote this.

Darlings, You two have crossed over a national boundary now, which is not like going down the street, you know. It's a new start, though of course there's no such thing as a whole new start. [She and Mildred had obviously discussed this.] It's just the old start put under a new lamp. I know all about that. But you'll have a chance together in Canada and won't be blemished more by your father and me. No one will care where you came from or what we did. You won't stand out. I've never been there, but it seems so much like the U.S. Which is good.

I can remember Niagara Falls-looking across them when I was a girl, with my parents. You've seen that photograph. Whatever it is that separates people, the falls insisted on it (to me they did, anyway). We don't discriminate carefully enough, you know, between things that seem alike but are different. You should always do that. Oh, well. You're going to have thousands of mornings to think about all this. No one will tell you how to feel. You already imagine the world as its opposite, Dell. You told me so. That's your strength. And, Berner, you have a taste for the unique, so you'll do fine. My father crossed many borders after Poland, before he got to Tacoma, Washington. He always drew authority from the present. Most definitely.

I've discovered a brand-new coldness in me now. It's not bad to find a cold place in your heart. Artists do this. Maybe it has other names. . . . Strength? Intelligence? I rejected it before-for your father's sake. Or attempted to. I'm just trying to be helpful to you from here, but am at a disadvantage. I'm sure you understand. . . .

I've read this "letter" many times. Each time I've realized that she never expected to see either Berner or me again. She knew very well this was the end of the family for all of us. It's more than sad.

Chapter 45.

Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.

The days that followed my first meeting with Arthur Remlinger-August 31, 1960-must not, then, have been lonely days. Were it not that they ended in calamity, they might've been seen as full and rich for a boy in my situation-abandoned, everything familiar gone away, no prospects other than the ones I found in front of me.

My work duties at the beginning-before the Sports arrived and the goose shooting began-were all conducted in Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, in the Leonard Hotel, the hotel Arthur Remlinger owned. He himself lived in an apartment on the top third floor, with windows that faced the prairie and from which you could see (what I imagined were) hundreds of miles north and west. I was expected to walk to my work each day, or to pedal one of Charley's falling-apart J. C. Higgins two-wheelers down the highway, where big grain trucks had strewn a golden carpet of wheat chaff along the roadside, beyond which the Canadian Pacific tracks ran parallel, serving the elevators from Leader to Swift Current. On occasional days, Charley would take me in his truck-often with the Swedish woman, Mrs. Gedins, the other Partreau resident, silent and staring out the window-and deliver me to the Leonard, where my work was swamping bedrooms and bathrooms, which paid me three Canadian dollars a day, plus my meals. Mrs. Gedins worked in the kitchen, preparing the food for the hotel dining room. I had half my afternoons to myself and could either pedal the highway back to Partreau, where there was nothing to do, or else stay and be fed early supper with the harvesters and railroaders in the poorly lit dining room and get back after dusk. I was specifically forbidden by Charley to hitchhike the highway. Canadians, he said, didn't believe in hitchhiking and would a.s.sume I was a criminal or else an Indian and would possibly try to run over me. And hitchhiking would make me stand out and attract suspicion and draw the notice of the Mounties, which no one wanted. It was as if Charley himself had something hidden that couldn't stand a close inspection.

Although I'd never done swamping work, except to help clean our house when our mother required it, I found I could do it. Charley showed me tricks for getting into and out of rooms quickly so I could finish the ones I was a.s.signed-sixteen, plus the two shared bathrooms for each floor used by the roomers, who were oil-rig roughnecks and railroad-gang boys and drummers and custom harvesters from the Maritimes who moved across the prairies each fall. Many of these roomers were young, little older than I was. Many were lonely and homesick, and some were violent and liked to drink and fight. But none ever paid attention to how they'd left a room they'd slept in, or a bathroom where they cleaned themselves and used the toilet. Their tiny bedrooms smelled putrid with their odors-their sweat and filth, and their food and whiskey and the gumbo mud and bottled liniment and tobacco. Down the halls the bathrooms were rank and humid and soapy, and stained from private uses the men also never bothered to clean-as they would've in their mothers' homes. Sometimes I would push open a bedroom door with my bucket and mop and broom and rags and astringents, and there would be one of the boys alone in a room with several beds in it, smoking or staring out the window or reading a bible or a magazine. Or there would be one of the Filipino girls sitting on the bedside alone, and once or twice with no clothes on, and more than once in the bed with one of the roughnecks or some salesman, or with another girl sleeping into the long morning. Each time I said nothing and carefully closed the door and skipped the room that day. The Filipino girls, of course, were not Filipinos, Charley explained to me. They were Blackfoot or Gros Ventre girls Arthur Remlinger had had driven in by taxi from Swift Current or over from Medicine Hat, and who worked in the bar at night and enlivened the atmosphere and made the Leonard more attractive to the customers, since women were not otherwise allowed. Often when I arrived in the morning for work, I would see the Swift Current taxi parked in the alley beside the hotel, its driver sleeping in the front seat or reading a book, waiting for the girls to come out the side door, for the ride home. Charley told me one of the Filipinos was actually a Hutterite girl with a baby and no husband. But I never saw such a girl in the Leonard and doubted Hutterite girls would stoop to that, or that their parents would permit it.

And I don't mean by this to say that I instantly, perfectly fitted myself into the life in Fort Royal. It was far from that. I knew that my parents were in jail, and that my sister had run away, and I was in all likelihood abandoned among strangers. But it was easier-easier than you would think-to turn my attention away from all that and to live in the present, as Mildred had said, as if each day were its own small existence.

The little town of Fort Royal was a lively place in the early autumn and benefited considerably by comparison to Partreau, where I was made to live, four miles away-a strange, vacant, ghostly residence except for Charley in his trailer and Mrs. Gedins, who rarely acknowledged me. Fort Royal was a small, bustling prairie community on the railroad line and the 32 highway between Leader and Swift Current. It must've been little different from the town where my father robbed the bank in North Dakota.

