“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 accumulation 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 bumpy 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 Métis 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 assign 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, destitute 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 spaces 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 bassinets 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 wheatgrass outside the tree line where the sun caught their sides. These, I assumed, 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. Grasshoppers 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 gassy 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 bumped 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, glass-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 assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with others or for them. And assimilating 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 glassing 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 carcass 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 Métis had maintained their independent life, but that game was disappearing and provincial laws were passed 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 Métis 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 carcasses 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.