A Short History of Indians in Canada (13 page)

Sunday. And the train is late.

Sonny stands at the edge of the pool at the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL scooping bugs out of the water with the long-handled net and waits for the train to come chug-chug-chugging along. So he can hear Uncle HOLIE blow the train’s horn. So he can wave to all the passengers on their way to the coast. Water in the pool is sure blue. Blue and cool. Maybe he’ll take his shirt off. But he isn’t going to get in. No, sir. No sky-blue water for him. Even if the clouds don’t come and cool things off, he isn’t fool enough for that.

He’s the smart one.

There are three bugs on the net. Dead. All the bugs he pulls out of the pool are dead. When DAD was a boy, there were fish in the pool. That’s what DAD says, and he knows everything.

Sonny knows everything too. He knows all about sky-blue pool water and dead bugs. You can’t swim in the pool. You can’t swim in the pool unless you rent a room.
Those are the rules, and ADAM and EVE and all their kids come by on vacation in a brand new Winnebago pull up to the office and say, pretty please, aren’t going to get in the water until there’s up-front money and the key deposit. That’s the way things are.

Like it or hike it.

Sonny steps on a crack. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Cracks in the concrete. Cracks in the white stucco. Cracks in the black asphalt. Cracks in the fifty-foot sign with the flashing neon-red ball that blinks “GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL” and “Welcome.”

And it’s new.

Cracks in the windows. Cracks in the walls. Cracks hiding at the bottom of the pool where Sonny can’t get at them.

Don’t worry about the cracks, DAD tells Sonny. After a while, you don’t even notice them.

The GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL. Parking for long-haul truckers. Pool. Ice-making machine. Laundromat. Vibrating beds.

One day all this will be his. That’s what DAD says.

The GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL. Twenty-four rooms. Cable television. Telephone. Air conditioning. Video rentals. Breakfast coupons for the Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace.

Sonny swings the net deep and catches some cloud-shade on his shoulder. Here they come, he thinks to himself, and he forgets the bugs and looks up into the sky.
But it’s not a cloud. There are no clouds. Not even on the edges of the world, which he can see clearly from poolside, is there even the mention of a cloud.

Now, what the DING-DONG is that, he says to the dead bugs in the net.

It’s surely not a cloud. But now half of him is in the shade, and he’s standing in shadows with his net and the dead bugs, watching the pool water turn black and deep.

Whatever it is, it’s coming fast. And he starts thinking fast, too. A meteor would be okay. Or a flying saucer. Or a dark-green garbage bag.

One thing is for sure. It’s not the train.

Okay. Okay. He looks up because he’s run out of things, and he’s sorry now he didn’t finish high school.

“DING-DONG,” he says, even though he knows DAD doesn’t like that kind of language.

“DING-DONG,” he says, because he’s excited. Not in a naughty, excited way, but in that excited way he gets when he watches someone get whistled with a phaser on
Star Trek.

“Clear the way!”

Doesn’t sound like a meteor.

“Look out below!”

Doesn’t sound like a green garbage bag.

“MOVE IT!”

And that’s when Sonny thinks about running. Getting the DING-DONG out of there. And he knows now that this is the right answer, and that he would have thought of it all by himself if he had just had a little more time, but now it’s too late, and he knows that whatever it is
that is falling out of the sky and screaming at him is going to hit the motel or the parking lot or the pool or—DING-DONG, DING-DONG, DING-DONG—him.

Before he can finish netting all of the bugs.

The way DING-DONG hits the fan.

POOOWLAAASH!

The explosion whips the net out of Sonny’s hands and knocks him off his feet, and, as he goes down in a wet, lumpy heap, he finally figures it out. The video camera was the right answer. He should have run and got the video camera.

DING-DONG!

Instead he didn’t finish high school and that’s sure as DING-DONG one of the reasons he’s soaking wet, flat on his DING-DONG, watching the waves break over the side of the pool. His ears are ringing, but when he opens his eyes he discovers that he can see fine, and what he sees when he looks is something floating to the surface of the water.

It’s too big to be a bug.

“Hello,” says the woman. “Hello,” she says again.

All Sonny can see is the woman’s head, but what he sees is disturbing. RED SKIN and BLACK HAIR. Okay, okay, okay. Sonny has to think. BLACK PEOPLE have BLACK SKIN and BLACK HAIR. And ASIAN PEOPLE have YELLOW SKIN and BLACK HAIR.

