Canada: A Novel Part 10

"I didn't want a start," I said, my throat suddenly constricted again-with anger at her just for saying that.

"We don't always get to choose our starts." She reached and levered my door open, pushed it back and shoved me in that direction. "Now, go on. We're putting off the inevitable here. This is an adventure. Don't be afraid. You'll be fine. I said so."

I didn't feel right saying anything more to her, even if I could've. My pillowcase with my possessions packed to go to Seattle was on the back seat floor. I hauled it over, climbed out onto the pavement, and closed the car door. Whatever Mildred had agreed with my mother to do, she'd done now. But what I wanted to do was climb back in the car with her and have her drive us as far away as we could go. Only that wasn't in my mother's plan when she could still plan things for me. So I did what I was told to-as much for my mother as any other reason. I stayed a good son to the end of it.

Chapter 42.

So did you hear all about me?" Charley Quarters said. We were rattling along through the dark in his old International Harvester. I could only see the bright gravel roadbed in the headlights with the dusty shoulder shooting by, thick wheat planted to the verges. It was cold with the sun off. The night air was sweet as bread. We pa.s.sed an empty school bus rocking along. Our headlights swept its rows of empty student seats. Far away in the fields, cutting was going on after dark. Dim moving truck lights, the swirl-up of dust. Stars completely filled the sky.

I said I hadn't heard anything about him.

"It doesn't matter," he said. A lever-action rifle was barrel-down on the seat between us, close to his leg. His truck stank of beer and gasoline and the same strong sour-sweet stinging odor I didn't recognize. There was an animal carca.s.s in the bed of the truck, but I couldn't tell what it was. "Here's what's going to happen," Charley said. "I'm going to be responsible for you up here. But you'll look after yourself unless I need you. You have work every day. You sleep in the Overflow House by my trailer. You eat in the hotel. A.R. owns it. You get there and back on your own. Though some days I'll take you in the Rolls here. And you don't cause me any trouble."

Charley had the seat pushed far back so his feet barely touched the pedals, one hand on the wheel, and he was smoking Mildred's cigarette he'd previously put behind his ear. He was drinking another beer out of a regular can. A deer stood at the edge of the highway, chest-high in the wheat, its green eyes gleaming into the headlights. Charley sawed the wheel toward it, but it moved effortlessly back. "G.o.d d.a.m.n that," Charley shouted. "I coulda got that one." He leered at me, as if he was trying to scare me, and it amused him. "How old do you guess I am?" he said, cigarette clenched in his teeth.

"I don't know," I said. I hadn't answered anything about having duties. I hadn't expected to have any. I had no idea what I'd see once the sun was up.

"Don't you give a s.h.i.+t?"

"No," I said.

"Fifty! But I look younger." He talked in this clipped way. "You think I'm Indian. I know that already."

"I don't know," I said.

"May-tee," he said. "You don't know what the f.u.c.k that is, do you?"

"No," I said. Mildred had mentioned Metis, but I didn't know about it or even how you spelled it.

"It's the bloodline of the ancient kings." Charley elevated his blunt chin and let the smoke out the sides of his mouth as he talked. "Cuthbert Grant-all the way back. The line of martyrs." He snorted in the cold air. "Indians are entirely different. A lot of mental illness there. Too much drinking and inbreeding. They don't accept us. They want to kill Metis if they get the chance."

He suddenly stood on the brake. I got my hands to the dashboard just in time. Though I pitched out of my seat onto my knees and my heart started pounding. We were stopped in the bright alley of gravel between the wheat fields. "I need to. You need to?" Charley said. He had the engine killed before I could answer and was out the door, spraddling his legs in front of the truck, in the bright lights. He had his p.e.n.i.s already out where I could see him and was p.i.s.sing a hard stream down onto the dirt, concentrating fiercely. I wanted to. I hadn't had the nerve to say so to Mildred, though she was a nurse and would've seen such things. But I didn't believe I could do it in front of Charley, on the highway. I could've with my father. I was a town boy. So I just sat in the ticking truck, the headlights illuminating Charley and the widening circle of urine on the ground, road dust s.h.i.+fting through the open door, bringing in the lemony p.i.s.s odor. "What happened to you?" he called out from the road. He made a little gasping sound before he quit. "Did you get kicked out down there? You commit a crime?"

I hated to be staring at him and to see his private part. I said, "No." I didn't want to say, My parents got put in jail in Great Falls. My mother didn't want me to be in an orphanage. She wants me to be here in Canada.

