Canada (38 page)

The Americans in the bar were mostly large, loud-talking men dressed in rough hunting attire. They laughed and smoked and drank rye whiskey and beer and enjoyed themselves. Many of them thought that being in Canada was highly comical, and made jokes about having Thanksgiving in October and the strange ways Canadians talked (I’d never much detected it, though I tried) and how Canadians hated Americans but all wished they lived there and could be rich. They talked about the election campaign “down below,” how they expected Nixon to overpower Kennedy, and how important it was to fight the Communists. They talked about the football teams where they were from. (Some were from Missouri, others from Nevada, others from Chicago.) They made jokes about their wives and told stories about their children’s achievements, and their jobs back home, and about noteworthy events that had happened on other hunting expeditions and how many ducks and geese and other animals they’d killed. Sometimes they talked to me—if they noticed me, or if they’d earlier in the day sent me on an errand to the drugstore or the hardware for some piece of equipment they lacked. They wanted to know if I was Canadian, or if I was “Mr. Remlinger’s son,” or the boy of some other hunter who was there. I told them I was visiting from Montana, that my parents had gotten sick, but I’d be going home again soon and back to school—which often made them shout out and laugh and clap me on the back and say I was “lucky” to be skipping school and would never want to go back after being a “hunting guide” and leading a life of adventure most boys only dreamed of. They seemed to think Canada, although comical, was mysterious and romantic, and where they lived was boring and corny, yet they still wanted to live there.

At the end of these evenings—it was before eight o’clock, when Charley would pass through, having checked the goose pits, and was telling the Sports to go to bed, since we were rising at four—I would climb the stairs back to my room and lie in bed, reading my
Chess Master
magazine, and later on would listen to the hunters thumping up to their rooms, laughing and coughing and hocking and clinking glasses and bottles and using the bathroom and making their private noises and yawning, and boots hitting the floor until their doors closed and they’d be snoring. It was then I could hear single men’s voices out on the cold main street of Fort Royal, and car doors closing, and a dog barking, and the switchers working the grain cars behind the hotel, and the air brakes of trucks pausing at the traffic light, then their big engines grinding back to life and heading toward Alberta or Regina—two places I knew nothing about. My window was under the eave, and the red Leonard sign tinted the black air in my room, whereas in my shack there had been only moonlight and my candle and the sky full of stars and the glow in Charley’s trailer. I lacked a radio now. So to set my mind off toward sleep I inventoried the experiences of the day and the thoughts that had accompanied them. I considered, as always, my parents, and whether it was hard for them to be good in jail, and what they would think about me now, and how I would’ve conducted myself had I been present at their trial, and what we would’ve said, and whether I would’ve told them about Berner, and if I would’ve said I loved them where others would hear. (I would’ve.) I also considered the hunters’ gruff American voices and the achievements of their children, and their wives waiting at the kitchen door, and all their adventures, none of which caused me envy or resentment. I had no achievements so far, or anyone waiting for me, or even a home I could go back to. I just had my days’ duties and my meals and my room with my few possessions. Yet I surprisingly went to sleep almost always relieved to feel the way I did. Mildred had told me I was not to think bad of myself, since what had happened had been through no fault of mine. Florence had told me our lives were passed on to us empty and our task was to make up being happy. And my own mother—who’d never been where I was now, and knew nothing about Canada except as a view across a river, and who did not even know the people she’d handed me over to—even
she
had felt it was better for me to be here than in some juvenile prison in Montana. And she undoubtedly loved me.

Berner had written that our lives were ruined but had far still to go. And I couldn’t have made it up that I was truly happy. But I was satisfied not to haul my water in a pail, not to bathe myself using the pump and the hot plate and a bar of soap, not to sleep in the cold, drafty, acrid shack and see no one I knew, and not to share the privy with Charley Quarters. It’s possible, I felt, that I was experiencing improvement, which for a time I hadn’t believed I ever would. So that it was possible to think—and this was important to me—that at least some part of my human makeup was inclined to believe life could be better.