This is hard.

And HISPANIC PEOPLE have BROWN SKIN and BLACK HAIR. So THE WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY must be…must be…

Sonny takes out his
Illustrated Field Guide for Exotic Cultures
, skips past Leviticus, and goes straight to the section with the pictures. Sonny thinks about asking the woman. Asking in a friendly manner. But he remembers that
asking is against the law,
and that if the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY has the money or a valid credit card he is legally required to rent her a room. Unless the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL is all booked up, which it always is when people from exotic cultures arrive at the front desk.

But he can guess. Guessing isn’t illegal. And after looking at all the pictures, some of which are pretty graphic and revealing, he guesses that the woman in the pool is an INDIAN.

“You have to be a guest to swim in the pool,” says Sonny.

“What happened to all the water?” says the woman.

“That’s the rule.” And now Sonny’s feeling better. Now he’s feeling in charge, again.

“Last time I was here,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY, “everything was water.”

A meteor would have been simpler. Not the one that killed the dinosaurs. Something smaller. Dig it out, fill in the hole, patch the cracks, and get on with renting rooms to long-haul truckers bound for the coast. Too DING-DONG bad. Could have sold a meteor.

“What happened to the turtle?”

“We’re all booked up,” says Sonny.

“Why does the water smell funny?” The WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY gets out of the pool and
Sonny can see that his exotic culture tribulations are not over yet.

But Sonny has it figured out, now. The WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY fell out of a plane. You read about such things every day. She fell out of a plane. And the wind tore her clothes off.

That’s why she’s NAKED.

“DING-DONG,” says Sonny, because he’s excited and appalled at the same time.

“DING-DONG,” he says again, because he didn’t finish high school and can’t think of anything else to say.

But most of all, Sonny says “DING-DONG” twice because the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY has really big YOU-KNOW-WHATS and she’s really hairy YOU-KNOW-WHERE.

And because she’s PREGNANT.

Sonny looks up in the sky. But he doesn’t see any sign of her INDIAN husband on the way down. Maybe he wasn’t on the plane. Maybe he’s driving out to meet her. Maybe he’s on horseback. Maybe he’s chasing buffalo. Maybe he’s annoying a settler. Sonny knows what INDIANS do when no one is looking.

“You can’t wait here,” says Sonny. “You’ll have to wait for him at the Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace.”

“Who?”

“Your husband.”

“What husband?”

DING-DONG, thinks Sonny. He was afraid of that. How many times has DAD warned him about something like this? As if there weren’t enough women in the
world already. As if we needed another one. And an INDIAN one at that. And PREGNANT at that. Well, she can’t go to the Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace. Now that Sonny thinks about it, he remembers that people eat there. People bring their families there.

“We’re all booked up.”

“There’s supposed to be a turtle,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY, and she crosses her arms on top of her tummy and underneath her YOU-KNOW-WHATS, so the water drips off THOSE OTHER THINGS. “Where are all the water animals?”

Turtles? Water animals? Sonny doesn’t like the sound of this.

“Who’s going to dive into the water and bring up the dirt?”

All right! That does it. Sonny drops the pole by the side of the pool so it makes a CLANG-CLANG sound and gets the woman’s attention.

“Dirt?” says Sonny. “Do you see any dirt at the bottom of my pool?”

The WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY walks to the edge of the pool and stares into the sky-blue water. And she looks at the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL. She doesn’t look too happy now. She doesn’t look too smug, either. Now she knows who’s in charge.

“Not again,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY.

“As for any animals,” says Sonny, “there’s a pet-damage deposit of twenty-five dollars, cash or credit card,” though
Sonny doesn’t know why he says this, since he can see that the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY doesn’t have any animals, nor does she have any pockets in which to keep a credit card or enough money for a pet deposit, let alone a room.

It’s a good thing Sonny’s already made the beds and vacuumed the office and checked the licences on the cars in the parking lot against the registration forms. It’s a good thing he’s collected the money from the vending machines and the washing machine and the dryer. It’s a good thing he has nothing better to do than to stand by the pool and chat with an INDIAN who is NAKED and PREGNANT. It’s a good thing DAD is having a nap. It’s a good thing there’s nothing on television.

“Why do you guys keep messing things up?” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY. “Why can’t you guys ever get things right?”

