Canada: A Novel Part 16

"No, sir," I said. I hadn't said it was agreeable for him to say I was his son. Everything about him was a deception. I didn't know why I had to be a part of it. He, of course, didn't care if I agreed or didn't.

"See here now," Remlinger said, shutting the motor off, then the headlights, making himself an imposing figure in his hat. He took a heavy breath. His jacket squeezed together and gave off its leather odor. "There's no reason for you to get all upset. Just let me show these two yokels the kind of man I am. You don't have to say anything."

He was no longer pretending being here was about hunting or gambling or girls. He hadn't told me anything, but he was admitting I knew-since he knew.

I took in a deep breath of my own and tried to work the sick feeling down out of my throat. The whirring under my ribs hadn't stopped. I wanted to say that I wouldn't go inside. I didn't want to breathe the spoiled smells and rotted plaster dust, have its ceiling press on me, the gloomy, s.h.i.+mmering fluorescent ring like a jail cell. I barely knew how one thing "meant" something else. But the shack, with the two Americans waiting inside for us, meant something bad I didn't want to get close to again.

Except if I didn't go, there'd be a ruckus. Remlinger had a violent temper-Charley had said so-made up of his frustrations. And while he'd never done anything bad to me, he could turn against me if I insisted on staying. His interest in me was nothing. That's how human beings were, I thought-unattached to most of the things they said or felt.

It would just be easier if I went. The Americans could explain their position in the reasonable way I believed was natural to them. Remlinger could deny everything and deceive them. Then they could leave. Tomorrow I could tell Florence I was ready to go to Winnipeg. Remlinger, I thought, would do nothing to stop me. Altogether, it would save me from something worse.

"I'm not upset," I said, the nausea gone out of my throat, banished by realizing I'd make everything easier by going inside.

"I thought you were experiencing an unsteady moment," Remlinger said. His face was in shadow. He s.h.i.+fted in the car seat, scuffed his boots on the floor.

"I didn't have that," I said.

"Well, good. Because there's nothing to be afraid of with these two. They don't know a thing. We don't have to be in here long. Afterward we can go have supper with Flo."

"All right," I said. I thought how happy I'd be if Florence was here. She would have something to say to keep me in the car with her. But I was by myself, and that was how it would be. Remlinger got out of the car, and I got out, and we started toward the shack together.

Chapter 65.

Remlinger knocked on the small door inside the windowed vestibule. I was behind him. The door opened almost at once. The older man, Jepps, was there smiling, wearing his toupee and a green plaid s.h.i.+rt and wool pants that looked new. Crosley sat on one of the two cots in the shadows, wearing a heavy wool coat because it was cold inside, the way it always was. He stared at us intently. They seemed like different men from the Americans I'd watched register-in the day before, and later speak to Remlinger in the bar. They seemed to have a purpose that the tiny room barely held, as if it had gotten smaller. Though it was the same kitchen where I'd slept. Everything the same. The cold-dirt odor that made you think bare ground was directly beneath the linoleum, mingled with the lavender-candle scent I'd introduced. One of them had been smoking a cigar.

The hot-plate burners were turned on and bright red to create heat. The fluorescent ring glowed, giving off poor light. The stuffed coyote still stood on top of the ice box, and the door to the back room-where I'd moved cardboard boxes-was shut. (A third person might be there, I thought. I didn't know who.) The Americans' suitcases were all that was different from when I'd lived there. Standing behind Remlinger, I wondered what the Americans were expecting to do, how they would bring up the subject they were there to bring up, having driven so far. They believed he was who they were looking for. Where were their pistols kept?

"I thought I'd bring my son along with me," Remlinger said loudly. His voice and accent had become different-more at ease. He had had to stoop to come in the low door. He put his hand on top of his fedora to keep from dislodging it. We instantly filled the room up and I felt not able to breathe naturally.

Jepps looked at Crosley on the cot with his two knees together. Crosley shook his head. "We didn't know you had any son."

Remlinger reached his hand around to my shoulder where I stood behind him, nearer the door. "It might not seem like it at first, but it's a good place for a boy to grow up, up here," he said. "It's safe and clean."

"I see," Jepps said. He had a loose jaw when he talked, which made him seem to be always smiling.

Remlinger let several seconds elapse. He seemed completely at ease.