The Leonard dominated the west end of Main Street and was wood-constructed and three stories and perfectly square and painted white, with a flat roof and rows of empty unadorned windows, and offered a small featureless street entrance opening into a dark reception, a windowless dining room, and a shadowy windowless bar achieved through a narrow corridor to the back. The Leonard had a sign on its roof-which a person couldn't see from town, but that I could see from down the highway when I rode to work and back. Red neon spelled out LEONARD HOTEL in squat square letters, and beside it was the neon outline of a butler offering a round tray with a martini gla.s.s. (I didn't yet know what a martini was.) It was a strange sight to see from out on the prairie. But I liked seeing it as I came and went. It referred to a world away from where it was, and I was, and yet was there in front of me every day, like a mirage or a dream.

The Leonard, in truth, would not have seemed to be a hotel-compared to the Rainbow in Great Falls, or to fine hotels I've since seen. It had little to do with the town. Few town residents ever came there, except for drinkers and ne'er-do-wells and the bad-tempered farmers who Arthur Remlinger leased goose-shooting ground from, and who drank in the bar for free. The Leonard endured the blight of disapproval in Fort Royal, which had at one time been a temperance town. Gambling and girls were available, and most decent people had never been inside.

My duties were always over by two. If I stayed to eat supper at six, that is when I would often see Arthur Remlinger-always well attired, with his lady friend, Florence La Blanc, talking and joking and making himself congenial for the paying customers. I'd been told by Charley that I wasn't expected to make conversation with Arthur Remlinger-in spite of our first meeting having been agreeable. I wasn't supposed to ask questions or be conspicuous or even friendly, as if Arthur Remlinger existed in a rare state no one could share. I was a visitor there and was to understand I had no special status or privileges. Occasionally I'd pa.s.s Arthur Remlinger in the little reception or going up the stairs where I was sweeping or performing my swamping duties with my bucket and mop, or in the kitchen when I was eating. "All right. There you are, Dell," he'd say, as if I'd been hiding from him. "Are you managing in your billet where you are?" (Or words like that; I already knew what a billet was from my father.) "Yes, sir," I'd say. "Let us know if you're not," he'd say. "I'm managing all right," I'd say. "Fine then, fine," Arthur Remlinger would say and continue on his way. I would not see him, then, for several days.

Though in truth it was a mystery to me why, if he was willing to take charge of me and my welfare, Arthur Remlinger seemed to have no wish to know me-which was significant to a boy my age. He'd seemed good-natured but peculiar when I first met him-as if something had been distracting him. But he seemed even more peculiar now, which I a.s.sumed to be how it was to know new people.

On days I stayed in town, whiling hours until I'd get to eat again-following which I'd pedal back tired to Partreau before the dark highway turned treacherous with grain trucks and farm boys beered up for the evening-I often walked about the town of Fort Royal, taking a look at what it contained. I did this both because it was new for me to be alone and not looked after; and also because the little that was there made what I saw more striking, and I'd decided the way not to be forlorn and plagued by morbid thoughts was to investigate and take an interest in things the way someone would whose job was to write about it for the World Book. But, too-which is at the deepest heart of those lonely prairie towns-I took my tours because there was nothing else to do, and choosing to be an investigator conferred a small freedom I'd never known up to then, having lived only with my sister and my parents. And finally, I did it because it was Canada where I was, and I knew nothing about that-how it was different from America, and how it was alike. Both things I wanted to know.

I walked the hard pavement down Main Street in my new dungarees and secondhand Thom McAns, feeling that no one noticed me. I didn't know Fort Royal's population, or why a town was there or why anyone lived there, or even why it was called Fort Royal-except possibly because an army outpost might've been there in the pioneer time. Its businesses ran on both sides of Main, which was the highway, and there seemed to me just enough of everything to make a town. Grain trucks and farm trucks and tractors pa.s.sed through the middle every day. There was a barber shop, a combined Chinese laundry and cafe, a pool hall, a post office with a picture of the Queen on the wall inside, a community hall, two small doctors' offices, a Sons of Norway, a Woolworth's, a drugstore, a movie house, six churches (including a Moravian, a Catholic and a Bethel Lutheran), a closed library, an abattoir and an Esso. There was a co-op department store where Charley had bought my pants and underwear and shoes and a coat. There was the Royal Bank, a fire station, a jeweler, a tractor repair and a smaller hotel, the Queen of Snows, with its own licensed bar. There was no school for students, but there'd been one-its square, white frame presence sat across from a tiny, treeless park, furnished with a war monument with men's names carved in, and a flag and a flagpole. There were ten neat squared-off, unpaved streets of modest white houses where the town residents lived. These had clean lawns, often with a single spruce tree planted and a garden plot, the last petunias blooming in box beds, sometimes the English flag on a pole surrounded by white-painted rocks, or a Catholics' creche I identified from Montana. There was also a fenced-in dirt baseball diamond, an ice rink for curling and hockey when the winter came down, a weedy tennis court with no net, and a cemetery, south toward where the fields took up and the town stopped.

On my tours I looked studiously into the jewelry shop window-at the Bulovas and Longines and Elgins, and the tiny diamond engagements and the bracelets and silver services and hearing aids and trays of bright ear bobs. I entered the shadowy drugstore and purchased a small clock for my early wake-ups and breathed the scents of the ladies' perfumes and sweet soap and the soda fountain water and the sharp odors of chemicals from the back rooms and the customers' counter. On one afternoon, I stopped in the Chevy agency and inspected the new model they had-a shiny red Impala hardtop my father would've valued highly. I sat for a time in its driver's seat and imagined myself driving fast over the open prairie, just as I'd done when he'd brought a new DeSoto home and parked it in front, and life for Berner and me had been uneventful. A salesman in a yellow bow tie came over and stood by the door, and informed me I could drive the Chevy home if I wanted to, then he laughed and asked me where I was from. I told him I was American, I was visiting my uncle at the Leonard, that my father sold cars in "the States" (a new expression to me). But he didn't seem interested after that and walked away.