The only time I’d met Arthur Remlinger and truly had a word with him, he’d asked me—half joking—if I would like to change my name. I’d told him no, as anyone would’ve—especially me, wanting to cling to who I was and what I knew about myself when those points were in dispute. But in my room under the eave, I felt Arthur Remlinger possibly knew something I hadn’t known. Which was: that if anyone’s mission in the world was to gain experience, it might be necessary, as I’d already thought, to become someone different—even if I didn’t know who, and even if I’d believed, and our mother had taught us, that we were always a faithful version of who we were when we began life. My father, of course, might’ve said that this first person—the person I’d started to be—had stopped making sense and needed to give way to someone who would do better. He had probably thought that about himself by then. Though for him it was too late.

Chapter 54

I
T WAS FOLLOWING MY ADJUSTMENT TO FORT ROYAL—
a town with a genuine life and a consideration for itself—that I moved more into the sphere of Arthur Remlinger, which Florence had indicated to me would occur and I was extremely eager to have happen and couldn’t have said why it hadn’t happened already. In my weeks of living in Partreau, Arthur Remlinger had seemed like a different person each time I made contact with him—which naturally confused me and made me feel even more alone than I would’ve otherwise. One time, he would be friendly and enthusiastic, as if he’d been waiting to tell me something—but never did. Another time, he’d be reserved and awkward and seem to want to get away from me. And still other times he was stiff and superior acting—always costumed in his expensive (and what I thought of as) eastern clothes. To me, he was the most inconsistent person I’d ever met in life. Though it made him fascinating, and made me want him to like me, having never been around strange people, except our mother, and having never found anyone precisely interesting before, except Berner, who more than anything else was like me.

Once, on what became one of our automotive outings—after I’d moved into the Leonard and begun to see him more, and during which times Remlinger would navigate his Buick at battering speeds over the bumpy highway, declaring on this and that subject that occupied him (Adlai Stevenson, whom he loathed, the deterioration of our natural rights by the forces of syndicalism, his own acute powers of observation, which, he said, should’ve permitted him a life as a famous lawyer)—the Buick all at once crested a dusty rise at a speed of almost ninety. And there on the pavement ahead were six colorful pheasants, wandering carelessly out of the grain to peck at gravels and wheat seeds blown off the trucks en route to the elevator in Leader. I expected him to brake or swerve. I’d been holding the sides of my seat already. But both my hands flew to the dashboard, my feet stood up hard on the car floor, my knees locked in anticipation of the big Buick drifting or skidding or swerving off into the stubble or taking flight and tumbling whatever distance ninety miles an hour would propel us, after which we’d be dead. But Arthur failed to consider the brakes. Nothing in his features even changed. He drove straight through the pheasants—one struck the windshield, two catapulted into the air, a fourth and fifth were transformed into feathers on the highway, a sixth was untouched, barely noticing the car passing. “You see a lot of those birds out here,” he said. He didn’t look at the mirror. I was astonished.

Later, when we’d cruised through the small town of Leader, Saskatchewan, and parked and gone inside the Modern Café for a sandwich, Arthur fixed me, across the table, with his clear blue eyes, his thin lips together, almost smiling, as if he might be speaking words silently before he said them, but then didn’t smile. He was wearing his brown leather jacket with the fur collar—like the bomber jacket my father had brought back from the war—though Remlinger’s was nicer. He had his green silk handkerchief tucked in his collar as a napkin. His reading glasses dangled on their string against his chest. His blond hair was carefully combed. His bony, manicured fingers with thin hairs on top maneuvered his fork and knife as if his food was of the greatest interest to him. There’d been no reason given for why he’d ignored me for these weeks. Now no reason was going to be given, I assumed, for why he’d stopped. It was just how things were.

“How long have you been here now, Dell?” Arthur Remlinger said and suddenly beamed at me as if I was someone he realized he liked.

“Five weeks,” I said.

“And are you enjoying your work? Getting something out of it?” He spoke in his precise way that involved his mouth moving animatedly, as if each word had a space between itself and the next word, and he enjoyed hearing each one. His voice was unexpectedly nasal coming from such a handsome, refined-seeming man. These were things about him that made him seem old-fashioned, though he wasn’t old.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He tried his fork on the surface of the fried pork chop he’d ordered. “Mildred told me you might be a little unsteady.” He cut down into a small fatty edge and put that in his mouth, the tines of his fork turned down in a way I hadn’t seen anyone eat. He was left-handed—like Berner. “It’s perfectly all right if you are,” he said. “I’m unsteady myself. And I’m easily led—or I once was. We’re all unsteady out here. It’s not natural being here. You and I are alike in that.”