Jepps stuck both his hands in his trouser pockets and wiggled his fingers inside. "We need to talk about something, Arthur."

"That's what you said before," Remlinger said. "That's why we're out here tonight."

"It might be better if we talked about it alone," Jepps said. "Do you know what I mean?"

"Is it not to talk about shooting geese?" Remlinger said, acting surprised. "I thought that's what you cared to do. Possibly there're other things you want me to arrange for you."

"No," Crosley said. The cot was down in the shadows beside the cold window on which sat my lavender candle.

"We don't want to cause any trouble for you, Arthur," Jepps said and sat down on the old straight-back chair where I'd hung my s.h.i.+rt and trousers. He leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. His belly was tight and hard under his green s.h.i.+rt. Underneath my cot were some of the postcard pictures of the naked women that I'd left behind. No one would find them.

"I truly appreciate that," Remlinger said. "I do."

"We think. . .," Crosley said. He paused, as if the next thing he was going to say would be significant and he wanted to think it over a last time. He looked up at Arthur and blinked several times. "We think. . .," he said again, then paused again.

"I used to be a police officer," Jepps said, interrupting him. "I arrested lots of people. You can imagine-in Detroit." Jepps smiled in his loose-jaw way that wasn't smiling. "Many of the ones I arrested and who went on into jail-for years, sometimes-didn't really need to go. They'd only done one thing wrong. And because I caught them for it, and they could explain to me what they'd done, I knew they would never have crossed that line again. Do you know what I mean, Mr. Remlinger?" Jepps for the first time appeared to give us his serious face. He looked right up at Arthur as if he-Jepps-was used to being paid attention to and wanted to be paid attention to now. They were to the serious purpose they'd come all the way out here to act on.

"Yes," Arthur said. "That makes sense all right. Must be common."

(When I think back on it now, fifty years later, from another century, I might've sensed then that Arthur could shoot both Jepps and Crosley but hadn't formulated the idea fully and was still carrying on as though he would deny everything. But he was listening to them. People sometimes speak and mistakenly believe they are the only ones listening. They speak only for their own ear, and forget that others hear them. Jepps and Crosley were following a path they believed to be one of reason and that had their purpose in mind. That's how they'd decided they would succeed. They didn't know that Arthur had given up on reason long ago.) "What we believe," Crosley began deliberately, "is that the only right and good that can come out of this is to put the record straight, Mr. Remlinger. We have no force to bring against you here. It's another country. We understand that."

"Maybe you could tell me what you're talking about. Couldn't you?" Arthur said and adjusted his boot on the cracked linoleum. His leather jacket rubbed against itself again. He still had his hat on over his fine blond hair. The kitchen was airless and overheated.

"You could put your life in order just by talking plainly to us, I think," Crosley said and nodded at Arthur. "We came here not knowing what we'd do. We don't want to cause trouble now. If we just went back knowing the facts, that would be plenty."

Remlinger pulled me nearer to him. "What would I agree to?" he said. "Or what would I have to tell you? You can plainly see I don't know. I'm not a mysterious person. I'm not impersonating anyone. My birth records are on file in the Berrien County Court House, in Michigan."

"We know that," Crosley said. He shook his head again and seemed frustrated. "This is not a thing your son should hear."

"I don't know why not," Remlinger said. He was making a fool of them. They knew it. Even I knew it. They probably knew I wasn't his son.

"You can aerate a bad conscience," Jepps said. That was the word he used. Aerate. "The people I arrest-or that I did-always felt better making a declaration, even if they feared it. Sometimes even years later, like you. We'll go home and you'll never see us again, Mr. Remlinger."

"I'd be sorry not to see you again," Arthur said and smiled. "But what would I need to declare?" No one so far had said the words that told the reason for our being there. No one wanted to, I believed. The Americans, Charley said, lacked conviction for their mission and probably wouldn't say them. Remlinger wouldn't. We could've left then and nothing would've gone on further. A Mexican standoff. No one had any stomach for the words.

"That you set off an explosion. . .," Crosley said abruptly, and had to clear his throat right in the middle of what I thought he wouldn't say and may instantly have regretted saying. "And a man died. It was a long time ago. And we're . . ." Here he lost his air as if the whole thing was too much for him. I hated to hear those words, but I also wanted to hear them. The tiny room was charged by them. Crosley seemed like a weakling for being afraid.