On another day, I walked to the shut-down library and looked in through its thick gla.s.s door, down the aisles of empty shelving, the toppled-over chairs, the librarian's tall desk turned sideways to the door in the gloom. I read the marquee at the movie house, which operated only on weekends and only showed "horse operas." I explored down the dirt alleys behind town to the switch yard, watched the grain and tanker cars shunting east and west-as I'd also done before in Great Falls-the same gaunt rail riders eyeing me as if they knew me as they slid past in the boxcar doors. I walked past the abattoir, where "killing day" was Tuesday-a handwritten sign said-and a doomed cow stood in the back corral waiting. I pa.s.sed the Ma.s.sey-Harris repair where men were back in the dark bay, soldering farm equipment with torches and masks. The cemetery was beyond the town limit, but I didn't walk to there. I'd never been in a cemetery but didn't think it could be different in Canada.

It is, of course, very different to walk through a town when you're a member of a family that's waiting at home a short distance away-as opposed to being someone who no one's waiting for or thinking about or wondering what you might be doing or if you're all right. I did these tours many more times than once that early September, while the weather changed, as it suddenly does there, and the summer I'd lived through disappeared, and the prospect of winter arose for me and everyone. Very few people spoke to me, although no one seemed specifically not to speak to me. Almost everyone I pa.s.sed on the street looked me in my eyes and registered me as seen, certifying, I believed, that a private memory had been made and I should know that. And even if nothing in Fort Royal seemed distinctive to me, I was someone distinctive among people who all knew one another and relied on knowing it. (This was the crucial element my father had failed to understand, and why he'd been caught after he'd robbed the bank in North Dakota.) You could say I performed my tours the way anyone would who was a stranger to a place. But it was a place odd for being in a separate country, and yet didn't feel or appear so different from what I already knew. If anything, the similarity to America made its foreignness profound, and also attractive to me, so that in the end I liked it.

One woman with her daughter pa.s.sed me by where I was standing at the drugstore window, doing nothing more than looking wondrously in at the colored vessels and beakers and powders and mortars and pestles and bra.s.s scales on display-all items the Rexall in Great Falls had lacked and that made the Fort Royal store seem more serious. The woman turned and came back up the sidewalk and said to me, "Can I help you with something?" She was dressed in a red-and-white flowered dress with a white patent leather belt and matching white patent leather shoes. She didn't have an accent-I was acute to this because of what Mildred had told me. She was only being friendly, possibly had seen me before, knew I was not from there. I'd never been addressed this way-as a total stranger. Everything about me had always been known to the adults in my life.

"No," I said. "Thank you." I was aware that while she didn't sound different to me, I possibly sounded different from people she was used to hearing. Possibly I looked different, too-though I didn't think I did.

"Are you here visiting?" She smiled but seemed doubtful about me. Her daughter-who was my age and had blond ringlet curls and small, pretty blue eyes that were slightly bulgy-stood beside her, looking at me steadily.

"I'm here visiting my uncle," I said.

"Who is he, now?" Her blue eyes that matched her daughter's were shining expectantly.

"Mr. Arthur Remlinger," I said. "He owns the Leonard."

The woman's brows thickened and she seemed to grow concerned. Her posture stiffened, as if I was someone different because of the sound of Arthur Remlinger's name. "Is he going to put you into school in Leader?" she asked, as if it worried her.

"No," I said. "I live in Montana with my parents. I'll go back down there soon. I go to school there." I felt good to be able to say that any of these things were still true.

"We went to the fair in Great Falls, once," she said. "It was nice but it was very crowded." She smiled more broadly, put her arm around her daughter's shoulder, which made her smile, too. "We're LDS. If you'd ever like to attend."

"Thank you," I said. I knew LDS meant Mormons, because of things my father had said, and because of Rudy, who said they talked to angels and didn't like black people. I thought the woman would say something else to me, ask me something about myself. But she didn't. The two of them just walked along down the street and left me in front of the drugstore.

On the afternoons I didn't stay on in Fort Royal and conduct my investigations and keep myself occupied, I rode the Higgins back out to Partreau with a small lunch box of cold food in my basket. This I would eat in my dilapidated house before the daylight died off. It was miserable to eat alone in either of the two cold, lightless rooms of my shack, since both were cluttered to the ceiling with the dank-smelling cardboard boxes and the dry acc.u.mulation of years of being the Overflow House for goose hunters who came in the fall and would soon be there again. There was almost no room for me, only the iron cot I slept on and the one that had been reserved for Berner, and the "kitchen room," with the b.u.mpy red linoleum and a single fluorescent ceiling ring and a two-burner hot plate where I boiled tar-smelling pump water in a pan to make my bath at night. Everything in the house smelled of old smoke and long-spoiled food and the privy, and other stinging human odors I couldn't find a source for and try to clean, but could taste in my mouth and smell on my skin and clothes when I left for work each day and that made me self-conscious. In the mornings I cleaned my teeth at the outside pump and washed my face with a Palmolive bar I'd bought at the drugstore. Though as the weather grew colder, the wind stung my arms and cheeks and made my muscles tense and ache until I was done. If Berner had been there, I knew she would've been despondent and run away again-and I'd have gone with her.

