Canada (5 page)

IT SEEMS POSSIBLE
, I suppose, to look back at our small family as being doomed, as waiting to sink below the churning waves, and being destined for corruption and failure. But I cannot truly portray us that way, or the time as a bad or unhappy time, in spite of it being far out of the ordinary. I can see my father out on the small lawn of our rented, faded mustard-yellow house with white shutters, my tiny mother seated on the porch steps, hugging her knees, wearing her blousy, sailcloth shorts; my father in snappy tan slacks and a sky-blue shirt and a yellow-diamond snakeskin belt and new black cowboy boots he’d bought for himself after his discharge. He is tall and smiling and un-self-aware (although with secrets). My mother’s dense hair is pulled back careless and bushy with a scarf. She is watching him inexpertly putting up a badminton net in our side yard. The ’55 Chevrolet is at the curb in the stalky elm shade under the soft Montana sky. My mother’s small eyes are focused estimatingly, her features pinching into her nose behind her glasses. My sister and I are helping unspool the net—since it’s for us that the badminton is being erected. Suddenly my mother smiles and raises her chin at something he says: “Nothing’s foolproof around me, Neevy,” or “We’re not very good at this,” or “I know how to drop bombs, but not how to put up nets.” “We know that,” she says. Then they both have a laugh. He had his good sense of humor, and so did she, though as I’ve said she rarely felt the impulse to avail herself of it. This was typical of them and all of us at that time. My father went off to work that summer at one place or other. I began to read my book about chess and also about keeping bees, which I’d decided would be my other project in high school because no one else, I thought, would know about bees—which were an interest, I felt, likelier to be found in rural schools where there was FFA or 4-H. My mother had begun reading European novels (Stendhal and Flaubert); and since there was a little Catholic college in Great Falls, she’d begun going out there and attending a summer class once a week. My sister had suddenly, in spite of her severe views of the world and bad temperament, discovered a boyfriend—whom she’d met on the street walking home from the Rexall (which upset my father, though he soon forgot about it). My parents didn’t drink alcohol or fight with each other or to my knowledge have other lovers. My mother may have felt a “physical ennui,” and thought increasingly of leaving. But she always thought more about staying. I remember she read a poem to me at around this time by the great Irish poet Yeats, which had in it the line that said, “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” I’ve taught this poem many times in a life of teaching and believe this is how she thought of things: as being imperfect, yet still acceptable. Changing life would’ve discredited life and herself, and brought on too much ruin. This was the child-of-immigrants viewpoint she’d inherited. And while hindsight might conclude the worst about our parents—say, that there was some terrible, irrational, cataclysmic force at work inside them—it’s more true that we wouldn’t have seemed at all irrational or cataclysmic if looked at from outer space—from Sputnik—and would certainly never have thought we were that way. It’s best to see our life and the activities that ended it, as two sides of one thing that have to be held in the mind simultaneously to properly understand—the side that was normal and the side that was disastrous. One so close to the other. Any different way of looking at our life threatens to disparage the crucial, rational, commonplace part we lived, the part in which everything makes sense to those on the inside—and without which none of this is worth hearing about.

Chapter 6

E
VEN THOUGH OUR FATHER’S NEW SCHEME TO
sell stolen beef to the railroad went—at least at first—as he planned it, the story later published in the
Tribune
clearly disclosed it had been a more complicated scheme than the one he’d conducted at the base. There, the Indians trucked the meat in through the main gate. The guards were alerted to let them pass. They drove straight to the rear of the officers’ club, unloaded the beef, and got paid, possibly by my father, in hard dollars right on the spot. He and the officers’ club manager, a captain named Henley, held back an agreed-to share of the Indians’ money and took home their choice of tenderloins to feed their families. Everybody was satisfied.