"We're what?" Remlinger said. He was haughty, as if he'd gained a great advantage over Jepps and Crosley and they were of much less consequence for having revealed themselves. "That's laughable," Remlinger said. "I did no such thing."

I was at that moment thinking-feeling the weight of words: Had they ever even known the murdered man? They'd come there on no more than a notion, and now, without conviction, had accused a man of murder, a man they also didn't know, and whose only connection to the crime was that he'd done it. Though importantly-to him-he hadn't meant to. Remlinger, however, had no intention of "aerating" his conscience. The contrary was true.

Jepps and Crosley had forgotten about not wanting to say this in front of me. Though I knew everything and wasn't shocked and knew shock wasn't in my face. Remlinger was not acting like a man who knew nothing about a murder, only like a person claiming to know nothing about one. This would've been the thing they'd come so far to observe. He'd as much as admitted it by saying, "I did no such thing." Each one was sacrificing something-a strength-to achieve an advance toward a goal. Remlinger had told the truth when he said I would learn something valuable. I learned that things made only of words and thoughts can become physical acts.

"We thought an honest way of doing this would be the best," Jepps said. "Give you the chance to liberate your heart."

"What if I have nothing to tell you? To liberate?" Remlinger said derisively. "And if this idea is groundless?"

"We don't think it is," Crosley said, having recovered his air but still sounding weakened. He had taken a handkerchief out of his pants pocket, spit something into it, then folded it away. He was very afraid.

"Yes," Remlinger said. "But if I say it is, that's because it is. And if you two're not able to go back to wherever you live, satisfied, then what's going to happen?" It was just a matter of their wills now. No facts were in contest.

"Well, we'll have to talk about that," Jepps said. He stood up. I thought about the pistols-possibly already taken out, loaded, and put away close by. No one was telling much of the truth here: that Jepps and Crosley had no intention to come this distance and then go away; that they had more conviction than was believed. It was only a matter of deciding on what basis they would do what they meant to do. My presence was possibly the only reason they didn't do it at that moment. That was my use-to keep things in their places, provide a pause for Remlinger to be able to see his situation clearly. I was his point of reference.

"I admit I have something I can tell you," Remlinger said. He sighed deeply, in a way calculated for Jepps and Crosley to hear. "Maybe it'll satisfy you."

"We'll be glad to know about it." Jepps looked approvingly at Crosley, who nodded.

"You're right that Dell doesn't need to hear it. I'll put him in the car." Remlinger was talking about me without the slightest acknowledgment that I was there beside him. Whatever he hadn't formulated in his thinking before (but that I'd sensed he soon would), he had now formulated. What was in his mind was settled. It was one more use he needed to put me to.

"Very fine," Jepps said. "We'll be waiting right here for you."

"I'll be just a moment," Remlinger said. "Is that all right with you, Dell? You can wait in the car?"

"It's all right with me," I said.

"I won't be long," Remlinger said.

Arthur marched me out into the cold to the silent Buick, his grip tight on my shoulder, as if I was going to be punished. Snow was settling down in larger flakes. The wind had gone off and it was colder. Charley's truck was parked in front of his trailer. Light seeped under its door. Mrs. Gedins' white dog sat on the truck's hood, for warmth.

"These two are ridiculous," Arthur said. He seemed angry-a way he hadn't been inside. He'd seemed resigned, and before that haughty. He pulled open the car door and pushed me in behind the wheel. "Start it up," he said. "Get the heat going. I don't want you freezing." He reached in and pulled on the headlights, which shone through the drifting snow toward the house relics down South Alberta Street.

"What are you going to tell them?" I thought for an instant he might slide in beside me. I moved toward the pa.s.senger side.

"What they need to hear," he said. "They'll never leave me alone now." He reached a hand up under the driver's sun visor and took down the small silver pistol I'd seen in his rooms. It wasn't in its shoulder holster. It was there by itself. "I'll try to make this plain to them." He breathed in, then out. It was almost a gasp. "Just stay where you are," he said. "I'll come right back. Then we'll go have supper."