But bringing food back and waiting until dark to eat it under the deathly ceiling ring would send me straight to my cot where I would lie miserably, trying to read one of my chess magazines in the awful light, or wishing I could watch a show on the busted television, while I listened to pigeons under the roof tins and the wind working the planks of the elevator across the highway, and the few cars and trucks that traveled the road at night, and sometimes Charley Quarters driving in late from the hotel bar, standing in the weeds in front of his trailer, talking to himself. (I'd by then looked up Metis in my World Book "M" volume and found out it meant half-breed between Indian and French.) All of that would begin to conspire against me each night and swirl me up in abject thoughts of my parents and Berner, and of the certainty that I'd have been in better hands with the juvenile authorities who would at least have put me in a school, even if it had bars on its windows, but where I would have people to talk to, even if they were tough ranch boys and perverted Indians-instead of being here, where if I got sick as I sometimes did in the fall, no one would look after me or take me to the doctor. I was being left behind while everything else advanced beyond me. There'd been no mention-because no one talked to me except Charley, who I didn't like and who never paid attention to me, and because I wasn't invited to talk to anyone and therefore knew nothing of my future-there'd been no mention that I would return to anything I'd known before or ever see my parents, or that they might come and find me. Therefore it seemed to me, cast off in the dark there in Partreau, that I was not exactly who I'd been before: a well-rounded boy on his way possibly to college, with a family behind him and a sister. I was now smaller in the world's view and insignificant, and possibly invisible. All of which made me feel closer to death than life. Which is not how fifteen-year-old boys should feel. I felt that by being where I was, I was no longer fortunate and was likely not going to be, although I'd always trusted that I was. My shack in Partreau was in fact what misfortune looked like. If I could've cried on those nights, I would've. But there was no one to cry to, and in any case I hated to cry and didn't want to be a coward.

And yet, if I didn't sink myself this way each day-becoming bitter, abandoned-feeling, corrupting the whole day following-if I simply pedaled back the four miles to Partreau and ate my cold lunch box by five rather than after dark, leaving time to a.s.sign myself an interest in things at hand, taking notice of what was present around me in Partreau (again, the way Mildred had advised-not to rule things out), then I could undertake a better view of my situation and feel I might sustain myself and endure.

Since, after all, it wasn't in my interest to be cast off. Even if I was visited each night by a vacant feeling of not knowing what or where I was in the world, or how things were, and how they might go for me-everything had already been worse! This was the truth Berner had understood and why she'd gone away and would likely never be back. Because she saw that anything was better than being the two left-behind children of bank robbers. Charley Quarters had told me you crossed borders to escape things and possibly to hide, and Canada in his view was a good place for that (though the border had hardly been an event I noticed). But it also meant you became someone different in the process-which was happening to me, and I needed to accept it.

And so on those long, cooling high-sky afternoons, when a person could see the moon in daylight, and before or after I ate my evening meal (a busted dinette table had been thrown away in the thistles, and I brought a broken chair from inside my shack and set these up outside the window by the lilac bush, where I could see to the north)-on those days I would make a second tour, around Partreau. This investigation seemed to me of a different nature. If my walks in Fort Royal were in pursuit of that town's difference from life I'd known, and to render myself reconciled to the new, then my inspections around Partreau, only four miles distant, were of a museum dedicated to the defeat of civilization-one that had been swept away to flourish elsewhere, or possibly never.

There were only eight crumbling streets, lying north and south, and six going west and east. There were actually eighteen empty, dest.i.tute houses, with windows out and doors off, and curtains flagging in the breeze, each house with its number, each street a sign-though only a few names remained up on their posts and identifiable. South Ontario Street. South Alberta Street (where my shack was). South Manitoba Street, where a tiny empty post office and Mrs. Gedins' house stood. And South Labrador Street, which ran the margin between the town and the cut-over wheat fields, along a three-sided, squared-off row of dead Russian olives and Lombardy poplars and caraganas and chokecherries, where prairie grouse perched in the branches watching the highway, and magpies squabbled in the underbrush for insects.

There had once been more than fifty houses, I calculated by walking each block and counting s.p.a.ces and foundation squares. Back in the cluttered weeds and dooryards were rusted, burnt-out car relics and toppled appliance bodies and refuse pits full of cabinets and broken mirrors and patent medicine bottles and metal bed frames and tricycles and ironing boards and kitchen utensils and ba.s.sinets and bedpans and alarm clocks all half-buried and left behind. To the back of town, south and square to the fields and olive rows, stood the remains of an orchard, possibly apples, that had failed. The dried trunks were stacked husk on husk, as if someone had meant to burn them or save them for firewood, then had forgotten. Also, there I discovered the dismantled, rusted remnants of a carnival-red, mesh-hooded chairs of the Tilt-a-Whirl, the wire capsule of the Bullet, three Dodge-em cars and a Ferris wheel seat, all scattered and wrecked, with spools of heavy gear chain and pulleys, deep in the weeds with a wooden ticket booth toppled over and once painted bright green and red, with coils of yellow tickets still inside. There was no cemetery that I could see.

I took brief interest in two white bee hive boxes sitting solemnly in the volunteer wheatgra.s.s outside the tree line where the sun caught their sides. These, I a.s.sumed, were Charley's and that he had tended them once. But the hives, which sat on bricks and lacked their important flat tops, were empty of bees. Their wood panels were loosed from their joinings; rot had taken over from below. Their thin paint was weathered and cracked, their beeswax frames (which I knew a good deal about by then) lay in the weeds beside a pair of rotted work gloves. Gra.s.shoppers buzzed around them in the dust.

Farther-a hundred yards out in the field and beyond a dried pond bed-I investigated the lone pumping station, its motor humming in the breezy afternoon, exuding a stinging ga.s.sy odor as it sawed up and down, the hard, rounded earth saturated and black with oil that had been pumped and spilled. A pair of large, white-faced gauges attached to the motor mechanism measured what I didn't know. One day, from the distance of my shack, I watched a lone man drive through town in a pickup and out to the pumper site. He climbed out and fashioned around, consulting the gauges, inspecting various moving parts, and writing things on a pad of paper. Then he drove away in the direction of Leader and never (to my knowledge) came back.