Charley spit into the urine circle, then sucked back, clearing his nose. "Secrets are good," he said, zipping up. "Up here's a good place to hide." Mosquitoes and gnats were filtering out of the wheat into the headlamp heat. Some came in the open truck with me. Then a sudden, quick flicking flash of wing fell in through the light, twisted upward, and was gone again. A hawk or an owl, drawn to the insects. It made my heart pound harder. Charley didn't see it. "You know anything about A.R.?" He was still out in the road, talking, staring into the darkness above the cone of headlight. I believed he meant Mildred's brother.

"Mildred said he was her brother." I didn't think he could hear me.

He scuffed his black rubber boots around on the gravel. "You'll think he's strange." He didn't seem to be doing anything now. "What do you want to be called?"

"Dell," I said.

"How many years have you got, Dell?"

I knew what that had to mean. "Fifteen," I said. "Almost sixteen."

Charley came back to the doorway and climbed up into the driver's seat, his animal odor accompanying him. "Are you lonely?" He started the truck with a roar. The headlights dimmed then brightened.

"I miss my parents," I said, "and my sister."

"So where'd she go? Some orphanage?" Charley closed his door and rolled up his window. Mosquitoes were whining around us.

"She ran away," I said.

"Good for her." He was silent, his hands on the steering wheel. "You don't know anything about anything, do you?"

"No," I said.

"What do you want me to tell you?"

"Why would anybody take me up here?" Again, what I said was only what I was thinking, as I had with Mildred.

Whatever had intruded into the headlights a moment before fell through again in full view. An owl-a curved, white face, wings extended, th.o.r.n.y feet grasping, its eyes intent on something beyond the light's edge. Then it was gone. I'd never seen an owl; I'd only heard them from my room at night in Great Falls. But I knew what it was. Again, Charley didn't seem to notice.

"A.R.'s peculiar. He's American," Charley said. "He's been up here a long time. Maybe he's lonely for company. I don't know. Let me feel your hand."

His tough, hard hand, which was shockingly big, found mine and captured it and squeezed it four or five or six quick successive squeezes. His hand was thick and short-fingered and blunt-nailed and grainy like his canvas pants. I tried to pull my hand back, but he held on, squeezing even tighter. "Did that old nursy try to f.u.c.k you," he said, as if he was about to laugh.

I couldn't look at him. I said, "No."

"She wanted to. I could tell that. She wanted to f.u.c.k me, too. We could've both done that. You don't want to let anybody do you that way, though. You wait on some nice girl. I got shown things too early. And here I am." Struggling, I got my hand free and pushed it under my leg where he couldn't get it. He scared me. "Okay, there are you, Dell." He revved the truck, which made a racket. The headlights brightened down the road. Insects swarmed up. "You don't have any interest in Hitler, I guess, do you?"

"No," I said. All I knew about Hitler was what my father had related. "Schicklegruber," he'd called him. "Little Adolf, the wallpaper installer." My father hated him.

Charley pulled the truck down into gear. "He interests me," Charley said. "He had his struggles. I'm misunderstood most of the time, too." He held two stubby fingers up under his nose, his eyes suddenly wild. He turned toward me, gawking. "Look-it this, see? He looks like this, eh? Got his little cute mustache. Nein, nein, nein! Achtung! Achtung!"

My father had said Hitler was dead, his wife with him. Suicides.

"He was a good artist, you know," Charley said, revving the truck again. "I fancy myself a poet. But we don't have to talk about all that now." He mashed the accelerator, and we lurched away into the dark. It was Canada where I was now. It was my mother's plan.

Chapter 43.

Life-changing events often don't seem what they are.

Voices woke me. A man laughing, then the mutter of a second voice, then the sprung-metal bang of a car hood being shut. Then more laughing. "I just wish a woman would tell me one thing I didn't already know," a voice that sounded like Charley Quarters said. These voices were somewhere outside the room I'd been asleep in, a room I remembered entering, but didn't recognize. The cool smell of earth and something tangy and metallic and sour thickened the air. A thin gray cotton cloth with a white border was tacked over a window beside my bed-which was only a metal folding cot-softening what had to be morning light. I didn't know morning light where, or how long we'd driven the night before, or if here was my destination.

I sat up. The room was small and low ceilinged and green shadowed, as if water danced behind the curtain. I was tight-headed. My back and legs ached. I was wearing my Jockeys; my clothes and shoes and socks were heaped on the linoleum floor at the end of the cot. My memory was broken in pieces: a truck's headlights crossing a small white building; a door opening in; a flashlight beam jittering over a room with a cot in it; Charley Quarters urinating on the brightly lit gravel, staring intently down; an owl's plush face like in a dream; a mention of Hitler and Filipino girls; me-fighting to be awake, but failing.