He closed the door, leaving me in the cold car with hot air blowing under the dash. Through the driver's window-snow turning to water on the gla.s.s-I watched his hat move back through the dark toward the shack's door, which was ajar. He didn't look around, or seem in any way hesitant. He had his pistol down at his left side, not hiding it, although it was small and the light was poor, so it might not have been noticed. I thought Jepps and Crosley might have their own pistols out and be holding them when Remlinger came inside. It made sense they wouldn't have believed him, would know what was going to happen-if they knew what they were doing.

Remlinger walked in through the mud vestibule-the gla.s.s panes of which were gone. He stepped to the door and pushed it open with his boot foot.

Jepps, I could see, was still standing in the shallow light just as he had been. Crosley's legs were all that was visible of him from where I was. He was still sitting on the cot. They only expected to be spoken to. They were the uncomplicated men they'd been described as being. Remlinger had misjudged the kind of men they were. He stepped forward into the lighted doorway. I saw Jepps' face acknowledge him. And Arthur raised his silver pistol toward Jepps and shot him. I didn't see him fall. But when Arthur advanced into the kitchen-to shoot Crosley-I saw Jepps lying on the linoleum, his big feet apart. Pop was the sound the pistol made. It was not a large caliber. A lady's gun, I've heard such guns called. I heard no shouts or voices. My window was wound up, the heater blowing. But I also heard the shots that killed Crosley. One pop went off, and I saw Crosley moving clumsily to his right, trying to go behind the cot. Arthur stepped closer to him. I saw him very plainly point the silver pistol down to where Crosley had gone behind the cot to find protection. Arthur shot two more times. Pop. Pop. Then he looked around at the floor, almost casually, to where Jepps was, his left foot agitating up and down very fast. He aimed the pistol almost considerately at Jepps' head or his face and fired another time. Pop. Five shots in all. Five pops. All of which I heard and saw through the open doorway from inside the Buick. Arthur looked down at Jepps as he put his pistol in the side pocket of his jacket. He said something very animated. He seemed to make a face at Jepps, and pointed a finger down at him, and thrust the finger at him three times, and spoke what were for me soundless words (though Jepps surely wasn't aware). Words of reproval that expressed the things he felt. He turned then and looked out the open door, across the dark, snowy s.p.a.ce separating us-my face framed in the car window, containing an expression I cannot imagine. He said something else then, directed at me, his lips moving vociferously, his big fedora still on his head, as if his words put right what he had just done. I felt I knew what these words meant, even if they never reached my ears. They meant, "Now, then. Now, that's settled, isn't it? Once and for all."

Chapter 66.

We buried the two Americans the night they were killed. It is a measure of the kind of man Arthur Remlinger was that he forced me to help Charley Quarters and Ollie Gedins (Mrs. Gedins' son, the tall man in the cap and the windbreaker I'd seen in the Leonard parking yard) with the removal of the bodies out to the holes dug in the prairie where-should they have lived-the Americans would've shot geese the next morning with me as their "guide." It is a second measure of him that he did not in the least take care of me, nor was he at all interested in me, nor did he have a better plan for me than what the spur of that moment provided; certainly not for widening my education other than for me to find out (all over again, in a much worse way) how many more things are possible than my fifteen-year-old mind could've imagined. When he thought of these events later, if he ever did, he would not have entertained a thought of me, might have forgotten even that I was there-like a hammer left in a photograph, present only to provide the scale, a point of reference, and that exhausts its value once the picture's taken. He had, after all, given up on any scale he himself might've provided for himself, just as he'd given up on reason. He did only what he wanted to do, within limits he alone recognized. If you say he should never have brought me there that night, that he changed if not the course of my life, then at least the nature of it; risked my life (I might as easily have been shot and killed had things gone differently)-if you say these things, you would be correct. And it would've been entirely irrelevant to him. Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle. Other people were for the most part dead to him, as dead as the Americans we lumped in Charley's truck that night, while Remlinger stood in the snowy shadows and smoked a cigarette and watched us. Put all these elements together and you'll make as much sense as can be made.

Chapter 67.