Other days I simply walked up to the little commercial row, the businesses that had once thrived along the highway, facing across the hardtop to the pool elevator and the CP tracks. From my bed, I'd often heard freight cars late at night, the big diesels gathering and surging, the wheel springs squeaking, the brakes and sleepers crying out. It was much the way I'd experienced it in my bedroom in Great Falls. No trains stopped at Partreau. The elevator was long emptied. Though sometimes I'd be jolted awake and would step outside in the chill moonlit dark, barefoot, in my Jockeys, hoping I could view the northern lights, which my father had talked about but that I'd never seen in Great Falls-and never saw in Partreau. The blocky shadows of the grain cars and tanker cars and gondolas swayed and b.u.mped along, sparks cracking off the brakes, lights dimmed and yellow in the caboose. Often a man stood on the rear platform-the way I'd seen photographs of politicians giving forceful speeches to great crowds-staring back at the closing silence behind him, the red tail-light not quite illuminating his face, unaware anyone was watching.

But when I inspected the little commercial frontages-an empty, pocket-size bank, a Masons' building of quarried stone from 1909, the Atlas shoe store with shoes scattered inside, a shadowy pool hall, a gas station with rusted, gla.s.s-top pumps, an insurance office, a beauty parlor with two silver hair dryers pushed over and broken apart, the floors littered with bricks and broken furnishings and merchandise racks, the light dead and cold, the busted back doors letting the damaging elements in, all the establishments emptied of human uses-I found I always thought of the life that had gone on there, not of life cast aside. And not, as opposed to what I'd first thought, like a museum at all. I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to a.s.similate, a person perhaps a.s.similated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with others or for them. And a.s.similating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else-but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt.

Chapter 46.

As the summer weather changed into fall, my daily duties changed as well. The wind thickened and came to us more from the north, pushing dust up from the fields. Larger, bulkier clouds ran in fast, and gray rain swept across the prairie toward the east. I began to see more of Charley Quarters. He drove me in more regularly with Mrs. Gedins. And after midday, he'd take me in his truck out over the long section roads and involve me in his doings, which mostly pertained to shooting coyotes-first gla.s.sing them at a great distance, then driving the switchbacks to intercept them where he'd gauge they'd cross the road. It also involved pouring water down gopher holes to roust them, and running his various traps for rabbits and foxes and badgers and muskrats and occasionally a small deer, sometimes a lynx or an owl or a hawk or a goose-all of which he'd shoot or dispatch with his knife. He'd throw the often still-twitching, blinking carca.s.s into his truck bed, to be skinned and dried and stretched and in some instances tanned and preserved in his Quonset, then driven up to Kindersley and sold at Brechtmann's, where I wasn't permitted to go. He told me he sometimes saw moose on the prairie, resting in the shelter belts or the swales, and that their antlers were valuable, but these animals were no longer plentiful. He referred to this work as his "rough taxidermy." He told me trapping was how the Metis had maintained their independent life, but that game was disappearing and provincial laws were pa.s.sed against the ancient practices. It was now necessary to work for the likes of Arthur Remlinger, who he seemed to dislike and dismiss, but who was a given in his life that would never change.

I was made to come along and learn to drive the truck-which Charley referred to as the half-ton-because as the days grew colder and the migrations of wild geese and ducks and cranes poured in from the north (Lac La Ronge and Reindeer were places he often mentioned), and stopped over in the wheat and on the flats and pothole ponds below the South Saskatchewan a few miles north of Fort Royal, I was expected to do my part. Which meant to learn about shooting (though I was not allowed to shoot), and to accompany Charley to the fields to spot the evening geese in order to know where they'd be "using" the next day, and to dig goose pits, and to go the following morning before light to set decoys and situate the Sports in their pits so that when darkness lifted and first light found the decoys, the Sports would be able to shoot the geese as they flew in great droves up off the river to the fields to feed.

My most important job would be to sit in the truck cab with binoculars, a thousand yards away from the decoys, as the red sun inched above the horizon, while Charley hunkered in his pit with the Sports-usually four of them in four pits. He would call the geese using just his human voice as his device-a strange, unnatural ark-ike sound he made in his throat and was proud of, and which attracted the geese to the decoys so that shooting them was easy. (He said I would never learn this, since only Metis could know it.) From the truck, with my binoculars, I could view as many as three pit setups and could watch the shot geese fall, and keep count of them as well as the cripples, to be certain the limit of five per shooter wasn't exceeded. After the shooting, when the ground was littered with dead and dying geese, and the sun was high so the birds no longer decoyed, Charley and I would take the Sports back to the Leonard in the truck, and return with the Jeep and the flatbed trailer and collect the decoys and the carca.s.ses and drive them in to the Quonset. There on the cleaning log, we chopped off their wings and feet and heads with hatchets, stripped their feathers using the plucker machine Charley had built, gutted them, wrapped them in butcher paper, and took them to the shooters who were leaving that day, or else stored them in Charley's freeze box for whenever the Sports were ready for home-which was usually America.