I pulled aside the cloth and looked out the dusty window. One of its panes was cracked across, the glaze crumbled on the sill. Outside was a lilac bush, and behind it a patch of gra.s.s with dew still sparkling. Beyond that, a narrow asphalt street, pocked and heaved up, a concrete sidewalk humped and weedy, a square of perfectly blue sky, like a barrier.

An old white trailer on rubber wheels sat across the broken street-a rectangular flat-top trailer a person would live in. A TV antenna tilted on its side on the roof. Beside the trailer was an open-mouthed Quonset with a wind sock on top. Beyond that, a tall, wooden grain elevator with a steepled roof. The elevator bore faded lettering, high up on its bin. It said SASKATCHEWAN POOL and under that, PARTREAU.

Charley Quarters' dented International pickup sat outside the trailer. Charley stood in front of it, speaking to a man holding a straw hat, with a tan jacket over his arm, and wearing a pale blue s.h.i.+rt. Charley was still dressed in his black rubber boots, his pants legs stuffed in, and the same flannel s.h.i.+rt. All around, the trailer's yard was strewn with rusted metal implements, tires and empty barrels, bicycles, animal cages, an ancient motorcycle, and a green Studebaker car up on wood blocks-its windows out. Pieces of sc.r.a.p metal had been bolted or welded together to make odd shapes and set off in the weeds by themselves. A bicycle wheel joined to a swather blade. A hay baler equipped with a steering wheel and a mirror. A sundial made of a wheel rim. s.h.i.+ning pinwheels and flas.h.i.+ng whirligigs had been stuck up on wood sticks in the clutter, fracturing the sunlight. A makes.h.i.+ft wooden flagpole with the same flag as the border was leaned against the trailer's side.

Charley turned, his short powerful arms gesturing spiritedly first at the trailer, then at the window I was looking out of. I thought he was discussing me, and that the man in the blue s.h.i.+rt listening must've been Arthur Remlinger. Mildred's brother. I heard Charley shout, as if he wanted others to hear him, "Nothing's foolproof around me." He reared back and laughed. The other man looked at the building where I was, set a hand on his hip and said something and nodded. Charley turned and started across the gra.s.s toward me.

I quick got my T-s.h.i.+rt and pants on. I didn't want to be in my Jockeys if Charley was coming to get me. I pushed my shoes on without socks. I looked for a door to get outside. There was another, empty cot in the room. All around in the shadows were piled cardboard boxes, barely allowing room for the cots. There was no lamp. I heard Charley's voice already outside, "Who would you wish yourself on? I ask you that. . . ." I didn't know who he was talking to.

I hurried through a low door into a kitchen room-tiny, airless, jumbled. More boxes were stacked there, a cast-iron stove, an old TV with a cracked screen, and what looked like a stuffed dog or a coyote placed on top of an oak ice box with corroded latches. I shoved my s.h.i.+rttail in my pants and went through a door out into a tiny dirt-floor vestibule room with its own windowed door, then right into the brash sunlight. Which stunned me, struck my eyes, and made me shut them, just as Charley rounded the corner of the house. Green, then silver, then red spots swam in my vision. My scalp tightened on my skull. I didn't know what was about to happen. But I thought it was important. I was far away from Great Falls.

"Okay. Here he is," Charley called out loudly. I forced my eyes to open. The white stucco building where I'd been sleeping was the one in my dream that the car lights had swung past. It sat flat to the ground, scabs of stucco rotted off, laths and interior plaster showing through. I zipped my pants. My shoes were untied. I s.h.i.+elded my eyes, my face twisted. "A.R.'s here." Charley exhibited his large square teeth, grinning as if this was unpleasant for me and he enjoyed it. "Come up here now. He wants to see you." He turned around and I came after him through the weeds, and we crossed the crumbling street toward the trailer and the Quonset, where the man in the blue s.h.i.+rt was speaking into the window of a s.h.i.+ny maroon Buick three-holer I hadn't seen before.