You would think the removal of the two dead bodies out of the Overflow House and into the bed of the pickup would be the most memorable event of that night, and possibly the most memorable action a person would ever perform-the sudden weight of them, whereas in life the bodies seemed not to have weight; the awfulness of that; the realization of what a change death brings. As I said, I was the one who picked up Jepps' toupee where it had fallen onto the linoleum and lay in his dense, drying blood. But this is what I most vividly remember-the flimsy lightness of the strange, blood-soaked little topper. I don't remember what the bodies themselves looked like, or how they smelled, or if they were loose or stiff, or what evidence there was of bullets being fired into them, or the smell of the powder (which must've filled the room), or even whether we carried them out like bundles, or dragged them by their hands or by their heels like the cadavers they'd become.

I do remember very well how fast the shooting and the killing took place. There were no dramatics to it, as in movies. It happened at once-almost as if it didn't happen. Only then someone's dead. I sometimes believe I was in the room when it happened, and not in the car. But that isn't true.

I remember after the moment the shootings took place, the look on Arthur Remlinger's face, talking to the dead men-the look of reproval-and then the look he gave me through the door to where I was watching, purely astonished. It was a look (I believed then) that meant he would kill me, too, if the spirit moved him, and I should know that. Murder was written on his face, the look that Jepps and Crosley had been seeking, but only saw in their last moments.

I remember that when the shooting happened and Remlinger looked at me, saying whatever he was saying, I-out of instinct-looked away. I turned my whole body from the window and saw through the other car window Charley Quarters, standing in his trailer door, the light behind him. He was wearing just an unders.h.i.+rt and his underpants in the cold. He was leaning on the door frame, watching. Perhaps he knew everything and was only waiting for his duties to take up.

The final thing I remember was that when we buried them-naked of their clothes, their suitcases and belongings bound for Charley's burn can, their pistols and rings and shotguns bound for the South Saskatchewan River-we folded them into their holes, dug deep enough that coyotes and badgers wouldn't reach them. It was relatively easy. I stood above them looking down-each man in his separate hole, several yards apart-then looked out toward the dark prairie, above which I could hear a goose up in the snowy sky, making the screams they make. And I could see-it was to my surprise, but I saw it-the red Leonard sign off in the night, where Fort Royal was, closer than I would've thought, the butler offering his martini gla.s.s. For a moment it seemed as though nothing had happened.

Can I even speak of the effect of witnessing the Americans' killing-the effect on me? I'll have to make the words up, since the true effect is silence.

You might think that over the years I thought a great deal about Arthur Remlinger, that he was an enigma, a figure worth long consideration. But you would be wrong. He was not in the least an enigma. I had believed for a while that he possessed significance, a rich subtext that was more than merely factual. But he did not, other than as the cause of three men's deaths. He wanted significance, there's no doubt (Harvard, for example, and the first murder he committed). But he couldn't overcome the absence that was his companion in life and that led him everywhere. Reverse-thinking, the habit that had me believing there was significance when there was only absence, may be a good trait in the abstract. (It made me seem more interesting to my mother than I was.) But reverse-thinking can be a matter of ignoring the obvious-a grave error-which can lead to all manner of treacherousness and more errors, and to death, as the two Americans found out.

Much more, though, than I've kept Remlinger in my memory, I have tried hard to keep the Americans-Jepps and Crosley-alive there; since, inasmuch as they disappeared forever and without a trace, my remembrance is the only afterlife they are likely to have. I've thought, as I said, that their deaths seem connected to my parents' ruinous choice to rob a bank-with me as the constant, the connector, the heart of the logic. And before you say this is only fiddling, fingering tea leaves to invent a logic, think how close evil is to the normal goings-on that have nothing to do with evil. Through all these memorable events, normal life was what I was seeking to preserve for myself. When I think of those times-beginning with antic.i.p.ating school in Great Falls, to our parents' robbery, to my sister's departure, to crossing into Canada, and the Americans' death, stretching on to Winnipeg and to where I am today-it is all of a piece, like a musical score with movements, or a puzzle, wherein I am seeking to restore and maintain my life in a whole and acceptable state, regardless of the frontiers I've crossed. I know it's only me who makes these connections. But not to try to make them is to commit yourself to the waves that toss you and dash you against the rocks of despair. There is much to learn here from the game of chess, whose individual engagements are all part of one long engagement seeking a condition not of adversity or conflict or defeat or even victory, but of the harmony underlying all.

Why Arthur Remlinger shot the two Americans I can only guess by trying to hold close to the obvious. Nothing was settled by it-only some time given back to him, postponing until later his disappearance into even profounder obscurity than Saskatchewan-the "foreign travel" he mentioned.