Sonny isn’t sure the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY knows the difference between right and not right. For instance, being NAKED is certainly not right. Being PREGNANT without a husband is definitely not right.

And being INDIAN…well, Sonny isn’t positive that being an INDIAN is not right, but…

“Looks like we’re going to have to fix it again,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY.

We? What do you mean
we, Kemo-sabe?
DAD taught him that one. No way, Jose. Sonny knows them all.
Hasta la vista,
baby. Take a hike.

“Before it’s too late.”

Sonny knows better than to fall for that one. Only thing late around here is the train.

“Okay,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY. “Pay attention. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. I fall out of the sky into the water and am rescued by a turtle. Four water animals dive to the bottom of the water and one of them brings up a bunch of dirt. I put the dirt on the back of the turtle and the dirt expands until it forms the Earth. Are you with me so far?”

DAD says that people who sound as if they know what they are talking about are generally trying to sell you something.

“Then I give birth to twins, a right-handed twin and a left-handed twin. They roam the world and give it its physical features. Between the two of them, they help to create a world that is balanced and in harmony.”

Encyclopedias. Sonny is pretty sure that the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY is selling encyclopedias.

“But if I can’t find the turtle, I can’t fix the world.”

The train doesn’t pull onto the siding next to the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL until evening.

“Three guys in a Chevrolet stalled on a level-crossing,” Uncle HOLIE tells Sonny. “Drunk as skunks. Where’s your DAD?”

“Sunday,” says Sonny. “He’s resting.”

Uncle HOLIE and Sonny find the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY a nice window seat.

“As soon as I find that turtle,” says the WOMAN
WHO FELL FROM THE SKY, “I’ll be back.”

Uncle HOLIE and Sonny stand by the side of the train and watch the sun set. “Don’t worry,” Uncle HOLIE tells Sonny, as he signals the engineer and steps onto the caboose. “It’s what DAD would do. And there hasn’t been a turtle on the coast for years.”

Sonny watches the train chug-chug-chug off into the night, the lights of the caboose swaying in the dusk. Then he walks back to the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL. With its twenty-four air-conditioned rooms. Cable television. Ice machine. Vibrating beds. Breakfast coupons for the Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace.

Sonny gets a soft drink from the vending machine and stretches out on one of the aqua-green plastic chaise longues by the pool and closes his eyes. Fix the world? Just as well the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY couldn’t find a turtle, he thinks to himself. Just as well she didn’t have a credit card.

The white stucco of the motel plumps up pink and then blue as evening spreads out across the land, and the big neon ball that says “GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL” and “Welcome” twinkles like a star in the western sky.

Auntie Beth was the scandal in our family. Before her death in a scuba-diving accident, she had had seven husbands. Not counting the Indian, there were six. Granny preferred not to count the Indian, because Beth and Juan “Kid Savage” McTavish were married in Mexico. It was an Indian ceremony; Beth sent back pictures but there was no doubt in Granny’s mind about the legitimacy of a “pow-wow” as she called it.

“Can’t call that a marriage,” she said.

Then, too, Granny wasn’t at all sure that Juan was really an Indian. She had lived a long time, she said, and she was sure we had killed off all the Indians.

“He’s probably just a Mexican,” Granny said.

According to the postcards Beth sent, Juan was a Kickapoo, part of a tribe that had fled the U.S. in the 1800s. Phoebe brought home a book from the library and, sure enough, the Kickapoos were in it. Granny just shook her head.

“I’m sure we killed them, too.”

Juan was a professional boxer as well. “He fights for
Kickapoo culture,” Beth wrote. All the money he made in the ring, she explained, went back to the tribe and that was why they were too poor to travel and why Beth loved him. It was the kind of nobility you found in new novels and old poems, and Granny snorted whenever Beth started about sacrifices and commitments. Beth wrote several times to say that she and Juan were coming to visit, but they never did.

One year later, Beth left noble causes and Juan and Mexico, and took up with a Chinese architect in Seattle. She married three more times before she died, floating up in the Gulf and leaving a string of stories, no children, and two and a half million dollars in her wake.

None of us knew about the money until after she died, and we were all summoned to court and given our share of her estate. After that, Auntie Beth was toasted as “eccentric” rather than “crazy” and “headstrong” rather than “self-indulgent.” And all of the Auntie Beth stories were slowly resurrected from the family vault, polished and passed around at dinners as a memorial to the strength of the woman and a testimony to the power of cash. It was mostly the men in the family who drank to her health.