“I’m not unsteady.” I resented Mildred telling him such a thing, and resented her for knowing it. I didn’t want to be that way.

“Well.” He looked pleased, which suited his fine features. “You’ve never been alone before, and you’ve had an unlikable experience.”

There were several people in the café, farmers and townspeople, and two police officers in heavy brown coats with brass buttons, eating at the lunch counter. They noticed us. They knew who Arthur Remlinger was, just as the Mormon woman in the street in Fort Royal had. He was very recognizable.

I wasn’t supposed to ask questions but was supposed to wait to be told things. But I wanted to know why he’d driven his car through the pheasants and killed them. It’d been so shocking. My father would never have done that, though I thought Charley Quarters would. It hadn’t seemed to linger in Remlinger’s mind. “It’s not a simple chore to live up here,” he said, calmly chewing his fatty meat. “I’ve never liked it. Canadians are isolated and in-grown. Not enough stimulation.” A lock of his blond hair fell across his forehead. He moved it back with his thumb. “The writer Tolstoy—you’ve heard of him”—I’d seen his name on the book shelf—“he paid for peasants to come out here in the last century. I presume, to get rid of them. Some of those people are still here—their ancestors are, anyway. There was a brief civilization. People put on plays and pageants and light operas. There were debating societies, and famous Irish tenors came from Toronto to sing.” His blond eyebrows jumped. He smiled and looked around at the other people in the café and at the policemen. There was a murmur of voices and the noise of silverware on plates that he seemed to like. “Now”—he went on cutting and eating and talking—“we’re returning to the Bronze Age. Which isn’t all bad.” He wiped his lips with his silk handkerchief, fixed his gaze on me again, then turned his head at an angle to indicate he had a question. I saw he had a tiny purple birthmark on his neck in the shape of a leaf. “Do you think you have a clear mind, Dell?”

I didn’t understand what that meant. Possibly a clear mind was the opposite of unsteady. I wanted to have one. “Yes, sir,” I said. I’d ordered a hamburger and had begun to eat it.

He nodded and moved his tongue around behind his lips, then cleared his throat. “Living out here produces a fantasy of great certainty.” He smiled again, but the smile slowly faded as he looked at me. “People do crazy things out of despair when their certainty fades. You’re not inclined to do that, I guess. You’re not in despair, are you?”

“No, sir.” The word made me think of my mother in her jail cell—smiling and helpless. She’d been in despair.

Arthur took a sip of his coffee, holding the cup around its rim—not by its little curved handle—blowing on the surface before he sipped. “That’s settled then. Despair’s out.” He smiled again.

I’d been inside Arthur Remlinger’s rooms—seen photographs of him. Seen his books. His chess board. His pistol. He seemed approachable now—a moment when he could be my friend, which was what I’d wanted. I’d never considered asking a person why they were on the earth where they were. It hadn’t been a topic in our family, who’d always moved on someone else’s authority. But I wanted to know that about him even more than I wanted to know about the pheasants, since he seemed more out of place here than even I was, and since I’d become accommodated in spite of everything. We weren’t very much alike, I didn’t think.

“Why did you ever come out here if you don’t like it?” I asked.

Remlinger sniffed, took his handkerchief out of his collar and pinched his fine nose with it. He cleared his throat the way his sister, Mildred, had. It was their only resemblance. “Well, a better question would be . . .” He turned and looked out the café window beside us onto the street where his Buick was parked beside the policemen’s Dodge.
MODERN
had been lettered in reverse on the inside with gold paint. It had begun to snow. Wind pushed a gale of tiny, swarming flakes up the street like fog, swirling a funnel around the cars and trucks that were passing, their headlights turned on at noon. Arthur seemed to forget what he wanted to say—the better question. He was flicking his gold ring with his thumbnail. His mind had attached itself to some other thought.