The Great Northern Railway transaction, however, had to be different because the Spencer Digby Negro turned out to badly fear and distrust Indians and was also of a skittish nature about his job—a well-paid union job with a high seniority status in the dining car service. This Digby would let the Indians drive their panel truck—which had the sign of a Havre carpet company on its side—to the loading dock at the Great Northern depot and would take delivery of the contraband. But he refused to pay the Indians on the spot—again, for reasons having to do with fearing and distrusting them, and because of needing to check the quality of the meat. Both of these reasons insulted the Indians, who didn’t like doing business with a Negro. An arrangement had to be made, therefore, for our father to come to the depot and receive the money from Digby, but not until a day had passed and Digby had secured the money to pay and had satisfied himself that the meat was of a high enough quality to serve in the dining cars. Digby wanted the two transactions—accepting the beef and paying out the money—kept separate, as if the money wasn’t really
for
the meat (in case he was caught), and as if my father was the actual provisioner and the Indians only worked for him as laborers. At the heart of schemes like this there’s always something unreasonable, the explanation of which is that human beings are involved.

THIS ALTERATION
in the original air-base scheme put my father into a precarious position. He liked the role of middle man because it made him feel and look competent, and he didn’t see it as precarious (until it was too late). But the new scheme meant that for a day or more the Indians no longer had possession of the beef they’d stolen and butchered at grave risk to themselves, then driven down to Great Falls and delivered in more or less full view—after having already put themselves at risk by cruising through town with a truck full of beef that didn’t belong to them, at a time in history when the Great Falls police would’ve gladly arrested an Indian for no reason, and also generally kept their eyes on any Negroes, since they were then causing trouble down South. In return for these risks, however, the Indians were not able to take prompt possession of the money they were fully entitled to—$100 per beef side (beef was cheap then). And even more perilous in their view, they had to wait conspicuously around town to get the money from my father, who they only partially trusted. Before, they’d trusted the Air Force because one of them had once been an airman, and Indians always tended to trust the government to take care of them because that’s the way it’d always happened. In that way they were not so different from my father.

The danger of the new scheme—an arrangement my father worked out, believing it would please everyone—was that he was in the middle between parties who were both criminals, and who didn’t trust or like each other, but who he himself had decided he
could
trust, if not actually like. And worse, each time beef was delivered, he immediately owed money to Indians who no one would want to owe money to or be owed money
by
because they possessed well-respected violent tendencies. Two of them, the
Tribune
later said, were murderers, and another was a kidnapper. All three had been in Deer Lodge Prison for more than half their lives. Looked at all these years later it is a ridiculous scheme that should never have worked even once. Except it did and is no more ridiculous than robbing a bank.

One day in mid-July my father got up in the morning and told us all he was planning to drive out to Box Elder, Montana, on the highway north toward Havre to inspect a piece of prime ranch land his new company was hoping to sell at a big profit. He wanted my sister and me to go with him, since he said we’d been Air Force brats all our lives and knew nothing about where we lived and spent too much time indoors. In any case, our mother could use a quiet morning to herself.

We drove in the white-and-red Bel Air out Highway 87, leading north and up into the hot, ripening wheat fields in the direction of Havre, which was a hundred miles away. The Highwood Mountains, east of Great Falls, were to our right at an indistinct distance, blue and hazed and more mysterious looking than the way they looked with town as their point of reference. After an hour, we passed Fort Benton where we could see the Missouri River below the highway—the same shining river we saw out our school windows. It was smaller and calmer and headed east along the base of chalk and granite bluffs, on its way (I already knew) to its meeting with the Yellowstone and the White and the Vermilion and the Platte and finally the Mississippi at the border of Illinois. The highway went down and along a creek bottom, then up again onto a bench with more cropland, and different blue-tinted mountains ahead of us—longer and lower than the Highwoods, but just as hazy and timbered and foreign looking. These were the Bear’s Paws, my father announced authoritatively. They were on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, which meant Indians lived there but didn’t own anything outright because they didn’t need to with the government taking up the slack, plus they weren’t competent to own land anyway. He’d done business out here before, he said, and we could drive onto their land without trouble or permission.