Granny endured the stories, but she endured them poorly, interrupting whenever Geraldine or Phoebe began romancing Beth and her penchant for “minor eccentricities.”

“She wasn’t eccentric, Phoebe,” Granny would say. “She was a silly girl.”

“Oh, no,” Phoebe would whine. “Auntie Beth was just modern.”

“Fiddle,” said Granny.

On land, perched high in her floral wingback chair, Granny looked like a prehistoric bird, one of those dinosaur things, half reptile, with their long, jagged beaks and their ancient leather wings. Her hands were hooked claws which she clutched tightly in her lap, so you couldn’t see the danger. But in the ocean of life, she was a leviathan sunk comfortably in the depths, looking up with black, bloodless eyes, watching the rest of us float around above her.

“Married six times,” Granny would say, suddenly, and shake her head.

“Seven times, Granny,” Geraldine or Phoebe would correct.

“Just looking for attention.”

Granny had married once. There were eight children and a big house and Grandpa’s whiskey. Geraldine said that Grandpa started drinking one night and raised his hand to hit Granny. “Uncle John said he didn’t hit her, just raised his hand. When he realized what he had done, he was filled with remorse and began to cry.” However, Aunt Ruth told us that Grandpa had hit Granny, knocked her down and that he only stopped because he was too drunk to continue. In Uncle John’s version, Grandpa, blinded by tears, tried to sit down on a straight-backed kitchen chair, lost his balance, fell, and broke his arm. Aunt Ruth said that after Grandpa stopped hitting her, he collapsed in the easy chair and fell asleep and Granny went to the kitchen, took down a ten-inch cast-iron skillet, and broke his arm with it.

Whatever happened, Grandpa’s arm was in a cast for two months and the next year, when Aunt Ruth graduated from high school, Grandpa moved out of the house (if you listened to Uncle John) or was thrown out (if you believed Aunt Ruth). He rented a small apartment above the firehouse and was found that winter, frozen in a hard lump behind the Chinese laundry, dead of a broken heart or dead drunk.

After that, Geraldine said, Uncle John said Auntie Beth started doing all sorts of crazy things. “It was because Auntie Beth loved Grandpa and she hated Granny for killing him.” Aunt Ruth said Auntie Beth just liked being different. “Beth and Granny would always have these long talks about life,” Ruth told us. “Those two were too much alike. You could see it.” Uncle John said he could hear Beth and Granny arguing all the time, shouting. “Granny didn’t like Beth doing the things she did, but Beth would tell her to go to hell and do them anyway.”

There was occasional agreement in these stories. When Beth was eighteen, Granny put her out of the house. Homer Pyre saw Beth and Harold Loften holding hands in the theatre and called Granny. Harold was black and/or a criminal and Granny was a racist and/or concerned. Beth said she did it just to see what Granny would do and what Granny did was to pull all of Beth’s clothes out of the drawers and wad them into three suitcases and place the cases on the front lawn. There was an envelope taped to the side of the large green one. Inside was a note, a bus ticket to
Roseville, one hundred miles away, and a cheque for fifty dollars.

“Here are your clothes,” the note said. “Please leave town.”

So Auntie Beth left. Three years later, she came back with her first husband. He was a dentist in a three-piece blue suit with a blue shirt and a blue tie. He brought a bouquet of yellow flowers and a bright pink box of Granny’s favourite candy, large, white-and-red-striped, hard-shelled peppermints. Phoebe and Geraldine took turns bringing in tea and listening at the door.

“He just sits there and goes on and on about teeth and what a nice house this is.”

That evening, Beth and her dentist husband went back to San Francisco, and, when we got up in the morning, there were three suitcases on the front lawn. Phoebe and Geraldine opened the note that was taped to the side of the large green one. There was a cheque for fifty dollars and a note that said simply, “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.”

We brought the suitcases inside and Geraldine gave Granny the note.

“Wasn’t that dentist fellow of Beth’s nice?” Geraldine said.

Granny’s eyes crackled, and the shawl covering her hands moved.

“He was so polite and well-dressed. That was a very modern tie.”

Granny grunted and said something that sounded like “guppy.”

And so the procession of “guppies” began. Every few years, Beth would bring another by, and Granny would sit in her chair, pass the candy dish, and watch them with the casual purpose of a hungry animal.