This was wholly a new life to me, who'd seen only Air Force bases and the towns attached to them, and schools and rented houses with my parents and sister, and who'd never had friends or fitted in, or had duties or adventures, and who'd never spent a day alone on the prairie. And even though I'd never worked-as I admitted to Arthur Remlinger and been self-conscious about-I found I didn't mind work and could be serious and persistent about doing it well-both in the Leonard and in the goose fields. My duties were admittedly small, but I felt they were respectable. In the Leonard, I often observed the behavior of adults when they were alone or believed no one could see them-which seemed worth knowing. And in the fields I was acquiring special knowledge no other boys my age, or who'd had my life, could hope to gain-which had always been my goal. Though most important, each day when I was set to my daily duties, my mind would leave behind the subjects that habitually preoccupied it-my parents and their sad fate and their crime, and my sister. And my own future. So that at the end of the day, when I got in my bed, tired and often muscle-sore, my mind for a while would be empty, and I could go straightaway to sleep. Though, of course, later I would wake alone in the dark, and those same thoughts would be there to meet me again.

Charley Quarters himself was in every way the strangest creature I'd ever imagined to meet in life. I didn't like him, as I said, or trust him and always felt apprehension in his presence. I never forgot him clutching my hand in the dark truck the first night. And I was aware he observed me when I was out of my shack, eating my brought-home supper at my dinette table, and doing my walks around, accommodating myself and finding ways to get along alone. Sometimes when we were together in the truck, bouncing out across the sea of wheat fields, I would notice he was wearing lipstick. Once he smelled of sweet perfume. On another occasion he wore dark eye makeup, and his black hair was sometimes blacker than other times, and occasionally black color smudged his forehead. I made no mention of this, of course, and pretended I hadn't noticed. Though I was sure Arthur Remlinger knew about it and possibly didn't care. They were both, I felt, as strange as strange could be. I was also always aware that because we jointly used the privy behind my house-which contained two sawn employment holes side by side, a bag of lime and a stack of old Saskatchewan Commonwealths-that Charley might suddenly appear when I was inside. There was no latch or lock, so that I had to pull the door closed using a nail and a length of baling twine I'd installed, which I could hold on to tightly when I was "on the throne"-which was also my father's expression. This nervousness made me naturally wary, so that I found I visited the privy only when Charley was away from his trailer-or late at night when I would be afraid of snakes-and always tried to use the guests' bathroom upstairs in the Leonard.

In truth, however, these worries about Charley (whose actual name, I learned, was Charley Quentin) never came to anything. Mostly he acted distracted when I was around, as if things were on his mind that deviled him and weren't susceptible to fixing. I never knew or asked what they were. He would often say he didn't sleep and never had. When I would sometimes look out my window in the middle of the night-the coyotes' singing frequently woke me-a light was always lit in his trailer, and I pictured him inside it just lying awake, listening to his wind chime. He once said he'd had a "bad bowel infection" when he was a boy and that often came back to plague him and kept him from a complete life. I would sometimes see him outside his trailer feeding the birds that flew around his sculptures and silver whirligig devices; he was always adjusting their little plastic propellers to better face the wind. Sometimes he would bring out a set of iron barbells he kept in his Quonset and do lifts and squats and curls in the weeds. And still other times he brought out a bag of wooden golf clubs and a peach basket of b.a.l.l.s. He would set the b.a.l.l.s up onto tufts of gra.s.s and stiffly strike each one out toward the highway and the train tracks, skipping them off the hardtop, or clattering them against the sides of the elevator, or just sailing them out of sight into the fields. He must've had an infinite supply of b.a.l.l.s, since I never saw him retrieve one.

Mostly, however, he was charged grudgingly to teach me what to do when the Sports were there. It was clearly a plan devised by Arthur Remlinger to keep me occupied until he could think what else to do with me. But I was interested in learning, since I wasn't learning anything more than that by then and felt morose about it. I'd asked Charley about attending school-if I'd be allowed to, since a yellow school bus swayed through Partreau every morning, going west, with LEADER SCHOOL UNIT NO. 2 painted on its side, just like any American school bus. Every afternoon it rumbled back toward Fort Royal, the students' faces in the windows. It often pa.s.sed me as I sawed my old bike along the road shoulder back and forth to work. No one inside gestured or waved or changed expression when they saw me, though once I saw the pretty, blond bulgy-eyed LDS girl whose mother had spoken to me in the street. She didn't seem to recognize me. And even though I'd gradually begun to feel better about myself, more accommodated to where I was (as Remlinger had said), each time the bus ground past I felt a renewed sensation of being left behind, and that conceivably I would never sit down in another school room, or be educated or well rounded as I'd hoped I'd be; and that possibly (which was in some ways the worst part) I'd overestimated school's importance in the grand scheme of things.

When I'd asked Charley about school, he'd ignored me. I'd learned from Mrs. Gedins-one of the few words she'd spoken to me-that a Catholic school for wayward girls was situated down the highway toward Leader, in the town of Birdtail, Saskatchewan, only a few miles distant. I thought possibly I could go there on my bicycle and attend on Sat.u.r.days, since she said school went on all week. But when I mentioned this school to Charley, he said that only Canadian children went to Canadian schools, and I shouldn't want to be Canadian for any reason anyway. This was on one of the last warm blue-sky days, when a long, milky cloud line of what could've been the first winter storm hung over Alberta, which was only fifty miles away. Charley and I were sitting in two of his folding aluminum lawn chairs on a rock outcrop, watching below where a great flight of geese had settled across a barley field above the banks of the South Saskatchewan. More and more birds tilted in, landed, and took their positions to eat. The season for shooting them was only a week off. We were there to estimate the geese's tendencies, to determine the fields they were using, note how many birds were present, where water was standing or dried up, and where pits might be set in for the best shooting. Even though I was uncomfortable around him, I was willing to be influenced by Charley and by what he knew and could impart to me, since I knew nothing about hunting or hunters or shooting geese for sport.