I took my chance for a look around. It was a town, but not like one I'd seen-even when our father had driven Berner and me out to the Indian reservation in Box Elder and we'd viewed their homes. A few gray wooden houses were scattered along the remains of several town streets. There was likewise evidence of where other houses had been-empty brick foundation squares, falling-in wood outbuildings, a standing chimney, and open ground where something had existed but was gone. The five or six still-standing houses looked vacant-their outer doors hanging open on hinges, their yards weeded in. Some had no roofs, others had their roofs boarded and rough-patched, their chimneys crumbled and porches sagging. No electrical wires ran to anything except the white trailer and the Quonset and the house I'd just been sleeping in, and to one other house where the roof had a hole that rain could fall in. A large woman wearing a loose gray dress stood on the back steps there, watching us across the distance. A looping clothesline was strung up in the backyard. White sheets and women's underwear bloomed in the dry breeze.

Off toward what looked like a paved highway, two big flapping grain trucks rumbled past a dilapidated row of flat-top business buildings across from the elevator. These buildings looked abandoned, their windows out and doors missing. No people were in evidence. At the edge of the town, which became visible as I walked across to the Quonset, a border of box elders and Lombardy poplars (I recognized these from Montana) had been planted to block the wind, but had died. Beyond these and the town's edge were cut grain fields dotted with straw bales, and in the near distance, a bladeless windmill, and a black oil pumper patiently delving. Farther on, the land stretched away not flat but rolling, without mountains or hills, and almost no other trees as far as I could see. Only the horizon broke the line of sight a great ways off.

"Okay, here he is." Charley was still shouting. I followed him across the weed lot toward the trailer and the Quonset where the new-looking Buick sat. The Quonset, I could see, housed an old cloth-top Jeep back in its shadows, and a flat single-axle trailer loaded with what looked like geese but were wood decoys, and a pile of shovels. "I woke the little baby up," Charley carried on. "He's used to soft treatment down in the States. He won't survive up here." He looked around for me. Charley was even stranger in the daylight-his k.n.o.bby head larger, his shoulders unnaturally narrow, his legs bandied out at the knees where his boots stopped, his black hair still clutched back with his rhinestone barrette. He was a disturbing sight out in the open.

I put my hands in my pockets to keep from shading my eyes. They ached. Gra.s.shoppers popped in the choke weeds and crawled across the ground at my feet, rattling like snakes-which made me tense. Tiny brown birds flitted among the flas.h.i.+ng pinwheels and whirligigs and metal sculptures. The sun baked my hair and my shoulders and stung my eyes, though the hairs on my arms were cold and p.r.i.c.kly. I'd begun to perspire in my hairline.

The man holding his tan jacket and a straw hat, who'd been talking through the window of the Buick-a woman was visible in the pa.s.senger's side, laughing at something she'd just heard-this man stood up and began walking toward where I was.

"I had to pry him outa the bed," Charley said still loudly-for the man's benefit. "This is Mr. Remlinger. You can call him *sir.'"

I s.h.i.+elded my eyes again. Sun shone behind the man's head. I was nervous. This was the man who was responsible for me. Arthur Remlinger.

"We've been waiting on you," the man said. I looked up to see his face. He was tall and handsome and had fine blond hair parted carefully on the right side, the opposite side I parted mine on. He wasn't smiling, but he seemed interested. I didn't say anything. "Tell us your name, why don't you?"

"Dell Parsons," I said. My name sounded strange being spoken there.

The man looked at Charley Quarters and smiled. "Does *Dell' stand for something else? It's unusual."

"No, sir," I said.

"Go on, speak out," Charley Quarters said.

"Weren't there supposed to be two of you?" The man stepped closer to me as if he needed to see me better. A pair of metal-rim spectacles hung from a string around his neck. His large hands were bony and manicured. He seemed amused.

"The other one ran off before she got here," Charley said.

"Well, too bad," Arthur Remlinger said. "You look tired. Are you all worn out?" He fanned his face with his straw hat.

"Yes, sir," I said. He hadn't said his own name. Arthur Remlinger wasn't a name that went with the way he looked. It seemed like an older man's name.

"And people are hunting for you, is that our story?" His eyes moved to Charley, then back to me. He wanted me to talk more, but I didn't feel comfortable talking.

"I don't know," I said. Warm breeze spun the silver whirligigs in the weedy yard. They made soft clicking sounds, fluttering.

"He doesn't enjoy talking," Charley said. He turned and looked at the devices spinning. They seemed to make him happy.

"Well. If the RCMP come out here," Arthur Remlinger said, "you just say you're my nephew from back east. They don't know where Toronto is. Would you like me to give you a Canadian name?"

"No, sir," I said.

He smiled, then the smile vanished off his face as if he was uncertain about something that had to do with me. He had a dent in his chin that showed when he smiled. His complexion was smooth and pale. He was unusual looking. "There aren't any of those anyway," he said, and began turning his hat around in his fingers, as if he was appraising me. His gaze rose above my shoulder toward the stucco shack where I'd slept. "Are you accommodated in your little house. Over there?" He spoke that way-as if each word was chosen specifically.