It's possible he had thought it through. Not the way another person would think something through-measuring pros and cons and letting your thoughts and judgment guide your acts with the understanding that they might guide you away from those acts. Possibly he believed the Americans would eventually shoot him; and if not, then they at least would never let him rest (as he said), never go away, never not return; that they were more committed than he'd been given to think. Thinking something through, for him, was much more a matter of shooting them unless something unexpected made him not do it. Who knows what that something might've been, since it didn't occur? Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what you want to do-if you can. Possibly he simply wanted to kill them: because they came to him at all and tried to reason with him; because the idea of talking made him furious-after years of silent frustration, longing, disappointment, isolation, waiting; possibly to be talked to by two ordinary nonent.i.ties from nowhere, who also meant him ill, might've infuriated him, since he possessed an elevated sense of his own intelligence; possibly to hear words like *aerate' and *liberate,' and to have it implied that the two Americans sympathized with him-all that might've made him suddenly approachable and then lethal. He may have long known unreason was his great failure. And he might simply have quit caring, accepted he could do no better, that unreason was his nature, and he deserved whatever he wanted from it. He was a murderer-just like, in a smaller way, my parents were bank robbers. Why hide it, he may have believed. Glory in it. Any time you murder two people there must be a quotient of insanity involved.

What was the outcome of it all-two murders? Little, that I personally know about. The Americans' Chrysler was hidden in Charley's Quonset, then driven down to the States by Ollie Gedins and one of his cousins, using the Americans' identification, which no one at the U.S. border would've been careful enough to notice (it was Canada, it was 1960). The two Canadians checked themselves into the Hi-line Motel in Havre, Montana, using the names Jepps and Crosley; then quietly disappeared into the Montana night, leaving the car parked in front of the room, and the authorities to search for the men, believing they'd left Canada, gotten into Havre, then mysteriously gone out of sight. It's possible the RCMP came to the Leonard later on, asking questions, showing photos. No one connected Arthur Remlinger to the deaths, just as they didn't connect him to the bombing years before. In the case of Jepps and Crosley, buried out on the soon-frozen prairie (the ground had been just soft enough for the holes to be opened), there was never proof their deaths had even occurred. If someone came looking more closely-a wife, a relative up from Detroit-it would've been long after the time I'd taken the bus to Winnipeg.

Something certainly must've pa.s.sed through the electrical currents of the Leonard in the days after the murders. Charley Quarters, however, continued taking Sports into the fields each morning. Remlinger continued circulating spiritedly through the dining room and the bar at night. I was forbidden to take part in anything, as if I was no longer trusted. But I was still allowed to eat in the kitchen, and stay in my room, to be at loose ends around the Leonard, or to roam the wintry streets of Fort Royal as I had in the warm days of September. I saw Charley Quarters' half-ton on the street and in the parking yard behind the hotel. Once I encountered Arthur Remlinger in the lobby where the Americans had registered in. He was reading a letter. He looked up at me in a way he hadn't ever before. He seemed energetic, as if at that moment he wished to express something to me he also hadn't expressed-though his face quickly changed and seemed almost stern. "Sometimes, Dell, you have to cause trouble for things to be clear," he said. "We all deserve a second chance"-which he'd said the night of the murders. What he said didn't make sense, and I didn't know what to say back. I'd seen him murder two people. I was beyond words. He put his letter in his coat pocket, and just walked away. I believe that was how he understood shooting two men and burying them in goose pits on the prairie: it was in behalf of a certain clarity he sought, and of relieving his suffering. I tried to understand it and reconcile it with how I felt-which was mortified and ashamed, as if some part of Remlinger's absence had opened in me. But I never could.

I don't know what Florence either did or didn't know about the murders. My private view is that she knew about them, and at the same time didn't. She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind. So much of life fits into that category. Marriage, for one thing. To do that was consistent with the little I knew about her.