Charley had untied his black hair and wore a singlet undergarment that showed his short knotty-muscled arms and made his hands and chesty torso appear larger and more powerful. He had tattoos on both forearms-one that showed a woman's smiling face with lush movie star hair like Charley's, and had the words Ma Mere written underneath it. The other was a blue buffalo's head with staring red eyes, the meaning of which wasn't apparent. Charley had his old worn lever-rifle across his knees where we sat, a cigarette clenched in his teeth, and was training his binoculars on the long raft of geese strewn out in the distance above the shining river, and also on a pair of coyotes who were observing the geese from a hilltop and slowly moving closer to them.

"Canadians are hollowed out," he said, after proclaiming I shouldn't want to be one-something I hadn't contemplated. I only wanted to go to school and not be left behind. I thought Canadian schools would teach the same subjects as American schools. The children on the bus all looked like me. They spoke English, had parents, and wore the same clothes. "Americans on the other hand are all full," Charley said, ". . . of deceit and treachery and destruction." He kept his binoculars fastened to his eyes, his cigarette curling smoke into the warm air. "You're the son of bank robbers, aren't you?"

I was sorry he knew about that. Arthur Remlinger had obviously told him. But there was no denying it. I didn't think what he said about Americans was correct, however, even with my parents being bank robbers.

"Yes," I said reluctantly.

"I don't think that's so bad." He lowered his binoculars and widened his eyes at me, which made his head with its oversized cheekbones and heavy brows and large lower jaw look grotesque. He was wearing pink lipstick that day, but no eye makeup. One of Charley's dark blue eyes-his left one-had a permanent blood blotch in the white. I wasn't sure if he saw out of that eye or not. "My parents lived in a dirt-floor house in Lac La Biche, Alberta, and both died of TB," he said. "Bank robbing would've been a big step up for them."

"I think it's bad," I said, referring to my parents being robbers, not his parents dying. What had happened to my parents seemed like a long time ago, though it had only been a few weeks since Berner and I had visited them in jail in Great Falls.

Charley coughed down into his hand and spit out something substantial, which he scrutinized and flung away. "Something goes into me when I go down below," he said. "Then something goes out of me when I come back up here. Not that I can go down there anymore." He'd told me he'd traveled in America extensively in his past-Las Vegas, California, Texas. But things had happened-he didn't say what-so he couldn't go back. "It's all played out up here. They all think they're being cheated by the goverment. But they're not," he said. "This place is waitin' to blow away." I believed he only meant where we were then, not all of Canada, which he probably knew nothing about. He set his binoculars on the ground beside his chair. The air, two hundred yards below us, was thick with black-and-white geese and their sharp cries, conniving and flapping and sporting with and against one another, flying up and setting down. "You want to be gone from here in six weeks, that's for sure," he said. "It'll turn into Siberia. North's the wrong direction to go, as far as I'm concerned."

"Why does Mr. Remlinger never talk to me?" I said, because that was what I wanted to know.

Charley lifted his rifle off his knees and carefully shouldered it, still seated in his lawn chair. I believed he was just sighting-which he often did. "I don't get in his business," he said.

He rested back against the stretched nylon strips to steady himself and settled the muzzle on one of the two coyotes we'd been watching. It was a hundred yards away, trotting down a bald rise where barley didn't grow, in the direction of a second rise around which it could go unnoticed and draw closer to the geese. The other coyote stood farther away, beside a pile of stones heaped up from when the field had been cleared. This second coyote was motionless, silently watching the first. I didn't speak then.

Charley lowered his rifle, gazed across the distance, took a deep breath and let it out, bit into the b.u.t.t of his cigarette, re-sighted the rifle, pushed confidently back in his chair, c.o.c.ked the hammer, breathed in again, then out through his nose, spit his cigarette to the side, breathed in once more, then squeezed off one deafening shot. I was sitting right beside him.

The bullet struck behind the first coyote. Even at the distance we were, I saw the puff of dust and chaff kick up. The second coyote instantly began running, its long back legs kicking around toward its front. It looked back and seemed able to run forward and sideways at once. The raft of geese below us made one enormous, piercing, frightened squealing sound that consumed the air. They all immediately but not quickly rose off the stubble ground in a great upheaval-a thousand geese or possibly more (uncountable, really) beginning to flap their wings and shout and rise and move away in one clamorous occurrence.

The coyote Charley had shot at stopped to watch the geese rise and circle over and around itself. It turned its head in our direction-two indistinct dots, with Charley's truck a hundred yards behind us. It hadn't put these facts together-the dots, the sound of a shot, the kicked-up dust, the unplanned rise of the geese. It looked back up at the great swirling column in the air around it, then scratched its left back foot behind its left ear, c.o.c.ked its head to gain a better angle on the itch, shook itself, looked back at us, then trotted away in the direction the first coyote had gone-no doubt, I thought, toward where other geese were.

"I'll see that devil dog again, wait 'n find out," Charley said, as if missing the coyote hadn't mattered and was just practice. He ejected the spent cartridge, reached around where his cigarette lay smoking on the ground. "The world's got his number-in the person of me," he said. "He thinks he's safe. His death and my death are playmates. That's funny. I know it, and he doesn't."

"What about Mr. Remlinger," I said.

"I don't get in his business. I said that already." Charley stuck his cigarette back between his lips and looked annoyed. "He's strange. We're all wasted on somebody, eh?"

I didn't understand what that meant and didn't ask again. As I said, Charley Quarters made me uncomfortable. He seemed to be involved in life too much through death. I thought it meant he didn't care about very much. If I gave him the opportunity to show me more about it, or tell me (which I intended never to do), he would've. Then that was all I would've learned.

Chapter 47.

On the days when Charley did not take me onto the prairie to learn about geese, and when I didn't stay in Fort Royal and could be alone in my shack without constant despairing, I actually began to experience the illusion of being someone who had an almost happy life and hadn't been given up on, and who still carried on an existence that, as my father would've said, made sense.