WE DROVE UP
the narrow highway through the wheat until we passed a small dusty town with a grain elevator, then quickly came to another, which was Box Elder—the name of the shady trees on our block. It had a short little main street across some railroad tracks, with a bank and a post office, a grocery, two cafés and a service station, and was surprising to be out there in the middle of nothing. We turned east off the highway onto a narrow dirt and gravel road that headed straight toward the mountains, where the ranch was that my father’s new company hoped to sell. Nothing more than mountain foothills and oceans of wheat lay ahead of us. No houses or trees or people. Ripe wheat stood to the road verges, yellow and thick and rocking in the hot dry breeze that funneled dust through our car windows and left my lips coated. Our father said the Missouri River was to the south of us now. We couldn’t see it because it was down below more bluffs. Lewis and Clark, who we knew about, had come all the way up to here in 1805 and hunted buffalo precisely where we were. However, this was the part of Montana, he said—steering with his left elbow out the window—that resembled the Sahara through a bombardier’s sights, and wasn’t a place where an Alabama native could ever be happy living. He teased Berner and asked if she felt like she was an Alabamian—since he was. She said she didn’t and frowned at me and puckered her lips and made a fish mouth. I told my father I didn’t feel like an Alabamian either, which seemed to amuse him. He said we were Americans, and that was all that mattered. After that we saw a big coyote in the road with a rabbit in its mouth. It paused and looked at our car approaching, then walked into the tall wheat out of sight. We saw what our father said was a golden eagle, poised in the perfectly blue sky, being thwarted by crows wanting to drive it away. We saw three magpies pecking a snake as it hurried to get across the pavement. Our father swerved and ran over it, which made two thump-bumps under the tires and the magpies fly up.

When we’d driven several miles out this unpaved road with our dust storm behind us, the wheat abruptly ended, and dry, fenced, grazed-over grassland took up, with a few skinny cows standing motionless in the ditches as our car went by. My father slowed and honked his horn, which made the cows kick and snort and shit big streams as they heaved out of the way. “Well, pardon us,” Berner said, watching them from the back seat.

After a while, we drove past a single, low unpainted wooden house built off the road, flat to the bare ground. Visible a ways farther down the road was another one, and a third one you could barely see in the shimmering, weltering distance. They were dilapidated, as if something bad had happened to them. The first house had no front door or panes in its windows, and the back portion of it had fallen in. Parts of car bodies and a metal bed frame and a standing white refrigerator were moved into the front yard. Chickens bobbed and pecked over the dry ground. Several dogs sat on the steps, observing the road. A white horse wearing a bridle was tethered to a wooden post off to the side of the house. Grasshoppers darted up into the hot air the car displaced. Someone had parked a black-painted semi-trailer in the middle of the field behind the house, and beside it was a smaller panel truck that had HAVRE CARPET painted on its side. A couple of skinny boys—one without his shirt—came to the vacant front doorway and watched us drive past. Berner waved at them and one boy waved back.

“Those boys are Indians,” my father said. “This is where they’re living. They’re not as lucky as you two. No electric out here.”

“Why would they live here?” Berner said. She looked out the rear window through the dust at the run-down house and the boys. Nothing about them indicated they were Indians. I knew all Indians didn’t live in teepees and sleep on the ground and wear feathers. No Indians went to the Lewis School that I was aware of. But I knew there were Indians who stayed drunk, and people found them in alleys in winter, frozen to the asphalt. And there were Indians in the sheriff’s office who only handled Indian crimes. I’d thought, though, if you went where Indians lived, they’d look different. These two boys didn’t look any different from me, even though their house was ready to collapse. Where were their parents, I wondered.

“I think you could ask the same question about the Parsons family, couldn’t you?” my father said, as if this was a joke. “What are
we
doing in Montana? We oughta be in Hollywood. I could be the double for Roy Rogers.” He broke into a song, then. He often sang. He had a mellow speaking voice I liked hearing, but he didn’t have a good singing voice. Berner usually covered her ears. This time he sang, “Home, home on the range, where the goats and pachyderms play.” It was one of his jokes. I was thinking these Indian boys didn’t play chess or have debates, or probably go to school at all, and would never amount to anything.