I was sweating down my cheek. I looked around at the terrible shack. A plank shed sat in the weeds beyond it. I knew this was a privy. A large white dog stood outside, facing the door, wagging its tail. A silver whirligig had been placed by the side of it, which meant Charley used the privy. My father always told jokes and stories about privies. They stank and you used the phone book for your paper and never had privacy. I'd never thought I'd have to use one. I didn't want to go back in the stucco shack. "I don't know," I said. "I'd . . ."

"You can move things around inside just as you please. Some of those boxes are mine," Arthur Remlinger said, still turning his hat. "You won't be easy for somebody to find there, if that's our goal. No one'll bother you." He rubbed his ear, which was large, with the heel of his hand. He seemed uncomfortable now. "Fort Royal's where I live down that hardtop four miles." He turned and looked toward the highway. "Which is east. We'll find you something to do at the hotel. Have you been alone before?"

"No, sir," I said.

"I'd imagined not," he said. "I a.s.sume you've worked though."

"No, sir," I said. I didn't know what Arthur Remlinger knew about me, but I believed he must've known most everything-though possibly not that I liked to play chess and was interested in bees, or had never worked because my mother didn't want me to for her own reasons.

"Do you feel strange here?" He looked as if something had just occurred to him. His brows furrowed. I'd never met anyone like him. Mildred had said he was thirty-eight, but his face was a young man's handsome face. At the same time he seemed older, given how he was dressed. He wasn't consistent, the way I was used to people being.

"Yes, sir," I said.

He turned his straw hat around inch by inch with his long fingers, on one of which was a gold ring. "Well," he said, "some things are regrettable that happen to us, Dell. We can't do anything about them." He looked over my shoulder again at the stucco house. "When I got here . . ." He stopped as he looked at the house, then began again. "I lived in your little house there. I'd stand out in the gra.s.s and stare at the sky and fantasize I saw brightly colored birds and I was in Africa and the clouds were mountains." His blue s.h.i.+rt, which looked to me like a nice s.h.i.+rt, was sweated through in places on the front. He kept his pretty beige jacket over his arm.

"He's American, like you are! So he's strange," Charley suddenly said and laughed. He was referring to Arthur Remlinger. He'd been watching the brown birds flit around his pinwheel garden, but also listening without seeming to. He started walking away toward the trailer, which had a wood crate under its door for a step, his rubber boots kicking the weeds, sending gra.s.shoppers and the small birds arcing up. "You two are birds of a feather," he said.

"What do you enjoy doing, Dell?" Arthur Remlinger's blue eyes had almost no color. He c.o.c.ked his head and put one hand awkwardly in his trouser pockets as if we were going to have a conversation now. He seemed to want to speak to me, but not to know what to say. Mildred had said he was unusual, which he certainly was.

"I like to read," I said.

He pursed his lips and blinked at me. This seemed to interest him. "Are you planning to attend a good college then when you're older?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

He was wearing soft suede boots one of his pants legs was tucked into. They looked like expensive boots to me. He was dressed in an expensive way, which made him even more out of place being here. He rubbed one boot toe on the dusty ground, then turned and looked back at the car. The woman inside was watching us. She waved but I didn't wave back. "You and Florence'll probably get on," Arthur Remlinger said. "She's a painter. She's a devotee of the American Nighthawk school. She's very artistic." He nodded. This seemed to amuse him. "I have one of her paintings on the wall in my rooms. I'll show it to you when I see you again." He cast his gaze all around where we were-the hot weeds, the Quonset, the broken-down house trailer, the remnants of the town n.o.body lived in. "They'd definitely burn what's left of this place down where I'm from," he said.

"Why?" I said.

This seemed to almost make him laugh, because the dent suddenly appeared in his smooth chin. But he didn't. "Oh, it would horrify them," he said. Then he smiled. "No more possibilities for success. Americans all fear that. They have an improper fit with history down below."

"How long do I have to stay here?" I said. This was the most important thing I wanted to find out, so I should say it. No one had taken up the subject of my going back to Great Falls. Arthur Remlinger hadn't mentioned my parents-as if he didn't know about them, or they weren't important.

"Well," he said, "stay as long as you want to." He situated his straw hat up onto his head. He was ready to go. The hat had a leather cord strung from the brim that he pulled under his chin. It made him look entirely different-slightly silly. "You might like it here. You could learn something."