Time, in truth, didn't seem to pa.s.s. I might've been alone in Partreau for a month, or six months or even longer, and it would've seemed the same, the first day or the hundredth, so that a small, impermanent world became created for me. I knew eventually I'd go somewhere else-to a school, even to a Canadian school, or possibly to a foster home, or by some means back below the border to whatever was waiting for me. And that this present life and its daily patterns and routines and persons wouldn't last forever or even for much longer. But I didn't think as much about that as someone might imagine I would. It was a frame of mind, as I said, my father would've approved.

The occurrence that subst.i.tuted for the pa.s.sage of time, day to day, was the weather. Weather means more than time on the prairie, and it measures the changes in oneself that are invisibly occurring. The summer days, which had been hot and dry and windy with deep blue skies since I left Great Falls, disappeared, and autumn clouds bore in. First mackerel clouds, then marble clouds, then whiskery mare's tails with new cold slicing in behind. The sun sank southward and shone at a new angle through the dead trees around Partreau and brightly onto the white exterior walls of the Leonard. Suddenly it rained for days at a time. And after each rain-driving wind-charged sheets from the low gray clouds-the air became colder and heavier and penetrated the red-and-black plaid jacket that Charley had bought for me at the co-op and that smelled like sweat, though it was new. There were few warm days left. Woolly worms appeared in the gra.s.s. Yellow and brown spiders built nests and webs for flies in the rotted window cas.e.m.e.nts of my shack. Box elder bugs were in my sheets. Harmless black and green snakes flattened out in the sun on the sidewalk chunks. Two cats emerged from the elevator across the highway, and mice moved in behind my walls. The brittle yellow gra.s.shoppers were no longer buzzing in the weeds.

Inside the heavy school bus that pa.s.sed me each day, the children had on their coats and caps and gloves. Geese and ducks and cranes had begun to fill the skies, wavering long silver skeins of them in the low sunlight, morning and evening, their distant shouts filling the air even at night. When I woke up-always early-frost came halfway up my windows, and the weeds and thistles around my shack door were stiff and sparkling in the sunlight. At night, coyotes ventured closer into town, hunting for the mice and the cats and for roosting pigeons in the broken-down houses and refuse holes. The dog I'd seen on my first day and that belonged to Mrs. Gedins, barked often at night. Once in my room, under my coa.r.s.e sheet and blanket, I heard it growl and paw my door and whimper. Then many coyotes yipped and yipped, and I thought I might not see the dog again. (My mother hadn't liked dogs, and we had never had one.) But he was there in the morning, standing in the empty street, the night's trace of snow twinkling on the ground, the coyotes gone.

Why the change of weather and light produced a change in me and made me more accepting-more than the awareness of time pa.s.sing-I can't say. But it has been my experience in all these years since those days in Saskatchewan. Possibly being a town boy (in town, time matters so much) and being suddenly set down in an empty place I didn't know, among people I knew little about, left me more subject to the elemental forces that mimicked the experience I was undergoing and made it more tolerable. Against these forces-an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving-time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.

During these early cold days I would sometimes see Arthur Remlinger in his three-hole Buick, driving at great speed down the highway, headed west-toward where, I had no idea. Someplace specific, I a.s.sumed. Florence's head would frequently be visible in the pa.s.senger's seat. Possibly they were on their way to Medicine Hat-a town whose name fascinated me. Other times I'd see his car beside Charley's trailer, the two of them conferring-often intensely. After four weeks, I'd still had no important contact with Arthur Remlinger-which, as I said, was not what I'd expected. Not that I'd have wanted him to be my best friend. He was too old to be that. But that he might want to know more about me, and that I could learn things pertaining to him; why he lived in Fort Royal, and about going to college, and interesting things that had happened to him-all facts I knew about my parents and was the way, I believed, you learned things in the world. Mildred had a.s.sured me I would like him and would learn things from him. But his name-which seemed stranger being his name than Mildred's-was most all of what I knew; that, and how he dressed and talked in the little he'd spoken to me, and that he was American, from Michigan.

As a result, I'd begun to experience misgivings about Arthur Remlinger, an uncomfortable sensation of waiting that involved both of us. Mildred had also told me I should begin to notice things in the present when I arrived to Canada. But once you do that you can believe you conceive patterns in daily events, and your imagination can run away with you, so that you make up what's not there. What I'd begun to a.s.sociate with this partial personage of Arthur Remlinger (which was all I knew) was that there must be an "enterprise" attached to him, a significance that was hidden from view and wished to stay hidden, and that made him not predictable or ordinary-which is what Charley and Mildred had both told me I would notice. I'm certain, after the experience of my parents being put in jail, that I was also given to look for what might not be good, where from most appearances there was nothing bad to be found.

There are people like that in the world-people with something wrong with them that can be disguised but won't be denied, and which dominates them. Of adults, I'd only known my two parents by then. They were in no way exceptional or significant, were barely distinguishable as the small two people they were. And they had things wrong with them. Anyone but their son might have seen it from the very beginning. After I detected it about them, and had time to decide what was true, I never didn't see the possibility of something being wrong again wherever I looked. It is a function in myself of what I call reverse-thinking, which I've never been entirely free of since I was young, when there was so much cause to believe in it.

On one occasion, when Mrs. Gedins was busy in the hotel kitchen, I was given a key and sent to the third floor to clean Arthur Remlinger's rooms-make his bed, clean his toilet, remove his towels and washcloths, wipe the surfaces where dust had sifted out of the old tin ceiling and been blown in under the window sashes.

His rooms were only three, and surprisingly small for a man who had many belongings and left nothing neat or arranged when he wasn't there. I made no effort not to examine whatever my eye fell on, and looked further than I should've, since I believed I'd likely never know Arthur Remlinger better than I knew him then. Knowing so little and wanting to know more had caused me misgivings in the ways I've said. And misgivings can be a source of curiosity as well as suspicion.