On the fourth day after the murders-the eighteenth of October-Florence came to my room and woke me. She'd brought a pasteboard suitcase with leather latches, and stickers on the side that said PARIS and NEW ORLEANS and LAS VEGAS and NIAGARA FALLS. She set this on the dresser and said I couldn't go the rest of my life with my belongings in a pillowcase. I could return it when I saw her again. She had a bus ticket, which she gave to me, along with a small oil painting she'd made, showing the caragana row at the back of the town of Partreau, the white bee hive boxes beyond, the prairie and blue sky fully painted in. "This is a better view than previous," she said in a business-like way. "This'll make you remember things more optimistically. The town is out of sight." (This, as much as anything, made me think she knew about the murders.) I told her I liked the painting, which I did very much and was astonished to believe it was mine. It was what I should've told her about her other painting, and hoped this would compensate. I put my few clothes, my chess pieces, my Chess Fundamentals book and my roll-up cloth board, my two World Book volumes, the Building the Canadian Nation she'd given me, but not my Bee Sense book, which I'd given up on-all inside the suitcase. Which made it weighty. Together we walked downstairs, out of the hotel and down the bl.u.s.tery main street of Fort Royal, to the barber shop where I'd gotten my hair cut in those last days, as if I knew something was going to happen to me. We stood inside the gla.s.s door, and Florence told me she was putting me on the bus, and I should stay on until Winnipeg-a distance of five hundred miles, which would take until early the next morning. Her son Roland would meet me there. I would live with him and be put in school and taught by the nuns, until things could be "properly sorted out." It would all be fine and dandy. It was good I was leaving before the winter took its grip on life. There was really no use, she said, in saying more about things. She hugged me and kissed me when the bus arrived-things she'd never done, and that she only did then because she felt sorry for me. She would see me again, she said. I did not say good-bye to anyone but her. It was as if I'd already left some time before and was just catching up with myself. Ideas about parting, in which kind formalities are observed all around, turn out to be an exception in life rather than a rule.

I was, of course, very, very happy to be leaving. When I'd sat in the car after the shootings, and before the removal of the Americans, I'd looked around out Remlinger's car windows at the Americans' car and at Partreau, there in the dark and snow, and had decided it was a place made for murders, a place of absence and promises abandoned. I had almost escaped it, I thought, but finally I hadn't. This, I felt-in my seat on the bus, rolling out of Fort Royal and Saskatchewan-seemed to be my last best chance.

I had very few looking-back thoughts as the bus plowed eastward. I have never been good at that. Events must sink into the ground and percolate up naturally again for me to pay them proper heed. Or else be forgotten. I didn't for an instant think all the things that had happened to me would color how I thought of my parents and their much smaller crime. Neither did anything enhance my belief that I would ever see them again-though I wanted to. The uses that Remlinger had put me to-to be his audience, then to be his supposed source of interest, then to act the part of his son, then to be his surety, his witness and accomplice-were not things I was glad about. But they hadn't, for all of it, kept me from climbing the steps on that bus, or kept me from a future I wanted to have.

Did he not think I would tell what I'd seen? I'm sure there was never a moment when he thought I would speak about what I'd seen and partic.i.p.ated in-no more than the two Americans would in their poor graves. Some things you just don't tell. I feel in fact a small satisfaction to realize he knew me at least that well, that ultimately he'd paid some attention to me.

Mildred Remlinger had counseled me to try to include in my thinking as much as I possibly could, and not let my mind focus in an unhealthy way on only one thing, and to always know something I could relinquish. My parents for their part had by turns counseled me in favor of acceptance. (Flexibility was my mother's word.) In time, I would be able to explain it all to myself-somewhere. Somehow. Possibly to my sister, Berner, who I knew I would see again before I died. Until that time, I would try to mediate among the good counsels I'd been given: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me-and, with these things, to make a life.

Chapter 68.

I have always counseled my students to think on the long life of Thomas Hardy. Born, 1840. Died, 1928. To think on all he saw, the changes his life comprehended over such a period. I try to encourage in them the development of a "life concept"; to enlist their imaginations; to think of their existence on the planet not as just a catalog of random events endlessly unspooling, but as a life-both abstract and finite. This, as a way of taking account.

I teach them books that to me seem secretly about my young life-The Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, The Sheltering Sky, The Nick Adams Stories, The Mayor of Casterbridge. A mission into the void. Abandonment. A figure, possibly mysterious, but finally not. (These books aren't taught now to high school students in Canada. Who knows why?) My conceit is always "crossing a border"; adaptation, development from a way of living that doesn't work toward one that does. It can also be about crossing a line and never being able to come back.