“Beth certainly lives an exciting life,” said Phoebe over supper. “All those men and all that travelling.”

“Those aren’t men,” said Granny. “Please pass the turkey.” And Granny stabbed a big piece of white meat. “Was probably better off with the Mexican.”

Between the marriages, Beth would come home alone. Sometimes she would just stay in her room. After her fourth marriage, when she was at the house, Geraldine and Phoebe and I sneaked down the stairs and listened at the door to the big room.

“You’re looking well,” said Granny. “Any children?”

“I’m not married right now.”

“Oh,” said Granny.

“I’ve met a very nice man, though. I think you’ll like him.”

“Of course. What happened to the Mexican?”

“You mean the Kickapoo.”

“I mean the Mexican.”

“Did you ever meet Bill?”

“Who’s Bill?”

Sometimes when Auntie Beth came home, she would take my sisters and me to the park, and we’d play on the swings and talk.

“Have you been to Tahiti?” Beth would ask.

Of course, we hadn’t, but Auntie Beth had, and she told us all about the sand piled up at steep angles on the beaches and the coral reefs alive with dark eels and bright fish and the sunsets all pink and glowing.

“Have you ever been skydiving?”

We said we didn’t even know anyone who had done that.

“I’ve done that, too,” said Beth. “You have to wear goggles because the wind blows so hard up there. And it’s scary when you first step out of the plane and you begin to fall. Sometimes you wonder if your chute will open, but mostly you feel as though you could float forever like you were in an inner tube on the ocean. You just rock back and forth up there. My instructor says that some people enjoy the sensation so much that they just forget to open their chute.”

Auntie Beth had done everything. She had gone canoeing down the Coppermine River in Canada and had surfed in Australia. She had been to Hawaii twice and climbed a volcano. She even had her own pilot’s licence, and she could speak French and Spanish.

“Why’d you get married so many times?” Geraldine asked her once.

“Looking,” said Beth.

“For what?”

“The right man, I guess.”

“Why’d you marry all those wrong ones?”

“They didn’t seem wrong at the time,” Beth laughed.

“What was the Indian like?” said Phoebe.

“He was the best,” said Beth.

“Granny doesn’t have a man anymore, and she isn’t looking,” said Phoebe.

“Granny doesn’t need a man,” said Beth.

“Do you need a man?” said Geraldine.

Granny and Beth had a big fight after Beth brought home her sixth or seventh husband, depending on how you were counting. He was an artist with short spiky hair and red glasses. He smoked long, thin, black cigars, and, when Granny had Geraldine get him an ashtray and a plastic bag, he picked at the side of his nose, looked over his red glasses, and said, “What’s the bag for, lady?”

“It’s for your smelly butt,” said Granny and she leaned out of her chair, ready to float over to the couch and chew on his head.

Later that night, Beth came back without her husband and she and Granny sat across from one another in the big room. For a long time, neither of them said a word.

Finally, Beth said “You’ll be dead soon, why don’t you try being nice?”

“I am nice,” said Granny.

“Why do you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You’ve never liked any of my husbands.”

“I never met the Mexican.”

“What about the others?”

“I’m very fond of you.”

“You don’t even let us stay in your house overnight.”

“You can stay whenever you like,” said Granny.

There was another silence. Beth sat on the couch. Granny sat in her chair.

“I don’t think you love me at all.”

“I love all my children.”

“Robert says you’re an old shark,” said Beth.

“Who’s Robert?” said Granny.

The next morning, Beth was gone. None of us ever saw her again. The postcards continued to come, but there weren’t any more husbands. She sent us a postcard from Alaska and one from American Samoa. We looked up each place on the globe that Granny kept in the living room.

About two years later, we received a letter from the Galveston sheriff’s office that said that Beth had died in a scuba-diving accident in the Gulf of Mexico. She had gone too deep, the letter said, and just ran out of air.

Phoebe was sure Beth had gone back to Mexico to be with Juan. “Isn’t that romantic,” said Phoebe. “She was looking for him when she died.”

“What was she doing looking for him underwater?” snapped Granny.

But Phoebe was adamant, and maybe that’s what Beth was looking for after all, for Juan. Looking down into the warm waters past the smaller fish, down to where the blue plunges into darkness and great shadows float slowly in the depths. And maybe it was Granny she saw just before her lungs burst.